David Bowie, ‘Jump They Say’: The man who fell to earth

David Bowie
‘Jump They Say’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
Number 9 on March 28, 1993

Hey folks! A quick content warning: this one contains mentions of depression and suicide. Nothing graphic, just giving you a heads up.

1.

Like most late-70s babies, one of my formative memories involves a magical Saturday in the summer of 1985, when I poured some cereal, turned on the TV, and spent the next twelve hours watching Live Aid. The rest of my family joined me on the sofa as the day wore on, and we were all together as the dusk settled on Wembley.

This was my moon landing. The best part of Live Aid was knowing that everyone was watching. Not just everyone in my house, or everyone on my street. Everyone. Billions of people across the world, all of us clapping along to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.

I was seven years old, and this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. The world felt so big; the future felt so open.

2. When comes the shaking man

Eight years is a long time when you’re a kid.

By 1993, I was 15, and I wasn’t doing so great. Nothing serious, just your typical teen blues, although I had them pretty bad. I actually don’t remember a lot from around that time (because it turns out that serotonin is essential for forming memories—who knew?)

One thing I do remember is the feeling of stuckness. Adolescence seems to go on forever, and an unhappy adolescence feels like purgatory. Once you were small and happy, and now you’re big and sad, and that’s all you know. That is the breadth of your universe. So it feels like there’s no end to it. It is endless, bottomless. Part of me, I think, believed that I would be 15 forever, in school forever, unhappy forever.

Worst of all, I felt like I would be me forever. I couldn’t imagine myself growing or improving or evolving. The wind had changed, and now I was stuck like this. Forever.

Years later, I learned that this is actually a symptom of depression. Neurotypical human brains can perform a kind of time travel: we can daydream about what lies ahead and construct a mental image of the future. Depressed people often can’t mentally time travel. When they imagine the future, they don’t even see pain. They see nothing.

And I think this is one of the most urgent red flags. From my own—experiences and from many years of supporting friends and family—I would say that people will generally be okay as long as they see a path ahead. Even if they imagine that path is full of torment, they’ll keep going, because seeing the path is enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

But when someone can’t see any path ahead? That’s when they’re in real danger.

3. They say he was born again

Eight years is a much longer time in pop music.

Live Aid turned out to be the worst thing that happened to music since Buddy Holly’s plane crashed. Live Aid’s stars became a kind of rock aristocracy, elevated above the vagaries of the pop charts, and that seems to have affected their creativity in the same way that Twitter has affected Elon Musks’s brain. They became insular, smug, risk-averse, and utterly separated from their pre-Live Aid selves. And their music sucked.

Bowie suffered a terrible case of Live Aid Syndrome, although he had been showing symptoms since 1982 when Let’s Dance became a commercial hit. Bowie absorbed the yuppie spirit of the 80s and embarked on several money-making projects: the albums Tonight and Never Let Me Down; and the lavish Glass Spider tour. I think it’s fair to say this of all three projects—Patrick Bateman would have loved them.

But Bowie’s greatest talent has always been his ability to reinvent himself. The late 80s saw him start a band, and, while Tin Machine weren’t exactly a creative breakthrough, at least he was trying.

1992 saw Bowie marry Iman, the supermodel best known for appearing in Michael Jackson’s ‘Remember The Time’ video. At the time, it seemed like your typical middle-aged-rock-star-marries-supermodel gossip column fodder, and journalists no doubt drafted a “Bowie and Iman split” story that they could run in six months.

But, in hindsight, Bowie’s reinvention as a married man was perhaps his most important. The couple mostly kept their marriage out of the limelight, but the few details that emerged suggested that they were a surprisingly normal family, and David just spent most of his time watching Spongebob with his daughter.

In 1993, Bowie released Black Tie White Noise his first solo album since 1987’s Never Let Me Down. The record was largely inspired by his new relationship, beginning with a track called ‘The Wedding’ and ending with ‘The Wedding Song’.

And it was… pretty good! The lead single made the Top Ten, which was something Bowie hadn’t achieved since ‘Absolute Beginners’ in 1986. He did not appear live on Top of the Pops, sadly, although he did perform on some other TV shows.

4. Don’t listen to the crowd

‘Jump They Say’ was inspired by the suicide of Bowie’s half-brother Terry who played an influential role in Bowie’s childhood, introducing him to the records and books that shaped his tastes.

Burns had lifelong mental health issues, eventually dying from suicide in 1986. Talking about the origins of ‘Jump They Say’, Bowie told this story:

“One of the times I actually went out with my step-brother, I took him to see a Cream concert in Bromley, and about halfway through he started feeling very, very bad… He used to see visions a lot.

“And I remember I had to take him out of the club because it was really starting to affect him – he was swaying… we got out into the street and he collapsed on the ground and he said the ground was opening up and there was fire and stuff pouring out the pavement, and I could almost see it for him, because he was explaining it so articulately.”

Bowie also points out that ‘Jump They Say’ isn’t just about his half-brother’s suicide, but also his own flirtation with destruction over the years, and a meditation on whatever divine force may have protected him over the years. Essentially, the song is wondering why he lived but Terry did not.

After all, Bowie had some close calls. Famously, he spent the mid-70s living in L.A. and subsisting on a diet of milk, red peppers, and cocaine. He was heading for an early grave, but suddenly he packed it all in and moved to Berlin, where he recorded one of the greatest album trilogies of all time.

People often talk of this as one of his amazing reinventions, like the transition from Ziggy to the Thin White Duke. However, if you look past the records and the mythology, it’s actually the story of a more mundane—and more impressive—transformation. A guy with a serious addiction problem managed to get clean, and then he rebuilt his life. He saved himself. Or allowed himself to be saved, which is kind of the same thing.

That’s actually a more impressive feat than recording ‘Heroes’.

5. They say jump

As a contented middle-aged dad myself, I can now fully appreciate Bowie’s 90s transformation.

He has lots of experiments still to come, and he will spend much of the 90s trying on new ideas and styles. Some will work better than others, but we’ll forgive any failures because… it’s Bowie.

But his biggest transformation was happening in secret, and we’ll never know what it was like. Only his family got to experience Middle-Aged-Dad era Bowie. And that’s as it should be.

I like to imagine him cuddled up with his kid, laughing at Spongebob while some part of him wonders, “How did I survive long enough to enjoy this?” And the answer is simple. He just kept going. He put one foot in front of the other. That’s the only way anyone survives.

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