CityLife

Meet Bowie the new man

IN recent years, David Bowie, much like his early inspiration Bob Dylan with his so-called Never-Ending Tour, has started playing the "hide in plain sight" game.

Being all chummy with the likes of Jonathan Ross is, of course, a long way from the icily-controlled era of The Thin White Duke or the frenetic image manipulation that went on during the Man Who Sold The World/Ziggy period, when every little art student who'd ever felt like a bit of an outsider adopted Bowie as their personal saviour.

The good news, of course, is that it's also a long way from the lamentable Tin Machine/Glass Spider era and, heavens preserve us, his most recent two albums have even been listenable!

"I don't know what's happened," he observed recently about his latest incarnation as a normal human being who happens to write and play songs for a living.

"Perhaps it's having a child recently. It's not that the work doesn't seem a priority but that puts it in perspective. You realise that working in front of a crowd is not a life-threatening situation.

"It's just going out and singing some songs. This has been coming home to me and I've enjoyed it a lot more. Shows have become something else for me in recent years, more of a 'here's me, here's the songs I write, you'll like some of them, some you won't have heard of and others you just won't like.' I'm very comfortable with that."

And it's fed through into his new interview friendliness.

Gregarious

"I'm not particularly a gregarious person, so it's something almost of a social breakthrough," he allows.

While he's reluctant to reduce the new-ish Reality album to being his "New York" album, he admits that the city where he now mostly resides "informs it, but it's not the content of the album.

"My own success as a songwriter and a performer," he believes, "really flies or not on whether I'm doing it with a personal integrity.

"All my biggest mistakes are when I try to second guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it and just do what I want to do.

"Over these past three or four years," he concludes,

"I'm really happy with the way I'm writing. I now feel very confident about touring and putting new songs against old songs. I don't feel intimidated, it's as simple as that."

David Bowie plays at the ME.N. Arena on Monday, November 17 at 7.30pm. Tickets are £36-£46 - to book, call 0870 060 1768 or visit the website below.