I was surprised - no, make that gobsmacked - to learn that there are plans to fashion a stage musical out of David Bowie's Deram era songs. While I'm very fond of many of these whimsical or bizarre numbers and would be delighted to be proven wrong, I can't help thinking that the idea is destined to fail: Sister Josephine Kicks the Habit all over again.
You may or may not have heard of Sister Josephine ... Probably the latter, if you're not already a fan of the unique singer/songwriter Jake Thackray, as it isn't likely to come roaring into the West End, trailing clouds of glory from the West Yorkshire Playhouse or wherever, anytime soon. It was an attempt by Ian McMillan to shoehorn some of Jake Thackray's best-known songs into a musical, and on the strength of an official DVD I saw of a live performance it didn't really work as a whole. Alan Plater subsequently took it over, though I don't know how far he got with reworking it before his death.
Seated in an actual theatre, full of others who also revere Thackray, might make it easier to be indulgent. But the inescapable fact when experiencing the show, as I did, at one remove is that his songs are self-contained stories and resistant to being pressed into the service of a broader narrative.
The same is surely true of Bowie's array of disgraced soldiers, middle-aged Mummy's boys and the like. You could argue that both songwriters' subjects are misfits, so there is a thematic link of sorts, and a case could be made for some sort of unifying Under Milk Wood-type structure, loosely containing the characters ... but I have never seen a stage production of Under Milk Wood which felt like it really belonged there as opposed to a radio studio. Medals or no medals, whoever is writing the book for this new project will really has their work cut out.
It is also interesting that it's only the Decca songs which will be utilised. An artistic decision, or the only compositions which could be licensed? And it's not even clear whether absolutely everything he recorded for that company is available for possible incorporation into the storyline - whatever that may eventually turn out to be. Could this even emerge as "a play with music" as opposed to a musical? That might be a more interesting challenge.
I understand that the working title for the show is Images, which gives me pause. Possibly it's just a coincidence, but this was the title given to one of several repackagings of the Deram songs in the seventies. It wasn't a bad compilation, to be fair - a double album so you got more than what appears on The World of David Bowie, the budget album which introduced many of my generation to those pre-Ziggy songs - but a photograph of Bowie in Young Americans garb, complete with that tie with the outsize knot, adorned the UK cover (top). Will this production be a similarly shameless cash-in?
I will admit I have seen shows about disparate characters which ultimately achieve a sense of cohesiveness through music - Robin Soans' play A State Affair, which revisited the housing estate where playwright Andrea Dunbar grew up, told the stories of many different people on the estate in their own words (though it wasn't a verbatim piece in the strict technical sense), and at the end all the characters joined in an rendition of Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released ... which may seem, written down, a corny and obvious device but the effect during performance was extremely powerful.
That thought offers a faint note of hope, at least, for the Bowie show. Might there be a song which will somehow encompass all those mini-narratives, sweep them up into a single bundle? I can't think of one offhand.
And there has been at least one musical, or play with music, recently which offered rather more than a nostalgiac romp through a songwriter's oeuvre and proved that it can be done. I didn't get the chance to see it, but have read Paul Sirett's script for Clear White Light, which played at Live Theatre, Newcastle in 2018. This successfully integrated Alan Hull's songs into a story adapted from Poe but set within a modern day mental hospital, and members of Lindisfarne were involved. And Sirett's earlier musical based around Ian Dury songs, which I have written about in the Gnome Thoughts ... series here, was a delight to watch.
So who knows? Perhaps my fears are unnecessary and a successful structure is being hammered out for Images - or whatever name this proposed work eventually adopts - as we speak. Given the nature of those early songs, however, please to allow me my doubts. Especially if the show is intended for the West End, as I presume it is, rather than some fringe venue where punters can sit with a pint in hand; flaws in the shape will be more glaringly apparent and a general audience who have shelled out rather more than a few diehard fans in a room above a pub may be less inclined to smile indulgently.
It hasn't yet been revealed who is actually working on this show, nor have I seen any official confirmation about its being prepared. The name of Dave, or David, Hamm has been bandied about in some of the internet nooks and crannies where I first happened upon the news; assuming it's the same person then all I know about him is that he has written a book making the case for Irving Berlin as an influence upon the Beatles (which I reviewed here) but I'm not aware of any credentials as a librettist.
I don't know who currently owns those early songs, though some were published, along with a few from the Space Oddity album, in a 1983 UK songbook. Is David Bowie's estate aware of this new development? Do they have the power to veto such a show? Would they want to?
I don't suppose it matters much: the strong probability is that this will all come to nothing. Yet I admit I'd be intrigued to see the result arriving in London - if just for one day, after the almost inevitable critical mauling it will receive. And regardless of what form it takes, how hardy or rickety the cage constructed for the containment of those bat's-wing melodies of Bowie's youth, if the show serves to make fans more curious about those early efforts then that will be a result - of sorts.
One can only wonder what Bowie himself would have made of the news - especially if The Laughing Gnome gets a look-in.
Note: A piece by Peter Lathan on the British Theatre Guide website, here, makes the case for Sister Josephine ... and says the DVD, though professionally recorded, is "a less than perfect record" with "no retakes or studio inserts, and no attempt to recreate the show for the screen".
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