Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

pal Hoggle; the bog gives off a delicious stench
indeed, and the execrable soundtrack was clearly
recorded there. “Chilly Down,” in which Bowie semiraps,
is not exactly “The Rainbow Connection.”
“Underground,” the film’s ostensible main theme
song, returns Bowie to his soul-singer mode without
any of the passion that he knew in ’75. The
sensational pipes of Chaka Khan, who provides
backup vocals, as she did on every single song
released in 1986, are wasted. Upon its release in
the summer of ’86 Labyrinth failed to connect, raking
in just twelve million dollars theatrically. “It was a flop
at the box office because it’s not a particularly good
film,” says John Scalzi, film critic and author of The
Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. “I think it’s pretty
clear that Bowie wasn’t brought in to hide himself in
the role of the goblin king, he was brought in so that
the goblin king could be like David Bowie. They
didn’t hire him to be an actor, they hired him to be a
star.”
A brief reunion with Iggy Pop on their third
collaboration, Blah Blah Blah, resulted in some
strong songs—and a minor hit with Iggy’s cover of
the old Johnny O’Keefe rockabilly hit “Real Wild
Child”—but Iggy’s real creative foil on that record
was Steve Jones, the former Sex Pistols guitarist.
David Bowie turned forty on January 8, 1987. In an
interview with Charlie Rose in 1998, the year after he
turned fifty, Bowie explains that the big four-inch was
much more troubling. By fifty, he’d released two
more very strong albums, 1995’s Outside and