News “It’s all pose”: The only David Bowie song that Keith Richards actually liked
Rolling Stones guitarist and perpetual high seas pirate impersonator Keith Richards once proudly proclaimed: “You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.” Apparently, you’ve also got naff, hackneyed quotes too, but we won’t hold that against him. The rocker backs himself more than a match-fixing boxer to take a fall, but he rarely affords any of his contemporaries that same complimentary liberty.
This, in part, comes down to Richards ‘playing the game’. Even when a compliment is unavoidable, as it was in the case of the incomparable Jimi Hendrix, Richards still manages to say that he “ruined” the guitar. He has a point there in some ways at least, as often his legacy has led to guitarists trying to match his technical proficiency rather than the soulfulness that made it soar.
When it comes to David Bowie, however, like a man rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, Richards has failed to grasp things entirely. He is not alone in missing the point when it comes to Bowie. In fact, ‘The Starman’ almost seemed to weave the trap himself, and a slew of people have fallen into it.
“It’s all pose. It’s all fucking posing,” Richards once scathingly asserted. “It’s nothing to do with music. He knows it, too.” The rock ‘n’ roll pirate was not quite Jack Sparrow on this occasion, he was more akin to Captain Obvious. ‘He’s got an eye patch, neck-high boots, hair the colour of hot ash, and a shirt made of moondust on, Keith, of course, it’s all pose’, any Bowie fan would retort. That’s the brilliance of it. Bowie subverted the posturing of rock ‘n’ roll and made it interstellar.
How many people had the creative ingenuity to pose as an androgynous alien rather than another cliched snarling rock star? The Rolling Stones are all pose and they’re all the better for it. Sam Shephard rightly said about the masterful Bob Dylan, “[He] has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch… He’s not the first one to have invented himself, but he’s the first one to have invented Dylan.” That’s an invention that changed the world and The Stones would’ve been nowhere without it.
In fact, Lemmy even accused them of orchestrating their own identity. The rocker said, “They went to starve in London, but it was by choice to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability.”
The difference is, when Bowie came along, rock ‘n’ roll was in need of new molds, and he provided some of the most enthralling, inclusive, bombastic ones in history. And in due time, Richards himself would even start to see the wood amongst the trees when it came to Bowie, eventually calling him “a true original in everything he did”.
Nevertheless, he never became an express fan and the Hunk Dory masterpiece ‘Changes’ is the only song he really liked. “I can’t think of anything else he’s done that would make my hair stand up,” he said in a backhanded compliment of the track. In fact, he even said he was “not a huge fan” and that ‘Changes’ was just about the only song he could remember—a notion that perhaps says more about Richards than Bowie’s own oeuvre.
