Pretty - The reaction of me to my wife being pregnant was archetypal daddy - Oh he's gonna be another Elvis. This song is all that plus a dash of sci-fi.

Eight - The city is a kind of high-life wart on the backside of the prairie.

Life On Mars - This is a sensitive young girls reaction to the media.

Kooks - The baby was born and it looked like me and it looked like Angie and the song came out like - if you're gonna stay with us you're gonna grow up Bananas.

Quicksand - The chain reaction of moving around through out the bliss and then the calamity of America produced this epic of confusion - Anyway, with my esoteric problems I could have written it in Plainview - or Dulwich.

There is a time and space level just before you go to sleep when all about you are losing theirs and whoosh void gets you with its cacopfony of thought - that's when I like to write my songs.

Fill - Biff Rose song.

Andy - A man of media and anti-message, with a kind of cute style.

Bob - This is how some see B.D.

Queen - A song on a Velvet Underground-Lou Reed framework s'about London sometimes.

Bewlay - Another in the series of David Bowie confessions - Star-Trek in a leather jacket.

However, left to my own devices these same pieces just took on a life of their own in the studio, the narrative and 70's memories providing a textural backdrop in my imagination that manifested as a truly exciting work situation. In short, I took the TV play motifs and restructured them completely except, that is, for the theme song.

Overall the pace of work was frenetic, taking only six days to write and record 'though a full fifteen days to mix, owing in part to some technical breakdowns - nothing serious but enough to put our team out by five or six days.

I'll tell a little of the working methods: I took each theme or motif from the play and initially stretched or lengthened it to a five or six minute duration. By means of time-code I experimented with various rhythmic elements, drums, percussion, temple blocks, et al until I found a sense of companionship to the primary motif. Then, having noted which musical key I was in and having counted the number of bars, I would often pull down the faders leaving just the percussive element with no harmonic informations to refer to. Working in layers I would then build up reinforcements in the key of the composition totally blind so to speak. When all faders were pushed up again a number of clashes would make themselves evident. The more dangerous or attractive ones would then be isolated and repeated at varying intervals so giving the impression of forethought.

On two pieces, "The Mysteries" and "Ian Fish", the original tape was slowed down, opening up the thick texture dramatically and then Erdal would play the thematic information against it.

On my favourite piece, "South Horizon", all elements, from lead instrumentation to texture, were played both forwards and backwards. The resulting extracts were then intercut arbitrarily giving Mike Garson a splendidly eccentric backdrop upon which to improvise. I personally think Mike gives one of his best-ever performances on this piece and it thrills on every listening, confirming to me at least, that he is still one of the most extraordinary pianists playing today.

My personal brief for this collection was to marry my present way of writing and playing with the stockpile of residue from the 1970's.

Here is a partial list:

Free association lyrics
Pink Floyd
Harry Partch
Costume
Blues clubs
Unter den Linden
Brücke Museum
Pet Sounds
Friends of the Krays
Roxy Music
T. Rex
The Casserole
Neu
Kraftwerk
Bromley
Croydon
Eno
Prostitutes & Soho
Ronnie Scott's club
Travels thru Russia
Loneliness
O'Jays
Philip Glass in
New York clubs
Die Mauer
Drugs

The list is actually endless but the above initially springs to mind.

Fifty percent of the lyrical content is used merely semiotically, the rest either with implied abstruse connotation or just because I like the sound of the word.

There has always been a hazy rootlessness to my writing. I put it down to an overwhelming sense of transience, or is it a case of imagination being memory rearranged? This leads me often to re-complicate much of my composition writing, something I'm working earnestly away from.

I should make it clear that many of my working forms are taken in whole or in part from my collaborations with Brian Eno, who in my humble opinion occupies the position in late 20th century popular music that Clement Greenberg had to art in the 40's or Richard Hamilton in the 60's.

In general, Brian's perceptions on form or purpose within culture leave most critics tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss spouting virtually nothing but fashionable blathering.

With a little coercion they will happily swan-dive into the vortex of their own making.

However, Brian 'he singe lik a litul gerl ha ha all mixd down and dubul-trak' so I'm one up on him there.

A major chief obstacle to the evolution of music has been the almost redundant narrative form. To rely upon this old war-horse can only continue the spiral into the British constraint of insularity. Maybe we could finally relegate the straightforward narrative to the past.

On the other hand, modern circumstances having had a dysfunctioning capacity upon pure chronological perspective, my writing has often relied too arbitrarily on violence and chaos as a soft option to acknowledging spiritual and emotional starvation. I know I'm not alone with his dilemma.

On yet another hand, chaos itself has been expressed intelligently, contextually, virulently and in vital ways by Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Fall, Glen Branca, Television, Suicide, to name but a few. Now this chaos, chthonic and Apollonian mush, harnessed and ordered, can work for us. It could be reordered within a formal harmony to recreate focus and, to some degree, rebalance the often loutish nadir into which we have blundered.

Our prodigious British talent is more than able to reveal the real gems submerged under this swaggering, violent and ignorant millennium.

We have been parading a numbed, self-degrading affair over this last decade, requiring of our art no more than, to quote Paul Valéry, "the sensation without the boredom of the conveyance."

I am constantly bewitched by the actualization of form, to use rhythmic element as an armature of sorts, placing, rather like decorations on a Christmas tree, blobs or arcane information.

The real discipline is then to pare down all superfluous elements, in a reductive fashion, leaving as near as possible a deconstructed or so called 'significant form', to use a 30's terminology. The irony, of course, is which is the most captivating - psychologically provocative form or mere aridity?

Having said that, I am completely guilty of loading in great dollops of pastiche and quasi-narrative into this present work at every opportunity.

By virtue of its subject matter this collection is in danger of being regionalist even parochial, a criticism levelled at nearly all British work this century.

Maybe because of our inherent love of the narrative form we anchor ourselves a little too firmly to our arcadian self-image. It seems to me a deeper evaluation of the international position of British artists (I include all the arts here) is currently gathering momentum as we approach the year 2000. A jolly good thing too.

It isn't all Pollack, Springsteen, Warhol and Nirvana. As with most craft to which we turn our hand we are extraordinarily inventive, 'though quirky, raising the stakes, but, alas, incapable of following through in pure hard sell. As of writing there are but five British artists in the US Top fifty, and a demoralizing TWO British albums in London's Virgin Megastores' "50 Essential Albums" rack.

This is not as it should be, and could be rectified by our insistent proselytizing that what we accomplish is as important internationally as it so obviously is nationally. We have so much un-nurtured talent in this country that it borders on criminal.

No other country, least of all the States, has been able to smoothly incorporate unpatronizingly so many diverse cultural elements into a cohesive and socially stable music form as we have on this isle.

In America modern popular music has never been more divisive, both racially and socially. The great danger over the next few years is the further escalation of the Great American Cultural Blanket. From within its homogenous threat emanates the mock adoption of grievance against a short-lived and out-moded emphasis on productivity and material success over and above any speculative interest in the deeper mysteries of our beingness.

As they say, a generation with no sense or interest in its past will surely eat itself.

Rarely now do we artists tell us much of ourselves. We are without history, interest or spiritual life. Our thoughts are often scattered and banal. Those occasional strands that have some merit are often stunted if not still-born.

Although I get the sense that all art is somewhat autobiographical it seems increasingly hard for the artist to relinquish his solipsistic subjectivity.

My own personal ambition is to create a music form that captures a mixture of sadness and grandeur on the one hand, expectancy and the organization of chaos on the other. A music that relinquishes its hold upon the 20th century yet searches-out that which was stimulating and productive as a basis from which to work in the 21st century.

This collection has brought me immense pleasure as a project and I cannot thank Hanif Kureishi and Alan Yentob enough for asking for my participation in such a dynamic and irreverent drama.

Also thanks to Kevin Loader and Roger Mitchell for their good sense and guidance to my approach to my first attempt at soundtrack.

David Richards, a 'silent' producer for far too long, along with multi-instrumentalist and longtime friend Erdal Kizilcay, make their mark as more than inventive in their individual capacities.

Hip-Hip Harangue.
Happy Xmas and Manifesto returns to you all.

David Bowie:
All clear 1980
Personal - eyes only
Tragedy Converted
Into comedy
Indifference
Complete lack of
Task
To be 67 by 1990
To win a revolution
By ignoring everything
Else out of existence
To own personal copy of 'Eraserhead'.

---

Vince was American and came to England, then went to France and became a star of dirge.

But then he came back to England and we spoke of our Findings. He wore a white robe and sandals and we sat in the busy London street with a map of the world and tried to find the people who were passing by and scowling at us. They were nowhere on the map.

Vince went back to France, then I heard about the famous show where he had told his band to go home and appeared in front of the curtains in that old white robe and sandals telling the French people about the comings and goings due upon us. He was banned from performing.

My records were selling and I was being a man in demand. I thought of Vince and wrote "Ziggy Stardust". I thought of my brother and wrote "Five Years". Then my friend came to mind, standing the way we stood in Bewlay Bros. and I wrote "Moonage Daydream".

---

It gets loud. It gets a Bristol-blues bruising buffered by the pace of dub. The pace of dub where Karmacoma shouts: "We don't look for music, it just hangs there". His stand, it's just like Tricky Thaws to say that. In vague memory of the slow-simmering garden wall where you, Martina, sang me down, under the turf. Fighting for air I was. I stole away into the yellow nether regions round the corner. All the the other sounds had been farmed-out and cut-up. So get cut thought I. Get cut and rough and raw like the end of the world. Escape this jonbarry of a British Isle hell. Escape this heat-death diving into a gene-pool, just for a laugh, like Tricky and Martina. I was the Original Mesmer and they were just the clubbers, so I waited and watched the fat-tracks slither across the stage like slimey steam assassins. Eating all they slid over. Into those front-row mouths they squirmed, trails of mucus on well-trained pink-chinned limeys. But, oh, Martina, but we were so limey with the nod of "Yes" to Tricky's STOP, STOP, STOPPIT, STOPPIT, STOP. A No-Bunch in what was an exercise in remembering America. Don't hide the fragments. They're all we've got left. But you Martina, just following the night you'll be making some money. Follow the blue lines and you'll make-up the future as you go along.

BACK IN AMERICA DO YOU REMEMBER so wound up in their immeasurable self-hurt aching and griping. They didn't understand your loss. It was in parade form all aglow with sex and bass.

Back then Tricky was the tough guy staggering across the ballroom floor shooting wicked looks at the plumbs and peaches. He carried blue steel and wrote black lines. The edgy conspiracy theories that grew up around him.

"Men are very instant" he'd say. "You fuck with a man, he's raging weak. You suffer a woman and two years later she makes you ruthless".

I'D BEEN CHASING TRICKY FOR A number of weeks, diving down into the low bars of Bristol. "He don't live here no more," I'd be told. "He went to America". I wasn't going to buy that. He'd been spied by the Magpie girl only last Thursday, slipping in and out of the shadows down by the quay, drawing black lines on his own posters drenched in salty-sea splash, grinning synergy and singing swatches of malodorous song.

The dark wisps of rumour trailed him like tow-ropes and now I was reeling him in. I didn't know what to expect. The phantom was known to move as a group of one. Never took prisoners. You'd never catch him snorting vodka at the bar. You'd never catch him period, I'd been told. A shaman who'd never slept with the Others, he was still pure, his spells unblemished. "Maxinquaye," he would intone, his eyes rolled back into his head, the beads of sweat, jewel-like, rushing upwards over his skin, an eerie light, green and mouldy, circling his feet.

"Hurry up and be cool", I heard him intoning from four blocks away. "Control me", his voice sneered. The dark bassline moved me along to the shrieking doors. Door number two. That would be it. One on earth and one in heaven.

"We're climbing tonight", I yell as I foot the latch and the mauve paint splinters off from the door panels. "Oh, there you go", Tricky accepts. "I'm tired a bit, soccer's no game for a man. I bin playin' all afternoon and I'm a sore man. But I can climb. Is it quiet out there?"

"Yes, it's sleepily lullish, "I confirm. "We may need coiling ambience of a narcotic".

"Don't touch the stars", says Tricky pulling on a deeply purple ski-mask, "they're mine". The plain concrete of the inner town looked faintly pretty in the flickering negative-lights. Even along to the foot of the 'Breaker', the 97 floor explosives depository that separates Ground Street from Little Breaker Road. Standing at its base we crane our necks and stare up through the watery moonlight to the ever so high, high topness of it.

"Ready"? I ask him.

"Groove-up", he insists. I no longer understand - I overstand. I do this because we're at about floor 77 and very cold it is too. My fingers are frozen and sore, the middle and the thumb bleeding from tearing desperately at the cornice of a passing window when I slipped an hour or so ago. As I locked myself back in place my head slammed into the concrete. The sky whirls and the street below seem to beat back and zoom foreward in quick succession.

When my head clears I find Tricky's quizzical mug furrowed into mine. His mouth moves. I hear nothing. Then I hear something. A swish of metal narrowly misses my head.

"Keep statue-like", mouths Tricky. "It's a culture-jacker".

Sure enough, round the corner of the building disappears a guy called Gerald. Well known and well done on the skyjack circuit, Gerald made headlines by jumping from three buildings in two nights.

"Clever kid" grins my companion. "Never misses a trick".

"When do we jump?" I ask. "When do we see what's what?"

Patience, older guy, let me tell you why we even stick to the wall. Let me tell you stories. I'm like Jesus. I have an argument with the cloying mass of this town. The petty. The posse I left behind. I think of them. Did you know that cars can fuck you up through your body. It's the energy, and 15 year old kid can tell you this. I get rude, knocking crockery, but I'm not the kid anymore. I graduated. I'm no more the hard affair.

"I'm like Jesus. I see the first overripe thing, all slowed down. It's a saddness and it does big changes. Bad ones. And you smoke too much. Here we go calling notorious the young townies. This means you have to learn the young kids' peace. Learn them peace. Beware that you don't run into personality. The warehouse, the homewares, the rampage crime against yelling out loud. You look at a young one and he's breaking into a cancer. He should have a going at home woman but he's become a Knowle-West disease, using the town badly.

"I suppose it's got an off-beat kick to it, all sinister, dark and distorted. It pisses me off that you talk and get arrested. They give you time and trippy delusions of what it's like to be demented. I've learnt though, I've gone through big changes with a load and a hard".

"What about your enemies?" I ask.

"He's fucked-up, ole what'sisname. I thought I was unknown but I was robbed. It's a bad thing, stealing names like that. I stayed in my area, laying low, like. What to do, I thought, now there's a war on? So I grabbed a song, seeing through and watching the machine stealing.

"What'sisname gave me some scary look, mouthing off and all that. But you learn when you're raised all dark and distorted. You run into a little black and things get high in the pulse department. I get rude but look..."

He points into the glass next to our faces. A bang of YWCA-rinsed ladies are pulling some powerful stuff from their bottles. Eyes expectant with the raising of an affair. they catch sight of our two faces, white and black, on the night and run screaming to the office door. You've never heard such sobbing pursued by clattering billows of exits ringing in the air.

"I'm running solo myself", chants my small griot, chanting as he is, to the chimes of loneliness and far distant traffic.

The mists of the '90s surround us, permeating every pore with their grey clammy fingers. should be on the jump any time soon.

I LOOK SIDEWAYS AT THE TRICKY AND watch his flattened cheek scruff at the brick, so hard as it pressed that I swear he's listening to the heartbeat of the building. With his eyes slowly closing and his lips moving, I sense his breath as a broken circle of vapour hits the pane.

A missile of babble rises through the night. I look down. Word is out that there will be a jump tonight. A quite large crowd of urban jollies have gathered at the base of our mountain. Frying thoughts, I suppose, passing round the warm epithets and bon mots no doubt. The fires are lit and I spy a news team. Their lights strike up the face of our man-mountain with speed of lizards. I'm caught in a bright-beam and I can't see.

"Don't look down", says the voice. "Look up. It's the only place.

"You know something" he continues, "only the kids shoot each other off. The children-to-be. The baby-guns. Don't you just thrive on this behaviour? It's the haunting '90s, man. It suddenly turns out we've never heard of it. They've been here before, y'know. The '90s, I mean. I remember them. Long, long ago they brooded on the side-lines when Christ was crucified, and then again the rats brought the plague to Europe in the dark-time. They keep cropping-up, these intolerable '90s Heh heh heh.

"Just don't look down. We're gonna jump in a minute. But first I want you to think back. It's a Saturday. You're tweeny-little, just a speck of a spindly-stick. You're deprived of gaggles. No friends to speak of. Pleasure starts slowly from that place. It raises itself up like a crimson monster, hauling its huge limbs with an ever increasing strength. Huffing and puffing its nature into your heart. Weaving little deeds to inspire the smartest hooligan out of you."

By the time you're a teen, you're in your renegade-chapter, carrying on and off with the pick'n'mix, selling and stealing, shooting the others and sobbing at home. To protect yourself, to not let your sadness contaminate, you dream of the smartest moves, ringing the sexual sponge dry, crimes against a tricky kid. You're soon on tour. What pleasures will be lurking by those shopping-mall escalators? The first carry-on despicable crime. Very nice. You're now a known associate. You're soon to tour but can already contaminate the dead.

"I was like Jesus. 15 and spinning. Breaking into the Saturday afternoon Knowle-West perils, using sex as a threat. They swarmed all over me, brooding and grabbing and threatening. Hard life innit? The smartest go to war, deprived, so they tell me. No longer guardians they let the hollow nausea of failure drip out of their blown out stomachs. They go off with a bang. Not for me though. That's powerful stuff that is.

"Going out and hunting down death on some wretched field in god-knows where. Deluded, some men are. Pisses me off, do-good-ers lying on the greasy paving slabs, it's petty. Deluded they are. I'm just gonna press the alarm button, so don't be alarmed".

A BLUR OF LEATHER WHIPS OUT AND his boot cracks me on the arm. My fingers straighten in panic and I'm free-falling, pitched into the bad light and murk which rushes at me like a foul memory. The little group of gawpers enlarge with the perversity of a colony of maggots.

"Now I'll show you something" he yells, sticking papers to an already massive spliff, "This drop will go on for hours, maybe eternity. I cut our paraballoons. They're not gonna function so we may never land".

The rinsed-ladies wave, the stars twinkle. I hear the rachets of fun from a distant games-machine. I smoke. My little white hard life looks up at me and forms the shape of all my hopes and desires. This must be sex as death. The peril of music. This album is over. It was the best of chimes. It was the hearse of chimes. Here come the horses to drag me to bed. Here come the Tricky to fuck up my head.

© D. Bowie 1995

For me the Eastern leg of a tour is always the carrot. For the rest, however magical the chemistry of the performance, they day-to-day mechanics of getting from city to city are draining and monumentally boring. That's the stick.

During the cab ride to the Ming Court Hotel, I direct a string of unrelenting tourist questions at the driver. Where's the old part of town? Is this the Arab or Chinese or Malay section? Why are they pulling down all the picturesque stuff? He lets know in no uncertain terms that the new apartment blocks with their bathrooms and air conditioning are far more in favor with families of five or six than are the rat- and cockroach-infested unsanitary slums that I take as local color. I'm crushed. He then goes on to tell me about the recent drug-related hangings. "Many people hang one day. Fourteen years old up to seventy. Death just for smoking the hashish. We clean up town."

The driver also lets slip how hard it is for him to keep up the relentless upward spiralling cost of living. He hasn't ever had a holiday and thinks he may have taken a dew days off work about four years ago. "But everybody works," he says. "Singapore will be next Hong Kong."

When I move into my suite at the Ming Court Hotel, the little Malay porter indicates the three-tone carpet, the ten-channel T.V. He is bursting with pride about the bathrooms but is visually awed by the three hundred square feet of personal freedom. He paces the room from wall to wall. "So much space," he sighs.

The Singapore authorities are not friendly toward rock & roll. Two of my songs, "China Girl" and "Modern Love", were banned from radio play. "Restricted," as they say. Our wonderful and fearless promoter, Dr. Goh Pohseng, risked his livelihood, bank balance, and even his freedom to get me and my band into his country. When the authorities heard I was going to an impromptu guest appearance at this youth club two days before our major gig, they busted it, banned the resident band for indecent performance, and threatened Dr. Pohseng with imprisonment if a guest of the club - (me) - should get up on stage and sing. He also faced incredible local resistance in getting the staging and lights together. When he asked for three yards of cable, local supplier - knowing it was for rock & roll - would only sell him a 100-yard drum. No one would lease him timber for the stage, so he ended up buying an architect-designed permanent structure at ten times the cost... and so it went, over and over.

The lights were flown in from all over Malaysia. Many arrived broken, and those intact not much more powerful than a bedroom lamp. But, good lord, he tried.

I am supposed to say something to the children in the Singapore audience. These children who are doomed to ride the up escalator forever. These American-designed fiber glass light-conducting interested-inscrutable faces. I stand on a beautifully improvised high-tech kitchen-unit stage, and I am shocked at how loose-eyed and shoddy my songs seem in the face of the fact that these green- and red-streaked kids represent a thousand-year-old culture. As if in agreement with the cultural difference, the local authorities have separated me from the kids with a 65-foot ramp between the first row and stage. I do mean kids and I do mean separated!

I rip through a welcome and an introduction to the band in Chinese. It is received with dutiful sympathy by the crowd as my pronunciation is so dreadful that not one word is understood. The audience end of the ramp is so far away from the band that I am singing half a beat behind them. I look back and see a tiny, jumping Carlos Alomar leading a badly lit rock & roll group. I peer out and see paramilitary cops at the ratio of about one to two with the first row. They finger their billy clubs, their hands on their guns. My jacked style is designer Tokyo - skyscrapers and diamante searchlights. There is so much lacquer in my hair that a hurricane couldn't move it. My shirt is held into my pants by elastic thongs round my legs. I have two pairs of socks on because over oversized shoes. I am imploring the crowd, "put on your red shoes"... there is a scream of recognition - 15,000 strong. A tiger-print-clad girl is slapped back over the security boundary by a ferocious swing of a billy club.

In a city where you can be arrested for chewing gum, a demand to put on red shoes is deemed unhealthy.

The warm night air bathes our bodies, and the scents and smells of the East grown stronger as the evening grows longer. For a moment I feel I am playing to the tiger-infested jungle that existed here until the arrival of concrete a few short decades ago. There is an audible breakdown of reserve as curious uplifting faces recognize this song, then that one. They are singing along. It is an overwhelming experience for me and for any artist, I suppose, to see an audience of a culture ostensibly so far removed from one's own, singing along. It may not should like a big deal, but for one night it can mean everything.

Now we are all dancing and loving each other and having the greatest of times. We are back for an encore, and the crowds swell up over the ramp. We touch hands and inspire each other on. All at once my songs sound very good, and I get another elusive glimpse of how lucky I am to be doing what I do. I think I my tour again.

So now I pass from my notebook to the writing of Chet Flippo and the camera work of Denis O'Regan as they give you their own impressions of a rock & roll tour of the world in 1983.

She came to the gig at the Olympia did Tracey. She rocked backwards and forwards and shimmied like a disco-queen (which she nearly was once). Possibly screaming her manta 'Write this, Draw this'. If she wanted, she could travel the length and breadth of the land with me and my band. Everyone from stage hands to musicians immediately fall in love with her. She's so charismatic, she sends off sparks.

We stay at the U2-owned Clarence Hotel on the River Liffey. Iman takes some photos of us looking out to the far side of the water and two small girls throw themselves into the shot.

'Are you a model?', asks the smaller one, of Tracey. Tracey laughs. 'Make your mouth do this', orders the girl and makes a grimace. Tracey obliges. 'Naw, you're no model. Now send me copies of them pictures to me house will ya', and they nonchalantly wander off picking up their previous conversation. Back inside the hotel, Tracey and I talk.

There is a childlike excitement that at last people will show, in a gallery, all the nooks, crannies and fag-ends of her life. I never knew her before this year, but who I see in front of me now is someone highly charged with solipsistic overdrive. Within 30 minutes of meeting her I have a full run-down on her newest intimate relationships, her hopes and dreams for her personal life as well as proffered opinions on Balthus ('a dirty old man, a pervert'), my interviews with Damien Hirst (You're obsessed by him') and her sponsorship contract with a rather exotic alcohol brand. The latter it seems is extremely important to her as booze is a 24-hour companion to her life.

I love her fractured energy and could sit and listen to her for hours. Although her viewpoints, tastes and interests are standard and unvaryingly those of any eighteen-year-old art student, it slowly dawns on me that she is in fact a 34-year-old woman. Her natural youthfulness is exhilarating. She is also extraordinarily sexy. The elastic lips, famous broken teeth and half-closed eyes, deliver one of the more seductively interesting faces in British art. I think I can look at her face for even longer than I can listen to her talk.

She wants very much to be firmly identified in this modern world, but time and again she reveals a deep fascination with passions from another time - Munch, Schiele, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gioto, narrative painting.

She says her work has been compared to Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. I don't buy into this at all. If anyone springs to mind it's William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh. There is little sarcasm, cynicism or even intended irony in her work. It has little of the mystic hippiness of Kiki Smith or the Fuck You diffidence of her best friend Sarah Lucas. It has more of the construct of the self. The dawning of late-eighteen-century self-conciousness, that first realisation of self you find in early nineteenth-century self-portraits. Or maybe, even, a Mary Shelley of Margate.

There's also the smashed glass-splinter effect echoing the deeply dysfunctional work found at Gugging Hospital in Vienna, the bastion of working 'Outside' artists, or at L'art Brut, Lausanne, the Vatican of fringe.

Her little museum in Waterloo is not so much a '90s absurdity, but more an updated reflection of the nineteenth century, 'I am' reverberations of the John Soane house and museum.

A few others, but only a few, also have an ambivalence toward her work. Charles Saatchi, in curating his upcoming 'Masterworks at the RA', belatedly acquired a single 1995 Emin piece, her tent with lovers' names, only a few weeks ago. This doesn't seem to imply a passion for her work, but rather a need to make up for a full set of Mod-Brit Artists. Amusingly, this piece having acquired an almost iconic status set Charles back considerably more than he is used to shelling out.

It probably comes from the need to have seen it all.

Head Of S.C.
66cm x 54cm Charcoal on Rag 1994

Head Of S.C.
30" x 23" Charcoal and Chalk on Rag 1994

The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction As Beauty
42" x 28" Computer Print 1995

Crouch
40" x 25" Charcoal and Chalk on Computer Print 1994

Afro/Pagan I
42" x 28" Computer Print 1995

Afro/Pagan II
42" x 28" Computer Print 1995

Afro/Pagan III
42" x 30" Computer Print 1995

Coastline
30" x 22" Charcoal and Pastel on Paper 1994

Old Master
30" x 23" Charcoal and Pastel on Paper 1994

Double Head Of D.B.
16" x 28" Acrylic on Canvas 1994

Head Of D.B.
19" x 26" Charcoal and Pastel 1994

Head Of J.O.
25" x 20" Acrylic 1976

The Crowd Pleasers
39" x 31" Acrylic on Canvas 1978

Head Of R.G.
30" x 23" Charcoal on Rag 1994

Head Of M.G.
30" x 23" Charcoal on Rag 1994

Tambourine Dance
8" x 10" Acrylic on Canvas 1993

The Deposition
16" x 30" Acrylic on Canvas 1993

Part Victim
15" x 18" Acrylic on Canvas 1993

Ramona A. Stone
Computer Print 1995

A Small Plot Of Land
Computer Print 1995

Proto-type for the "The Remember" Series
24" high Chrome Plated Bronze 1995

Hearth And The Black Coat
68" x 53" Acrylic on Canvas 1993

My sincere thanks to my studio assistants, Alex Hamilton and Andy Spray, for their hard work and enthusiasm.

This brochure was created and typeset using Apple Macintosh computers and Adobe Photoshop.

David Bowie would like to thank Laura Ashley Ltd. for providing its expertise and help in printing the British Conflict Series and Minotaur wallcoverings for this exhibition and for providing an original Laura Ashley design as an underlay for this purpose.

By now I'm sure you may have seen the film Merry Xmas Mr. Lawrence. Working with Mr. Oshima was one of the highlights of my artistic life. The exuberance and enthusiasm generated by this great artist spread quickly throughout the cast and crew so that we were all caught up in his vision.

Right now I am starting a world tour for my new album "Let's Dance". We start in Europe in May then go on to America and finish the tour in Japan and Australia.

I look forward to coming back to Japan, one of my favourite places and seeing my friends and fans once again.

Waking up every day to a world of pieces and bits we spend the remaining hours putting it into some kind of form we can deal with. No order, no function. Basquiat takes a cursive swipe and re-establishes the disorder that is reality. The pure joyful chaotic miasma of it all. Goo-goo-ga-joo. Refracting fact fractions facting refact. He's milking the diction-dairy, wiping up the puddles of Anglo detritus and scoffing the lot. He's stealing us limb by word.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: 'I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head'.

All young black men in white worlds know more about white than white know about black. For hundreds of years they have been subjected to histories, posters, lectures, cartoons, dinner conversations, listened to in silence from the shadowy corners, pontifications on how white speak - sit - think - walk - talk that talk.

Then film, tv, advertising, media, everything white - it's all there - anger, manipulation, generosity, rationality, jealously, love, hostility, each and every nuance that, brick by brick, builds the bridge to the Caucasian fields. Meanwhile, on the other trackside, stereotype black dance-sing-disgruntled, not satisfied-with-their-lot above their station or happy-loyal-where-would-I-be-without-Massa subservience. Until developments of the past few decades, this was the white-invented form we imposed on the West-world black. When the black artist refuses to be harnessed by the form and content of a patronising art-world, he creates a raging maelstrom into which all the carefully propped-up relics of cultural conditions are sucked and crushed. All revealed, the bars of the captor's prison are bent, twisted and gleefully reshaped into the budding flower of emergence. Bruised, bashed and battered, finally unmasked, the grin sneers at the bigotry and idiocy lying wasted on the Roman cobbles; from the flat white-walled cubes the lips whisper, 'I caught you smilin' again'. Blushing and irritated, the white viewer quickens his pace while the screaming fills his ears: 'I'm gonna Fuck You Up'.

What makes Basquiat's work so powerful is his transcendence of the black-white posturing and the truly dignified indifference of the existentialist... I feel the very moment of his brush or crayon touching the canvas. There is a burning immediacy to his ever evaporating decisions that fires the imagination ten or fifteen years on, as freshly molten as the day they were poured onto the canvas. But, unlike Graham Greene, say, who in his youth would steal his father's army pistol, sit quietly in the woods near home and click off a solipsistic game of Russian Roulette to give his young life an edge, Basquiat had no choice but to grasp at the minimal options open to him on the streets of New York, hold on like hell while the meteor of fame dragged him up to its full ascendancy, eventually to deaden the pain of the burns and welts of jealousy with heroin.

In between times, he borrowed or crafted life for himself. His background history would change with every telling.

Although he managed to put most people off the scent, his reality must have been something like this.

He was brought up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the eldest of three children. Two sisters, Lisanne and Jeanine. His Haitian-born father, an accountant, secured a good middle-class salary; young Jean-Michel went to private school. His mother, a Puerto Rican, encouraged his obsession for art, introducing him to various pictures and styles through their visits to museums and galleries. They were close, and her temporary institutionalisation for treatment of a mental illness veiled Jean-Michel with a certain sadness.

At around eight years old, a car accident put him in hospital for an unspecified period, probably months, cutting him off from friends and familiar places. Matilde, his mother, brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, possibly to explain the ins and outs of the operation to remove his spleen. The skeletons and skulls that frequent his work may well have been triggered by this illustrated tome.

Around ten years of age, his mother and father parted, dad taking the kids with him to live with a white English woman. From his first days as a tag or graffiti artist, his efforts at making good relationships were thwarted by his own singular sense of drift.

Irony is, of course, that this sense of not belonging is one of the great strengths of his STUFF. He knew as much as he needed about art and probably a whole lot more than his contemporaries, and there is no great shrieking voice of proven Blackness here. As he himself would insist, when asked, 'I am not a Black artist, I am an artist'.

It comes as no surprise to learn that he had a not-so-hidden ambition to be a rock musician, as his work relates to rock in ways that very few other visual artists get near. He seemed to digest the frenetic flow of passing image and experience, put them through some kind of internal reorganisation and dress the canvas with this resultant network of chance. Word ensnared by colour. Shape qualified by phrase.

The wave he would have liked us to see was the surf-wave of free-association, uninhibited and loaded with a new fractured language, a street-map for a city not yet designed, a dialogue with our sub-present.

His STUFF is the continually dividing cell of our future-past. Embryos with all the cross-referenced features in place. But the stash was terminated before maturity. I should like to have seen it all grown-up.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1994
122 EAST VILLAGE, MANHATTAN

Ron Athey, performance artist not for the squeamish - former heroin addict-HIV positive, pushed what looks like a knitting needle repeatedly into his forehead, a crown of blood, must hurt like hell. Stream red dribble-dribble. No screams. Face moves in pain. Carried upstage and scrubbed down in his own blood. Then water. Now dresses in nice suit and tie. Now in black T-shirt and jeans, carving, with a disposable scalpel, patters, into the back of Darryl Carlton, a black man. Bloody blotted paper towels then hung on a washing line suspended over the heads of the audience Blood-prints from life. An extremely limited edition. When it was first performed back in March, "Four Scenes In A Harsh Life" exploded controversy shrapnel throughout the National Endowment For The Arts. "We have taken every precaution with our disposal systems," and Athey spokesperson said. "The towels containing the blood are immediately deposited in hazardous-waste bags. Each evening, the material will be driven to a hospital for final disposal". Athey says he is dealing with issues of self-loathing, suffering, healing and redemption.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999, 10.30AM
MUSEUM OF MODERN PARTS

I'm drinking up the Oxford Town. New Jersey fume. Salty and acid. maybe I can get a handle on this thing back in Soho at the bureau. It used to be Rothko's studio, now the playground for all us Art-Crime folk, AC' or "the daubers" as we're dubbed. Rothko himself, in a deep-dark-drunk one night, carefully removed his clothes, folded them up neatly, placing them upon a chair, lay upon the floor in a crucified position and after several attempts, found the soft blue pump of his wrists and checked out. He'd held the razor blades between wads of tissue paper so that he wouldn't cut his fingers. Deep thinker. Always was.

11.00AM
"DAUBER" HQ, SOHO

Ramona A. Stone: Female. Caucasian. Mid-40s. Assertive maintenance interesting-drug dealer and Tyrannical Futurist. No convictions. Contacts: Leon Blank, Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek.

Leon Blank: Male, Mixed race. 22 years. Outsider. Three convictions for petty theft, appropriation and plagiarism with license. Contacts: Baby Grace Blue, Algeria Touchshriek.

Algeria Touchshriek: Male. Caucasian. 78 years. Owner of small establishment on Rail Yard. Oxford Town, NJ. Deals in art-drugs and DNA prints. Fence for all apparitions of any medium. Harmless, lonely.

Small cog, no wheels. Not much to go on but R.A. Stone weighs heavy on my memory. No problem, it'll come back. Best thing to do now is feed all relevant pieces into the Mack-Verbasiser, the Metarandom programme that re-strings real life facts as improbable virtual-fact. I may get a lead or two from that.

11.15AM

Jesus Who. I hate typing. Anyhow, we've got some real interesting solvents from Mack-random. How about this! Verbasiser down-load, first block:

JUNE 15, 1977
KREUTZBURG, BERLIN

OCTOBER 28, 1994

New Yorker magazine advance copy, celebrating fashion. It's a first of its kind since Tina Brown took over as editor. One look is all it took. It took the look and wrote a new book on what sophistaplites would take and bake. Guy Bourdin featured heavily in this new eDISHion. Since the advent of AIDS and the new morality, and, of course his death, his dark sexy fatal style had fallen out of Vogue. An uncompromising photographer, he had found a twisty avenue through desire and death. A white female leg sticking gloomily out of a bath of black liquid enamel. Two glued up babes covered in tiny pearls. The glue prevented their skins from breathing and they pass out. "Oh it would be beautiful," he is to have said, "to photograph them dead in bed." He was a French Guy. He had known Man Ray. Loved Lewis Carroll. His first gig was doing hats for Vogue. He'd place dead flies or bees on the faces of the models, or, female head wears hat crushed between three skinned calves heads, tongues lolling. What was this? Fine Arts? The surrealists might even think his work passé. Well, it was the '50s, that's what it was. The tight-collar '50s seen through unspeakable hostility. He wanted but he couldn't paint. So he threw globs of revengeful hatred at his nubile subjects. He would systematically pull the phone cord out of the wall. He was never to be disturbed. Disturbed. Never. Everything and everyone died around him. One shoot focusing upon a woman lying in bed was said to be a reconstruction of his estranged wife's death. Another picture has a woman in a phone booth making some frantic call. Her hand is pressed whitely against the glass. Behind her and outside are two female bodies partially covered by the autumn leaves. His dream, so he told friends, was to do shoots in the morgue, with the stiffs as mannequins. I don't know. I just read this stuff. Now is spirit was being resurrected. We're mystified by blood. It's our enemy now. We don't understand it. Can't live with it. Can't, well... y'know?

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999, 11.30AM

After surgery and investment in a bullet-proof mask, Ramona turned up in London, Canada as owner of a string of body-parts jewellery stores. Lamb penis necklaces, goat-scrotum purses, nipple earrings, that sort of thing. The word on the street, however, suggested that it was not in the best of interests to become one of her clients as occasionally, a customer would step into her shop and not come out again. The whistle blew after a much-loved and highly respected celebrity, known for being known, failed to show for a gallery-hanging of her mirrors. Other celebrities, equally known for being known, some only to each other, thought it the most profound exhibit in years and couldn't takes their eyes off the works. All the pieces sold within an hour, many for record prices. When the critic for Tate magazine asked for an interview with the celebrity-artist, the gallery owner recalled that he hadn't seen her since earlier that day. She'd mentioned that she would be going shopping for a diamond-encrusted umbilical cord as a celebratory thing to announce her pregnancy. She would be back in an hour. Just a quick stop at the "Gallstone". 1986. That pregnancy would have produced a being that would be around 14 years of age.

To be continued at a later date...