David Bowie: Straight Time
In February, Bowie brought David Mallet, the London-based director with whom he collaborates, to Switzerland to help work up storyboards for the two videos he wanted to do: “Let’s Dance,” the title track from his new album, and another song on the LP called “China Girl” (which Bowie had written with his friend Iggy Pop in 1977, and which had previously appeared on Pop’s album The Idiot). In less than a week, they were in Sydney with an English producer and cameraman, and an Australian crew numbering about a dozen people. Bowie had also secured the services of two students from Sydney’s Aboriginal-Islanders Dance Theatre and a young Chinese woman from New Zealand named Geeling, and soon had them racing all over town. One morning, he’d have the Aboriginal pair –– a boy named Terry Roberts and a girl named Joelene King –– clambering up a hand-built “hilltop” on a promontory overlooking Shark Island in Sydney’s spectacular harbor; in the afternoon, the whole company would tear across town to a machine shop in the sweltering suburb of Guildford, where Terry would be filmed toiling at a big steel milling machine amid stifling clouds of artificial smoke. (A few days earlier, Bowie’d had Terry actually pulling the machine down a major Sydney thoroughfare while Joelene, on her hands and knees, scrubbed down the intersection with soap brush and water – much to the audible dismay of an army of Saturday drivers.)
Geeling was also exotically occupied, one day “making love” with Bowie on the beach, another romping through Chinatown in a gray silk Mao uniform and red-star cap. Aside from Bowie and Mallet, no one could figure out what the hell was going on.
Both videos, of course, were about racism and oppression. “Very simple, very direct,” Bowie explained one afternoon. “They’re almost like Russian social realism, very naive. And the message that they have is very simple –– it’s wrong to be racist!” He can’t help laughing at the sentiment so baldly stated. “But I see no reason to fuck about with that message, you see? I thought, ‘Let’s try to use the video format as a platform for some kind of social observation, and not just waste it on trotting out and trying to enhance the public image of the singer involved. I mean, these are little movies, and some movies can have a point, so why not try to make some point. This stuff goes out all over the world; it’s played on all kinds of programs. I mean – you get free point time!”
It is, as Bowie says, a place of “frankly brute character.” Town of Carinda, a close-to-the-ground sheep-country settlement some 400 miles out over the Blue Mountains and down into the sunbaked bush west of Sydney. There’s been no useful rainfall in these parts for four years, and the sun beats down with an incendiary power. At 10:30 in the morning, crew members are already estimating the temperature at around 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
As a hard-scrub fantasy of a frontier outpost, Carinda might seem overdrawn even to Sergio Leone. There’s no one on the main street except a fly-bitten dog and a town drunk, and at any moment, one expects to see Clint Eastwood stepping out into the glare with a bulge in his poncho, gunning for Lee Van Cleef. Inside the one-room pub in the Carinda Hotel, several large-bellied locals are already lined up at the bar, swatting down schooners of Tooths beer –– leathery men in the bush shorts, T-shirts and sweat-stained slouch hats that are a kind of uniform among the good old boys of the outback. There isn’t much to do out here beyond drinking and fighting, and these geezers, apparently, are getting an early start.
No one pays too much attention when Bowie walks in. He’s wearing his usual gray shorts, bush boots, short-sleeve shirt and a kind of semisoft fedora known locally as a Snowy River. Even though he lacks the pendulous gut that makes for authenticity in these matters, he’s not conspicuous. He looks around at the linoleum floor, the dart board and pool table, the overhead fan, the dustcaked cricket trophies above the bar, the wallboard menu offering chicko rolls and meat pies, and he smothers a chuckle. “I love this place,” he says in a discreet whisper.
The locals soon realize that something’s up: a lot of impossibly pale-looking people are starting to haul in Arriflex cameras and klieg lights and stun-size audio speakers. They’re tacking glare netting over the open doorway, and one of them’s starting to squirt smoke around, which is really stinking the place up. They’ve also brought a pair of Abos with them, which must be some kind of unwished-for first. “Where’d you get the dark couple?” asks one tippler in a flat, chilly tone.
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