Chris O'Leary: Rebel Rebel - Blogger, Author
Writer Chris O'Leary discusses his revised book 'Rebel Rebel,' revelations from the past decade of David Bowie archival releases, and why chronicling artists may become impossible for future generations.
Today, the Spotlight shines on writer Chris O'Leary.
Chris has spent over a decade and a half writing what's become the definitive study of David Bowie's songbook. His blog, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, covers every song on every album in Bowie's extensive canon. The first post from 2009 covers David's first single, 1964's "Liza Jane", and the most recent is about Chris's latest work, a newly revised edition of Rebel Rebel, a collection of his writings on Bowie songs from 1963 - 1976. Chris has written for Pitchfork, Slate, and Billboard, and he's currently working on an online project called 64 Quartets, a series exploring musical quartets across genres.
I previously booked Chris back in 2021 to speak at the Bowie 75 pop-up I produced in New York City. There, he presented on Bowie and Brian Eno's 1995 album Outside.
Chris is here to discuss his updated book, what new archival releases have taught us about Bowie's creative process, and why he chose the blog format to tackle one of music's most ambitious projects.
If you are interested in more of our episodes touching on the life and work of David Bowie, check out last week's episode with Donny McCaslin, 2022's episode with Chris Duffy, or 2021's episode with David Whitehead.
Dig Deeper
• Chris O'Leary's blog "Pushing Ahead of the Dame"
• Rebel Rebel: The Songs of David Bowie, 1963-1976 (revised edition, July 2025)
• Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016
• Repeater Books
Historical/Cultural References:
• Beckenham Arts Lab
• William S. Burroughs (interviewed Bowie in 1973)
• The Man Who Fell to Earth (film and unrealized soundtrack)
• The 1984 Project (unrealized Orwell musical adaptation)
• Glastonbury 2000 (Bowie's return performance)
• Rykodisc reissues (early 1990s CD releases)
Other Memoirs and Books Mentioned:
• John Hutchinson's memoir (Bowie's bandmate 1969-1973)
• Mary Finnegan's memoir (Bowie's roommate/girlfriend 1969)
• Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald (Beatles book that inspired O'Leary's approach)
Other Music Writers and Projects:
• Andrew Hickey - A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs (podcast)
• Greil Marcus
• Jon Savage
• Charles Shaar Murray
• Nate Patrin
• Michelangelo Matos
• Amanda Petrusich
• Tom Ewing - "Popular" (blog)
Music Industry Figures:
• Jeff Rougvie (Rykodisc, producer of Sound and Vision box set)
• Tariq Goddard (Zero Books, original publisher)
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: On this occasion of the new updated edition of Rebel Rebel, something I've been wanting to ask you about is this: of all the revelations and all the updating that you had to integrate from the last decade, were there any items that came across to you as particularly interesting or surprising, exciting in that batch of discoveries and revelations?
Chris O'Leary: There were a few things. One is my misperception about how much storyline Bowie had done for Ziggy Stardust. I thought that he had kind of made up the story about Ziggy after he made the album, and when he was talking to William S. Burroughs in late 1973 and discussing black hole jumpers and Ziggy being an extraterrestrial messiah figure, it all felt like the stuff that he had come up with after he had made most of the songs. Now, with all the release of the demos and particularly the notebooks in the box sets, "Rock and Roll Star" and "Divine Symmetry," you really can see that he spent a lot of time thinking up the book of the play that was never made, the narrative. He really did have this kind of structure in mind, and it changed the album for me. I could see how "Velvet Goldmine," for example, fit in much better with the storyline now because there was supposed to be a character called Zip who was Ziggy Stardust's manager. The manager would be singing "Velvet Goldmine" to him. Obviously, you can have your own interpretation of the song any way you want, but it's interesting to be like, oh, okay, this was intended as a stage role for this part that was then cut. Maybe that's one reason why he cut the song from the album, because it's a great song. I think many fans would argue it probably deserved to be on there more than something like "It Ain't Easy," the Ron Davies cover that was actually recorded during Hunky Dory. The notebooks and the rough notes and the outtakes really did transform what I had thought about a few of the albums.
Lawrence: Something that your writing has really done for me as a fan and interested party in David's career is how you've helped build narrative around and shed light on what I call the Proto Bowie—those years of woodshedding, trying on different personas and styles, the ambition and the seeking wrapped up in all that. In addition to the Ziggy reframing or recontextualization, which is fascinating, what did the flood of memoir and auctions and everything else that you've had to witness and metabolize over the last decade tell you about the Proto Bowie that was new, and what other eras did you get really new understanding of?
Chris: Again, the releases of the demos that were collected on the set Conversation Piece shed light on an area that was always kind of shadowy, which was the period after his first album when he pretty much got dropped by his label, by Decca, before he wrote "Space Oddity" and before he got his contract with Philips Mercury. There's sort of a blank spot. It's basically 1968, and everyone knew his manager said in his memoir that Bowie was planning to do a second album in 1968. There were a number of songs that everybody had assumed would be recorded for it, like "When I'm Five" and "London Bye Ta-Ta," things like that. But what the demos showed is what that album would have sounded like—things like "Goodbye 3d Joe." Even more intriguingly, there's a song called "Jerusalem," which is from a little bit later, after he writes "Space Oddity" but before he records the album, which is a real coming head to head with the influence of Bob Dylan, which was kind of new because you could hear Dylan in it. Obviously, it was a song for Bob Dylan, but you can also hear Dylan in songs like "Cygnet Committee" and "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed," but this is pretty much head on, like I am doing a Bob Dylan song. Not just a Bob Dylan song, but a song specifically from the Bringing It All Back Home acoustic side, "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright Ma"—very long, endless stanzas of lyrics is what he's taking on in that. What it did was it showed a little more about the development between the guy who did "The Laughing Gnome" and the first album, and the guy who did "Space Oddity," and that he did start out writing in the Anthony Newley style with these kind of slightly twee songs. Then you can see the influence of Lindsay Kemp, the mime, and that whole milieu that Kemp was part of seeping in and changing the songs. Songs are getting a little more sophisticated, a little darker, even though the first album had plenty of dark songs in it in its way. That was, I thought, very valuable because that's one of the big periods that nobody really knew much about, apart from song titles.
Lawrence: "Cygnet Committee" is a track for me that—I think we're probably of similar age range. I think a lot about, especially with the classic rock artists, that everybody has their version. I came into David very similarly, I think, as you—basically the "Let's Dance" era. Maybe slightly earlier. I remember being aware of early MTV and seeing the videos for the albums around Scary Monsters. I remember being terrified of the "Ashes to Ashes" video when I was—
Chris: It's designed to terrify children. Absolutely, it really is perfect for that.
Lawrence: As I was exposed like so many of our generation to the Pop David in the eighties and then very quickly got into crate digging and buying records on my own, Space Oddity was one that was always in the used bins. So one of the early acquisitions, and as a young teenager, "Cygnet Committee" was just a track that befuddled me. Here we are over forty years later, and it's one of those tracks that every time I hear it, it just unlocks for me something that's very hard to articulate in the way that music can function as a time machine. It's such an evocative song. It's so frigging wordy.
Chris: It is. You can kind of hear where the Dylan comes in, and it has a Dylan-like quality in that Dylan wrote a song, "When the Ship Comes In," one of these great civil rights movement songs, but the origin, allegedly, according to Joan Baez, was him being really angry at a hotel clerk who was rude to him. I feel like "Cygnet Committee" is him complaining about an arts lab in Beckenham and that people in the arts lab are getting on his nerves, these kind of hippies who are just boring the hell out of him. It's such a very minor gripe, given what's happening in the world in the sixties, but he uses that kernel of irritation to just blow into this absolutely vast fervor and anger and sort of disgust at everything, the world in general, over the course of ten minutes. It's very much a young person's song, an angry young man song, but it's also very strange. It's one of the first really like compositions where you're like, only Bowie could have written this. This is a very unique and very odd song that has multiple parts to it. If someone sat down and tried to cover it, tried to learn the whole thing, I imagine it would be challenging. It's hard to sing and probably hard to play, the time signatures and the key changes and what have you.
Lawrence: To mimic that conviction in the delivery is—how would you characterize 1963 to 1968? The ungenerous version is that he was trying to find the trend that he could latch onto. I mean, it's hard to reconcile that with just studying mime. I'm not sure that was a path to mainstream success. (laughter)
Chris: Exactly. It stems from Bowie creating his own myths and creating his own story of himself, so he was one of the first people to be like, it starts with "Space Oddity," everything before that was juvenilia, just don't pay attention to it. He was kind of embarrassed by it. It also helped that it wasn't owned by the same record companies, so whenever you did a reissue or greatest hits, there wasn't the access to the songs. Basically, you always start with "Space Oddity," you always start with that period. I think you can divide it into three parts. One is the quite real desperate attempt to become a pop star by any means possible—sort of Yardbirds stuff. Then he moves into softer pop, and then he tries to do Spencer Davis Group, kind of white soul, and then he goes right into sort of early psychedelia. He is kind of, but he's never embarrassingly behind the trend. He was always very good at being very keen at seeing where things were going and being right there. So there's never a time when you're like, wow, he is trying this kind of old hat. A great example is that he's covering the Velvet Underground before the album is out in America because his manager gets him an acetate at the end of 1966. So he was always kind of very in vogue. But I think there was a real break, as you said, with Kemp, with his consecutive failures. I think by the time of the first album it doesn't really go anywhere, and "Laughing Gnome" feels like one last go for the brass ring, like I'm going to do a big silly song and maybe it'll be a hit. After that, he's like, okay, that path is not going to work for me, so what can I do? I think there is a period where he is considering becoming more of a theatrical artist or becoming—Anthony Newley was always an influence, but the idea of becoming somebody who could write songs for others to sing while he was an actor, a playwright, or film director. One of Bowie's big unrealized dreams was to be a film director. That, and the mime stuff, and also the influence of people like Lionel Bart, who he knew and was part of that social circle, does change the trajectory. Otherwise, I think at one point he was like an eccentric Steve Marriott, and then by the time of "Space Oddity" and "Cygnet Committee," he's on his own course. He's kind of gone on a path that no one else, even Marc Bolan—Marc Bolan had the mod to hippie transition, but it was a pretty simple one, a pretty straightforward one, where Bowie takes a long time to get there.
Lawrence: Before we move on from this era, I can't help but be fascinated with the whole endeavor around Toy. Really the last, let's pick a number and call it twenty years, maybe twenty-five years of David's life where for an artist who was so adamant about always looking forward, he became much more willing to bring the themes and riffs and ideas into his contemporary music and then peaking with him going back and rerecording all those songs, or recording the songs from this early Proto Bowie era. How does that land for you? What did you get from that?
Chris: It's kind of a strange period, even though it's a mainstream period. As you said, he spent the nineties really fighting tooth and nail to not become a legacy act, to not become Elton John or something and somebody who could just play sheds and play summer tours and sing "Changes" and sing "Rebel Rebel" to people and everybody be happy. You go home and he puts out an album, and here's a song from the new album, and everybody's like, polite applause, and then waits for the next hit. That's sort of what the trajectory is for people who were big in the sixties and early seventies, and he is really fighting desperately to not have that be his fate. Then at the end of the nineties, there's almost like a relaxation, like a falling back of, okay, I am in my fifties now, and people do love the old music, and I don't mind playing it anymore. So there's kind of where he returns to Glastonbury and this return of the king kind of style in 2000, and he does all these old hits for the BBC and for some select shows in New York for his website. Toy, I think, is part of that. I think Toy is like, let the gates open, let the waters come in again, it's okay. But also, I think there was—because I, as I said, he was always so loath to acknowledge any of this music from the sixties—it was kind of like an acceptance of, this is part of me also, I'm going, this is the canon. I can't help thinking about "Let Me Sleep Beside You" and "Silly Boy Blue" and "In the Heat of the Morning." Those songs are as much a part of me as "Jean Genie" is. So I think that was part of it, but also at a more mercenary angle, he had had a composition partner for many years now with Reeves Gabrels. Gabrels cowrote Hours with him, cowrote most of Earthling. Outside was collaborations with Eno, with Carlos Alomar and Gabrels and Mike Garson and kind of group sessions. Bowie for some time had not, had rarely just sat down and written stuff again, and I think he was a little out of shape. Not maybe the right way to say it, but kind of not used to having to go back down to the keyboard and put everything together by himself. So I think doing covers was a way to kind of maybe buy a little time until you could get back in the groove, and you can kind of hear it towards the end when he starts writing the songs that turn up on Heathen, like "Afraid" and what became "Slip Away." The great song "Uncle Floyd" comes towards the end, and you can kind of be like, okay, he's back. But I think Toy was a convenient way to get in the studio, make a new album. I've already written these songs, and they've already been arranged, so let's just play them, because the arrangements of Toy are not radically different from the originals. They're just played probably better, more professionally, and recorded in modern style, but it's not like they're doing wild improvisations or changes to these songs.
Lawrence: Well, and his band is so good at that point too.
Chris: Yeah. So they're treating it like other Bowie compositions. They nail the performance down, they get it done in a few takes, and so I think it was probably a fairly easy album to make. Plus, he was about to become a father again, so I think that was also part of it.
Lawrence: It's really interesting, and I promise we'll go back in a moment, but I'm very excited about this forthcoming eras box for September because I talk a lot with people—Bowie fans, people just interested in Bowie. We all seem to share this phenomenon, which is when Bowie's records came out in real time, I'll just speak for myself, I often didn't get them or didn't like them or shrugged or found the two or three songs and then moved on. Almost to an album, I could go back with a decade's worth of hindsight, sometimes more, sometimes less, and be completely floored at the quality of the albums. I've had that experience with what I'd call the Sony era, with the two thousands albums. I was pretty immersed in the world of Bowie when Heathen came out, and I liked it and I was excited to have a high-profile new album. It wasn't on heavy rotation for me, and then very excited when Reality came out. It was the same thing—there were a couple of tracks I liked. I go back to both those albums now, and then forward to The Next Day, and I'm like, wow, I would almost say that one of my favorite Bowie characters was the adult male, middle-aged man who was committed to being an artist, like a working songwriter. I admire what he was doing.
Chris: It's interesting because, as you said, there are great examples of albums that I think were pretty well reviewed at the time and got classic, you know, Rolling Stone, four stars kind of treatment. But I don't think they made a huge impact. I think it's always different in the UK. I think they sold more and maybe you heard them on the radio once in a while. I feel like in the US, they were just really not—this was the period of the Strokes and Missy Elliott and Eminem and all of that. Bowie's not really there in my memories of the early two thousands. There's the contemporary albums, but they're a little bit out of time, and maybe distance, as you said, does reveal more about them. I think Heathen is definitely a capital-P performance, sort of a real character thing, whereas Reality feels more like, as you said, a working older artist with a few covers and some uptempo songs for the tours and then a few brooding numbers. You can see him using that—I mean, The Next Day has a similar template, though it's different in some ways, but you can see him using Reality as the guidebook. If he had made some more albums in the two thousands, if he had had a 2006 album or 2009 album, I don't think it would have sounded radically different from Reality.
Lawrence: I think that's right. I think it would be actually very interesting to have heard the album that bridged him from Reality to The Next Day. Maybe that's in the vault somewhere. Who knows? I'm curious about that flood of memoir that you referred to. Was there anyone's in particular that—the rock, we all know that rock and pop culture memoirs can be very self-serving and fraught with peril as you navigate them. Were there one or two that really stuck out for you where you said, this is actually additive, this is not just self-mythologizing?
Chris: John Hutchinson. For those who don't know, John Hutchinson was Bowie's partner for a brief time in the "Space Oddity" period. They were kind of like a Simon and Garfunkel duo. Then Hutchinson returned—I think he basically, he was getting no money, so he had to go. He had a small child and was married, so he had to go back to work. Then a few years later, during the 1973 Ziggy Stardust tour, Hutchinson joined the band again and was kind of the rhythm guitarist. His memoir was—he died in 2018. I'm drawing a blank. It was after Bowie died, and the memoir came out in 2014 or 2015. It's really interesting because he's an entertaining writer, but also it is just being one of these people who is in history's way. He's right there when David Bowie becomes David Bowie for the first time, and you can see it changing in months when he goes from being the guy that Hutchinson first knew, who was this kind of struggling pop singer in mid-sixties London, to this much different person. It ends with him onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon at the last Ziggy concert, and what a transformation that is for him. But Hutchinson's perspective is always very grounded and pretty humorous and sees the absurdity of it but also is aware of how privileged a view he has. That adds to it. Then the other one from the same period I thought was really fascinating was Mary Finnegan. Mary Finnegan was the person who cofounded the arts lab in Beckenham with Bowie, and she was Bowie's roommate and girlfriend very briefly in 1969. Just her view of Bowie—you could kind of see what people have said about him over the years, that he had different doors to him. If you were a musician on his touring group, you'd see one side of him. Obviously, other people would see different sides of him. She gets this very charming, extremely charismatic artist who moves in and spends all his time writing songs. At the same time this is happening, his manager is working the phones and he's recording "Space Oddity," he's still doing pop music, and she is not even aware of that. To her, he is this kind of countercultural figure who suggests, let's do this folk club, let's have this kind of neighborhood theatrical troupe. There's one wonderful thing—it's the kind of thing you wish was filmed or recorded in some way. I think it was like, I don't know if it was a recreation of Lord of the Rings or reading from The Lord of the Rings, but Bowie was part of this thing where they would go on the town green and maybe act out scenes from The Two Towers or something, which is just absolutely bizarre and charming to imagine.
Lawrence: In English.
Chris: In English. Also, he is into UFO spotting and obviously some of the other things. But again, it's somebody who catches him at a very limited period of time, but you can see everything happening in the background. So those are the two that, in terms of things I'd recommend as books, are up there.
Lawrence: Something that maybe doesn't get mentioned enough in the context of your work, and I'm going to right that wrong, Chris, is—first of all, I really struggle to think about Pushing Ahead of the Dame as a blog. It seems such a small word for such an ambitious and rigorous undertaking, but I don't need to get hung up on the semantics on your behalf if you're okay with it.
Chris: Yeah, it's fine with me.
Lawrence: But there's a rigor and a precision to what you do that could be said to have more in common with books, or I actually have come to really think of what you do as, in a way, a predecessor to what Andrew Hickey's doing with the A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast. I mean that in the way of using one of these new media to explore long-form narrative in a serial fashion of nonfiction subjects, doing these academic works in these new media. I'm curious about how you arrived at—I'm even going to struggle to articulate this, and I have to apologize, but choosing to elevate the blog as a medium, I guess would be the way I'd say it, because you could have done much less. Did you not have a path to publishing at that point? Did you just want the workout in real time? Could you just give me maybe a little bit of, if not necessarily the genesis origin story, more like what you were thinking?
Chris: The important thing is that I did not set out to do anything of the scope that it became. I think if that had been the plan from the beginning, it probably would have failed. I think it only survived and it only grew because my expectations of it were so minor. I had started doing, now this will date me, it was called MP3 blogging in 2004. I had thought about writing about music for some time, but I wasn't really connecting with what was popular in the end of the nineties, early two thousands, so I didn't really have anything to say about a lot of music that was out. It also seemed so daunting to try to break into whatever was out there then. But I had thought I wanted to write about music in some way. Suddenly there was this kind of vogue for do-it-yourself publishing based on the Blogger platform for the most part, and that's how it started. It was a blog called Locust Street, and the idea was to do a song for every year of the twentieth century. Then I realized I didn't really know much about the nineteen hundreds or the nineteen tens, so I was like, I'm going to start after the war, 1945, which I know a little more about. Then it kind of went on from there, and then I went back to the start of the century. That was most of the two thousands, and it was something that was not like a huge success by any means, but it had a small little readership and I liked doing it. It was a nice distraction, but I was kind of getting burned out. So I thought, well, maybe to rejuvenate myself, I'll do another blog thing with the idea that there'd be a side project and maybe I would abandon it at some point, but it would be nice not to have to think about recreating 1947 or something, whatever I was doing. I thought, okay, well, I had gone through a period where my personal life was kind of in upheaval, and so one of the things I did to kind of ground myself was I would have lunch with my dog. I had the book Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, which is a song-by-song in chronological order thing of the Beatles. So every day I would get the MacDonald book and I would listen to the song while I had a sandwich, and I would read the entry. I thought, this is a kind of fun way to listen to the Beatles, because I heard the Beatles ever since I was a child because my parents loved them, but I mostly knew them through album sequencing or what have you. But to go through the songs in the order they were made and think about each one over the course of fifteen minutes, whatever, I thought it was really a perspective I hadn't had before. I said, boy, that would be fun to do this in a blog format with the idea of somebody would be at work, not really wanting to go to work yet on a Monday morning, and be like, okay, well, what's the new song? That would be the point of it. So back when the blog started, it was going at a really fast clip. It was like three entries a week, which seems absolutely superhuman to me right now. But it was almost a daily blog. The whole point was that here's a song, here's some stuff about it. And it kind of went from there. As a year went on, the tension was taken away from this other project I was doing, this long-term thing, and the Bowie thing took up more and more time because I got more ambitious with it. I also kept reading more about it, but I never had the idea that it was going to be a book or anything. Then once it was picked up by a few people, it was picked up by Tom Ewing, who runs a blog called Popular, and then it weirdly got picked up by Time magazine of all people. Time magazine wrote about it, and The Guardian and a few others. More and more people would come, and a good comment section developed. Then through that, Tariq Goddard, who was then at a publisher called Zero Books, contacted me and said, do you want to turn this into a book? I was like, oh yeah, okay. That's how it started. It was always a bit haphazard and not really planned out. I do consider the books, particularly this second version of Rebel Rebel, the revised version, to be my final word on stuff, even though I'm sure I'll disagree with myself at some point in the future. But whereas the blog, if you go back to the blog, in some cases it's more flippant or it's sillier, what have you, and those were the first go at it. You kind of have, if you really wanted to, three different versions of what I thought—three different moments in time as to what I thought of a song like "Cygnet Committee" or what have you. If you really wanted to, you could compare the 2009 blog entry to the 2015 book entry to the 2025 book entry, and you might see I have grown up in some ways, or grown down, or—
Lawrence: Now I know what I'm doing this afternoon. Thanks, Chris. (laughter)
Chris: But if people like it, if I brought enjoyment to people, I do think it came about in this, to use for lack of a better word, organic way. I did not have a master plan summer of 2009 that this is going to be a two-book series. It was much more slipshod than that.
Lawrence: I think a lot of us have seen projects, whether they're our own or other people's, that start with a flourish and a statement, like, this blog is going to be this. Then after a few weeks, it's in the graveyard of abandoned projects.
Chris: It's hard. It's hard to keep it up. It's frustrating. I totally get it.
Lawrence: Would you have ever let yourself stop, or did you ever have a conversation with yourself where you were like, come hell or high water, I have to do this now? Or is part of your ability to keep doing it that you've always allowed the trapdoor?
Chris: I'm trying to think if there was a moment I hit a wall. I don't think so. There was a time I was doing the revisions for the first version of Rebel Rebel, and at the same time I was doing new entries, which I think were Earthling. So it was this really hard transition between revising the sixties stuff and then having to write new stuff on mid-nineties material. I think I maybe put the blog on mini hiatus then because it was just too much. It was exhausting. The other time was after Bowie died. I still had a few to go. I had put out most of them. The rest were in the Ashes to Ashes book. There were probably like five or six songs left, and I just did not have the heart to do it anymore. I just felt like everything had changed and it felt like suddenly a big curtain had dropped and the blog had to become something different. It couldn't be what it was. But by the time I was really getting rolling, I felt like I'm too much of a completist, and I can't be the guy who abandoned the Bowie song-by-song guide before he even hit like "Ashes to Ashes." I didn't want that on my gravestone, you know, had a good idea and it didn't work out. So I kept with it, by gum. (laughter)
Lawrence: Yes. I remember reading in real time when David passed and being a follower of the blog, and also the fact that it's easy to forget how wrapped up everybody was in the power of Blackstar. Then all of a sudden we have it for three days, and this other event completely recasts what the album apparently could have meant, the whole mythology of it being the audio death mask, you know, a really incredible moment. It's also easy for people to forget how long it went on. It was one of the few celebrity passings where it felt like it took months for the intensity of the emotion to die down.
Chris: Yeah, and it was just a really strange, dispiriting year because you feel like when everybody had started coming to terms with Bowie, then Prince died. I believe Prince died in April.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Chris: It felt like there was just a series of shocks that kept happening throughout the year. Leonard Cohen dying at the end of it, and George Michael, it was almost like somebody was writing it, tragedy that year, 2016.
Lawrence: Did Carrie Fisher die that year also?
Chris: Probably. I mean, it was just like the wheels really fell off.
Lawrence: And then we had a certain presidential election.
Chris: Yeah, and Brexit happened that summer. It was just everything kind of happened. It feels like a real hinge year.
Lawrence: Could you tell me a little bit about how you listen? I kind of mean it from a process point of view. I have this image of you in a listening room with a chair and a pad and a quill, thoughtfully stroking your chin as you're listening to each track. (laughter) But there has to be some kind of visiting and revisiting and metabolizing, and I'm curious if you could peel back a little bit on that.
Chris: I mean, I started out, so when I was doing it, I would know the next album or the next period, listen to it on background while I was cooking or something to kind of get into it. Then when it came time to really dig into the song, I think I just put on headphones and I'd listen to it a couple times. I would, if there was sheet music, kind of use that as a basis and then write in over that drum lines and bass lines and what have you, and then see what had, because I had this kind of big pile of research by that point. So kind of searching through, what did Bowie say about this song in various interviews? What were reviewers at the time, what did they say about it? So getting all of that in and then just kind of sometimes listening to it four or five times in a row to train myself to be like, this time I'm going to listen to the bass, or this time I'm going to listen to what the backing singers are doing to try to really get into it. Because the thing I really wanted to do from an early point was to make it as much a musical—the study of the music as much as the lyrics. I think, understandably, when people write about music, it's often about the lyrics. It's the easiest thing to write about if you're a writer. What is the person singing? What do the lines mean? What's the rhymes? What's the imagery? That's very important, but I think I really wanted to not downplay that. This is recorded music, and these are people in a studio playing. Listen this way, it's being mixed in a certain way, and there's choices being made to turn this up, turn this down, and to arrange things in a certain way and how all that comes together to make the final song. It would be like a day or two of this kind of really tedious, back again, first minute, second minute again, just what am I hearing? Then the writing, it would depend. This was faster back in my youth. You could do it in a couple days, and at some point it became, oh, this took a week or two weeks or something. But it was never an extremely long time, and it was never any kind of, unfortunately, I didn't have a cork-lined or soundproof room with quadraphonic speakers or anything. It was mostly Discman and headphones, at one point, and then the iPod and my living room speakers. That's pretty much it.
Lawrence: It's interesting because you articulate a similar evolution as what I perceive happening with the Andrew Hickey podcast. He started off being able to very quickly produce shorter episodes, and then all of a sudden something happened and he was sucked in, and now we get these two-, three-, four-, five-hour epic explorations.
Chris: Oh yeah. It's incredible. I do love that you can see there's a certain element of his fan base who are like, what's going on here? I think it's marvelous and that it's becoming like a history of the twentieth century. It really has at this point. The tangents he goes on and what he brings in, I think is just really incredible work. I believe, not to speak for him, but I believe he said that as we get out of this kind of crux period of the late sixties, early seventies, things might start compressing a little bit. I don't know if there's that much to write about. If he does "Stayin' Alive" or something, I'm sure there's plenty to talk about, but the culture of rock music is maybe not as directly embedded with the events of the day in 1978 as it was in 1968. So maybe the lens might tighten a little bit, but right now I'm really just enjoying the hell out of it. I can see that somebody who just wants something to listen to on the drive to work is maybe a little baffled, but they're missing out, and I really hope people stick with that podcast. It's a treasure, really.
Lawrence: I love playing the parlor games with some of my music-loving friends about trying to guess what he's going to do in the eighties and nineties. I remember a year or two ago, maybe more now, there was a profile in The New Yorker about him, and one of the anecdotes was that by the time he's done, it's going to be one of the largest, if not the largest, work by a single individual or something like that in the English language.
Chris: Oh yeah, I can believe it.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's insane. It's absolutely insane. What lineage do you see yourself in, in terms of—you work at this nexus of academic study and fan devotion and being rigorous yet having this accessible voice, which seems to be such a big part of your success and your ability for your work to connect with the audience. Do you see yourself as part of a team or a league or a lineage?
Chris: Not really. Obviously there are writers, music writers who I loved when I was first reading rock criticism—Greil Marcus and people like that, and Jon Savage, Charles Shaar Murray. There are writers whose work I always will read when I see something by them, by Nate Patrin and Michelangelo Matos and Amanda Petrusich and people like that. I don't really consider myself a rock critic or anything. What I do is kind of odd, and I never was part of that world. I felt, nor do I remotely think I'm like an academic. I got a bachelor's degree in journalism. That's as far as it went. So I don't know what I do, really. I don't think I'm aligned with anybody. I feel in Hickey's podcast a sort of simpatico soul. I understand where he's going. But I don't consider myself part of a team, as you said. I think what I did, I don't know if it could be done today. I do wonder about—I fear there's sort of this really societal push to downplay writing at this point, to make this sort of a more visual society, with AI replacing what people, human beings, once wrote. I don't think that's a great thing. In terms of, for example, when you go back, you're writing about Bowie in the seventies, you can expect that if he went on tour or put an album out, that there's going to be dozens of pretty well-written reviews of his concerts and reviews of his records and in-depth interviews with him, whether it's radio people or magazine writers or newspaper writers or fan writers. There's this kind of great corpus of material to use. Now I wonder, that—I guess Taylor Swift is not a good example because I still feel like there's just tons of writing about Taylor Swift, but I'm thinking of like a maybe a second-tier person. I don't know if that infrastructure is there anymore. So if you are, if this is the year 2050 and you want to write about, I don't know, Bruno Mars or something, what's there going to be? Is the stuff going to survive? Or the YouTubes and TikToks and podcasts—is the technology going to be there in thirty years for the stuff to even get played? Will anything be archiving it? Will AI mash it all up and it becomes this kind of Wikipedia voice, this crap that's all over the internet? I just hope that there's a pushback against that because I think it is a loss, and I think that the stuff that I was able to do with somebody like David Bowie, I don't know if somebody's going to be able to do simply because the research, the reference material is just not going to be as dense, is not going to be as rich.
Lawrence: And it's such an era of publicist control as well that you won't get some of the philosophizing that David would do.
Chris: Yeah. You think of all the interviews, all the great interviews with him where he's just going off. Pete Townshend is another great example, Neil Young. These, you know, they would just say sometimes crazy things, but like absolutely no filter. It just feels like there's nobody who's famous right now who's doing anything like that because they're scared witless, probably, and rightfully so, because if they said one thing that somebody could take out of context in any way, they're going to get lambasted for it, or the president will call them out in a tweet or something insane. So I understand the wariness and the sort of the corporate boilerplate speak that everything seems to be written in right now.
Lawrence: It's so fascinating because I try to—I definitely hear you and relate to what you're saying. I try to be careful to not let that for myself bleed into becoming a cranky old man or—
Chris: Oh yeah, very much. Yes. I do think that podcasting, there's a great future in that, and I do hope that if video is the future, that there are going to be people who are really adept in video who can make video more of an archival and a more rich medium. I just fear in the latter case, just from like, if you tried to play a CD-ROM from the late nineties lately, I do wonder if that stuff is even going to be technically able to be accessed.
Lawrence: Oh yeah. I mean, so many of the early—even David's website, so much of that stuff's gone. The little Flash things that were built—there's so much, yeah.
Chris: There's so much from the two thousands. Someone had a good point that it's probably easier to find a primary source from the thirties than it is the two thousands at this point. At least all the newspapers are on microfilm somewhere.
Lawrence: It's interesting you raised that example. I was talking to a friend of mine last night who's doing a revised version of a book he wrote. He has spent a bunch of time basically in archives like that, going through microfiche and just going down rabbit holes, and he said something very similar about how there's this rich body of material, especially when you get into music and cultural, for lack of a better way to say it, subcultures—all the great regional and local black newspapers that existed, and there was this whole parallel universe of things going on that yes, the historians wouldn't know about if they only read the mainstream newspaper in a city, things like that.
Chris: Yeah. All the alt-weeklies, all the zines. That stuff is incredibly valuable, and I do hope some version of that continues. I feel like it's more of a challenge now.
Lawrence: You had said that it's hard to close the door on Bowie even now, yet you've made a couple of comments around trying to tamp down the engagement with the work. I wonder how you're thinking about, or if you're going to have to reckon with the inevitable further releases and discoveries and—it's highly unlikely that the body of work is done being revealed. Are you adopting an I'll deal with it as it comes thing or—
Chris: Yeah. I really regretted that. I really thought that the chapters on "Space Oddity" and Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust were much improved by the release of the archival stuff, and I really regretted that I couldn't wait until Diamond Dogs, if they do anything, because I feel like Diamond Dogs is a real challenge, I think, still to get a grasp of how it all came together. I think it's one of the more shadowy processes for him because he's doing so many different things in the post-Ziggy months. He has so many different ideas—plays and films and albums and musicals and so forth. You get—so a little more light as to, okay, how serious was the 1984 project? How serious was the Ziggy Stardust musical he was talking about? What songs come from what? What did we really know, and what was going on with the Astronettes, his vocal trio with Ava Cherry and Geoff MacCormack, which is at the same period? Could Mick Ronson and him have still worked together in some way? There's so many unanswered questions. So yeah, if a lot of material came out from that period, I'd be tempted at some point to be like, yeah, I've got to get the back half of Rebel Rebel a little better, but that won't be for a very long time.
Lawrence: Touch wood. (laughter)
Chris: And in terms of, I don't know—because the release strategy so far for these sets has been to show you some things, some demos and a few studio outtakes and the notebooks, but at the same time it's not on the scale of a Dylan bootleg series or some of these Beatles super-deluxe sets, which are just tons of stuff. It feels very controlled. So I don't know if we're ever going to get that rigorous documentation of Bowie's songwriting. So I don't know, for example, if we're ever going to learn more about, as we've said, Reality or Heathen. That could be like, all we have is what we have there. I guess I'll find out. (laughter) At this point, I don't see the need to really update the second book, and I don't—yeah, I'm at the moment curious to see what comes out, but no rush to do anything else.
Lawrence: Is it unfair to ask you if there is anything from a song to an album to an era that you are repeatedly drawn back to, either because of your intellectual curiosity or just because of your passion as a fan?
Chris: Yeah. Because I, we talked about, I started out as "Let's Dance." That's how I first knew Bowie and probably, you know, terrified also of the "Ashes to Ashes" video. Then I didn't really follow him that much, and the Rykodisc reissues came out on CD in the early nineties, so that was kind of my first introduction to him. The Man Who Sold the World was the first one I got. That's kind of a shock if you knew David Bowie as "Let's Dance" or "Blue Jean," "Dancing in the Street." This sounds like a weird, strange takeoff on Black Sabbath or something. It's like, what is this stuff? So I've always had a soft spot for that album. It feels like it's a bit anomalous. It feels very much like what I think it was, which is that Mick Ronson and Tony Visconti had time in the studio to do whatever they wanted, and Bowie was kind of distracted and would come in and say, yeah, sounds great, I'm going to write this song, I'm going to write that song. So I've always loved that album because it was one of the first records for me, but also because it's such an outlier. It's kind of in the middle of the sequence, which doesn't really fit. Then I think always the Low and Heroes period, because I think it's one way that he was able to remain relevant later in life, I think, because that was the time for people who had had success in the sixties, early seventies—
Lawrence: Yeah.
Chris: End of the seventies is when new wave kicks in, when there's disco, it's when a lot of these guys start floundering. You have missteps or trend chasing or reactionary moves or what have you. I do think that the Berlin records are this wonderful sidestep that he does. I don't think intentionally—I think it was where he was going anyhow because he was trying to take what he learned from The Man Who Fell to Earth, the soundtrack that he never finished. But it turns out that it really put him in a very good place because it wasn't like he was ripping off punk or anything. He wasn't, but the music was not really mainstream at this point, and that kept him—he didn't become Rod Stewart. He didn't become, you know, even like T. Rex, the last years before Bolan died. You can see he was really trying to get back, and he had a TV show where he had a few punk bands on, so he was getting there too. But Bowie, it feels more like it's this moment where he again steps out of time a little bit and has these discreet little strange records. I always found that really interesting.
Lawrence: I think that's a great take on that era and how it really did establish him as something other than, or yeah, something other than the template of, go be an arena rocker.
Chris: Yeah. And they were, not in America—they were pretty much duds. Jeff Rougvie, who did—who was Ryko's guy who did the Sound and Vision box set—said that the last disc of that is Low through Scary Monsters, and he wanted to subtitle it "What America Got Wrong," what America missed, because the music was not played on the radio and it didn't sell. Lodger, I think, was very much a big stiff commercially in America. So I think that's one reason maybe the records sound so fresh, is that they aren't played to death. They almost sound more experimental than maybe they even are because they just were not part of the conversation in the late seventies. They weren't competing with Rumours or the Rolling Stones' Some Girls. It was like they were just in their own little, as I said, kind of a little aisle.
Lawrence: It's really fascinating too that people don't really understand how, if you're an American and you grew up in the States, your experience with David Bowie is completely different than anywhere else on the planet.
Chris: Oh, very different.
Lawrence: Different scale of the success and the sustained duration of his even commercial or chart success outside of America is really hard to fathom.
Chris: Yeah. Like classic rock radio, David Bowie was like six songs. It was like "Space Oddity," "Changes," "Ziggy Stardust," "Jean Genie," "Rebel Rebel," maybe "Young Americans." That was it.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Chris: That's all you'd heard. And "Drive-In Saturday" was like a number-two hit single in England, and nobody, no one knew what the hell that song was in America unless you were a hardcore fan.
Chris O'Leary
Author
Chris O'Leary is the author of two books on the songs of David Bowie: "Rebel Rebel" (published in 2015 and revised in 2025), and "Ashes to Ashes" (published 2019). He has also written for Pitchfork, Billboard, Slate, New York and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. A current project is 64 Quartets, an ongoing series of essays on musical quartets of various genres (https://64quartets.wordpress.com/).
