Some artists – AC/DC, the Ramones – find their sound and lock in. David Bowie never stood still.
In a new interview, Placebo frontman Brian Molko has revealed the advice the legendary musical chameleon gave to him.
In a new interview, Placebo frontman Brian Molko revealed the advice Bowie gave him. “It reminds me of what David Bowie said to me,” he said, “and he said this to everyone. He would always ask you a question: ‘Are you comfortable with what you’re doing?’ And the answer would normally be, Yeah, actually, I am. And then he’d say, ‘Well, you’re doing it wrong. You need to step out of your comfort zone.”
“Never play to the gallery,” Bowie once said. “Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.”
But it was what he said immediately afterward that has often been echoed in the years since his passing in 2016.
“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in,” he quipped, “you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of. Go a little bit out of your depth.
“When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
That’s why Bowie felt the need to invent new personas and recalibrate his musical identity in periodic intervals. It’s why “Uncle Arthur”, the skiffling baroque pop ditty that opens his self-titled debut album, is a million miles apart from the throbbing and shadowy jazz-blues-electronica song, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” that closed his final record nearly half a century later. And that’s a comparison that could be made across his sprawling discography.
By exploring new sounds and new aesthetics, he continuously challenged himself. He never made the easy move.
Even still, there came a point where, like a certain time lord, he got sick of shedding his skin only to pretend to be someone else. He craved a new kind of discomfort.
“I was happy to buy into the idea of reinvention,” he once told BBC Radio 6 Music. “I got quite besotted with the idea of just creating character after character, and there was a point in the ’80s where I felt my characters were getting in the way of myself as a writer, and I endeavored to kill them off and start writing for myself.”
Elsewhere, Earl Slick has reflected on his nerve-wracking debut in Bowie’s band, while Jeff Beck, who Bowie had wanted for the Spiders From Mars, proved to be the one that got away.
