Zum 10. Todestag von Davie Bowie sein prophetisches Interview zum Internet aus dem Jahr 1999 für die BBC:https://im.allmendenetz.de/attach/b519b708-c471-4b01-8e84-447af6c9c470?f=&zid=abspeckgefluester.de%40abspeckgefluester.deTranskription: Klicke zum Öffnen/SchließenJeremy Paxman: I was thinking back over your career, and it seems to me that there's been a constant reinvention.David Bowie: Of sorts, yeah.Jeremy Paxman: Why did you do that?David Bowie: I think I was quite happy to buy into the idea of reinvention up until the beginning of the 80s, really. And it came about, I think, more than anything else, that when I was a teenager, I had it in my mind that I would be a creator of musicals. I sincerely wanted to write musicals for the West End and for Broadway, whatever. I didn't see much further than that. As a writer, and I really had the idea in my head that people would do my songs, and I was not a natural performer. I didn't feel at ease on stage, ever. And I had created this one character, Ziggy Stardust, that it seemed that I would be the one that would play him because nobody else was doing my songs, and the chances of my actually getting a musical mounted were very slim. And so I became Ziggy Stardust for that period, whatever. And things sort of led... I liked the idea, and I felt really comfortable going on stage as somebody else. And it seemed a rational decision to keep on doing that. And so I got quite besotted with the idea of just creating character after character. And I think, probably, there must have been a point in the late 70s, well, I know there was, where I felt that the characters were in fact getting in the way of myself as a writer, and I endeavoured to kind of kill them off and start writing for me as just a singer -songwriter. I'm not sure if I was ever successful in that, because I do take a degree of theatricality when I go on stage all the time. It's, you know, sort of, that's how I deal with the stage situation. I'm still not comfortable on stage.Jeremy Paxman: But, I mean, David Bowie himself is an invention. I mean, do you think of yourself as Bowie, or David Jones, the boy from South London?David Bowie: Er, less and less as Bowie, Bowie, Bowie. How are we supposed to pronounce it? I don't even know how to pronounce it anymore. I've lost track. I always thought it was Bowie. I thought, what is the Scottish name? Must be Bowie. But nobody in Scotland pronounces it like that. They pronounce it Bowie, I think. It was some kind of discovery in the 80s, I think, that a lot of what I am is my enthusiasms, that I've always been a very curious and enthusiastic person, again, as there's from when I was a teenager, and that it really wasn't up to me to try and identify exactly what that meant. I just had to accept that I was a person that had a very short attention span, would move from one thing to another quite rapidly when I got bored with the other. And I became comfortable with that and didn't try and identify myself or try and ask myself who I was. The less questioning I did about myself as to who I was, the more comfortable I felt. So now I have absolutely no knowledge of who I am, but I'm extremely happy.Jeremy Paxman: But do you find the business of being in the music industry as interesting and attractive as it is?David Bowie: I have nothing to do with the industry. I really have so little to do with it. The hub of my creativity comes from what I do and where I go. I put myself in places, one that maybe I've never been before, or that I feel there's a certain tension involved. I can't really write or produce much if I'm in a place that's relaxing. I have to have a set of conflicts going around me, not necessarily of my own doing. I've learned that that is a particularly bad idea.Jeremy Paxman: What do you mean?David Bowie: Well, I don't create my own conflicts in my own life. I think I might have done that to quite an extent when I was younger. Actually, things were going too smoothly. I would be drawn... Being an addictive personality, I would be drawn to create conflicts that would produce the tension necessary to write. Now I find that I can do it by observation more than being absolutely deeply involved in a mess to be able to write. But the industry side of things, I'm not even sure what that word actually represents to me anymore.Jeremy Paxman: I mean, at a personal level, you don't do drugs anymore.David Bowie: No, absolutely not.Jeremy Paxman: And you don't drink?David Bowie: I don't drink either, no.Jeremy Paxman: Not even a glass of wine or anything?David Bowie: No, it would kill me.Jeremy Paxman: What do you mean it would kill you?David Bowie: I'm an alcoholic, so it would be a kiss of death for me to start drinking again. And my relationships with my friends, my family, everybody around me are so good and have been for so many years now, I wouldn't do anything to destroy that again. It's very hard to have relationships when you're doing drugs and drinking. For me personally, anyway. And you become closed off, unreceptive, insensitive, all the dreadful things that you've heard every other pop singer ever say. And I was very lucky that I found my way out of that. It's been good for me. I've reassessed my life any number of times.Jeremy Paxman: If you were starting out now, did I read somewhere that you said if you were 19, you wouldn't go into the music business?David Bowie: I think that's probably quite right. I think I'd probably just be a fan and a collector of records.Jeremy Paxman: What would you do?David Bowie: I wanted to be a musician because it seemed rebellious. It seemed subversive. It felt like one could affect change to a form. It was very hard to hear music when I was younger. When I was really young, you had to tune into AFN radio to hear the American records. There was no MTV and there was no, it wasn't sort of wall -to -wall blanket music. And so therefore, it had a kind of a call -to -arms kind of feeling to it. This is the thing that will change things. This is a dead dodgy occupation to have. It's still, oh, produce signs of horror from people. If you said, yeah, I'm in rock and roll. It was, my goodness. Now it's through a career opportunity. And the internet is now, carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic. Oh, yes, it is. Forget about the Microsoft element. The monopolies do not have a monopoly. Maybe on programs.Jeremy Paxman: What you like about it is the fact that anyone can say anything or do anything.David Bowie: From my standpoint, from where I am, because of the, by virtue of the fact that I am a pop singer and writer, I really, I really like, I embrace the idea that there's a new demystification process going on between the artist and the audience. I think when you look back at, say, this last decade, there hasn't really been one single entity, artist or group, that have personified or become the brand name for the 90s. Like, it was starting to fade a little in the 80s and in the 70s there were still definite artists and in the 60s there were the Beatles and the Hendrix and in the 50s there was Presley. Now it's subgroups and genres. It's hip -hop. It's girl power. It's a communal kind of thing. It's about the community. It's becoming more and more about the audience. Because the point of having somebody who led the forces has disappeared because the vocabulary of rock is too well known. It's a currency that is not, it's not devoid of meaning anymore but it's certainly only a conveyor of information now. It's not a conveyor of rebellion. And the internet has taken on that, as I say. And so I find that a terribly exciting area. So from my standpoint, being an artist, I'd like to see what the new construction is between artist and audience. There is a breakdown. There's a... personified, I think, by the rave culture of the last few years where the audience is at least as important as whoever is playing at the rave. It's almost like the artist is to accompany the audience and what the audience are doing. And that feeling is very much permeating music and permeating the internet.Jeremy Paxman: But what is it specifically about the internet? I mean, anybody can say anything.David Bowie: Yeah.Jeremy Paxman: And it all adds up to what? I mean, it seems to me there's no... There's nothing cohesive about it in the way that there was something cohesive about the youth revolution in music.David Bowie: Oh, but absolutely. And because I think that we, at the time, up until at least the mid -70s, really felt that we were still living under the... in the guise of a single and absolute created society where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in. That started to break down rapidly in the 70s and the idea of a duality in the way that we live. There are always two, three, four, five sides to every question. That the singularity disappeared. And that, I believe, has produced such a medium as the internet which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.Jeremy Paxman: You don't think that some of the claims being made for it are hugely exaggerated? I mean, when the telephone was invented, people made amazing claims for it.David Bowie: I know. The president, for example. The president at the time when it was first invented, he was outrageous. He said he foresaw the day in the future when every town in America would have a telephone. Now that, how dare he claim like that? Absolute bullshit. No, you see, I don't agree. I think the internet, I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we're actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.Jeremy Paxman: It's just a tool, though, isn't it?David Bowie: No, it's not. No. No, it's an alien life form.Jeremy Paxman: What do you think, I mean, when you think, then, about the future...David Bowie: It's their life on Mars. Yes, it's just landed here.Jeremy Paxman: But that's, it's simply a different delivery system there. You're arguing about something more profound.David Bowie: Oh, yeah, I'm talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico. It's going to, it's going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. But it's happening in every form. It's happening in visual art. The breakthroughs of the early part of the century with people like Duchamp, who were so prescient in what they were doing and putting down. The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.Jeremy Paxman: Bowie bonds are the big, one of the things you're best known for.David Bowie: Yeah.Jeremy Paxman: You were supposed to raise 30 million by sellingDavid Bowie: Yes, I did.Jeremy Paxman: rights to your earning future earnings on your back catalogue. Doesn't there come a point at which there's no point in earning any more money?David Bowie: Do you know how expensive it is to get involved in the internet? I think that I probably the majority of the money that I make goes, I plough back into some new project rather. I also, of course, being working class always feel that there's never enough to leave my family. So, there's a kind of a survival instinct that okay, I could definitely, that's going to be fine. I can leave that to all the kids' future and past and everybody will be okay. However, I would love to start a new internet company as well, so I'll need a bit more for that. So, you kind of get a bit plough, you just keep ploughing it back in. I'm not a buyer of things. I think the only thing that I buy addictively and obsessively probably is art. I'm not really a house man or a car man. The only nice car I've ever bought for myself was a 1967 E -Type one and a half, which is quite, I would get the half. I don't have things, I don't have a plane, I don't have a, I haven't, I haven't got very much, do you know, I'm not a buyer of stuff, I much rather, I do tend to regard money as the oil to get other things going. I much, I feel more comfortable with it like that.Jeremy Paxman: Do you have any desire to come back here?David Bowie: I'd love to come back here and I will. We haven't decided when it'll be but that's an absolute given. There are a few other things I want to get accomplished over the next, I'd say, two years that may be quite surprising to people.Jeremy Paxman: What do you make of cool Britannia?David Bowie: Oh, lumpen. It's so clichéd and silly and ineffective, I think. I don't think it's really changed. I think it might have, I think it's helped the media get some handle on how to describe these times, but I don't think anybody else anywhere believes it. There's good and bad in everything that we do. We're brilliant architects, got some wonderful artists, visual artists and some rubbish artists as well. Music, we've always been good at music. We're not truly a rock nation. Everything that we do in rock and roll has a sense of irony attached to it. We know that we're not the Americans. We know it didn't spring from our souls and so as the British always do. They try and do something with it to make them feel smug and that's what we're good at doing.Jeremy Paxman: But when you see politicians embracing rock stars, I mean, personally, I start reaching for my revolver then.David Bowie: Well, at least I wear a pair of women's high heels when I meet our primary. I do my bit still. He didn't even notice, you know.Jeremy Paxman: What, this was Tony Blair?David Bowie: Hmm.Jeremy Paxman: He didn't notice you were...David Bowie: ...wearing women's stiletto shoes and a nice suit and tie. That's the last time I wore a tie. I think. No, it wasn't. No, I wore a vicar's dog collar. Nice black suit, black shirt with a dog collar and a pair of women's high heels. And he didn't bat an eyelid.Jeremy Paxman: Thank you very much.
