On 14 January 2017, I was staying in the Thistle Hotel, Euston, within striking distance of Euston station in London. That evening, I ordered a copy of the original cast recording of Lazarus the musical with music by David Bowie and a book by the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. I know the exact date I bought the recording because Amazon helpfully tells me that ‘You last purchased this item on 14 Jan 2017.’
The reason I ordered the CD was that I had just returned to the hotel, exhilarated, after seeing the musical at King’s Cross Theatre which was built specially to host it. The musical premiered in an off-Broadway production in New York in 2015. Poignantly, the first night was the last time Bowie was seen in public, before his untimely death on 10 January 2016.
To add to the poignancy, the New York cast came into the studio to record the musical on 11 January 2016, when the world was waking up to the news of Bowie’s death only a few days after the release of his final album, Blackstar. The whole Lazarus album is superb, with a very strong vocal cast, in particular the actor Michael C Hall who played the central character and whose voice is similar to Bowie’s but with its own distinctive timbre.
The instrumental arrangements are stripped-down compared with the original studio versions. In the case of This is Not America, the arrangement is hauntingly sparse, giving the song a melancholy, contemplative quality that’s absent from the original. Once heard, it’s difficult to shake the mesmerisingly simple opening synth chords from your musical memory. Sophia Anne Caruso’s vocal performance is very different from Bowie’s, childlike but also astonishingly mature.
Sophia Anne Caruso told TheaterMania that she received the call asking her to play the part of Girl in the New York production on her fourteenth birthday,
“I’m good at playing other-worldly roles… I enjoy doing stuff that’s a little more dark and trippy”
She ended up rehearsing Life on Mars with Bowie himself in the room.
Bowie recorded the original version of the song in late 1984 with the jazz/fusion band the Pat Metheny Group for the soundtrack of John Schlesinger’s spy film The Falcon and the Snowman (1985). Although Bowie rarely collaborated with jazz musicians, his regular keyboard player Mike Garson had jazz chops. Blackstar heavily features a jazz band: Donny McCaslin (saxophone), Jason Lindner (piano), Tim Lefebvre (bass) and Mark Guiliana (drums). He recorded his 2014 single Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) with Maria Schneider and her experimental jazz orchestra.
But This is Not America is not particularly jazzy. It features 80s synths, and a gentle calypso rhythm, with no virtuosic jazz solos or instrumental breaks. It was a Billboard pick of the week, ‘an enigmatic mood piece with the singer in his West-End musical mode’ (page 82 of the 2 February 1985 issue).
Bowie recorded a live version at the BBC Radio Theatre, Broadcasting House, London on 27 June 2000. It’s driven by a fiercely funky guitar from Earl Slick, melodic bass from Gail Ann Dorsey, and eloquent keyboards from Mike Garson. The closest that this version comes to the Lazarus musical version is the backing vocals from Holly Palmer and Emm Gryner. The song was was released on a bonus CD as part of the Bowie At The Beeb set, but it is doesn’t appear to be available on streaming services. All three versions are excellent, but I do find myself returning to the haunting Lazarus version again and again.
In memory of David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016)
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