Through A Glass Lightly

Nostalgia: it can trip you up, speed you on your way, stop you in your tracks, up the saturation levels, lower the contrast and gum up the present. Very often, all of the above.

Welcome to David Bowie The Buddha Of Suburbia. A flop LP soundtracking another man’s journey temporally and culturally through the 1970s, based on a novel I didn’t rate very highly but pretended I did in order to impress my sophisticated girlfriend. An album I had no real idea existed until my son’s Bowie-obsessive boyfriend kindly gave it to me for Christmas a few years ago, which now makes me think of him nostalgically as they are no longer in a relationship together.

All these tangled skeins of existence.

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The Buddha Of Suburbia is the last stop on the Bowie line for me* and it is one I really rate; despite the gnawingly irksome vocals on ‘Sex And The Church’**. I really enjoy how it was basically a direct collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kızılçay, with Bowie extending himself to play guitar, keys, synths, sax (two flavours thereof) and keyboard percussion. There is I think a sense that he had fun making this LP over 21 days in 1993 – 6 to record, 15 to mix and sequence.

On one of the inner sleeves Bowie gives us his mood board for The Buddha Of Suburbia and it is everything you could want for reminiscing about the 1970s^. This nostalgia has a place in one man’s book about his/his protagonist’s life in London, that ends just before the death grip of the Thatcher election.

The title track, also available at the end of the LP in a ‘Rock mix’ version with Lenny Kravitz supplying extra guitar, is in itself playful pastiche of 70’s Bowie, that manages to tip decades of his work aside by virtue that he is really fun and great in that mode, even if it is just larking about. Lyrically as well as nods to past Bowie touchstones it evokes Sid Vicious, South London, madness and Englishness. I’m really rather fond of the internal rhyme of ‘Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer‘, it kinda lingers.

My fave two tracks on The Buddha Of Suburbia are two instrumentals, the rather hip trip-hop inflected jazz of ‘South Horizon’, which reminds me of the whole Rebirth Of The Cool genre, series of compilation albums; which began in 1993. It is great and, along with some far-out piano (possibly overdubbed by Mike Garson) the music swells and melds with the electronic beats in a rather counter-intuitive fashion.

My very favourite cut here though is the rather gorgeous ‘The Mysteries’, which gives us seven swoonsome illuminated minutes. It is decidedly Eno adjacent and no worse for it at all, we can all enjoy a reflection.

Elsewhere we have the Madchester bop of ‘Shine Like A Craze, Dad’ where Bowie gives it his best Charlatanstoneroses impression. I really like it a lot, despite the slightly laboured Krays/craze pun. Another excellent track is the formally lovely ‘Strangers When We Meet’, heard here in its best form, its a little out of place on The Buddha Of Suburbia but no less lovely for it.

The next three are lesser entities, ‘Dead Against It’ has the virtue of anticipating all manner of 90’s indie, but ‘Untitled No.1’ lacks any auditory fibre at all and the 6 minutes of ambience entitled ‘Ian Fish, UK Heir’ is bollocks, albeit with an initially nice sinister edge.

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Memory is a fascinating prism through which to interrogate the present, the past, the present past and this present. In The Buddha Of Suburbia it served to push Bowie towards some interesting futures while refracting his own past, heavily curated as his life always was.

The Buddha Of Suburbia is a very good Bowie LP, of the type that most of us had given up on him producing by 1993. That it was cloaked as a soundtrack to another man’s fictionalised reminisces and then pretty much forgotten about for 28 years adds so many layers, mirrors, reflections refractions and retractions that I can no longer cope with how meta everything is, forcing me to hide under my bed in an unironic fashion^^.

In the end, as always, we are left with some deliberately bumpy spiral grooves. Some songs are better than others here and everything is beautifully played and recorded, the full 21 days worth. Overall I think The Buddha Of Suburbia feels like something Bowie really enjoyed doing and a project that unlocked something within him.

Remember that.

1275 Down.

PS: I never could get on with the Hanif Kureishi source novel, I am a big fan of My Beautiful Launderette though.

*if there isn’t already a Bowie Line on the London underground there really should be you know. Perhaps one of the many hugely-influential power brokers who slavishly follow my writings can make it so; I would adjudge it a personal favour.

**somewhat akin to a malfunctioning teenage Speak n’ Spell machine set to ‘maximum smirk’. Take that away and you have a perfectly passable instrumental track, especially when the sax slides into and between the beat.

^born in 1972 my own mood board would be somewhat more rusk-centric and feature more about the literature of the Rev. W. Awdry and B.B than about ‘Prostitutes and Soho’. True story.

^^ironically.