DavidBowieTribute

20 YEARS AGO TONIGHT BOWIE ON PARKINSON “Pictures on my hard drive...” Twenty years ago this evening, The Parkinson Show featured Michael Parkinson in conversation with David Bowie, Victoria Beckham and Clive James. Rather than us rattle on about how good it was, you can still view the full show over on the BBC iPlayer: bbc.in/47uBFZN Aside from the BBC’s own image of DB and Parky, David is pictured here during performances of Ziggy Stardust and The Loneliest Guy and while rehearsing for the show. #BowieParkinson #BowieBBC

THEY SAID JUMP 30 YEARS AGO TODAY “Look at him climb...” Jump They Say, a 1993 Top Ten single in the UK and a taster for the upcoming Black Tie White Noise, was released thirty years ago today. Promoted as a comeback single, the track reached #9 in the UK charts, Bowie’s only Top Ten single between 1986’s Absolute Beginners and 2013’s Where Are We Now?. According to Bowie, the song tackled his feelings about his schizophrenic half-brother Terry, who had taken his own life in January 1985. The lyrics tell of a desperate man driven to a terrible act by the pressures put upon him. Bowie also cited his own feelings about jumping into the unknown metaphysically. Musically, the influence of Nile Rodgers led to a funk-based sound, though the track was also influenced by contemporary jazz, with a solo from Avant-jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie. As the first single from the album, Jump They Say received a considerable promotional push with widespread press advertising and a slew of promotional 12" singles. The following year Jump: The David Bowie Interactive CD-ROM was released; wherein endless mixes of the song and versions of the video could be created. The promotion also included the darkly stylish video directed by Mark Romanek, depicting Bowie as a businessman paranoid of his colleagues, who seemingly conduct experiments on him and force him to jump from the roof of the corporate building. The video was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville as well as Chris Marker's film La jetée and Orson Welles' The Trial - both from 1962. The uniformed women shown looking through high powered telescopes are an homage to the stewardesses in the Pan-Am space plane in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The video was praised by Entertainment Weekly after Bowie passed in 2016, saying: “Bowie is an excellent actor, and this video may be his best character performance in a music video.” Following Warhol’s lead with his 1962 multiple, Suicide (Fallen Body), the final scene of the Jump They Say video ends with an homage to the tragic Evelyn Francis McHale. Evelyn committed suicide in 1947 by jumping from the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. An image captured four minutes after her death by photography student Robert Wiles gained iconic status and became known as ‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’. The image we’ve used here is from that final scene and you can watch the full video here: bit.ly/JUMPupgradeYT #BowieJUMP #BowieJUMP30