TEARS OF A CLOWN – DAVID BOWIE AND THE INFINITE MELANCHOLY OF SCARY MONSTERS

“I’m Pierrot, I’m Everyman. What I’m doing is Theatre and only Theatre…What you see on stage isn’t sinister, it’s pure clown. I’m using my face as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants – they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness…”
David Bowie (1976)

1980 would mark the year of one of Bowie’s most iconic looks, the pierrot clown that mixes joy with sadness, perhaps most well-known from the music video for ‘Ashes To Ashes’.

The famous Duffy photograph which appeared on the album cover of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) shows Bowie mid-striptease, il flagrante in a display of studied indifference. Bowie flirts with the viewer camera of photographer, Brian Duffy, and looks further out towards the massed silhouette of an audience he knows lies beyond the shallow lens, breaking down the fourth wall to play between connection and distance.

scary monsters and super creeps david bowie pierrot clown

Bowie was a master of such ‘accidental’ spontaneity. Where other performers endlessly jived, gyrated, danced, clapped, and pouted, spiraling into meaningless gestures (Jagger) Bowie also presented a statuesque quietude that slipped away from the glib go-go-go of the pop aesthetic. Through his characters and personas he managed to establish a relationship with the audience, projecting human warmth through abstract pose. Where Bowie presented himself as being caught off-guard, his knowing smile from behind a veil of cigarette smoke; what the cover reveals is Bowie’s studied self-awareness, to the extent that the ruined clown who has been hurt and betrayed before, is also furtively watching you.

silhouettes and shadows david bowie clown suit

Chris O’Leary noted that on the cover of Scary Monsters, we actually see two clowns, two Bowies, within the one flattened image: “the dignified one who looks straight at you and the disheveled one who hides behind him”. Bowie trumps our sense of intrigue with his own duality, showing us hints of a true self and the artificial construct, never fully defining which is which. Furthermore, there is the mismatched shadow sucking light from the body standing in front of you, already growing stiff in his legend, driven by the need for a conscious break from the past that is destined to follow you.

Bowie’s clown costume represented one of many ghosts from his more insalubrious creative past. It was designed by Natasha Kornilof, another contemporary of Bowie’s short-lived collaborator, Lindsay Kemp. Bowie asked her to make him: “the most beautiful clown in the circus” The costume she made bears traces of the harlequin diamond pattern as rippling feathers of blueish silver, alongside the highly original facepaint by iconic 80s make-up artist, Richard Sharah, casting Bowie as an exotic creature, topped-off with a pointed cornet hat. An image of perfection which demanded to be undone.

Soir Bleu, Edward Hopper (1914)

Established by traveling Italian entertainers, Pierrot draws from the Commedia del’Arte tradition; more than the straight jester or harlequin; he walks an emotional tightrope of extremes, from joy to comedy to sadness, emphasizing the ridiculous and the surreal, always tipping towards the point of tragedy and the acute melancholy that follows. Pierrot is often seen as a trusting character, taken advantage of by others. In this, the pure performer remains a public servant, someone who puts their own emotions aside for the enjoyment of others, absorbing their catharsis as his own.

The NME’s review of Scary Monsters, ‘Fears Of A Clown’ carried a darkness behind its title pun. In the emotional highs and lows of the album, we ride along with Bowie’s seething undercurrent of doubt and anger. Like Pierrot, Bowie presents himself as both foolish and wise, burning with a passionate intensity that nonetheless threatens to drag him over the edge. For Bowie, pierrot offered a new shell in which to become ‘someone else’, but as the actor forever in disguise as a rock star, he must forget himself in the process. It is left to the audience to reflect on the ways in which Ziggy Stardust soon became a schizoid projection which threatened to overwhelm the real David Jones.

Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Acrobat and young harlequin picasso Scary monsters and super creeps david bowie

Some of Pablo Picasso’s early 20th century paintings, such Acrobate et Jeune Arlequin ‘Acrobat And Young Harlequin’ (1905) show people in masks and make-up, suggesting a further interest in exposure and concealment beyond his usual heavy metaphors. In this painting, we see the group, standing adrift in a beautiful garden, looking just as lost as Bowie on the shore of “Ashes To Ashes”.

Acrobate et Jeune Arlequin (1905)

Set against another painting from the same era La Mort d’Arlequin ‘Death of Harlequin’ (1906) we see the body of an anonymous clown laid out in rest, he is mourned by people who thought they knew him–as much one can–so even in death he wears a kind of mask.

Picasso death of harlequin david bowie 1980

La Mort d’Arlequin (1906)

Picasso would often represent the harlequin wearing traditional chequered clothing, the harsh diagonal lines cutting through the everyday like a dancing chess board. The frivolous pattern of the harlequin suit shows us that life is a game, where deep seriousness rubs up against cosmic indifference; therefore we must play with the pieces we have and make the best of it.

Early in his young life, Picasso would enter a phase of painting rich oil paintings of melancholic realism that become known as his ‘blue period’. Said to be inspired by the death of his close friend, Carles Casagemas, to suicide following a doomed romance; a suitably Bowie-esque theme given Scary Monsters title track and ‘Because You’re Young’, Indeed the intense depth of blue as medium more than colour appears throughout the work of several artists and musicians, least of all Miles Davis’ most iconic album and New Order’s Blue Monday, a nocturnal daytime mood shown in the Edward Hopper painting, Soir Blue (blue evening).

Picasso later shifted gears into his notably brighter loved-up phase of the ‘rose period’, as if he had thawed from his grief and woken up to life again. In his following cubist style and later line drawings the clown is reduced to core elements of harsh polygons, clashing triangulation of the vorticist, a hat or a crown cut down to a triangle, wearing a mix of frown and smile. For Bowie, Picasso’s stripped-back sketches show the mask as the ‘dream’ of the perfect clown, in costume and pose Bowie would apply this simple alchemy to forge his own masks, outwardly engaging symbols of pain and joy that provided a further protective armour.

Pierrot In Turquoise (Or The Looking Glass Murders)

Bowie had learnt his stagecraft from one of his earliest mentors, Lindsay Kemp. Finding found his own young muse reflected in the lissome 19 year-old Bowie, Kemp cast him as the balladeer Cloud in his stage play Pierrot In Turquoise (Or The Looking Glass Murders): “He drifted on and off the stage like he drifted in and out of my flat on Bateman Street.” For Bowie’s part, Kemp was “a living Pierrot. He lived and talked Pierrot. He was tragic and dramatic and like everything in his life—theatrical. And so the stage thing was just an extension of himself”.

Bowie wrote three short songs for the stage show. ‘Threepenny Pierrot’ bears a jaunty Gilbert & Sullivan humour (sung with the harsh accent of cockney rhyming slang that axes the main phrase into the clipped ‘thre’punny’, an early nod towards Bowie’s continued ‘Londonism’) which provides contrast to the ‘The Mirror’ and echoes of ‘Andy Warhol’ from Hunky Dory. This early song’s lyrics already carry a deeper melancholy beyond Bowie’s years, expressed through fading make-up as the removal of a face that concealed as many layers as it revealed.

Arlequin assis (Harlequin sitting) (1901)

The artist Edward Bell, had a starring role in the creation of the iconic Scary Monsters album cover, as detailed in his cut-up visual memoir, Unmade Up. Following a brief meeting, Bowie asked Bell to paint an album cover for him, but he needed it in just one week. Bell knew next to nothing about the album or much of Bowie’s music before arriving at the photoshoot led by Duffy, already a legend in his own right. Bell immediately asked Bowie to deconstruct the look so carefully prepared for the shoot: removing the hat, smearing his make-up, messing-up his carefully combed hair, and dropping the costume off one naked shoulder.

Romy Haag the Berlin transexual cabaret performer and Bowie paramour, claims that he stole their closing act when at the very end of the night’s performances she/he would whip off their wig and smear lipstick across the face: “I really liked the idea of screwing up his make-up, after all the meticulous work that had gone into it. It was nice destructive thing to do. Quite anarchistic.” This gesture draws a line from Bowie’s Berlin-era to the “Boys Keep Swinging” video of 1979 and the Scary Monsters photoshoot. In this Bowie revisited: “The falling apart of purity” a theme he borrowed from any number of decadent authors, perhaps most explicitly Yukio Mishima.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde

Bowie in the “Boys Keep Swinging” video (David Mallet) 1979

We can clearly see Bowie making his move early at the close of the ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ video, a gesture of subdued flamboyance designed to rub up against gender fluidity, as a man in a dress exposing himself as: “David playing Glenda Jackson playing Stevie Smith singing about uniforms and boys checking each other out.” (Gordon Burn, Sunday Times, 1980) In the music video for ‘DJ’. Bowie pushed this further, where he starts as a man in a box spinning records then ends-up let loose and wild on the streets. He is grabbed, hugged and smothered in kisses from passers-by, forcing himself objectionably into the human traffic a man and a woman make passionate, violent advances, he takes the hits, the brutal love of their glancing bodies are deflected against him, Bowie interrogates the trial of fame in public as a sexual object he offers-up his body as sacrifice to his fans, hungry for a taste of the new flesh.

In outtakes from the Scary Monsters photo session, Bowie tilts his head further back and turned to the side, a defiant gesture, drawing the eyeline down the nape of his neck. In Japanese art, the neck is offered up in a sensual gesture towards the body whole—Bowie suggests an open-ended vulnerability that sends shivers down the spine of the viewer. In Duffy and Bell’s composite clash, the image chastens this more open-ended view, even with Bowie’s cigarette casually dangling from the lips, even when moving to the vice-like grip of crooked fingers, an affected form of security, where almost half the publicity photos from Bowie’s Seventies show him clasping a cigarette like a burning pen.

Bell pushed his wrecking ball of deconstruction further, until Bowie could have been one of the homegrown Blitz Kids of Greater London, returning home and shedding their persona en-route as they tried to return to the normal world. As suggested by psychologist and en vogue author R. D. Laing: “The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the ‘personality’, false self, mask, ‘front’, or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive ‘personality’ of its own.”

Bell stated that his instinctual process: “swept the clown away; leaving a proud hero, unbowed and romantically disheveled […] no longer wistful, pretty, safe, or fey, but a glimpse of glamor in dangerous extremity; decadent and blatantly seductive”. In that brief era Bowie let his hair return to its natural colour but for the sleeve of Scary Monsters Bowie made a single stipulation to Bell’s artwork – a return to the fiery red Ziggy colour: “because in America I’m known as the red-haired bisexual.” This conscious design choice, again, suggests stepping back into the limelight, to make himself familiar but maintaining distance as the ghost of a former self, a continued push and pull with his audience.

Bell took the photo handed to him by Duffy along with instructions simply to ‘color it in’ towards cut-up abstraction — ripping it in half. Bell later used one of these halves for the back cover of the record, the two parts showing Pierrot crossing from the wings to center stage; the broken moment divided by time lost and regained. By drawing and painting over the photo Bell shows a visibly piqued (staged) Bowie-as-clown quietly raging, hollow fire poised upon doubt and uncertainty.

Kevin Cann noted that Bell’s audacious design meant that only the whole image of Bowie’s shadow could be seen lending the artwork a Dorian Gray hidden portrait mystique. Edward Bell told David Bowie News: “I started life as a photographer, but I found the medium limiting, so this fact led me to various manipulations: photo montage, over painting or even just using the photo as inspiration for a painting,” “I was impatient with the technicalities of producing the perfect photograph; if a shadow fell in the wrong place, rather than adjust the lighting, I would airbrush, tint and montage.”

My “act” has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It’s no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense of normality. To say it another way, I’m becoming the sort of person who can’t believe in anything except the counterfeit.
-Yukio Mishima, Confessions Of A Mask

It was with the now-iconic ‘Ashes To Ashes’ video that Bowie’s clown on the beach, would become the most well-known version of his pierrot persona, brought to life beyond the static vision of the album cover. Artist, George Underwood connects its roots back to the rear cover of the Space Oddity album, for which he designed the artwork. Arriving more than ten years later, the ‘Ashes To Ashes’ video carries echoes of Underwood’s work. Like a dream poured out onto the page, Space Oddity and director David Mallet’s work reflect Bowie’s method of providing an artist or musician with a basic sketch and giving them free rein to help him realize his inchoate vision. George Underwood said: “It was fascinating when I heard that song for the first time and saw its video. I thought, Bloody hell, all these references! I drew that Pierrot with the woman, for the back of the Space Oddity cover – and there it was again in three dimensions. Everything that you see on that back cover, all my work there, was in service of David’s ideas.”

Glamour, so often Bowie’s armor of choice that enabled the suburban lad to ascend into becoming an intergalactic ubermensch, was stripped away. Coming up, coming out, turning the unsought mundane into the spectacularly otherworldly, the unmasking simply revealed a peacocked spread of further possibilities. Bowie’s “Ashes” Pierrot persona closes his major creative decade of the 1970s, ending on a deep melancholia that he would attempt to overturn with Let’s Dance. The song would provide a reflective meta-commentary on the song ‘Space Oddity’, inviting comparisons to Bowie’s past of cycling personas, killed off and then returned to life, a shifting cast of masks.

“I think it [music] should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium. The music is the mask the message wears—music is the Pierrot and I, the performer, am the message”
David Bowie, 1971