Music interview: Momus on how David Bowie inspired his his cabaret show '˜Dybbuk'

Now aged 57 and resident in Japan, he will be making a rare UK appearance at Where Are We Now?, a “state of the nation festival” organised by the avant garde art collective Neu Reekie! as part of the programme for Hull City of Culture. He spoke to The Yorkshire Post about what to expect from his cabaret show, Dybbuk Momie.

You’re going to be presenting your cabaret show Dybbuk Momie at the Where Are We Now? festival in Hull. In what ways do you feel David Bowie has inspired your own work as a songwriter and performer?

David Bowie is the alpha and omega, as far as I’m concerned: my role model. Frankly, if there’d just been, you know, David Essex and Alvin Stardust and people like that when I was growing up, I would have gone into another field. Bowie showed that you could be a multimedia artist working in the electronic media, talking about the important things, being massively popular and influential, being an entertainer yet retaining fierce spiritual grace and sexual power. On the other hand, if he hadn’t existed, perhaps Jake Thackray would’ve been my role model. In some ways, my own work as Momus bears more resemblance to Thackray’s songs than to Bowie’s. There’s no Ziggy, no “Heroes” in my discography, but lots of droll little squibs like Lah Di Dah and One-Eyed Isaac. So who knows?

Bowie himself absorbed a huge variety of influences over the course of his career. I think your show focuses on his formative years when he was dallying with everything from Jacques Brel to Lindsay Kemp to Aleister Crowley. What interested you about that period of his life in particular?

Brel is definitely a point we have in common: just a few years after Bowie was being massively influenced by the stage show Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (he went half-a-dozen times, according to Lindsay Kemp), I was being influenced by the film version, which I saw in Montreal at the age of 14. Of course, it must’ve reminded me of Ziggy Stardust at the time, at least subliminally — it was the first of many, many moments when I noticed that something I thought was Bowie’s own invention turned out to be a cunning adaptation of something he’d been impressed by. I think that was the secret of Bowie’s “Imperial Period” (the whole of the seventies, basically): he was an index of everything worth paying attention to, a cultural summary. You actually didn’t need to know about obscure culture (assuming you could even find it, in those pre-internet days, and especially if you lived outside the major metropolitan centres): Bowie would bring it all to you. There’d be Burroughs, Brecht, Brel, Genet, Chris Burden, Harmonia, Neu!, Kraftwerk, the black sound of Philadelphia, heavy metal from Hull, Nietzsche, Buddhism, Berlin, method acting, Biff Rose, cabaret, drag, Warhol, camp, Kubrick — all mixed together and transmuted into something gloriously compelling. My show tries to steer clear of the obvious selections and look at how off-the-wall some of these interests were — for a mainstream artist, anyway. My generation was very lucky to have someone like that, a subcultural guide who managed to get onto TV and into the newspapers, whose records were sold in Boots.

What was the first record by David Bowie that you remember hearing? Did he make an immediate impression on you?

At my boarding school in Edinburgh the boys were suddenly singing this refrain in the dorms: “So where were the Spiders while the fly tried to break our balls?” One day I heard the original on the radio, and the voice astounded me: hard, robotic and incredibly high, menacing yet sexy. Could this be a man singing? Was it a woman? A machine? A creature from space?

Does Dybbuk also give you an opportunity to perform songs that Bowie himself never played live? And if so, how have you decided to approach that material?

Yes, there are quite a few songs Bowie never attempted live, including really early ones like Uncle Arthur. I just arrange them the way I want to, and sing them as I can. Sometimes they’re too high and I have to change the key — something Bowie himself did quite a bit in his later years too. Often I make the arrangements a bit more quirky, a bit less rock. I also do covers he never sang live, like his incredible take (orchestrated by Dominic Muldowney) of Brecht’s The Drowned Girl.

You began doing Dybbuk shows a couple of years before David Bowie’s death. Did you find it interesting that Bowie returned to some of those early sources of inspiration for his final work, Blackstar?

Yes. His death was obviously devastating, but not the least of the grief was the fact that he was really getting back on track, finding his raw, experimental, urgent edge again after so many years in the artistic wilderness. While I welcomed The Next Day, I thought of a lot of it as “Dad Rock”, Bowie-by-numbers. But Blackstar is something else again, and it really suggests he could have kept going, getting stronger and stranger, for quite some time. Then again, I think it was death concentrating his mind, so it may be that — without the end in sight — he would have continued in silence, had he lived another 20 years, just enjoying what I call “the last temptation of Bowie”: normal domestic life with his family.

Having expressed concern about pop music being crushed by its own archive, how did you feel about your own being anthologised in the ‘Public Intellectual’ CD box set last year?

It’s pretty much an inevitability. The main thing is that you shouldn’t let the archive museumize you while you’re still alive. I think that’s why Bowie chose the title (or was it Paul Morley’s idea?) “David Bowie Is…” for the V&A show in 2013: sure, his archive was literally going into a museum, but he was still alive, still active, still in the present tense. I don’t think the compilation (and there’s a box set in the works right now, Create, due from Cherry Red later this year) stifled or stymied my current production, which continues apace.

What are you going to be working on next?

I’ll be starting a new record as soon as I get back to Osaka in June. At the moment I have a provisional title for it, Miilk, and the idea that I want to do something like Schoenberg’s lieder! But we’ll see: usually what happens is that I impose some absurdly non-commercial concept, then let my pop instincts rebel against it: I carefully build the cinema then rip up the seats.

Momus will be at Where Are We Now? on June 2 as part of Hull UK City of Culture 2017. For further information visit: www.hull2017.co.uk/wherearewenow