January 25, 1997 - David Bowie NME Birthday Bash Review

Fifty in the park - the Thin White Duke trawls, magnificently, through his golden years

KEVIN CUMMI MINS

Frank Black bellows a rollicking 'Scary Monsters'. Robert Smith strums and sighs on an unimaginably wonderful "Quicksand'. Foo Fighters make a juggernaut guitar marathon out of 'Hallo Spaceboy'. Shiny-topped Billy Corgan (He's a baby! He's a baby!) towers over Bowie in romping versions of 'All The Young Dudes' and 'Jean Genie'. Magnificent.

But even this starry parade can't compete in the eccentricity stakes with Bowie's current band: a carnival of chrome domes, Uncle Fester lookalikes and 3,000-year-old jazz pianists. Which is about as truly 'alternative' as it gets. They rock like bastards too, with minimum muso indulgence and maximum volume. Maybe that's why Dave pares his usual theatrical excesses down to some low-key back projections, revelling instead in a simple stage presentation where music is the prime focus.

So when Lou Reed finally arrives he's almost surplus to requirements. This is the first time the grizzled old goat has performed with his one- time Britpop mentor in almost 25 years, but even that doesn't explain the extraordinary chorus of booing which greets his arrival. Only later does it transpire that the crowd are actually chanting Reed's surname, Springsteen-style, in mass worship. So that leaves just your NME reviewer jeering loudly between songs at the overrated old curmudgeon. Oh dear.

To be fair, Lou enters into the event's spirit with a certain gusto. Introduced by Bowle as "the king of New York", the pair lurch into strutting glam-punk rarity 'Queen Bitch' from 'Hunky Dory' an inspired choice since Dave ripped the song's style and mood off Lou wholesale in the first place. 'I'm Waiting For The Man' and 'White Light, White Heat' both receive reverential hammerings and Reed also gets to trot out his more recent 'Dirty Boulevard', presumably as a reward for deigning to turn up at all. Strikingly, though, it is Reed who appears a generation apart at Madison Square Garden rather than the lithe, energised, robes of doom, the croaky old charlatan that is David Bowie uses this 50th birthday bash to piss away what remains of his career. Opening with the Lord's Prayer and ending with a Nazi salute, Dave tests the endurance of 20,000 assembled disciples with a medley of prog-metal noodling from his Tin Machine period and a silent mime about feeling a tad alienated in Chinese-occupied Tibet. He then delivers a Burroughsian cut-up poem about space donkeys and explodes. Hurray! That's what you want to hear, isn't it? A 50-year-old pantomime dame on the skids, making horrible music and murdering his classic hits? Not, say, an all-time original talent back in focus after years of false rebirths

even the godfather of art- rock extremity testing his mettle against several generations of his musical offspring, from Robert Smith to Dave Grohl? Or maybe that, for the first time in nearly two decades, Dave has new songs which can hold their own against his back catalogue in terms of starkly dramatic delivery and simple melodic power? Insane notions, of course. Unlikely beyond reason. Too much to dare hoping for. But all completely true.

Essentially, this mammoth benefit bash is a win-win situation for even the most disillusioned Bowie fan. If you've been patiently hanging on for Dave to make noises as savage and uncompromising as his '70s prime, then the gnashing Industrial junglism of 'Little Wonder' and 'Battle For Britain' fit the bill perfectly. If you only want the classics, they're here - from 'Jean Genie' to 'Heroes' to 'Fashion' and beyond. And if you've given up on old Wonky Eyes altogether, you ridiculously youthful Bowie. Even younger guests like Sonic Youth seem slothful by comparison, slouching onstage to add superfluous art-punk guitar turbulence to the already ear-splitting newie 'I'm Afraid Of

Americans'. Scoff all you like at Bowie's gargoyle axeman Reeves Gabrels, but he makes a bloody great knob-in-a- blender racket by merely pressing the 'Sonic Youth' pedal on his Arseblaster 9000 control panel, thereby rendering the Yoof's amateurish lo-fi scrongling instantly redundant. Arf.

It all ends with Dave's solo strum through 'Space Oddity. Inevitable, cheesy, predictable - but a slice of pop history and, yes dammit, quite a touching moment too. Next year he may well be back to rubbish big-haired metal again, of course. But right now, the case for a full- blown David Bowie revival has never looked stronger. Stephen Dalton