Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

the same breathy counter-tenor delivery,
confessional feel and a similar chord sequence.
‘Glass Spider’ was preposterous, and hence at least
noticeable. The utter dearth of inspiration was
epitomised by the sole cover version: Iggy’s ‘Bang
Bang’. The original had been an act of desperation
on Iggy’s part when he’d been told by Arista to
deliver a hit or leave the label. David’s rendition of
the plodding, predictable chord sequence and cokeaddled
lyrics represents the very nadir.
The reviews, when they came, were dreadful. That
was not the main problem, for plenty of Bowie’s
contemporaries had made poor albums. More
serious was the way that this album seemed to
damn all his previous work by association. As
Rolling Stone’s Steve Pond commented, ‘[Bowie]
has reached a startling level of influence and status
while making few genuinely groundbreaking
records.’
The subsequent Glass Spider tour, based on the
album’s silliest track, would become notorious, a
celebrated disaster in David Bowie’s career. Such
is the distaste in which it is held, that its one
transcendent moment has been forgotten. It took
place on the Platz Der Republik, Berlin, just north of
Hansa Tonstudio 2, on 6 June, 1987.
David had dropped in to see his friend Edu
Meyer, who was working on a session with David’s
band, two days before. ‘He was still the same guy I
remember from Lust for Life, still a worker.’ The city
was already filling with West Germans who’d made
their way out to the isolated enclave of Berlin for the