Paul Schiernecker

Tag: David Bowie

  • Desert Island Discs.

    This week I was asked what my Desert Island Discs would be. Unfortunately, it wasn’t by Kirsty Young.
    For the longest time, I have thought about what my eight songs, one book and one luxury item would be if I were cast adrift on a desert island, but until now, nobody had asked me. The conversation was more of a back-and-forth and I can’t promise that if I am ever on the show that the songs would remain the same (I’ve just realised I missed Led Zeppelin out). For now though, these are my Desert Island Discs.

    1. Tubby The Tuba – Danny Kaye
    When I was a kid, we spent a fair amount of time with my mum’s parents, my grandparents as it were. Understandably, they didn’t have a lot of toys but they did have an old VHS of the 1975 animation, Tubby The Tuba. For those of you who aren’t up on your cartoons about brass instruments, it tells the tale of a tuba who goes on an adventure to find a song of his own. He’s a vicious and podgy little narcissist but aren’t we all at some stage.
    We watched Tubby every time we were there. I never really appreciated the brilliance of it at the time. I heard the opening spiel on 6Music recently and it brought all these memories of my grandparents flooding back. This track is the sound of the orchestra gearing up. It reminds me of the opening of Moonrise Kingdom too, which can only ever be a good thing.

    2. What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? – R.E.M
    To this day, my parents swear that we would always listen to Automatic For The People but this is the opening track of Monster and I know what I’m about, son. As kids, we holidayed for two weeks in the south of France every year. Mostly because my dad is scared of flying. There, we would stay in a caravan and try and make friends with French kids, by shouting at them in English.
    These holidays involved driving through the whole of France, listening to cassette tapes. I remember The Beautiful South, Joseph & The Technicoloured Dreamcoat soundtrack and R.E.M. As the opening track of the album, it always signaled a change in tone. I was too young to know that R.E.M. were fucking cool but it definitely set a tone for my tastes in music.
    Listening to them always invokes these mad stories of our time together as a young family. Accidentally getting an enema from sliding down the flumes over and over again, falling in love with any girl who dared make eye contact with me, my father in drag for some reason, reading Lord Of The Rings, mum flicking butter at our next door neighbours, stealing my brother’s chips until he noticed and cried, watching my other brother get split in two by a bungee trampoline. Ahh, the good old days.

    3. With A Little Help From My Friends – The Beatles
    This was the first song I learnt to play on the piano. I had lessons when I was very young, before I really appreciated what my parents were trying to do. I used to visit this old woman in a block of flats for lessons. Her name was Mrs Udaman. She was fascinating and terrifying. She used to give me cherryade and tell me stories about riding on the backs of elephants in Africa.
    That aside, she babied both my brother and I in our lessons. It seemed forever before I went from learning Catty, Ducky, Eggy (C, D, E) to an actual, recognisable tune. That tune was With A Little Help From My Friends. It was a real lesson in what music could do and how creating noise could make you feel. It’s obviously from one of the most important albums of all time but this song in particular has a deep message about friendship and love too.

    I can’t find the studio version on YouTube but look at them!

    4. I Know It’s Over – The Smiths
    As Nick Hornby says, via Rob in High Fidelity; “what came first, the music or the misery?”
    I believe Morrissey came first. There’s something about The Smiths and the time you come to that band that very heavily influences you. The first time I heard The Smiths and remember it impacting me was when my friend Sam used Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me as the soundtrack to a short film we shot at college. I can’t remember the details of the film but he was adamant we used the song. I was hooked. It felt like Steven Patrick Morrissey was reaching into my heart and soul and understanding just how misunderstood I was. I appreciate now that’s it silly. In the same way that my book of choice isn’t really for the me I am now, that’s why I continue to listen to The Smiths. I can imagine this being played in my funeral. What a better opening line for that day. It touches something in the loner and allows them to belong. What better way of indulging in your own masturbatory pursuits while adrift on a desert island than listening to this?

    5. Claude DeBussy – Clair De Lune
    I used to spend a lot of time with this girl. I don’t know what happened there but we used to lie in her bed and listen to piano moods. I was in my early twenties and I didn’t think I had any time for piano moods. It didn’t fit in with what I was feeling or who I thought I was. I don’t even know if this is one of the songs that we would listen to but there’s something about the vibe of it that has stuck with me. It also featured beautifully in Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited. Why can’t I take one film with me onto the island? That’s the real question here because it would definitely be that. There’s something about the mood of this piece that I absolutely adore. I’ve spent hours with this piece of music playing on repeat as I try to fathom my way through something I’m writing. That’s why a bit of DeBussy makes the cut, it helps you to turn off from everything else and just zone out for a while. It’s intricately beautiful. It drives something up from within me that contemporary music can’t. Sometimes it’s nice to pretend you’re swanky with some piano moods.

    6. Boys In The Band – The Libertines
    Going from one extreme to the other, this song reminds me of the best part of my coming of age. I will never forget the number of times I have bounced around, clad in leather and denim, arms around someone I love, screaming every sloppy lyric in their ear. I will always love this band and I will always love this song.

    7. Kooks – David Bowie
    This track is from one of my absolute favourite albums. I have my parents to thank for that. I remember listening to it on vinyl when I was very young. I would run my finger along the contours of his face on the cover. The wonder of records was that you paid so much more attention to the artwork because it was so big. The album sounded completely different to anything I had ever heard before and this track is sublime. It has a touch of madness to it which I believe is linked to his feelings about his brother. I can relate.
    It’s like a nursery rhyme to me and was the start of my love for David and my love for vinyl. If anyone asks, I grew up with three parents; Trace, Si and Bowie.

    8. Road To Joy – Bright Eyes.
    So this is my last song. I’ve placed it last because it is the closer on one of my all-time favourite albums. The way this song drives and the bombastic ending with the trumpet wailing and the hoarse way Conor shouts the words over it all kill me every time. This was an album that my friend introduced me to. He’s one of those people who is always into cool stuff before anyone else seems to have had the chance to have heard it. He’s always a cut above. I remember going for long, roaming drives with this on as we smoked roll ups and talked about our dreams.

    A book?
    Do I still have to take a bible? If we are talking works of fiction, there are others I would much rather switch it out for. I know I get the complete works of Shakespeare as well. If anything, this will be a good opportunity for me to read them. I’ve never really committed to it. I hope I can find a way of relating them all to something else, in the way that I can only process Hamlet by thinking about The Lion King.
    My choice though, my favourite book of all time, is actually tattooed on the back of my leg. It’s a cliche I know but it’s Catcher In The Rye by Jerome David Salinger. Like The Smiths, it was a piece of culture that smacked me between the eyes at just the right time. I read it at least once a year, usually around Christmas time. I would be only too happy to do the same on a desert island. Sure, there are parts of Holden’s personality that I now find insufferable, but that’s only ever going to be because I am becoming more phoney as I grow up. I can still see what I saw in that book then and that’s what I hold now. It’s a work of absolute genius. It’s one of the most important works of the 20th century. I know he grew to despise the way people treated him because of it but J.D. Salinger shaped a lot of people and it would be my absolute pleasure to be adrift with his work.

    A luxury item?
    Can I have two? They go hand-in-hand, literally. A bucket and spade. Every day I could go down to the beach and create something. The tide could take it away and then I could just begin again. That would satisfy me greatly and the fact that I would be repeating the same process every day and looking for a different result is the first sign of madness. What a beautiful place to go insane.

  • Kooks

    When I was a kid we used to go on holidays that involved dangerously long road trips through Europe. One of the best things about them was being able to listen to a league of incredible music that my parents chose to expose us to. The best of this mix was David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. An album that has come to mean a great deal to me. In tribute to the great man and because I know it’s one of my dear mother’s favourites, here’s my cover of Kooks.

  • An open letter to your next transition.

    Dear David Robert Jones,
    The Man Who Sold The World,
    The Man Who Stole My Heart,
    The artist, the musician, the icon, the hero, the mime, the alien, the heathen,
    I didn’t know you. I would like to think I did but how well can two people who never knew each other know each other? All I knew was the image. What you allowed me to see and I wanted to thank you for that. From the earliest age I remember you, like an extra parent. I would stare at your mismatching eyes and the globule on your shoulder and wonder what it all meant and where you had come from. Then there was that voice. Those sounds. That instrumentation. The way you cut and pasted words until the sentences made more sense than anything else I had heard.

    I can’t imagine a time without you and that’s why it feels like there is a rock in my guts. I’ve never been in a world without you before. No matter how quiet and tentative you kept, I knew you were there and now you aren’t. A fascinating man and an incredible artist, this world will never see anyone like you again. Your characters and your reinvention were so important to so many people.
    You can assess people on their favourite Bowie. Your terrifyingly handsome face on the cover of Hunky Dory will always be my favourite Bowie but like we are all taught, it’s what is inside that counts. The eleven tracks on that album take me somewhere else. I get lost in your words. I cry for you. Thank you for that.

    I don’t know where you have gone but as you said yourself, it won’t be boring. You have not just influenced but changed the world we live in and that debt can never be repaid. From the first to the last you were your own man and you were so incredibly cool about it. I hope that whatever transformation you have taken on is worth leaving us for. There’s no way you could have gone in the way they are reporting. Something so plain and human. No. You have been abducted. You’ve dissipated. You’re gone. You’re never going to be forgotten. You’re right though. It would probably blow our minds.

    Enjoy the great beyond.

  • ‘David Bowie Is…’ Exhibition – V&A Museum.

    The three albums which define my early childhood are REM’s Monster, David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Jason Donavan’s Ten Good Reasons. Luckily for all concerned I became disenfranchised with the latter before I was ever asked what my favourite albums were.
    The first two, meanwhile, are entirely down to my parents, who would permeate bathtime with glam rock hits by The Sweet, T-Rex and David Bowie.
    They saw Bowie on his Glass Spiders tour. Being that I was busy being a baby they didn’t take me with them, a gripe I have kicked up with them ever since. The reason I mention all this is to show how deep the lightening bolt runs, how indebted I am to David Robert Jones, and how much it meant to me when my own Lady Stardust managed to get us tickets for the exhibition of his extensive work and wardrobe at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington.

    The first two things to be aware of about the exhibit are as follows; the audio guide was put together by Tony Visconti and is like aural sex, and you aren’t allowed to take photos. If you were then it would have taken us five hours to get around rather than the two and a half hour lap time we managed.

    The exhibition covers Bowie’s career from his fledgling performances as Davie Jones and the King Bees right the way through to The Next Day. Along the way the provided headphones pick up sensors linked to particular events, videos or interviews and play them through. It’s amazing to think it is all the product of one man’s imagination and the literary depths he pulled from. Beforehand I was unaware Diamond Dogs was Bowie’s attempt to create his own dystopian landscape after being refused the rights to make a musical based on Orwell’s 1984.

    20130408-075458.jpg

    There are so many aspects to Bowie both as a performer and as a man. It’s incredible to see it all collated, and to wonder where it has been hiding for all of these years. Why the cocaine spoon he used during his Ziggy phase isn’t on a revolving plinth in the British Museum is beyond me.
    I think one of the nicest things to see was the range of people drawn in, admiring his work, his art, his prowess. It’s not something many are able to do. Everything the man has ever done has been with nothing but self respect and grace, he’s never said to much, he’s never been in it for the money and it shows because a decade on from Reality, people were ripping each other apart to get hold of the new Bowie album.
    I read a review in The Guardian which claimed the exhibit was in some ways a way of cashing in or was just a promotional tool for the album but if the exhibition were to open anywhere and at any time it would receive exactly the same reaction. The same could be said for the album.

    One of my favourite pieces was the room dedicated to Bowie in film. There’s a small cinema area screening scenes from his various on screen appearances; as Tesla, as Warhol, as Jareth. There’s a handwritten note from Jim Henson which accompanied the first draft of Labyrinth, for which Bowie was always in mind for, plus his crystal ball.

    The exhibition is one of the most startling and encompassing things I have experienced and it was made all the more powerful by the fact it felt so exclusive within my own headphone world.
    Within us all are those separate parts, the characters who want to glam up, and those who want to shy away. Bowie managed to cross back and forth between the two, teaching people it was okay to dress up, to want to look and feel and be different. It’s in part inspired a movement and a realisation and I’m so glad to have felt the bolt strike me.
    It seems a million miles from BBC reports of the time addressing Bowie as some kind of (space) oddity and questioning his popularity, sexuality and performance.

    We all need those small acts of rebellion and Bowie helped a lot of people to accept theirs.
    Today I am wearing my girlfriend’s earring. It will mostly go unnoticed but to me, I’m a rebel rebel.

    20130408-075538.jpg

  • Mancrush Friday – David Bowie.

    David Robert Jones. Such an ordinary name for a man who has smashed the holy fuck out of music in the last fifty years and obviously I don’t use those words lightly. David Bowie’s music is amongst the first I can vividly remember hearing (alongside Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy and The Sweet (thanks Dad)) so I’ve been a fan for at least twenty years. His way with words has inspired two generations of writers, bands and musicians and his style (adopted from the punk and glitter thing rising in New York) opened oppressed teens up to a world of shaved eyebrows and skyrocketing makeup. I’m honestly struggling to write this because there’s so much to say, and I’m trying to hold some of it back so I don’t just explode.

    The wonder of Bowie’s music is that you know every word but you rarely have any idea of what it could possibly mean. In the seventies this just added to his alien-like mystique, something that today wankers would call ‘clever marketing, the androgynous wanderer angle’. From my own understanding his style of writing was borrowed from the Beats and William Burroughs who popularised the ‘cut-up technique’ where you take a completed text, cut it into phrases or lines and then rearrange it in its entirety.
    That’s how you get lines like ‘tigers on Vaseline’ or ‘Time, flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor’.
    I’ve experimented with it myself and it’s an extremely difficult thing to pull off with any confidence.

    The treat of David Bowie isn’t just that he’s an excellent songwriter, musician and (seemingly) nice guy but it’s also down to his legacy. Bowie hasn’t performed publicly in two years, owing to a health scare, and the world is waiting for him. He isn’t a musician who will make a quick buck on a farewell tour, he believes in what he is doing and has commented that he doesn’t want to be performing Space Oddity forever. While everyone of the same era seems happy to croon up onstage a couple more times (and I don’t begrudge them that because I loved The Who at the closing ceremony and was genuinely surprised at their prowess and Daltrey’s voice) Bowie is resting up in Switzerland and promising us something called Object in December.

    Watching the recent BBC Bowie season I was amazed at his presence, to this day when Bowie appears there is a hushed revelry, he is honoured and long may it continue.

    20120817-075551.jpg