David Bowie’s pianist Mike Garson on their last conversation and talking him out of touring
Mike Garson, former pianist for David Bowie, has shared that he fears he’s to blame for the late singer quitting touring.
While speaking to Music Week, Garson shared that a conversation with the ‘Starman’ icon may have impacted his decision to stop touring after 2004.
“So he called me in 2006 and he said, ‘Well, Mike, do you think we should go out again?’ Now, I think the band and my wife want to kill me because I said something absurd, but actually deep and correct and honest,” Garson said.
He continued: “I said, ‘David, only if you’re feeling it’, because he wasn’t feeling it. I knew it but he wanted to give work to the band – our tour was cut short in 2004, so he was feeling guilty.”
Garson toured as part of Bowie’s band for three decades. He was also there for the final show 19 years ago which was cut short due to health issues. The pianist also played on the LP’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ and ‘Outside’.
He added: “Of course, my first thought was, ‘Yeah, let’s go’. But my second thought was, ‘I don’t want to be on the road with someone who is miserable and doesn’t want to be there.'”
The two stayed in touch up until Bowie’s death in 2016. They were planning on working together on different projects but that was cut short due to the legend’s passing. Bowie died at the age of 69 due to a private battle with cancer.
Garson shared: “He wrote to be saying he was hoping to maybe do another version of ‘Outside’ with Brian Eno and tour that. I had some hopes, but it was cut short unfortunately.”
The pianist claimed that he had a premonition before Bowie’s passing that he was going to die when they chatted via email for the final time.
“Right before he died, I was working on my biography and was asked to listen 60 songs we’d recorded together,” shared Garson.
He continued: “I was overwhelmed, because I never usually listened to our old songs – like David, I’ll be on to the next thing. I emailed him, saying I was in shock at how good we’d been. Within minutes, David wrote back saying, ‘Mike, we did a great body of work together.’ I suddenly felt tears, knowing something was wrong.”
“I said to my wife Susan, ‘That’s the last time I’m going to speak to David.’ I couldn’t explain why, but I was right,” he added.
In other Bowie news, Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp performed a cover of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ at their recent set at Glastonbury.
Back in 1977, Fripp recorded the guitar for the hit Bowie track, as well as featuring on the singer’s two hit albums ‘Heroes’ and ‘Scary Monsters’. He also got into a dispute with Bowie’s estate back in 2019, when he claimed that he was given improper credit for his contributions to the artist’s discography.
Dexys Midnight Runners‘ Kevin Rowland recently recalled calling Bowie “full of shit” and “a bad copy of Bryan Ferry“.
Of the comment, Rowland shared how at a gig in 1983 where the band served as openers for the icon, 50 people in the front kept chanting “Bowie”.
“So I went up to them and said something along the lines of: ‘You’re sitting in a fucking field all day in a load of mud waiting for fucking David Bowie! He’s just a pale imitation of Bryan Ferry!’ As we went to start the next song, the plugs were pulled. Bowie had been at the back of the stage and heard it. We were supposed to do two nights, but they didn’t want us back for the second.”
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Anagricel Duran
NME
