Fashion plays with the extremes of political trends which by 1980 would enter a new radical phase with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing Conservative government.
ICH BIN EIN LONDONER
David Bowie’s 1976 return to Europe for his new Isolar Tour was set to be another great moment in his restlessly evolving musical career, instead his appearance would quickly sink into infamy. With hundreds of fans gathered at London’s Victoria train station to witness Bowie’s arrival the mood of celebration was undone by a simple gesture, a sleight of hand captured in a stark black and white photograph.
The iconoclastic pop star freshly returned from his drug-ridden descent in Los Angeles appeared to make a Nazi salute from the back of his open-topped Mercedes Benz, dressed in a deep blue jumpsuit that resembled the uniform of Oswald Moseley’s British blackshirts: a compounded fashion faux-pas that dredged up memories of Adolf Hitler’s performative Nuremberg speeches at the advent of World War Two, coinciding with the rise of racist National Front skinhead gangs that shadowed the birth of the punk movement.
This post is an extract from my book – Silhouettes And Shadows: David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
Bowie would contest, misdirect and generally shrug away the accusation that he ever made a fascist “heil Hitler” salute, claiming that the camera angle captured a straight arm in motion. For once, his pose was ambiguous instead of performatively exact, as befitting a mime student of arch-thespian Lindsay Kemp, leading Bowie to argue in his defence that sometimes a wave is just a wave.
What would prove most damning were Bowie’s statements to the press. In his notorious 1976 Playboy interview with Cameron Crowe, Bowie would build on his ideas of being a dictator: “Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all fascism is really nationalism”. Lost in his snowblind ego Bowie offered himself up to a willing crowd where his charismatic drive overtook his perception of reality, curdled somewhere between common-sense politics and fascistic fantasy.
The imminent political upheaval prophesied by Bowie in the mid-1970s would never come to pass. The few who took him seriously were splinter groups of skinheads and members of the UK’s far-right National Front, but also The Musician’s Union. The organization released an anonymised statement referring to Bowie’s actions and pronouncements, with the suggestion that any such musician should be expelled from the union. They decried his reach of influence upon the youth as paving the way for destruction of the trade union movement, as it did in the early days of National Socialism in 1930s Germany.
It was also in 1976 that a drunken Eric Clapton made a racist and xenophobic anti-immigration rant from the stage: “Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out,” exclaimed Clapton to his captive audience. “Get the w*gs out. Get the c**ns out. Keep Britain white,” chiming with Enoch Powell’s equally hateful “Rivers of Blood” speech. It was the powerful combination of warning and gaslighting which alluded to violent reactionaries. All of which spurred the young political Left into action, leading to the creation of the Rock Against Racism movement, which held gigs promoting racial equality to make a stand against far-right politics.
Speaking in 2000 Bowie would later excuse the man he was in 1976 as being “out of my mind, totally, completely crazed” lost in the cups of his spiraling cocaine addiction alongside creeping alcoholism. Despite his constant travel and long expatriation from Britain Bowie would claim that his views reflected the political climate, just as he often seemed to anticipate the cultural tenor of the times. Given the growing political turbulence of the 1970s, he was at the very least acknowledging shifting subcultural elements that looked towards a new way in politics, leading to the increased radicalization of a hard left and right spectrum, but in trying to judge the popular mood of the voting public he was proven dead wrong, with stark consequences.
SEARCHING FOR SOME STRANGE
From the beginning of Scary Monsters Bowie was determined to tackle his critics and set the record straight. Across the opening track “It’s No Game (No.1)” Bowie rails against the accusation that he ever held far-right sympathies, where he screams: “to be insulted by these fascists – it’s so degradiiiiing!”. Putting distance between the David Bowie of 1980 and the extreme views he held just a few short years ago. In spite of his righteous outrage, on “Fashion” Bowie toyed with his invisible enemies on the far Right and his outspoken critics of the hard Left through flashback, razor-sharp satire. Playfully cat-calling the real world concerns of an increasingly homogeneous culture, fighting to forge a singular Western Democratic identity.
In 1980 Bowie recognised the same-old divisions of wealth and background from his 1950s childhood growing up in Bromley and Brixton. The Conservative Government would continue to ‘buy’ working class votes feeding on new aspirations towards middle-class security – pitching private home ownership as a trade-off to buy into the narrowing sweep of 80s accelerationism. Channeling the prejudices of the reckless social climber, Bowie hits us with the loaded phrase “People From Bad Homes” playing copycat to the blind political allegiance of class conformity, teasing the word ‘fascism’ with his stuttered “fa-fa-fa” lines along a metronomic beat.
In the coming years of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government “Fashion” would echo the hard lines drawn between ‘us and them’, people ‘in or out’ of mainstream society;, with or against tradition. Ever fearful of the imagined continental rift that eats away at the manufactured national identity; the chattering classes would become further entrenched in a phony war against otherness: “they do it over there, but they don’t do it here.” It was at the dawn of the Eighties that the growing question of a single market European economy grew into a divisive issue, with Thatcher at the forefront of the embarrassingly jingoistic anti-European lobby.
Meanwhile, in the United States [as Adam Curtis would say] new outbreaks of global terrorism and political coups drew battlelines for anti-Americanism across the Middle East and South America that further stratified Cold War tensions, with the special relationship further strengthened by the comradeship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Polarized by this combine of isolationism Bowie laments a lack of social concern for one another on the home front that is ever turning inwards, towards the needs of the individual – where the capitalist dance already had the majority of the population in its sway.
GANG OF FOUR TO THE FLOOR
After 1980, Bowie took a more open and outspoken stand against racism. Though his political leanings were rarely stated outright and the angles of attack in his songs were often oblique. In a 2016 Politico article Katelyn Fossett noted: “Bowie’s dystopian lyrics weren’t shy about refracting Western consumerism back at Western fans.” Peter Doggett points out the anti-fashion statement of bombing the boutique store Biba by the Angry Brigade in 1971. The group released their own statement-cum-manifesto which took the Situationist International tack that modern life was all boredom, only occasionally silenced by blind consumerism and slavish trend-following. The only thing to do was to kick against capitalist systems and massed humanity “until it breaks”. This assault on the popular consciousness of the modern shopper would become a lost war by the mid-1980s, when a broader spread of disposable income made shopping an aestheticized form of leisure, with people forever chasing constantly shifting brand cachet and the intangible meaning of ‘style’.
Bowie’s acidic sting against the inevitable momentum of fashion was sparked by the fear and loathing it raised in him, telling Angus MacKinnon in a 1980 NME interview: “It’s more to do with that dedication to fashion. I was trying to move on a little from that [The Kinks] Ray Davies’ concept of determination and an unsureness about why one’s doing it […] It’s that kind of feeling about fashion, which seems to have in it now an element that’s all too depressing…”
Bowie refers to The Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” which at the height of 60s London pop culture lampooned the fickle shifts of style, buying into the latest thing. He is pursued as a style icon, being copied as he copied others, he imagines himself to be a flower to be looked upon, but is really the bumble bee or butterfly, flitting from color to color. Like “having a tooth drilled” it nonetheless requires him to grit his teeth and accept a certain amount of aggravation. The deeper irony of “Fashion” is how much of Bowie’s early career was, like the fashion industry, driven by cannibalistic evolution, its alignment to art is driven purely by reinvention. [See this GQ article which charts a long line of Bowie looks]
DEATH DISCO
Ex-King Crimson guitarist, Robert Fripp would add thundering momentum across Scary Monsters, on “Fashion” his guitar is a revving engine coupled with a furious, beeping horn, trying to cut a way through human traffic grinding bumper to bumper, everyone fighting for space and not giving an inch. Fripp’s show of force is backed up by the muscular bounce of George Murray’s bass, Dennis Davis’ drums, and the “beep beep” phrase—lifted from Bowie’s kooky 1971 obscurity, “Rupert The Riley” —playful but urgent, it shoves the listener into step with modern life: the future is here. Fripp noted that for all its irreverence the double-punch lyric: “We are the goon squad/And we’re coming to town/Beep beep” was “a line that sticks in the mind.”
The Bowie critic Chris O’leary rightly branded “Fashion” as “a dance song with bad intentions” where mixed motives err towards slow death. The singer finds himself trapped in downbeat euphoria, a zombie parade of syncopated shuffling, sweating out the ebb of a cocaine high, sinking gray around the eyes. Again, the audience look to him for the next musical jump-start, a human jukebox: nothing too arty but easy to move to. Synth player for Bebop Deluxe, Andy Clark, would add further beeps and blips throughout the song, what Tony Visconti calls “kitten growls”, shards of electronic interference that add to the track’s disorientated, unsettled mood before Robert Fripp’s skronking angry guitar crashes the party, chainsawing the song in half.
LEFT/RIGHT
Frustrated that he could not come up with a suitable lyric, Bowie was about to jettison the song until Visconti implored him to try improvising some lines so as not waste a potential hit. Bowie used the first phrase he could think of: “ooh ja-ja-Jamaica”. ‘Bouncing’ the first syllable in a cod-reggae drawl, opening up the hummable tune and giving Bowie a jumping-off point from melody to lyric. Elsewhere, Bowie’s chanted phrasings snare the listener to echo the pre-chorus, using call-and-return to sound out the madness of crowds: “Turn to the left/Turn to the right” becoming the didactic middle-eight, caught between contradiction: “Listen to me/Don’t listen to me”. A show of force in the same vein as the 1975 hit single “Fame”, once Bowie nailed down the song’s main melody line everyone in the studio agreed they had a chart-friendly hit. Bowie remained somewhat dismissive of the new track: “a light throwaway song, about as important as fashion” reaffirming the idea of pop as a disposable commodity.
An early draft of Bowie’s lyrics embodied the criss-crossing conflict of dancefloor politics. With long and complex lines carving-up white space, he imagines the four-to-the-floor beat stiffened into a show of arms: “Stand by your station boys” OR “we midgets and fools should learn not to dance on concrete poured for GIANTS”. Something about the wrong people at the wrong time, trying too hard, dying to fit-in. Bowie’s final lyrics would be stripped of more overt lines that go beyond dance moves into the motions of street violence: “Hell up ahead, burn a flag/Shake a fist, start a fight”; and “We’ll break every bone/We’ll turn you upside down.”
Edging further into abstraction, Bowie’s vocal experiments stretched lines out of shape, where “they do it while their dancing on…” stutters into “th-uh-uh-uuuh-uh dancefloor” dragging his voice up an octave, suggesting the image of someone trying to foot their way into an already crowded dancefloor. Robert Fripp’s gyrating guitar remains high in the mix, striking seven layers of sheen off the song’s smooth groove. His distorted pyrotechnics would divide listeners; some considered his playing an effort of sabotage or an attempt to chainsaw through the near-monotone verse lyrics. It is telling that the single edit of “Fashion” cut out much of Fripp’s contribution, scuppering the art-rock angle for the sake of the radio audience.
BLOG POST: for more on David Mallet’s music videos for Davie Bowie – Read Here
Offering blood sacrifice at funtime, Bowie predicted the growing youth revolt against the closedown of social spaces echoed by The Specials. The internal division of their Afro-Caribbean and Coventry roots would be crystalised in the eerie post-industrial decline of 1981’s “Ghost Town”, where “too much fighting on the dancefloor”, whether from the racist skinhead thugs making trouble or musicians inciting the audience to passionate, aggressive postures, got bands canceled from gigs.
Compared to the rest of Scary Monsters, Bowie’s vocal on “Fashion” is delivered in a near-flatline of self-mockery, trapped in his own private death disco, he is the voyeur swarming about the corpse of a good night out. Bowie absorbed the “fa-fa-fa-faa” jabbering that occupies the chorus of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” and drained the blood from it. Lost amid the hollow noise of the crowd ‘fa fa fa’ ‘to-to to-to’ and ‘la la la’ reduce the lyric to detached expression of sound, with brilliant simplicity, he gatecrashed the peak (and nadir) of pop’s thrilling and knowing plasticity.
LET’S DANCE
Along with “Fame”, the song is a darker cousin to 1983’s super-hit “Let’s Dance” where on both songs a bluesy middle-eight spars with the beat for attention. on “Fashion Bowie throws up walls of self-negation, a series of pleas to a blank-faced lover trading in self-denial. In the sudden lull of “Let’s Dance” Bowie throws his voice out wide, “tremble like a flower” full with the yearning of wanting to be wanted, he seeks inner resolve in a new dance partner. Like “Ashes To Ashes”, Bowie nodded towards the tension of a musical style gone stale, like the fetid death-knell of glam, he cut-out early. The concept of funk turning “funky” after the rot has set-in, zombie music for the dead ear, deaf to itself, like “Fashion” and its deeper indifference, Bowie hails ambiguity, we are lost in its echoes.
The people keep on moving, the outside world can go to hell, spinning off its axis. On the dancefloor you can forget all your troubles, get swept up in the flow, and become someone else. The song fades out as fashion shrinks back from the edge of good taste into amorality, exhausted by its relentless pursuit of the modern, limping towards self-extinction, burning itself out. What began as bold, brash exhibtionism becomes the voyeur meeting their own reflection in the horrorshow of cracked glitterball and dazzled, dilated eyes; standing on the corpses of yesterday’s heroes, gazing up from the dancefloor’s sticky sump – keep on dancing – don’t look down.
Check out my book — Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) published by Rowman & Littlefield.
BIO
Adam Steiner writes about music, street-art culture, architecture and poetry. His books include Into the Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation of the Downward Spiral (2022), Silhouettes and Shadows: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). His next book is Darker with the Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs of Love and Death (December 2023)
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