A few years later, I
got to know a small group of Bowie nuts who were centered around a charismatic
character who called himself Ziggy Heroe. Ziggy was quite something. He walked,
talked, dressed and acted like Bowie. It was remarkable. He did good gigs too in
which he performed Bowie’s songs and, in due course, started to introduce his
own material which was impressive enough.
Anyhow, it was through
Ziggy and his friends that I first heard Bowie’s albums and these totally
changed my view of him. In particular the extended electronic instrumental tone
poems he wrote – partly with Eno – during his Berlin period made a very strong
impression on me. As a 15 year old I
had never heard anything like these before. I wanted more.
I started by following
up on Eno himself– as well as his own ambient albums, he had also persuaded his
record company to let him set up his own label – Obscure Records – and this he
devoted largely to the English experimental school. It released recordings of
works by Bryars, Nyman, John White, John Cage and John Adams amongst others.
Bowie and Eno had also drawn on the German Krautrock scene and I followed that
up too. A name that kept on coming up was Stockhausen . .
.
I won’t go on. Suffice
to say, for me this was the gateway into contemporary classical music. Cut to
many years later and I am running a small contemporary music festival in
Lincolnshire – the Grimsby St Hughs Festival. It occurred to me that if Bowie
and Eno’s Berlin work could act as a gateway for me, maybe it could do so for others
too. I got in touch with the Deltas and asked them to do a concert of some
arrangements I had done of some of Bowie’s instrumentals from his album Low alongside music by Glass, Nyman and
Bryars. It was a great concert – the large audience loved the Bowie inspired
mix of music which the Deltas embraced brilliantly. We seemed to be onto
something. The Deltas themselves then picked up the baton, doing further work
and commissioning further arrangements from others. The end result is the March
2018 Late Music Concert by the Deltas. This concert will also be the launch of
their CD – Bowie, Berlin and Beyond on
Trevor Taylor’s eclectic FMR label – a label which very much mirrors the ethos
of Eno’s Obscure Records. We seem to have come full circle.
As for Ziggy, he was
never to have a hit of his own but he did get his own deserved slice of
immortality in the late 1990’s when Harland Miller made him the central
character of his novel Slow Down Arthur,
Stick to Thirty. It is an evocative book that accurately captures Ziggy in
particular and the York late 1970’s rock scene in general. Well worth checking
out.
David Power.
