Teenage Wildlife: inside the song about Bowie's midlife crisis

Around 1976, London clubs began having “Bowie nights”, where DJs played Bowie records and clubgoers came dressed as an edition of him. For some, it was the pupal stage before they became punks. Others kept at it. By 1978, the big Bowie night was at Billy’s in Soho, where Rusty Egan was the DJ and Steve Strange worked the door. By the turn of the 80s, the scene had shifted to the Blitz club in Covent Garden, where Bowie nights became competitive pose-offs. Doing a variation on Bowie was work. In summer 1980, Jon Savage saw a group whose lead singer, “banging around in a Lurex mini-dress, was drawing entirely from a vocabulary invented by Bowie. And people stood and took it.” Egan and Strange formed Visage, later described by Simon Reynolds as “a confederacy of punk failures looking for a second shot at stardom” (so, very Bowie).

Bowie recognised his heirs, visiting the Blitz (he was sneaked in and ensconced in an upper room, like slumming royalty) and using Strange and other Blitz kids as mourners in his video for Ashes to Ashes. Each party had few illusions about the other. Strange regarded Bowie as a skilled operator, someone “allowed to get his ideas across quicker than up-and-coming bands. He’s always in the right place at the right time, checking out ideas. When he was in London he was always at the Blitz or at Hell.” And Bowie bottled his thoughts into Teenage Wildlife, his early midlife crisis song.

There was a tart individualism in Britain in the late 70s, a taste of Thatcher’s reign to come, and Bowie nights were part of it. Robert Elms recalled being a Billy’s kid, walking through Soho streets piled with trash during the winter of discontent in 1978–1979. “Little peacock clusters, our plumage an affront to a still judgmental town,” he wrote. “Billy’s was like a do-it-yourself teenage version of a Neue Sachlichkeit painting, Cabaret on a student grant.” Strange said “the Blitz was an escape route. When the kids were dressing up at night they were living the fantasies. The kids wanted somewhere to go to look good. They do go out to be noticed.” In his autobiography, his memories were grander: “350 of the most creative, individualistic people in London would cram into the club.” The Billy’s and Blitz kids lived in performance, competing for status. As Elms wrote, “I had no idea what I was supposed to look like, but we all knew you had to look and make people look.”

Bowie, who constantly altered his appearance, who had no ties to anyone – no longer a wife, no longer a country – fit this mood better than any other rock star of the time. Being Bowie had been a way of life for British teenagers since his Top of the Pops appearance in 1972. But “his example of self-creation was serious and playful”, Simon Frith wrote in 1981. “His tastes, the selves he created, were impeccably suburban … Bowie was youth culture not as collective hedonism but as an individual grace that showed up everyone else as clods.”

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Now the game was more serious – there were as many press photographers at the club door as actual Blitz kids, and the scene was full of fashion reporters and label executives “calculating the commercial possibilities of a national Blitz culture”. Touring in 1978, sampling scenes in London and New York, Bowie could see it on the horizon. He was becoming an industry (the first ever Bowie convention was held in Chicago while he cut Scary Monsters), being disassembled and used for parts. The Cuddly Toys took Ziggy Stardust, as did Bauhaus, who also raided The Man Who Sold the World. Duran Duran feasted on Young Americans, while Gary Numan built an altar to Low. Numan particularly irritated Bowie, to the point where Numan alleged Bowie had him kicked off a TV show on which they were both slated to appear. Numan argued that “image is to be copied. That’s the essential reason I created mine”, that he “never claimed to be original”, and that his success was owed to him filling a role for younger fans that Bowie had abandoned.

Bowie’s public thoughts on Teenage Wildlife were that “ironically, the lyric is something about taking a short view of life, not looking too far ahead and not predicting the oncoming hard knocks,” he wrote in 2008, where nearly 30 years before he’d said of the song “I guess it would be addressed to a mythical teenage brother if I had one, or maybe my latter-day adolescent self, trying to correct those things one thinks one’s done wrong.” The lyric’s starting point was a word-pile of resentment and paranoia from which he quarried ideas for Ashes to Ashes, Teenage Wildlife, and Because You’re Young. On this page of densely written text (part of the David Bowie Is exhibit), Bowie wrote, “let’s write about society and events of international import … who’s going to lead the working clash? It ain’t me buddy.” Over the page Bowie keeps circling back to the idea of an impending crisis (“won’t stop with Iran”). “There’s going to be war … there’s going to be chaos … you’re not gonna turn away. Pricks will write songs about it and tell you ‘it’s the truth’.” A few lines down, he becomes the prick: “it’s not strange it happens every day … It’s the truth.” The working title of Teenage Wildlife was It Happens Every Day.

The kids shouldn’t look to him for answers. Teenage Wildlife is another take on John Lennon’s God, a bloody denial of past selves. “Don’t ask me,” Bowie sings, after breaking the fourth wall and referring to himself as “David”. I feel like a group of one. The title is a play on adolescent abandon and teenagers as beasts. Pop and fashion are hard commerce, glam reborn as malicious ambition. (“The Conservative radicals were sounding really sharp,” Peter York wrote in 1980, where ABC’s Martin Fry later said that Britain in the early 80s “wanted a strong figure. They wanted individuals. They wanted heroes.”) A kid with squeaky-clean eyes becomes an ugly teenage millionaire. Pop stars are a succession of Lady Jane Greys, queens crowned and beheaded in a week. As Pete Townshend would say in 1989, “all pop music is a service industry”.

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The longest track on Scary Monsters, Teenage Wildlife is a series of hard demands on the listener, even with its Ronettes vocal hooks and the comforting piano of Roy Bittan, recruited from Bruce Springsteen’s The River sessions in another Power Station studio ([Tony] Visconti said it took him years to “warm up to this track”). As if leaving space for last-minute agitations, the song has no refrain: its verses end only when punctuated by the title phrase and a Robert Fripp guitar break. Yet it was meticulously constructed. Chuck Hammer, who provided synthesised guitar textures, recalled that the song “had a complex arrangement with a number of different sections, each requiring a different structure”, and that Visconti patiently led him through the song’s chord chart.

There’s an ecstatic isolationism in Bowie’s vocal – a performance that none of his imitators could have matched, let alone conceived. It’s peacocking: he wrings out each phrase, swooping upward, haranguing syllables, unravelling as he sings, making flapping banners of words (“teenyage mill-yuuuun-aaaaaiiire”) summoning new personalities on a dime (he sounds like Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs on the first bridge), placing stresses on words as if to break them, forcing and suppressing rhymes, closing out by singing “wiiild-liiife” at the frayed high end of his range. A vocal chorus runs beside him, sometimes in support, sometimes to translate, sometimes left in their own world to hum.

He wanted the guitars to be “a splintery little duel” between Fripp and Carlos Alomar, while Hammer’s guitar synthesiser (used to greater effect in Ashes to Ashes) adds an eerie choral tone. In his most glorious appearance on Scary Monsters, Fripp rewrites his work on Heroes — his yearning leads are the answer Bowie’s kabuki of a vocal won’t provide. If Teenage Wildlife was Bowie’s bequest to his successors, it’s a poisoned transfer of power. The future can’t live up to him: the ambitious kid can’t pass the test. Bowie considered it a central work of the period, writing that he was “still enamoured of this song and would give you two Modern Loves for it any time” in one of his last public statements. A phenomenal owning of the future, it’s still electrifying to hear today.

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