1. Outside as Bowie’s Gothic Technodrama: Fascism and the Irrational Near the Turn of the Millennia

Abstract

This chapter explores David Bowie’s 1. Outside as Bowie’s self-professed commentary on life in the 1990s, at the close of the millennia, but also as Bowie’s reconsideration of his artistic oeuvre and a continuation of his engagement with post-World War II fascism. It follows the development of 1. Outside from its source material in the unreleased Leon suites and then reviews plot, character, diction, and setting to organize the material in this very non-linear drama. Using Löwy and Sayre’s discussion of “fascistic Romanticism” in Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, the chapter then explores the significance of Bowie’s combination of the technological and the irrational in a Gothic drama for our understanding of the forms that fascism is taking today.

Appendices

Appendix 1: An Account of Leon and 1. Outside

David Bowie is William Burroughs singing Anthony Newley⁶⁴

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.⁶⁵

Because the album 1. Outside partially consists of material extracted and reworked from previous material, this appendix will review the Leon tracks and their development into 1. Outside to provide an account of the material as it exists in all forms, narrating the development of Leon into 1. Outside. 1. Outside is further complicated by the fact that not only is it an incomplete telling of a murder mystery (we never get past the detective’s notes), it’s also the first installment of what Bowie imagined would be a cycle of up to five albums released one per year from 1995 to 2000 culminating in an opera. Most available sources assert that the second album in this cycle was to be named 2. Contamination. Bowie promised this material would be forthcoming for some years until finally abandoning his plans, releasing the albums Earthling (1997) and ‘hours…’ (1999) before the end of the ‘90s instead. Earthling merges Bowie’s interest in industrial music on 1. Outside with a drum and bass sound also employed occasionally on 1. Outside, but ‘hours…’ is a complete departure from any of his work since 1975, returning to a 1970s’ pop rock sound updated with late twentieth-century production values.

Almost all accounts of the development of 1. Outside follow a similar narrative, which is that it began with The Leon Suites, which were written about a loosely connected group of characters, became more focused when Bowie wrote a fictional diary about one of the characters, and then was reworked into 1. Outside after record companies rejected Leon. The two fullest accounts are the entries related to this album in Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie, and in Chris O’Leary, Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976–2016, both of which include details about the recordings provided by David Bowie and his associates.⁶⁶ Paul Trynka’s David Bowie: Starman is an excellent biography also written in close contact with Bowie and members of his circle.⁶⁷ The Leon recordings are covered in relatively short form in both Pegg and O’Leary but are available for download via easy to find torrent sites and on generally hard to find bootleg CDs, as the Bowie estate has not yet officially released this material.

Because the Leon material is only incompletely available in bootlegged form on torrent sites, or on hard to find CDs, we have to address the available bootlegs and the narrative they present in associated .txt files as they have influenced public discourse about the album in rock reporting. Some .txt files associated with the Leon suites misidentify these songs as 1. Outside outtakes. However, the .txt file associated with “David Bowie—Leon 4. Downside Up, Inside Out—Version 2016/2019,” written by username “paperdragon,” relates the following:Verse

Verse I talked to one of the musicians who is on this and got a more complete story. First, these aren’t outtakes at all, and second, they weren’t initially intended to be a Bowie album.  The idea was to form a sort of supergroup behind Bowie and Eno, and record an album as a one-off project for that group. This is essentially that album.  So what we have here is a fully-realized concept album for a group that never came into existence.  It was then presented to the record company, who as we all know rejected it as “uncommercial.” After that, Bowie used parts of it as the basis for an entirely new project, which became 1. Outside. So, had this been released, 1. Outside would have never happened.  So, rather than this being outtakes from Outside, it’s actually more true that Outside was based on outtakes from The Leon Suites, an album in it’s [sic] own right. There were five suites recorded for Leon. Two were deleted, with three receiving a final mix then being presented to the record company for release.  It’s possible that some of the outtakes came from the two other suites, which themselves became outtakes.  And that’s only talking about the Leon project.  When the record company passed on Leon, Bowie took parts of it and used them as the basis for 1. Outside. That project has it’s [sic] own outtakes.  The confusion comes in because people fail to realize that we’re talking about two separate projects, Leon and the later Outside. They tend to lump the outtakes from both together and call them all outtakes from Outside. Even this was called Outside outtakes, when in reality it’s a finished album which, if released, would have meant that Outside would never have happened.

Paperdragon is responding to an initial bootleg of the Leon material that described it as outtakes from 1. Outside, and he’s correct in saying that’s a misunderstanding. Most of this information has been publicly verified by sources close to the recordings. Paul Trynka asserts that all “of the musicians remember the genesis of certain key songs [on 1. Outside] as dating from this period [Leon], with more than thirty-five hours of songs that evolved over the sessions. When complete, the work was edited into two CDs of material and titled Leon.”⁶⁸

It’s entirely possible the “leak” of this material was staged, as Brian Eno “was eager to release the results [of the Leon recordings] as a black label, ‘with no name on it,’ says [Reeves] Gabrels,” the album’s lead guitarist and co-composer for some tracks.⁶⁹ Bowie used a similar strategy for his release of The Next Day, drop** a new video on the Internet with no advance notice except a suggestive email sent to journalists the morning of its release. The account in the .txt file, on the other hand, seems confused on other points, as no other source cites the plan for a “supergroup” behind David Bowie except perhaps as an early conception of, or misunderstanding of, Tin Machine, which was over and done with for at least two or three years when the Leon recordings were made. The black label release may have also been mistaken for a group behind Bowie rather than a Bowie release. Reeves Gabrels, the only player from Tin Machine still working with Bowie during this period, has said in public interviews that finished tapes were presented to record companies for the Leon suites, describing them as “a three hour plus improvised opus,”⁷⁰ so there’s no question that Bowie intended the Leon material to be his album from the beginning. All available recordings of the Leon suites have Bowie on vocals when vocals are present.

The Leon recordings are certainly background for 1. Outside, however. Available downloads on torrent sites consist of only a portion of the three hours of finished material, some of it chopped up and rearranged. It’s unclear if any of the bootlegged material represents Bowie’s final mixes of any song. These downloads include five sets of tracks consisting of the following, with song titles repeated on 1. Outside in bold and song material reused on 1. Outside in italics:

Verse

Verse Download title: Leon 4. Downside Up, Inside Out—The Leon Suites Box Remastered (Arthur.Goody) [These tracks were remastered into lossless audio files. Track lengths are to the left of their titles.] 1.alt The Outtakes—Something Really Fishy 1. (4:20) Hello Leon 2. (22:36) I Am With Name/Hide Me/We’ll Creep Together (Part 1) 3. (1:53) Hide Me/We’ll Creep Together (Part 2) 4. (4:04) I’d Rather Be Chrome 5. (4:04) The First Time/I’d Rather Be Chrome 6. (15:48) I Am With Name/We’ll Creep Together (Part 3) 7. (6:53) The Leak Soldiers (2003 remix) 8. (5:36) I’d Rather Be Chrome (2003 remix) II.alt Leon Suites—the album 1. (22:49) Suite 1—I Am With Name 2. (22:08) Suite 2—Leon Takes Us Outside 3. (28:29) Suite 3—The Enemy is Fragile III.alt 2.Inside—The Reordered Album 1. (7:03) Leon Takes Us Outside, Pt. 1 2. (28:29) The Enemy Is Fragile 3. (22:47) I Am With Name 4. (15:06) Leon Takes Us Outside, Pt. 2 IV.alt 3.Upside—Another Album Assembly Untitled, numbered tracks simply listed as “Track1” through “Track15,” except for “Track3,” which is additionally titled “I’D RATHER BE CHROME.” These files exist in varying sound quality and may include files intended for a fan remix CD-ROM. Tracks vary in length between 2:04 and 7:34 except for Track13, which is 11:07. Download title: The Leon Suites (1. Outside Outtakes) (BOWSTAT018, older bootleg) 1. (22:09) Suite 1—I Am With Name 2. (21:29) Suite 2—Leon Takes Us Outside 3. (27:37) Suite 3—Enemy Is Fragile

The existing Leon material available for download seems to reflect paperdragon’s explanation that “There were five suites recorded for Leon. Two were deleted, with three receiving a final mix then being presented to the record company for release” as we see from the final three suites, which do indeed sound like finished products adding up to over an hour of music. The three tracks on The Leon Suites (subtitled 1. Outside Outtakes) are the most fully developed of them all, but they are also found in slightly different lengths on the second group of Arthur Goody tracks. It’s hard to know if the other two suites are represented in any of the material listed above, but my guess is they are not. The tracklist for 1. Outside listed below includes eight titles recorded during the Leon period which aren’t represented on the bootleg musically or otherwise.

The next stage in the development of the Leon material into 1. Outside occurred when Q Magazine asked Bowie to keep a diary for ten days, as he related in a 1995 interview:

Last December, Q asked me to do a diary of my past 10 days, which I thought might be a bit boring—going to a studio, coming home and going to bed. So I wondered what this character Nathan Adler would have been doing. Rather than 10 days, it became 15 years in his life! So I wrote that story for them, pulling on the elements of that improvisation. Then I realised this was a great skeleton to put the texture on.⁷¹

Bowie began somewhat directionless storytelling following Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards by creating characters, and then after being asked by Q to keep a diary for ten days, decided to write a fictional diary based on the characters he had sketched for the Leon recordings. An unformed narrative began to emerge organically from Bowie’s creation of these characters, but the diary assignment gave his work more specific direction. Leon recordings had commenced in early 1994 in Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland, which eventually included a first draft of the fictional diary. Eno did further work on these tracks in London, and then after seeing this material rejected by the record companies, Bowie and his crew relocated to New York City by early 1995 to record additional tracks. Their goal was to develop a more commercially accessible album out of the Leon material. These sessions lasted throughout January of 1995. The fictional diary found its way into 1. Outside as part of a booklet enclosed in four-panel digipak CD which includes photographs of the principal characters, all of whom except for Algeria Touchshriek are photographs of Bowie in different costumes and with different photographic treatments accompanied by lyrics.

Turning to 1. Outside, tracks reworked from the Leon material can be found alongside additional tracks recorded in New York.⁷² Repeated titles are in bold, and tracks that reuse at least some material found in the Leon bootlegs are italicized:Verse

Verse 1. (1:25) Leon Takes Us Outside 2. (4:05) Outside (originally “Now,” an outtake from Tin Machine I rerecorded in NYC) 3. (4:57) The Hearts Filthy Lesson (some lyrical material taken from Leon)Footnote

Nicholas P. Greco, David Bowie in Darkness: A Study of 1. Outside and the Late Career (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 154. Song titles are reproduced three times in the CD digipak: the back cover, throughout the booklet, and on the inside back cover, where they are normally and clearly printed to provide songwriting credit. The words “Hearts” and “Architects” in all three places lack the apostrophe. Some critics read this as a group possessive, but then the apostrophe should appear after the “s.”

4. (6:36) A Small Plot of Land (Montreux session recording not found on Leon bootlegs) 5. (1:39) Segue—Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette) 6. (5:14) Hallo Spaceboy (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 7. (6:49) The Motel (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 8. (3:47) I Have Not Been to Oxford Town (new track recorded in NYC) 9. (4:33) No Control (new track recorded in NYC) 10. (2:03) Segue—Algeria Touchshriek 11. (4:21) The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 12. (4:01) Segue—Ramona A. Stone/I Am With Name 13. (5:08) Wishful Beginnings (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 14. (4:33) We Prick You (new track recorded in NYC) 15. (1:00) Segue—Nathan Adler 16. (4:31) I’m Deranged (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 17. (4:22) Thru’ These Architects Eyes (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 18. (0:28) Segue—Nathan Adler 19. (5:07) Strangers When We Meet (Montreux session recording not found on Leon) 20. Nothing To Be Desired (outtake, Montreux session recording)

Appendix 2: Theme, Setting, Plot, Character, Diction, and Music of 1. Outside 

What follows is my organization of the material on 1. Outside following the conventions of theme, setting, plot, character, diction, and music to help organize this incomplete, nonlinear material. Music and diction aren’t treated as separate categories but are included in discussions of their associated characters. Diction, I should add, doesn’t extend to specific word choice, as most characters draw from the same vocabulary, and samples are too small to detect meaningful patterns of word choice across characters apart from vocal stylization. I should add that while the music on 1. Outside complexly blends genres, Tiffany Naiman argues in “Art’s Filthy Lesson” that this genre blending has recuperative value when placed within the world of the album:

… it is important to foreground Bowie’s use of Western art music history, which he employs throughout the work by quoting multiple composers and genres, which allows him to artificially reinsert aesthetic boundaries into a narrative of a world with none. Thus, by juxtaposing an array of styles, by not weaving snippets of genres neatly together, but by letting them stand on their own within a collage, songs such as “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” are acts of musical creation where boundaries, distinctions between musical genres, are reinserted through proximity and contrast.⁷⁴

The booklet enclosed with the original CD includes the words “to be sung by…” beneath some song titles, but not all. While the back cover of the CD has a full track listing (included in the previous index above), the booklet only includes a partial list of tracks. Album artwork is so heavily stylized that song lyrics are occasionally unreadable, possibly inspired by the art of insanity Eno and Bowie witnessed at the Gugging Hospital. The booklet includes lyrics for the following songs in the following order:Verse

Verse “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty),” sung by the Artist/Minotaur. Lyrics are alluded to on the inside front cover of the booklet but appear on page twenty. “Outside” (Prologue), unassociated with any character in the album lyrics. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” sung by Nathan Adler. “Hallo Spaceboy,” unassociated. “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” Leon Blank. “No Control,” Nathan Adler. “Wishful Beginnings,” Artist/Minotaur. “I’m Deranged,” Artist/Minotaur. “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” Leon Blank. “Strangers When We Meet,” unassociated.Footnote

Greco associates “Strangers When We Meet” with Leon Blank, but however much I look I don’t see those words on the lyric page for this song, which is very busy visually: lyrics are written onto two interpenetrating layers, a black base layer with a green paint layer smeared over it, the lyrics typed across both layers in four columns. Greco appears to be working with a copy of the Japanese double CD edition while I’m working with the original UK digipak, so there may be variants in the artwork. Thematically, the song seems closest to Nathan Adler’s feelings for Ramona A. Stone, and it's very likely the song has no connection whatsoever to the album narrative.

Theme, associated tracks: Kee** in mind that the theme of 1. Outside is the world of the mid-1990s, while the songs “Outside,” “Hallo Spaceboy,” and “Thru’ These Architects Eyes” do not advance plot, they do add texture to the world Bowie created on 1. Outside. Songs establishing theme, setting, and character with little or no direct relevance to plot sometimes appear in musicals. “Leon Takes Us Outside” is a spoken word track backed by ambient electronic music. Bowie’s untreated voice recites dates, some of them associated with holidays, some of them incompletely expressed. “Outside,” a mid-tempo electronic pop song with a brooding feel, immediately follows “Leon Takes Us Outside” and is subtitled “Prologue” in the lyric book but not on the track listing. Leon, through his music, takes us outside (our usual experience) to a world in which we witness “The crazed in the hot zone / The mental and diva’s hands / The fisting of life.”⁷⁶ The audience is being warned.

Besides alluding to outsider artists at the Gugging Hospital, Bowie may have also been influenced by Brian Eno’s conceptions of “inside” versus “outside” artists. An inside artist focuses on “the conventional elements of a musical work,” while an outside artist “deals with the ‘world surrounding the work—the thoughts, assumptions, expectations… and so on’… Eno calls all of these elements ‘the frame of the work,’ which, in turn, creates a ‘little world’ around it.”⁷⁷ Titling the album 1. Outside and saying that the narrative is just a frame for the album’s real focus, the world of the mid-1990s, points directly to Eno’s conception of the outsider artist. This idea was already fundamental to Bowie’s own ideas about his art; in the introduction to this collection, I discover how Bowie thought of his own music the way painters think about their art, in terms of the manipulation of surfaces. Almost twenty years after the recording of 1. Outside, during an interview covering the 2013 David Bowie is… exhibition that featured, among other things, his costumes through the years, Bowie said, “It’s much more a realism for me to think that this (clothes, hair, gestures, the room) is all me; that there’s nothing else in here,” and in another interview, “It’s all outside. I prefer that way of existence.”⁷⁸

“Hallo Spaceboy” sounds like a song that 1990s’ Bowie is singing to his own 1970s’ self, describing his sexual ambiguity and feeling of being lost,⁷⁹ an impression emphasized with the Pet Shop Boys’ remix of the track integrating cut up lyrics from “Space Oddity.” O’Leary reads the song as a tribute to Brion Gysin, a painter and sculptor who integrated the cut-up method of assembling words from newspapers into his paintings and poetry.⁸⁰ Musically, “Hallo Spaceboy” is a menacing, pounding industrial track.

Setting: Oxford Town, New Jersey, the Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts. The principal action takes place on December 31, 1999.

Associated tracks: “Thru’ These Architects Eyes” contributes to both theme and setting, especially when architecture is considered as a form of artistic expression. Sung by Leon Blank, his trio of songs establishes him as the guide through the world of 1. Outside. “Thru These Architects Eyes” expresses ambiguity about the city itself, but that impression is transformed when seen through an architect’s eyes: “All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye / All the joy I see through these architect’s eyes.”⁸¹ The city is an object of fear throughout the song until seen through architect’s eyes. But it’s specifically these architect’s eyes. Whose? Is the Artist/Minotaur in some way, figuratively or directly, the city’s architect?

Plot: Early in the morning on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the Artist/Minotaur engaged in an “art ritual murder” and dismemberment of the fourteen-year-old girl Baby Grace Blue in Oxford Town, New Jersey, mounting her body parts in the Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts as part of an art crime installation. Her body was discovered shortly afterward, and Professor Detective Nathan Adler was sent by Art Crimes, Inc. to investigate. Adler keeps a “non-linear” diary of his investigation, recording in it information about Grace’s known associates. He has a history with one of these associates, Ramona A. Stone, and by the end of his diary he realizes that Ramona had a child who would be about the same age as Baby Grace. Diary entries are recorded in the order in which this material comes to Adler, so are non-chronological. This partial narrative doesn’t extend beyond Adler taking initial notes on the crime. Narrative segments of the diary cover the following dates and times:Verse

Verse June 15, 1977, Kreutzburg, Berlin: Nathan Adler’s earliest memory of Ramona Stone, where he discovers she’s running a “Caucasian Suicide Temple” in Berlin. October 27, 1994: Adler recalls the performance of Ron Athey, an HIV/AIDS victim who pierces his forehead with a knitting needle and mutilates himself in other ways for an art installation. This description is of a real art installation Bowie attended during the ‘90s when he “was becoming particularly fascinated by the macabre end of the performance art spectrum, notably Rudolf Schwartzkögler, leading light of the ‘Viennese Castrationists’ who had cut off his own penis, and Ron Athey, an HIV-positive New Yorker whose Four Scenes in a Harsh Life involved impaling himself with knitting needles…”Footnote

Pegg, 425. O’Leary says that Scharwkögler was “wrongly believed to have castrated himself in performance,” but “did fall out of a window to his death” (372). See Greco’s more extensive and very good discussion of the specific artworks mentioned in the diary in David Bowie in Darkness (130–138).

October 28, 1994: Adler recalls a similarly gruesome art installation by Guy Bourdin, also a real artist. December 31, 1999, 5:47 a.m.: Murder, dismemberment, and display of Baby Grace at the Oxford Town Museum. December 31, 1999, 10:15 a.m.: Nathan Adler begins his investigation of the murder of Baby Grace. December 31, 1999, 10:30 a.m.: Adler’s thoughts about the Museum. December 31, 1999, 11:00 a.m.: Adler gets files from the “Data bank” on known associates of Baby Grace, which include Leon Blank, Ramona A. Stone, and Mr. Algeria Touchshriek. December 31, 1999, 11:15 a.m.: Adler receives information from the “Mack-Verbasiser” ho** that its randomly generated strings of text will help him develop leads. For the writing of 1. Outside, Bowie used a Mac app called the Verbasiser that he developed in conjunction with an Apple programmer to create random phrases from newspapers and other sources he could then arrange into lyrics. December 31, 1999, 11:30 a.m.: Last diary entry, Adler takes notes on Ramona’s life, which consists of selling art products in London made from human and animal parts. The diary ends with the revelation that Ramona was “going shop** for a diamond-encrusted umbilical cord as a celebratory thing to announce her pregnancy… That pregnancy would have produced a being that would be around 14 years of age,”Footnote

David Bowie, “The Diary of Nathan Adler, or, The Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue,” 1. Outside, 7243 8 40711 2 1, Virgin Records, 1995. CD, p. 14.

implying that Ramona is Baby Grace’s mother.

Characters:

Nathan Adler

• A “Detective Professor” who works for the private investigation firm Art Crime, Inc., which is funded by the “Art Protectorate of London” for the purpose of supporting the products of art crime as art.⁸⁴ Greco sees a play on words with addled/Adler, asserting that this character is generally confused.⁸⁵ Seeing a play on words is certainly reasonable given other character names: Touchshriek, Walloff, Stone, Blank. However, readers encounter Adler only during the first six hours of his investigation into a gruesome crime, so his processing of information related to the crime is in its early stages. Like any detective, he’s ruminating possible leads, following other leads, trying to discover connections, and making some. Since we encounter him in his first six hours of his investigation, in my opinion it’s too early to say he is confused. Bowie pictures this character in the album booklet as a Caucasian in his forties blowing smoke out of his mouth and wearing a dark green coat and what is probably a fedora hat—the hat is pushed back on his head so we can’t see the top—with a scar on his cheek. The pun on this character’s name may have been fully realized had Bowie finished the story.

• Diction: Bowie voices Adler in the clichéd style of a 1940s–1950s pulp detective film. Adler’s accent became heavier in the transition from Leon to 1. Outside so that he sounds like a bad Humphrey Bogart, or in other descriptions, a Sam Spade character. This performance is Bowie’s equivalent of Dick Van Dyke’s “Cockney” accent in Mary Poppins: no one actually talks that way anywhere around New York or New Jersey, but it’s not hard to identify the kind of accent he’s trying to imitate. Since Bowie is a talented voice actor and visual elements of this character are clichéd as well, Adler’s voice signals that the detective narrative itself is melodrama.

• Associated tracks: “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” “No Control,” and two segues.

• Musical style: “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” is a hybrid combining a “Bo Diddly bassline” with “a guitar so distorted it could be synthesized strings” and “an eight-bar Garson piano solo” that also incorporates “waves of static” with the sounds of shaken chains to give it an industrial sound.⁸⁶ “No Control” is characterized by Alomar’s rhythm guitar juxtaposed against Eno’s “purling banks of synthesizers and sequencers” and Bowie’s “mood swing vocals.”⁸⁷ This song was the last studio recording in New York and alludes to, either musically or lyrically, the musicals High Society and Oklahoma. Both tracks associated with Nathan Adler lean more toward an industrial sound than other tracks on the album, possibly to represent a gritty character that lives at the leading edge of art, technology, and investigation. In the segues, Bowie uses “reworked lines from Adler monologues on Leon while speaking over… ‘jungle’ beats.”⁸⁸ Segues on 1. Outside aren’t as developed musically as the main tracks: Adler’s first segue sounds like the rhythm section for a dance track, while his second, very short segue has slow tempo synthesizer sounds laid over a rapid drum beat.

• Adler is also associated with a character named Paddy who only appears in “The Hearts Filthy Lesson” as an assistant or informant of Adler’s. Adler asks Paddy in this song about Miranda’s clothes—he wants to know who is wearing them. Neither Paddy nor Miranda appear elsewhere on the album.

The Artist/Minotaur

• Because this character is unidentified he could be Leon Blank, Algeria Touchshriek, or Nathan Adler in disguise, or he may be another character whose identity has not yet been revealed. Either way, he murdered Baby Grace for the art installation. His picture, placed on the inside front cover, is what readers first encounter in the booklet. This character is pictured as an almost nude David Bowie wearing a bull’s head, crouching down and leaning forward with his hands extended to present a menacing figure. In the video for “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” Bowie puts on and takes off a bull’s head.

• Diction: Bowie’s natural voice perhaps pushed a bit more than usual toward elegance and sophistication.

• Associated tracks: “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty),” “Wishful Beginnings,” “I’m Deranged.”

• Musical style: “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction” sounds like a dance track overlaid with Mike Garson’s avant-garde piano playing, “its clatter of rhythm tracks, tom fills against buzzing insurgencies of electronic percussion points toward Earthling.”⁸⁹ “Wishful Beginnings” is a slower tempo song in which “the only harmonic structure is a synthesizer chord synced to the kick sample… By the midpoint… a few tiny melodies escape via keyboard.”⁹⁰ “I’m Deranged” builds an “arrangement [that] is both propulsive and tinny” on “drum ‘n’ bass rhythms” overlaid with what could be “a sampler track labeled ‘Off-Kilter Mike Garson solo.’”⁹¹

Ramona A. Stone

• Described in the diary as “Female. Caucasian. Mid-40s,” Baby Grace’s mother (implied); she has a long history of interest in macabre art consistent with art crimes. Therefore, it’s possible the Artist/Minotaur is Baby Grace’s father. She seems to have a longer-term connection with Nathan Adler, as some of his lyrics describe her almost in terms of a past, failed relationship, which makes it possible, alternatively, that Adler is Baby Grace’s father. In the booklet, Bowie presents Stone as a green-skinned character wearing a black choker, a short black tunic, fishnet stockings, and large black sandals. The tunic is overlaid with a chrome-plated corset, and she has an ammo belt wrapped around her waist. Chris O’Leary describes this character as being dressed in “battle gear,”⁹² and some lyrics allude to her being a sex worker at one time.

• Diction: Bowie’s voice, higher pitched, through a vocoder.

• Associated tracks: One segue and “I Am With Name.” Lyrics associated with this character and her equivalent on the Leon recordings make her sound like she’s attempting either to turn herself into a machine or to digitize herself.

• Her segue is spoken over slow synthesizer fill and her voice is subject to vocoder treatment and punctuated with bitterness. Drums start to fill the segue at the end, leading directly into the song “I Am With Name,” which is a principal track on the Leon recordings. However, Ramona’s voice does not appear on “I Am With Name,” just Bowie’s natural signing voice, his spoken word, and Nathan Adler’s spoken word about Ramona. Musically, “I Am With Name” is more experimental than some other tracks; it’s not clear which instrument is kee** time, and it mixes genres, possibly to represent a character who maintains a hybrid identity and seems to be evolving herself out of her humanity.

Algeria Touchshriek

• Described in the diary as “Male. Caucasian. 78 years,” Touchshriek is a lonely store owner in Oxford Town, NJ. He is the only character represented by someone other than Bowie in the booklet: an older, balding man with a large, bent nose.

• Diction: working class British, a “refugee from Bowie’s Sixties songs: the confirmed bachelors and elderly shoplifters,” possibly derived from Charrington in 1984.⁹³

• Associated tracks: one segue.

• Musical style: quiet, slow tempo music reminiscent of tracks on a Windham Hill album overlaid with Algeria’s spoken word monologue.

• Also associated with a character named “Mr. Walloff Domburg” to whom he is thinking of renting a room above his shop. Touchshriek doesn’t seem to have any specific purpose in the narrative, but the introduction of Domburg as a tenant may have later developed into Domburg being the Artist/Minotaur. Domburg is the name of a city in the Netherlands on the North Sea. In his commentary on the Leon suites, O’Leary identifies him as “Wolof Bomburg,” named after David Bomberg,⁹⁴ a favorite painter of Bowie’s, but Bowie changed his name to “Domburg” for 1. Outside. However, the association of this character with a painter further points in the direction of Domburg being the Artist/Minotaur. “Walloff” may be a pun on “walled-off,” indicating isolation or withdrawal, making him a good potential companion for a man named “touch shriek,” who would not want to be touched. Domburg is described in Touchshriek’s segue as “A reject from the world wide Internet / He’s a broken man, I’m also a broken man.”⁹⁵ During their imagined future conversations, Touchshriek anticipates they will spend their time “Lookin’ through windows for demons.”⁹⁶

Leon Blank

• Described in the diary as “Male. Mixed race. 22 years,” he has a minor criminal record. The Artist/Minotaur character on the Leon tapes seems hopeful that Leon will become a murderer. Bowie represents this character in the booklet exactly as described, his skin darkened to give him a mixed-race appearance. He has very short black hair and is wearing a zippered black coat. The booklet image of this character has his name spray painted in the upper left-hand corner of the page in the style of graffiti art with the words “lord get me out of here” and “the finger points at me” typed on different areas of the page, indicating that he’s been framed for the murder.

• Diction: Bowie’s natural voice, but somewhat modified on the Leon suites.

• Associated tracks: “Leon Takes Us Outside,” “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” and “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” the latter of which in the context of the narrative sounds like his alibi—the crime was committed in Oxford Town, and he hasn’t been there. While not listed as an associated track on the lyric page, Adler’s notes describe Leon as an “Outsider,” so “Outside” might be an associated track, especially since it immediately follows “Leon Takes Us Outside.”

• Musical style: “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town” is the most pop song on the album, one dominated by a rhythm section that foregrounds Carlos Alomar’s guitar playing, which closes the song. This musical style may have been chosen to associate Leon with youth culture.

Baby Grace Blue

• Fourteen-year-old female victim of the art crime, her name was spelled “Belew” on Bowie’s first draft of the diary after his former guitarist Adrian Belew, whose wife had recently had a child. In the art crime, Baby Grace’s body was dismembered and her torso was then mounted on a stand in a way reminiscent of the mounting of Greek statuary in museums. Her intestines were hung up in the building and her arms and legs were mounted in separate parts of the room: “Each limb was implanted with a small, highly sophisticated, binary-code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb.”⁹⁷ The Artist/Minotaur removed her bodily fluids and from them computer-processed her memories into haikus broadcast from these speakers. Bowie dresses as this character as well, kneeling in a satin nightgown and looking up hopefully and innocently with her arms crossed over her chest.

• Diction: Bowie’s voice at a higher pitch electronically treated.

• Associated tracks: One segue subtitled “A Horrid Cassette,” Bowie drew inspiration from an actual cassette recording made by the Moors killers, “who taped the ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey pleading for her life.”⁹⁸

• Musical style: treated spoken word over ambient guitar and synthesizer sounds.