Thirty years ago today, David Bowie released the soundtrack of The Buddha of Suburbia, a four-part serial which was, at the time, being aired on Wednesday nights on BBC2. More accurately, this record was billed as the soundtrack, complete with a cover photo of a seemingly crucified Naveen Andrews, with Bowie’s name given as much prominence as that of his co-producer David Richards (he did get the back cover, however).
The record got little notice in the British press, where it was mostly treated as an inconsequential bonus to the telefilm; the concurrent release of the Bowie Singles Collection got as much, if not more, attention. It got close to zero notice in the United States, where the film wasn’t shown and the album wasn’t released (it wouldn’t appear until 1995).
But it was not quite a soundtrack (Buddha had prominently used “Time” and “Fill Your Heart,” neither of which appeared on the record, and the only thing that one might have recognized from the show was the title track). It was, in truth, the erasure and deconstruction of a soundtrack: a secret album that Bowie slipped out at the end of 1993. Bowie always said that it was one of his favorites, and it remains one of mine.
It had started with Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the Buddha of Suburbia novel and its TV adaptation. He and Bowie had gone to the same school, Bromley Tech, and both were Bromleyites, if of crucially distinct generational subsets. Bowie (born early 1947) had grown up in a Bromley which had changed little from when H.G. Wells had lived there. Kureishi (born late 1954) had grown up in a Bromley whose most famous escapee was David Bowie. Both, however, had the same arts teacher: Owen Frampton, father of Peter.
The two met in early 1993 for Interview, a conversation that touched often upon Bromley. Bowie was in a nostalgic mood, having helped to compile an issue of Arena that cataloged his past and giving a Rolling Stone interviewer a guided tour of London and its suburbs. Kureishi said he was adapting his novel for television and asked Bowie for permission to use some songs. Bowie agreed. Working up the nerve, Kureishi then asked Bowie if he felt like contributing any original material. A few months later, Kureishi and his director/co-writer Roger Michell were in Switzerland, listening to Bowie’s score for the series.
His incidental music was greatly motifs—combinations of guitar, synthesizer, trumpet, percussion, sitar. Kureishi found it surreal to watch his film, a fictional document of his adolescence, playing on a TV monitor while the idol of his adolescence worked the mixing desk; he also found it daunting to tell his idol that the music wasn’t quite right.
After revising the soundtrack, Bowie thought he could rework some of the pieces into a new album. “He said he wanted to write some songs for it because he wanted to make some money out of it,” Kureishi recalled to Dylan Jones. (Bowie was perpetually surprised to discover how poorly the BBC paid.)
During his nostalgic turns in early 1993, Bowie had mused whether he could make a fourth “Berlin” album out of scattered pieces of his and Eno’s trilogy, a falsified Lost Berlin Tapes album that “never existed.” Not long before, Ryko had reissued the “Berlin” albums on CD, featuring allegedly lost outtake bonus tracks like “I Pray Olé” and “Abdulmajid.” These, in truth, were trial runs, with Bowie taking some bits from late Seventies sessions and compositions and fashioning essentially new tracks out of them. On Buddha of Suburbia, he’d do the same with his soundtrack motifs, fusing them into new shapes.
Relying on his usual jack-of-all-trades, the Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay, Bowie worked at Mountain Studios in Montreux in the summer of 1993 to extend the Buddha motifs into six- or eight-minute loops, isolating their “dangerous or attractive elements,” then recording vocals and instrumental lines over said elements. After a week’s recording and a fortnight of mixing, he had a fifty-minute album.
Bowie had found in Kureishi’s novel an observation that he felt rang true: a curse of being a suburban artist is a self-conflicted ambition, a need to feel you’re bettering yourself while fearing being found out as a fraud. “It’s a miracle,” Bowie once told Tin Machine guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, as their tour bus went through Brixton. “I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.”
Once asked why Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had been so influential on his work, Bowie said “for those of us born in South London, you always felt like you were in [the novel]. That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in.” The Buddha characters who thrive are those who transform themselves, like the protagonist Karim; those who wither, like Karim’s fundamentalist uncle Anwar, are those who can’t shake free of the past. Yet in Buddha this self-transformation, this multi-ethnic suburban counterculture, is ultimately twinned with Thatcherism—novel and series end on the night of the general election in 1979. The ferment generated by suburban hippies and punks parallels the economic “liberation” of Thatcher. The revolution, when it comes, will be a suburban one.
The Buddha film had lovingly recreated early Seventies Bromley for Bowie. For his new songs, he said that he drew from what he called a “personal memory stock” ranging from his teenage years through the late Seventies in Berlin. His Buddha would be impressionist autobiography. As he wrote in his liner notes, “a major chief obstacle to the evolution of music has been the almost redundant narrative form. To rely upon this old war-horse can only continue the spiral into the British constraint of insularity. Maybe we could finally relegate the straightforward narrative to the past.”
There was “South Horizon,” a join-piece of “trad” and “acid” jazz, featuring one of Mike Garson’s loveliest piano solos. Devoting as much care to the spaces between notes as to the notes he plays, Garson closes with a fractured lullaby on his highest keys. On his “Aladdin Sane” solo, Garson sounded like he’d soaked up every speck of music he’d ever heard and was able to reproduce it at will, like God’s player piano. His work here is more concise, conciliatory. He often keeps silent, or hints at some greater pattern.
The wonderfully odd “Sex and the Church.” The cold beauties of “The Mysteries,” an instrumental worthy of the Berlin years (which Brett Morgen used well on his Moonage Daydream). The only dud for me is “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad” which sounds like the sort of thing you get when you ask a random rock trio using your studio to jam with you for an afternoon.
Its finest tracks include the giddy “Dead Against It,” which Bowie considered revising for 1. Outside and Earthling. It’s the track that most sounds like its making: Bowie and Kızılçay camped out in the studio, eating hamburgers and listening to Prince, making odd little sketches.
Three lengthy instrumental stretches bookend and break up verses and refrains—an arpeggiated synthesizer line is answered by one on guitar. Bowie’s larking vocal is full of ascending phrases, sinking when reality sets in (“begins to sigh,” “my words are worn”). His lyric is clotted with internal rhymes and consonance: “I couldn’t cope/ or’d hope eloped/ a dope she roped.” There’s a barb in this spun sugar—he stares at her while she sleeps; she reads to avoid talking to him but talks to strangers on the phone—but it’s lost in the blissful waves of guitars that close out the track.
The melodic bounty of “Untitled No. 1” and the intriguing severity of its sister, “Ian Fish, U.K. Heir.” Where “Ian Fish” is an ebbing—what’s left when the tub’s drained—”Untitled No. 1” is the waters rushing in. The little melodies that Bowie and Kızılçay keep adding, like spinning plates upon a table; a rising scale figure answered by groaning bass, like sunlight rousing a sleeper; the stately entrance of the synthesizers; the swirling synth figures in the breaks; Bowie’s warm, adhesive ooooohs; the guitarist playing a line so entrancing that he won’t let it go, sounding its last notes again and again; the jangling countermelody to the opening scale motif that becomes a barrelhouse piano line. The saxophone line at the end of the first verse, soon bestowed on piano and keyboards. The breakdown into a quasi-Indian dance track until a guitar strums things to a close.
Two verses and a refrain of blur-words, cut to fit the generous spread of music: “Now we’re swimming rock [farther?/harder?] with [the doll?/the gull?] by our sides.” An indecipherable chorus hook: Sleepy Capo? Cynical Fool? Shammi Kapoor? (the first word in particular mutates throughout). A prayer is buried in the second verse.
A bleating vocal suggests that Bowie’s again lovingly parodying his lost friend, Marc Bolan. A tribute that more honors the living, the gracious hours that we have left to us. Its most distinctly-phrased words are “it’s clear that some things never take” and “never never.” “Untitled No. 1” burgeons. There were a few times where Bowie could have stood up and never recorded again: eddies of finality in which everything reconciled for a moment. This is one of them.
“Ian Fish”: I was too dismissive of the track when I first wrote about it, a decade ago now, and earned an incisive response at the time by Magnus Genioso, whose ears were far better:
“Imagine for a moment that the guitar is not there, then turn the backing tracks way, way up. There’s a lot of information there. The bells at the beginning of the track. The rainy “street” white noise that adds the high frequency information. Not one, but two layers of reversed vocals, one of them with an actual harmony part. Several layers of keyboards, two ambient drones in different octaves along with some slight shimmers. What appears to be a harp-like plucking part at the two minute mark. You can hear best just how many instruments there are at the very end of the song as they all fall apart one by one.”
Most of all there’s “Strangers When We Meet,” a strong composition that Bowie knew he’d buried here and so remade it for 1. Outside two years later. I prefer this earlier version, whose emotional charge comes in part from how it questions and undermines the elated mood of Bowie’s then-recent “wedding” album Black Tie White Noise— it’s what had to be buried before the wedding.
As a title, “Strangers When We Meet” references a Kirk Douglas film about secret lovers who need to part to preserve their marriages. They meet one last time in the empty house that Douglas, an architect, has built and get mistaken as husband and wife. Bowie draws on this, and on the broken couple of “Heroes”—a pair so consumed by passive-aggressive emotional violence that they no longer recognize each other.
In “Heroes,” the act of being together is courageous. Here’s the other side of it—a relationship that survives out of habit, the cowardice of someone knowing the match won’t work but refusing to admit it. A union never to be blessed by a wedding. The TV’s a blank screen, as is the window (“splendid sunrise, but it’s a dying world”). The man weeps in bed, cringes when she tries to embrace him. By the final refrain, he welcomes this state: after all, if they’re strangers again, they could fall in love again.
Pushing Ahead of the Dame 
It’s a great album; I only discovered it a couple of years ago, and I’m glad I did. (And yes, “great Bowie album” is a high bar, but I think it clears it.) Good to see “Ian Fish” getting its due, too.
I guess the title track is the least interesting compositionally – in that it came before the improv sessions – but I want to put in a word for it anyway. For me it perfectly captures something about my teenage years (in south London!) – the sense that something was about to begin, together with the perpetual frustration at it not quite beginning yet; the sense that you might never get out of that waiting room – your life might just dribble away (day after day), you might go mad waiting, it might turn out you didn’t have anything to offer after all; the sense of being keyed up and ready for things to change, and the fear that you might not like it when they did – or else that you might change with them (“sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer/sometimes, but always in vain”); above all, the intense awareness that things were happening – it was all happening! – but it was happening somewhere else.
When I was feeling all of that, at its most intense, I was listening to Bowie; among other things, I was listening to _The Man who Sold the World_, and “All the Madmen” (I loved “All the Madmen”). So there was something really beautiful about discovering this song, flashing back so vividly to that kid who thought he might be stuck living with his parents forever (or else end up in Cane Hill), and then hearing those words:
“Day after day…
Day after…
Zane, zane, zane,
Ouvrez le chien”
“It’s probably going to be all right,” 46-year-old Bowie said across the years to 14-year-old me. Love the man.
“I don’t know how this all happened.” This from a man who spent much of the 1960s trying every possible means to achieve fame and success. I’m not sure that this album deserves such praise as is heaped on it – the instrumentals are rather meandering – but it still holds up well after three decades.
is Buddha the underrated gem of Bowie’s 90s catalog? Or, his entire catalog?
What I find most fascinating is the, (clears throat), artwork. Whatever can be said of Buddha of Suburbia as a David Bowie album, the cover art does not distinguish Buddha as a Bowie record at all. His name is buried, and it is the first David Bowie record to not feature his likeness on the cover in some form.
(Lodger? Flip it over at the store, but, boots. American pressing of Man Who Sold The World, don’t even want to talk about it)
From a marketing / music biz perspective,
Did Bowie or his record label want two albums in 1993? [It would be first time in 20 years]
Would a major push undermine the Black Tie White Noise album “cycle”
Maybe Bowie didn’t think to have his face on the cover, because it was a, “soundtrack”?
Maybe Bowie didn’t care?
Hmm…
The cover isn’t particularly “good.” It doesn’t have the taste of a “David Bowie” album cover
Bizarre collage; (early?) Photoshop; looks like a still from a TV movie rather than a proper photoshoot. (At least, could have been a proper photoshoot). The color grading on the image feels cheap. The font choice and layout aren’t inspired.
TL;DR, Buddha looks like a bootleg at best
I can’t imagine being in the shops in November 1993 and seeing Buddha at first sight and thinking “David Bowie!” The record looks packaged to be forgotten. Maybe it was the lack of BBC Pay(?), but for an image conscious artist, I don’t understand the creative choice on Bowie’s part.
[The 2007 reissue attempts to correct this choice, of course]
All of this is to say, your blog pushed me to listen to Buddha for the first time, 10 or 11 years ago. One of my favorite Bowie albums somehow.
Cheers col, glad to see my old friend bowiesongs.wordpress again
qood questions as to why the record was so shoddily designed and poorly promoted—ones that no bio or interview ever fully answered. I would hazard a guess that it was related to the BBC (did they have the final say on the soundtrack release? possible). Don’t think it was BTWN promo-related—DB had checked out of promoting that album early on and he & the label that put it out in the US (the ill-fated Savage) were at odds by late ’93—they would soon sue him. The fact that Arista (which put out BTWN in UK/EU) issued Buddha only in UK/EU again suggests some sort of contractual issue. This is the sort of thing that access to the DB papers might clear up, in the way you can now with Lou Reed and Dylan’s business affairs. perhaps one day!
Another great piece, thanks for writing. It was a pleasure to find this is my mailbox 🙂
Well the Wikipedia says nothing about it but I definitely saw the series on PBS when it came out, so it did play the once in the States.
I’m sure you’re right but believe it was quite a bit of time after the first BBC run—there are a few articles from ’94-’95 about the “controversy” over showing it on PBS, given the nudity, drug use, etc. It was shown in a few film festivals in the US: recall one in NYC at the end of ’94-early ’95.
I’m a little surprised by that reaction (I guess it depends on the market) because in the 80s, in Atlanta, PBS was actually my only source of televised nudity, which I faithfully taped every time. I think I still have a tape of Equus somewhere (you take what you can get). Come to think of it, 1993 would have been circa Tales of the City, which was likely controversial as well, I imagine.
While I agree about the overall qualities of Bleeds Like A Craze, the first few seconds are among my favourite moments in Bowie. There’s just a few seconds of Garson’s piano hanging suspended in the air, tricking the listener into thinking we’re in for something of a piece with the previous two tracks before the drums and guitar kick suddenly and snottily with a colossal ‘fooled you!’ – it’s a musical joke and I love it every time.
It was a relief when you wrote ‘if there is a latter-day “great” Bowie album, it’s this one’ first time around because until then it felt like I was the only person who thought this. However, I also gave the sole vote for Silver Treetop in the song poll so you possibly don’t want my endorsement on what makes great Bowie…
A really enjoyable essay on a late DB gem , which I’ve heard piqued Brian Eno’s interest in working with Bowie again on Outside. It’s probably stating the bleedin’ obvious to point out that “Ian Fish UK Heir” is an anagram of Hanif Kureshi!
I recall seeing the UK import in a store in Orlando in late ‘93. After the “Let’s Dance” debacle, I’d gotten “Bowie-shy” for good reason. He’d utterly lost my ears in an occurrence that still seemed to be a nightmare from which I’d never wake a decade later. After buying the “Jump” CD-ROM in mid 1993 (now there’s an obscure vector of infection!) I managed to hear enough of “Black Tie White Noise” to have bought a cheap used copy of it by the time that “Buddha Of Suburbia” was released. I found it to be half of a good Bowie album that unraveled by its end. During this time I still had not touched the EMI trilogy of “hits” but had bought all and sundry Tin Machine releases.
When a second Bowie album had appeared that year and sporting such a meretricious package coupled with the pedigree of a BBC telefilm soundtrack… let’s just say that I didn’t want to push my luck! I had just heard his first solo album since 1980 that year and it had not fully convinced. I passed on buying “Buddha Of Suburbia” as an expensive import.
Then his next move seemed to be what I had been pining for since 1980; a re-teaming with Brian Eno! Surely that would bear luscious fruit! How wrong I was! To this day I consider “1: Outside” an album that battles itself to a conclusive loss; a collection of some strong songs encumbered with an overweeningly contrived and ultimately hoary framework conceit that might have been edgy in 1979 but was playing catch up by 1995. To this day I can only enjoy songs from it in a random playlist as the album as a linear work of art is still dead from the neck up! Well, he did label it a “non-linear Gothic drama hyper-cycle.” We had all duly warned, but as the Great White Hope of Bowie albums it was decidedly a non-event.
Little had I known at the time that such an event had already slipped out in late ‘93 with “Buddha Of Suburbia.” It remained until the 1999 album “hours…,” which had ironically been released in the year that “1: Outside” had been attributed to, that I heard a Bowie album that didn’t feel like he was chasing trends, and settled into writing straightforward songs that didn’t have to belabor heavy conceptual baggage to make their point. At that point a switch clicked and I wanted to hear every Bowie album for a context of his full creative arc. That meant hearing “Let’s Dance,” “Tonight,” and “Never Let Me Down” for the first time and yes, they were every thing I’d rightly avoided for many years, but the shining silver lining to all of this was in finally hearing the dare I say riveting work found on “Buddha Of Suburbia!”
I found it to be everything I had been hoping to hear on the ill-starred Eno album. The sound of Bowie re-connecting with his late 70s peak period while hitting earlier touchstones such as Bolan and Mike Garson along the way and laying the ground work for Bowie’s final, third act which would manifest perhaps shakily in the 90s, but result in the transformative final album, ★. Of the last 13 years of Bowie music, I’ll cite “Buddha Of Suburbia,” “Heathen,” and ★ as being the crucial works.
Excellent update on the entry on TBoS. Am I the only one who sees Bowie’s mother in “Dead Against It” (” a dope she roped” sounds like reports of her commentary on why she married Bowie’s father) and Angie in “Strangers when we meet”. Many phrases look addressed to her: “All our friends / Now seem so thin and frail / Slinky secrets / Hotter than the sun”, “Forget my name / But I’m over you”, “Cold tired fingers / Tapping out your memories”, “I’m so glad that we’re strangers when we meet”.
I’ve never seen the miniseries, so the album’s cover amuses me. It looks like Naveen Andrews is being borne aloft by peasant extras from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The music, though, has really grown on me. Especially “Untitled No. 1.” It’s a triumph for Bowie and Kızılçay
on Untitled No.1 You cited your first draft right before the release of “Where Are We Now” directly. Nice touch and I’d be happy if I saw your first draft in real time.
Love all songs in BoS especially after seeing Brett picked “ambients” on film, especially he seems to be a denial for 83 and after. Would he recognized BoS as 4th Berlin album, too?
I’m Korean(South not North), never been on abroad, and born in 2003(Reality Tour started 4 days after I was born) so there’s no chance to see David in person for lifetime – I just started to be a fan in 2020 Glastonbury broadcast, then the 90s -BoS, Outside, Earthling era and its then-recent live albums- strangely came across to me. and gave me perception for fresh sound even in nowadays.
You know there’s so less info about 90s on internet, so your blog gives me a lot of guidance and inspiration for going into Bowie deeply, not just rather be a light fan who only knows his prime in general on 70s. Sincerely thanks.
This is such a rare chance that I can give you my full appreciation cuz you don’t need to post a lot in nowadays so my commentary is too long for my private thing 🙂 hope your life could be hapilly ever after, satisfied, and full by Bowie’s legacies too.
I bet Kızılçay just loved the “Music written and performed by David Bowie” on the cover.
Buddha is a challenging album: it asks a lot of you. So does “1. Outside”, but that album is also loaded with huge, irrefutable pop monsters like “Spaceboy”, “Hearts”, “Oxford Town”, “Architects”, and so on (also, I just noticed that none of the possessive nouns have an apostrophe. Makes me wonder if it’s supposed to be “Stranger’s When We Meet”…). while Buddha opens with the title track, then 18 minutes of uninterrupted prog ambient trance, then further weird twists and turns. Often the tracks seem sequenced with deliberate disregard: the way “Ian Fish” segues into the title track is genuinely jarring.
My favorite Paul McCartney album is II, and Buddha is arguably the closest he came to making that album. Scraps from the master’s table. I like it more than Black Tie or Hours or either TM record.