David Bowie, if I’m honest, isn’t a musician that I’ve explored a great deal.
I’m a firm believer that your early musical tastes are shaped by your parents. My mum wasn’t a particular fan of anything when I was growing up, preferring to watch tv in the house or have a silent car, if memory serves. Dad, on the other hand, loved Genesis, Meatloaf and Queen – and thus, my first real musical loves lay within that particular field. Bowie’s Queen collaboration is unspectacular, feeling fuelled by alcohol or other drugs (neither were at their best then, Under Pressure being the highlight of the poor Hot Space album). However, listening to pure voices, as below, really highlights just how majestic both Freddie Mercury and David Bowie were.
Brian Eno has paid tribute to the late David Bowie and spoken about their last correspondence, which came in the form of an email last week. Eno and Bowie worked together numerous times, most notably for Bowie’s ‘Berlin trilogy’ of albums in the 1970s (‘Low’, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’).
In a statement released publicly (via BBC News), Eno has said: “David’s death came as a complete surprise, as did nearly everything else about him. I feel a huge gap now. We knew each other for over 40 years, in a friendship that was always tinged by echoes of [comic characters] Pete and Dud.”
“Over the last few years – with him living in New York and me in London – our connection was by email,” Eno continued. “We signed off with invented names: some of his were Mr Showbiz, Milton Keynes, Rhoda Borrocks and the Duke of Ear.”
“I received an email from him seven days ago. It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence: ‘Thank you for our good times, Brian. they will never rot’. And it was signed ‘Dawn’. I realise now he was saying goodbye.”
Eno also stated that the pair had plans to work with each other again: “About a year ago we started talking about ‘Outside’ – the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that.”
The news that Bowie has lost an 18-month battle with cancer was announced this morning with his son, film director Duncan Jones, among the first to shares his message of love for his late father.
One of my favourite songs was Heroes. A few years ago, I arranged a version of it for Grange Moor Brass Band to play at a hero themed event. When you take on such a task, you really get under the skin of the piece – a faithful recreation has to do that. I’m less of an interpreter of music when I work on something like that and more of a recreator. For weeks, I would listen to it in the car on the way to and from work, have it pumping through headphones and do anything to hear it in different locations to be able to hear all the layers of the work. After that, piecing it back together again from the thoughts is fairly easy – instruments will have suggested themselves for different roles over a period of time. Hearing it played back to you through software is one thing, but to have a band play it highlights areas you’ve not considered so tweaks are often required. In the end, because it’s such a mechanical piece of music, it required a lot of discipline to get it to sound right.
Mine is, of course, not the only arrangement. Below I present to you the Hackney Colliery Band’s version, released today, as their tribute to the man.
[Brian Eno story via NME; David Bowie photo via Twitter; Hackney Colliery Band via Bandcamp]
