Q and A With Julian Shah-Tayler Reveals Perspectives On Bowie, Aladdin Sane 50th Tribute

By Keith Walsh
Just in time for the 50^th Anniversary of David Bowie’s classic album of 1973, Aladdin Sane, Bowie tribute artist extraordinaire Julian Shah-Tayler has released an album on his new Harmony Records label, featuring his talented friends and colleagues. The title, Forget That I’m 50 — ‘David Bowie’s ‘Aladdin Sane’ Remade, Remodeled comes from a line from the album’s fifth track, “Cracked Actor.”

“I’m stiff on my legend/the films that I’ve made/forget that I’m fifty/’cause you just got paid.”

That’s an apt quote for many reasons, not the least being that the character Aladdin Sane that Bowie presented on the album mirrored his anxieties (euphemism alert) at the time. This is one of the first things about the original Bowie album that Shah-Tayler explains in our phone interview. Referring to a list of 45 things about Aladdin Sane by Steve Pafford, Shah-Tayler tells me: “One of the things he references, it’s as though, Ziggy has come unhinged. So there’s no coherence in the same way the Ziggy album has. But Aladdin Sane is a lot more like ‘Ziggy goes to America and becomes unhinged.’” For more on this perspective, and the writing and recording of the 1973 album, please see my review at synthbeat.com.

 

 

Forget That I’m 50 is the first release on the new label, Harmony Records, in collaboration with Shah-Tayler’s close friend (whom he calls a mentor) David Chatfield. “It’s kind of a first dip into the world of us working together on a label sense,” Shah-Tayler tells me. “I’m excited. It feels nerve-wracking, because in the past, I do all the press, and I upload everything, and do all the rights clearances, and this is the first time that (I’ve let somebody else handle those.)”

In discussing other elements of Aladdin Sane that make it a special album, Shah-Tayler said: “It’s strange, isn’t it? The thing that stood out to me when I first got into it was not the songs as such, but the piano playing. Because Mike Garson really shines like he never has before or since, on that album. ‘Aladdin Sane,’ the solo…I’ve listened to a podcast where Mike’s talking about it and he didn’t really think anything of it, and suddenly it’s the thing that put him on the map. It’s so weird and oblique.”

Career Choices
Shah-Tayler is a classically trained pianist who chose to pursue multiple careers in rock music rather than take on advanced studies in the kind of repertoire that was required to become a touring and recording pianist. “I kind of resented the classical world in some ways because although I loved playing Debussy and Satie and all those more esoteric impressionistic styles, nobody cares. It’s such a small niche audience that you know, you’d never go on to be a classical concert pianist and play that stuff. You have to pay all the bombastic…, you know, Brahms and Beethoven, all that stuff. Chopin, Listz. That was never my interest — I always wanted to play the more sort of colorful and painterly styles of playing. And when I heard Mike Garson, I realized he was dipping in to every color in the book, he had classical training, he had Broadway, he had jazz, he had Latin — the whole thing. He is ludicrously brilliant.”

As luck would have it, Shah-Tayler has recruited Garson to play on a few tracks on his solo album, which is a work in progress, and will also include Bowie alum Carmine Rojas, who played bass on a string of Bowie tours and albums in the 80s – Let’s Dance, Tonight, and Never Let Me Down.

I mentioned to Shah-Tayler that to be a touring and recording pianist, one would have to play the repertoire of Lang Lang. ”Yeah! Lang Lang is fabulous,” he says. “I saw a documentary, The Piano I think it’s called, which is talking about pianists, and they had all the major pianists. They had Yuia Wang, Glenn Gould, I believe, he was still alive. A bunch of people. Lang Lang stood at as by far the greatest player of all those people…every time he’s on screen, he dominates. He’s been training since he was five, and he is truly that greatest that ever was, I think. His story is very sad—you can probably guess it. He had the whole pressure from his father, and all that stuff. Certainly there’s a tradition in China, particularly, of being very pressured with music. You’re very young and you practice eight hours a day from five years old and it’s crazy stuff. But the result – Lang Lang!”

(Note: I asked ChatGPT to find the title of the documentary and was told: “The documentary you are referring to is likely “The Art of Piano”, which was released in 2014.” So far I haven’t been able to locate this film.)

Favorite Records
Considering that Shah-Tayler is a Bowie tribute artist with his The Band That Fell To Earth (and a studio whiz for his solo projects as well as a member of leading Depeche Mode Tribute Strangelove), I asked him what was the first Bowie album that made an impact on him?
“Lodger,” he says without hesitation. Let’s dive into a Q and A:

PopularCultureBeat: Was that the first Bowie album that reached your ears?
Shah-Tayler: “No, no. It’s strange, because the first thing I heard by Bowie was Let’s Dance…and I’m classically trained, so my ears were very out of tune with blues rock. I always found blues rock to be very boring, and not interesting to me. AC/DC never interested me, Led Zeppelin never interested me. The Doors made their way in because The Doors were quite classically influenced, and jazz influenced. But when I first heard “Let’s Dance,” and “China Girl,” I was like ‘uh. What’s this– it’s rubbish.’ And all my friends were saying ‘no, no, this guy’s brilliant,’ and I was like ‘no he’s not, he’s blues rock, it’s nonsense.’ I put him in the same category as Phil Collins.”

Shah-Tayler: “And then I went to my friend’s house — he used to wear lingerie and negligees when he was going out in Nottingham, when I was used to live in Nottingham. He wasn’t a transvestite as such, he was just a provocateur. And he sounded a lot like Bowie, his voice, and sang songs that were influenced heavily by Bowie. Though I didn’t know it, ‘cause I wasn’t aware of Bowie’s work. And he took me to his house one time, and we got really drunk, and he put on Lodger. And I heard the song ‘Yassassin.’ And I just loved it. I dug in a little bit…and the guitar solo on ‘Look Back In Anger,’ fabulous. It was so beyond…, it was ‘art rock,’ and ‘Boys Keep Swinging,’ that weird, offbeat, not-quite-together punk rock band playing — it was a real eye opener for me. Then I listened to Low, which completely sold me, I was absolutely in love with that. And then I got Diamond Dogs, and Diamond Dogs was spectacularly weird, and cool, and punky. So yeah, I came to it through Lodger. Which is not usually the story you hear.”

PopularCultureBeat: When did you come around to Let’s Dance?
Shah-Tayler: “I haven’t said I’ve come around to it! There’s great elements to it, isn’t there? With Carmine (Rojas), who played on Let’s Dance, is playing on my new record too. His basslines are wonderful, the sound of it is commercial. It’s a great record, it is a great record – but it’s not what I love about Bowie.”

PopularCultureBeat: Well, he ditched Tony Visconti for that album.
Shah-Tayler: “Well, I love Nile Rodger’s productions. I mean, everything about the record is spectacular, it’s just not what I love about Bowie. ‘Loving The Alien,’ that blew my mind, because that is a spectacularly odd song.”
(Loving The Alien” is a single from Bowie’s follow up to Let’s Dance, titled Tonight. )

Shah-Tayler: “And I love it. And then Never Let Me Down  — I loved that record when it came out, I absolutely loved it. And it’s got the most flack of any Bowie record, He even hated it. But I loved it. Even the song ‘Never Let Me Down,’ and the sentiment, is beautiful, it’s a sweet, thank you song to somebody. I love it. There’s so many good things about it.”

PopularCultureBeat: Let’s talk about the process of getting Forget That I’m 50 together. How quickly did you get replies from the artists involved?

Shah-Tayler: “It was quick. I put it out to a lot of people that I know, we got a lot of replies from people submitting, and it was a lot of work for me to be honest. I put two and a half, three weeks to compiling everything, and I ended up producing, or executive producing six of the ten tracks. And they were all sort of due at the same time.”

PopularCultureBeat: Can we expect anniversary albums in 2024 for Diamond Dogs, 2025 for Young Americans, and 2026 Station To Station?

Shah-Tayler: “Definitely next year, Diamond Dogs, because Diamond Dogs is getting into my real love of Bowie. I’ll (probably) do ‘Sweet Thing,’ I imagine. I’ll do it on a twelve string. ‘1984.’ ‘Big Brother,’ they’re all such great songs.”

“Forget That I’m 50” Review At Synthbeat.com
‘Playing Favorites:’ Julian Shah-Tayler’s ‘Something Borrowed’
Julian Shah-Tayler on Bandcamp

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