April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 5Four years ago almost to the day as I write, pretty much
exactly a month after David Bowie’s death, Tilda Swinton
stood on stage at the 66th Berlinale and introduced him
in his most celebrated acting role, the alien Thomas
Jerome Newton in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 masterpiece The
Man Who Fell to Earth. Describing herself as “a fanboy”
and Bowie as “the leader of our tribe”, she tempered her
grief with hope and celebration. “Look what he’s left us
with,” she said. “Acres and acres of sound and vision.”
It’s not unusual to hear a child of the 1960s and 70s
talk about an obsession with David Bowie; how his look,
sound and sensibilities liberated some hitherto repressed
understanding of their own self. GQ editor Dylan
Jones, born in the same year as Tilda Swinton, wrote
an entire book about the four minutes of Top of the Pops
on Thursday, 6 July 1972 when Bowie played ‘Starman’
in the guise of Ziggy Stardust, which many of this
generation cite as a pivotal moment of their childhoods.
Jones writes: “When he appeared on Top of the Pops
that night he would help nudge a culture of adoration
that would be incubated in housing estates, garden
suburbs and bedsits all over the country. In short
Ziggy Stardust caused a tectonic shift in pop culture,
providing, in the words of Rolling Stone, ‘a model of
courage to millions who had never been embraced by
a popular culture before.’” This is the impact David
Bowie had on Tilda Swinton. What makes it unusual
is the connection that developed between them.
Unrelated but interesting nonetheless, four
months before Bowie’s Top of the Pops appearance,
The Godfather was released in the US. The following
year it would win Best Picture at the 45th Academy
Awards, a moment when the outsiders and misfits
of the New Hollywood ascended to the throne with
their own leader of the tribe, Francis Ford Coppola.
Something had brewed way beyond the TV screens
of the UK, strange, intoxicating and defining.
Bowie’s relationship with Berlin ran deep, a
connection that gave Tilda’s 2016 tribute added power
and meaning. Bowie had met Iggy Pop in 1971 and
produced The Stooges’ third album, Raw Power. The
band didn’t much like Bowie’s work on the record, and
the collaboration would have been largely forgotten
were it not for the fact that it cemented Bowie and
Iggy’s friendship, which would see them land in
Berlin together in ’76 and spawn five of the most
important records in music history: Bowie’s Low,
Heroes and Lodger, and Iggy’s The Idiot and Lust for Life.
Bowie found solace and anonymity in Berlin.
“For many years Berlin had appealed to me as a
sort of sanctuary-like situation,” he said. “Berliners
just didn’t care. Well, not about an English rock
singer, anyway.” I get what he was trying to say –
they weren’t intrusive. But they did care. They do
care. He’s one of their own, and will be forever.Tilda Swinton evolved from Bowie fanboy to Bowie
collaborator when she starred alongside him in his
2013 video for ‘The Stars (Are out Tonight)’, directed
by Floria Sigismondi (best known for her underrated
2010 film The Runaways, in which Dakota Fanning
plays a teenage Bowie-obsessive desperate to be just like
Aladdin Sane) and taken from his surprise comeback
album The Next Day, a less than subtle callback to his
days in Berlin. And in Luca Guadagnino’s 2015 film
A Bigger Splash, her rockstar Marianne Lane bears
more than a passing resemblance to her hero. Since
Bowie’s death Tilda has repeatedly been rumoured to
be playing him in a biopic, but she’s always denied it.
I bumped into David Bowie’s publicist, who I know
from a previous life, at an event the other night. We passed
the usual pleasantries and talked about what we were
each working on right now. Telling him about this Tilda
Swinton issue, his eyes sparkled and a fleeting memory
whistled between us. “Oh, Bowie loved her,” he said, and
he meant it. It wasn’t PR, It wasn’t spin. It was old friends
remembering old friends, admiration and adulation
coming full circle: the fanboy of the fanboy of the fanboy.
Imagine teenage Tilda, her unlistened-to copy
of Aladdin Sane tucked under her arm, the seeds of
her androgyny and otherworldliness beginning to
germinate, an awkwardness not yet overcome by
confidence, not yet knowing that one day she could be
a hero too, and not just for one day. Enjoy the issue!LADY STARDUST
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21 Stephen St, London, W1T 1LNIt’s not unusual to hear a child of the
1960s and 70s talk about an obsession
with David Bowie; how his look, sound
and sensibilities liberated some hitherto
repressed understanding of their own self
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON COOPER AT WWW.COOPERILLO.COM/PORTRAIT BY ETIENNE GILFILLAN
Editorial Mike Williams