Boys keep swinging

We will do our best to inform you of any unexpected delay. If you have any questions about shipping or delivery, get in touch. Drift is the award-winning independent record shop in Totnes, Devon. We have been gliding through life to the beat of our own drum since the mid-nineties and online since Drift is family owned and operated, and although taking it pretty seriously, we all recognise that Drift has to remain - above all else - really good fun.

We run a newspaper called Deluxe , co-founded the Dinked coalition of shops and started a festival here in Totnes called Sea Change. Do you, David? DB: Which snide was this? Ha ha. I've had at least a couple in my life. BE: It was, 'If these people are so concerned why don't they give their money over instead of just massaging their already enormous egos.

Yes, but it's perfectly understandable. It's a very British thing, isn't it? The same's true in America, isn't it? BE: No. You're allowed to take pleasure in, enjoy and actively even benefit from the act of helping somebody else.

Here, if you want to help somebody else it's got to be directly at your own cost. DB: It's got to have a halo attached.

But it's not just the charity, is it? It's an assumption that rock musicians shouldn't be doing art shouldn't be acting and shouldn't be writing books. DB: It's like saying journalists shouldn't be doing television shows - which in some cases is probably very true!

BE: In England, the greatest crime is to rise above your station. DB: There are more and more people moving into areas they're not trained for, especially in America. I've just been doing this film with Julian Schnabel ['Basquiat', in which Bowie plays Andy Warhol], and he's making movies, having just made an album. I think that's fantastic. What's the album like?

Lyrically, I think it's really good. A good dance record then? DB: Ha ha. I think it's as good as a lot of other records that came out that week. Not as good as others that came out that week. BE: One of the reasons it's possible now is that for various technical reasons, anybody can do anything, pretty much. I can, sitting in my studio, put together records with basses and drums and choirs, or I can put together a video in a similar way.

So the question then becomes not, 'Do I have the skill? DB: The skill hasn't been an issue in art for 50 years. It's really the idea. Damien Hirst once said something to the effect that if a child could do what I do, that means I've done it very well. DB: Picasso said, I think, when someone said to him a child of three could do what you're doing he replied, 'Yes, you're right but very few adults. To be Picasso is not suddenly to become a three-year-old child again, it's to become someone who understands what's important about what the three-year-old child does.

It says in the blurb about your album that much of it was improvised, and that Brian would hand out cards to different musicians saying things like: 'You are the last survivor of a catastrophic event and you will endeavour to play in such a way as to prevent feelings of loneliness developing within yourself; or: 'You are a disgruntled member of a South African rock band.

Play the notes they won't allow. BE: There are certain immediate dangers to improvisation, and one of them is that everybody coalesces immediately.

Everyone starts playing the blues, basically, because it's the one place where everyone can agree and knows the rules. So in part they were strategies designed to stop the thing becoming over-coherent. The interesting place is not chaos, and it's not total coherence. It's somewhere on the cusp of those two. The rhythm is very strong throughout the album. That's what holds things together DB: Something we really got into on the late-'70s albums was what you could do with a drum kit.

The heartbeat of popular music was something we really messed about with. BE: And very few people had done. It was, 'Right, bass and drums, get them down, then do all the weird stuff on top.

I did a lot of walking around with the album playing on my headphones, and oftenyou would get noises from the street- a bicycle bell, beeps from bus doors - and wherever they came in the songs, whatever noise it was, it fitted right in, you could absorb it into the song and it would work because the layers were so strong you could add anything on top.

DB: The great thing about what Brian was doing through much of the improvisation is we'd have clocks and radios and things near his sampler, and he'd say find a phrase on the French radio and keep throwing it in rhythmically so it became part of the texture. And people would react to that, they'd play in a different way because these strange sounds kept coming back at them. BE: Yeah, and he was doing the same thing lyrically.

We had a thing going where David was improvising lyrics as well; he had books and magazines and bits of newspaper around, and he was just pulling phrases out and putting them together. DB: If I read some off to you, some of them you'd find completely incomprehensible.

I did try that in fact. I read the lyrics sheet out loud and thought, 'He's gone off his rocker. DB: Exactly. There's an emotional engine created by the juxtaposition of the musical texture and the lyrics. But that's probably what art does best: it manifests that which is impossible to articulate. If an English student, on a poetry course or whatever, sat down and tried to analyse your lyrics, would they be wasting their time?

DB: No, because I think these days there are so many references for them in terms of late twentieth-century writing, from James Joyce to William Burroughs.

I come from almost a traditional school now of deconstructing phrases and constructing them again in what is considered a random way. But in that randomness there's something that we perceive as a reality - that in fact our lives aren't tidy, that we don't have tidy beginnings and endings. So you'd be very happy if I and another journalist had different ideas of what the songs were about?

DB: Absolutely. As Roland Barthes said in the mid '60s, that was the way interpretation would start to flow. It would begin with society and culture itself. The author becomes really a trigger. In rock music, the lyrics you hear are sometimes better than they turn out to be. In one of your early songs, 'Stone Love', a line I adored was 'in the bleeding hours of morning', I finally got the lyrics sheet and discovered it was 'fleeting hours of morning', which is much more prosaic.

DB: That's right. For me the most fascinating thing was finding out after years that what Fats Domino was singing was nothing like I'd gained so much from those songs by my interpretation of them.

Frankly, sometimes it's a let-down to discover what the artist's actual intent was. You've now got a computer program, apparently, to randomise your writing. But you've been doing cut-ups since the '70s, inspired by Burroughs.

And Burroughs. These 'outside' people were really the people I wanted to be like. Burroughs, particularly. I derived so much satisfaction from the way he would scramble life, and it no longer felt scrambled reading him. I thought, 'God, it feels like this, that sense of urgency and danger in everything that you do, this veneer of rationality and absolutism about the way that you live When I was a student and took lots of drugs, suddenly all kinds of things would make sense that otherwise wouldn't; or rather, you'd see connections between things you otherwise wouldn't.

BE: That's what drugs are useful for. Drugs can show you that there are other ways of finding meanings to things. You don't have to keep taking them, but having had that lesson, to know that you're capable of doing that, is really worthwhile.

DB: But you know, I think the seeds of all that probably were planted a lot earlier. Think of the surrealists with things like their 'exquisite corpses', or James Joyce, who would take whole paragraphs and just with glue stick them in the middle of others, and make up a quilt of writing.

It really is the character and the substance of twentieth-century perception, and it's really starting to matter now.

BE: What I think is happening there is it removes from the artist the responsibility of being the 'meaner' - the person who means to say this and is trying to get it over to you - and puts him in the position of being the interpreter. DB: It's almost as if things have turned from the beginning of this century where the artist reveals a truth, to the artist revealing the complexity of a question, saying, 'Here's the bad news, the question is even more complicated than you thought.

Bowie, who has been gesturing with dangerous animation, knocks an ashtray full of chain-smoked Marlboros on to the carpet Eno kneels to sweep up the ash and butts from Bowie's feet Why are you doing that, Brian?

David Bowie: Boys Keep Swinging (Video ) - IMDb

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David Bowie

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