With ‘five years’ remaining until the new millennium, David Bowie, tapping into the anxiety and quest for spiritual relief, returned to his first passion, art.
Back with his most innovative collaborator, Brian Eno, he dredged the bottomless pit of morose and despair. Dreaming up a morbid tale of future sacrificial performance art, gone wild, and taboo breaking cybernetics, he narrated a woeful diegesis through a series of ‘verbasier programmed’ characters.
Disturbing to say the least, our ‘cracked actor’ pitches an avant-garde ‘whodunnit?’, set in a parallel bleak world, where the self-mutilated gestures of Günter Brus (the patriarchal figurehead of body art) and ‘the orgiastic mystery theatre’ of Hermann Nitsch have been taken to new, hyper, extremes of blood-letting.
Led by the investigative diary of art crime detective Nathan Adler, a cryptic cut-up of Burroughs/Burgess language is used to not just explain the circumstances that befell the poor victim, Baby Grace, but also delve into the collective psyche.
Out on a limb musically, Bowie’s home life may have been content, yet something suddenly propelled him to bravely create a depressive requiem. Easily the best, if not most original, material since Scary Monsters, 1.Outside was entirely written in the studio, as the band extemporised: motivated by Eno’s synonymous oblique strategy cards.
Scott Walker lost in cyberspace; the industrial melancholy is at its most anguished on ‘A Small Plot Of Land’ (a version was used on the, Bowie as Warhol starring, tragic biopic of Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel), yet a more reved-up, pummelling bombastic variant is used on ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ and ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ (perfectly playing out David Fincher’s Seven).
Leaving many fans bemused (as I myself witnessed on the Outside tour, the baying audience pleading for the greatest hits package), the philosophical snuff opus seemed puzzling to those familiar with the pop-lite Bowie. Thankfully Bowie cut loose the shackles of commerciality for a contemporary blast of shock and dread.
