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I remember when I saw the first picture a few years ago, before Bowie left us, I laughed at how Bowie looked so happy and how Ivo Van Hove looked so worried. In my mind, I thought it was because Hove might have been super nervous about how Bowie would like the musical, “Lazarus.” While Hove might have been nervous about Bowie’s thoughts, it’s likely that Hove was worried about Bowie himself. Looking back, I can see how those around Bowie cared for him, and worried about him. You can see in the second picture (which is new to me), how Bowie is concentrating in his work and watching the going-ons of the play, while others were watching Bowie, worrying for him. Man, how I miss him.
This month marks the twentieth anniversary of David Bowie’s Earthling album, a record that saw him experimenting with new forms of electronic dance music. It came in the midst of his creative resurgence, a reaction of sorts to the albums he made in the mid-’80s that seemed to do little more than unsuccessfully chasing the success of 1983’s Let’s Dance.
A big part of that resurgence was guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who was a member of Bowie’s late-’80s/early-’90s band, Tin Machine. After that band broke up, he stuck with Bowie, playing on his ’90s solo albums. A trusted collaborator to Bowie, he co-wrote and co-produced much of Bowie’s material during that time, and was also his musical director. And although he left the band in 1999, you could argue that the work he did with Bowie put him on the path to his final album, 2016’s classic Blackstar, which won five GRAMMY Awards earlier this month.
Gabrels hasn’t spoken publically very much about his former bandmate since his passing last year, but he agreed to discuss his entire era with Bowie with Radio.com.
In 1995, photographer Gavin Evans was commissioned by Time Out magazine in London to shoot David Bowie, during the recording of ‘Outside’. The results were a series of distinctive portraits that became widely used and well-known, and are currently on display in Harpa’s new fourth-floor gallery….
…the show’s central image is something darker—a close-up shot in which Bowie gazes at the viewer with a vulnerable, almost existential expression. It’s a particularly humane portrait of the singer that’s very much at odds with the stylized characters for which he became famous.
“When I looked back at these ones,” says Gavin, “I thought: ‘I’ve never seen him like this before.’ I don’t mean photographically, but in himself. I think he was very much allowing himself just to be. He wasn’t playing the public persona—he was being less controlled, in that way.”
Two years later, Gavin got an email from Bowie’s management about the image. “At first I thought ‘Oh shit, are they going to ask me to stop using it?’” he recalls. “But as I read further down, it said that this was David’s favourite image of himself. He wanted to hang it in his Manhattan office, behind his desk. I thought, ‘Hang on, he’s connecting with this image?’ Some of the other shots from the session, like the shouting and ‘shh!’ images, are perfectly good shots, and I can see why people like them… but the one he chose had qualities that made it very personal for me. The fact that he felt it so personally as well, and acknowledged that it showed him—it’s a huge compliment, I suppose.”
Despite the naturalistic look of the shoot, Bowie still had some creative input. “When we first met,” says Gavin, “he was wearing loafers and chinos—I was quite surprised how casually dressed he was. But then he brought out these blue contact lenses, and I thought: ‘Ah, here’s the twist.’ When people see the photographs now, they often ask why we did the shoot with the blue contacts, because his eyes were such a distinctive part of his look. That was all him—he was still playing with his image….”
