In September of 1983, David Bowie said on live television that Keith Richards had nothing left to offer music. 1 hour and 47 minutes later on the same program, Keith Richards played something that made David Bowie stand up from his seat in the studio aud.i.ence. David Bowie did not sit back down until the song was finished.
After the broadcast, David Bowie found Keith Richards backstage and said something that Keith Richards has quoted exactly once in a private conversation as the most generous thing one musician has ever said to him. This is the story of the 1 hour and 47 minutes between those two moments. The television program in question was a live music special broadcast on a British network on the evening of September 19th, 1983.
The program had been running for 4 years and had built a reputation as the kind of television event that took music seriously, not as entertainment in the background sense, but as something worth giving an hour and a half of uninterrupted attention to. The format was simple. Performances, conversations, and the specific chemistry that live television produces when genuinely interesting people are placed in the same room and the cameras are allowed to follow what happens.
The program’s producers had assembled for the September 19th broadcast a lineup that included several of the most significant names in British and American music of that era. David Bowie was 46 years old in September of 1983 and had just released Let’s Dance, the most commercially successful album of his career, an album that had taken everything David Bowie had learned in 15 years of deliberate artistic reinvention and applied it to the project of reaching the largest possible aud.i.ence without surrendering the intelligence
that had always distinguished his work. Let’s Dance had reached number one in multiple countries and produced three consecutive hit singles. David Bowie arrived at the program studio in West London that evening with the specific confidence of a man whose recent decisions had been comprehensively validated by the world.
David Bowie was in the middle of the Serious Moonlight Tour, one of the most successful tours of 1983. David Bowie was, by any measure available in September of 1983, at the peak of his powers and his public standing. Keith Richards was 39 years old in September of 1983. The Rolling Stones had released Undercover earlier that year, an album that had received mixed reviews and that represented in the assessment of the music press at the time, a band that was searching for direction in a changed musical landscape. The Stones had been together
for 21 years. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. The music press in 1983 had not been kind to the Rolling Stones and the specific language it used was the language of diminishment of a band that had been important and was now less important, that had shaped an era and was now being shaped by it rather than the other way around.
David Bowie was 40 minutes into his conversation with the program’s host when the host asked David Bowie about the current state of rock and roll. It was the kind of question that live television asks because it is open enough to go anywhere and specific enough to have a center. David Bowie answered with the intelligence and precision that characterized David Bowie’s public speech, quickly, structurally, with the specific authority of someone who had spent 15 years thinking carefully about where music was and where it was going. David
Bowie talked about the new landscape. David Bowie talked about synthesizers and electronic production and the way the sonic palette available to musicians in 1983 had expanded beyond anything that had existed when the previous generation had built their careers. David Bowie talked about the artists who were using that expanded palette to make something genuinely new.
David Bowie was specific and compelling and clearly convinced in the way that people are convinced when the evidence of their own experience supports the argument they are making. David Bowie had, after all, just made Let’s Dance. David Bowie had just demonstrated personally that reinvention was possible, that a career could pivot without losing its integrity, that a musician could move toward the mainstream without surrendering the intelligence that had always distinguished the work.
David Bowie was speaking from a position of recent and comprehensive vindication. And then David Bowie said, with the specific casualness of a man making an observation he considers too obvious to require defense, that the guitar-based rock of the previous generation, and David Bowie named Keith Richards specifically as the emblematic figure of that tradition, that thou wilt less thou wilt thou sir.
Is there 10:30 wad? Yes, I will was naive. At a fan. Everything it had to give. David Bowie said that Keith Richards represented a musical vocabulary that had been fully expressed and had nowhere left to go. David Bowie said that what Keith Richards did was important, that the tradition Keith Richards represented had mattered enormously, but that mattering in the past was different from being relevant in the present.
David Bowie said it without malice. David Bowie said it as a fact of musical evolution, the way a scientist states a conclusion that the evidence supports, with the specific confidence of someone who considers the case closed. Two corridors away, Keith Richards was in a dressing room that had a monitor showing the live feed of the program.
Keith Richards heard every word David Bowie said. The producer assigned to Keith Richards dressing room that evening, a young man named Stephen Clark, who was 24 years old and had been working in television for 18 months, said afterward that Keith Richards expression when David Bowie finished speaking was not anger. Keith Richards looked at the monitor for a long moment.
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Then Keith Richards looked at his guitar, which was leaning against the wall beside the dressing table. Then Keith Richards picked up the guitar and began to play very quietly to himself, not for the monitor, not for Stephen Clark, but in the specific private way that Keith Richards played when Keith Richards was working something out.
Keith Richards played quietly in the dressing room for the next hour and 43 minutes while the program continued on the monitor. Keith Richards watched David Bowie perform. David Bowie was extraordinary that evening, sharp and controlled and in full command of the stage, everything that Let’s Dance had promised a live Bowie performance would be in 1983.
Keith Richards watched and listened with the specific professional attention of a musician assessing another musician’s work without the defensiveness that the circumstances might have excused. Keith Richards watched two other acts perform. Keith Richards watched the host conduct two more interviews. Keith Richards did not appear agitated during any of this.
Stephen Clark, who remained in the dressing room for the full hour and 43 minutes, said afterward that Keith Richards seemed less disturbed by what David Bowie had said than focused by it, that the statement had functioned not as an insult, but as a brief, specific, and useful piece of information about what Keith Richards needed to do when Keith Richards walked onto that stage.
Keith Richards appeared, according to Stephen Clark, more concentrated than Stephen Clark had seen anyone appear in 18 months of television production. The concentration of a man who has been given something specific to respond to and is deciding, with the full weight of 30 years of experience, exactly how to respond to it.
At 9:47, Stephen Clark told Keith Richards it was 4 minutes to stage. Keith Richards stood up. Keith Richards put the guitar strap over his shoulder. Keith Richards walked to the door of the dressing room. Then Keith Richards turned around, walked back to the dressing table, and spent 45 seconds making a single adjustment to the tuning of the guitar’s B string.
Stephen Clark watched this and said nothing. Keith Richards nodded once, not to Stephen Clark, but to himself, and walked out the door. Keith Richards walked onto the stage of the program at 9:51 in the evening of September 19th, 1983. David Bowie was in the studio aud.i.ence, seated in the second row.
David Bowie had been there for the previous two performances and was still there, which was not required of any guest, but which David Bowie had chosen because David Bowie took live music seriously enough to stay and watch it even when the cameras were not pointed at David Bowie. What Keith Richards played in the next 6 minutes and 14 seconds has never been officially documented.
The broadcast exists in the archive, and the people who have seen it describe it in consistent terms. Keith Richards played without introduction and without announcement. The program’s host had introduced Keith Richards by name and stepped back, and Keith Richards had walked to the microphone and begun without any further ceremony.
What Keith Richards played was rooted in the blues tradition that Keith Richards had spent 30 years studying and developing and making his own. The tradition that David Bowie had described 90 minutes earlier as fully expressed and finished. It was not finished. What Keith Richards demonstrated in 6 minutes and 14 seconds on a live television stage in London in September of 1983 was that the tradition David Bowie had declared complete was capable of producing something that night in that room by those specific hands on that specific instrument that
nobody who was present had heard before. Not a new form, not a reinvention in David Bowie’s sense of the word. Something older and deeper than reinvention. The demonstration that a tradition is not finished when someone decides it is finished, but only when it has nothing left to say, and that Keith Richards had things left to say.
David Bowie stood up from his seat in the second row at the 42nd mark of the performance. The people on either side of David Bowie noticed this, and some of them stood as well, not because they had decided to, but because the music was doing something that made sitting feel like the wrong response.
David Bowie did not sit back down. David Bowie stood for the remaining 5 minutes and 32 seconds with the specific quality of attention that Keith Richards had described to Stephen Clark in the 4 minutes before walking onto the stage as the only thing a performer can reasonably ask from an aud.i.ence. Not enthusiasm, not applause, but the willingness to be fully present with what is happening rather than waiting for it to confirm what you already thought.
What David Bowie was present with in those 5 minutes and 32 seconds was the demonstration that the musical vocabulary David Bowie had declared finished 90 minutes earlier was capable of producing in the hands of Keith Richards something that required David Bowie to stand up. The tradition was not finished.
Keith Richards was not finished. The evidence was in the room. When Keith Richards finished the studio aud.i.ence responded with the kind of applause that is different from ordinary applause, the applause of people who have heard something they did not expect and are expressing recognition rather than politeness.
David Bowie was the first person in the room to start clapping. This detail was visible in the broadcast to anyone watching closely enough, and it was the detail that people who saw the broadcast live mentioned when they described the evening to people who had not seen it. After the program ended Keith Richards was standing in the backstage corridor when David Bowie found him.
David Bowie had come from the studio aud.i.ence through the side door and had walked directly to where Keith Richards was standing with the purposefulness of someone who knows where they are going and why. The backstage corridor at that point was moderately busy, crew members moving equipment, production staff in the controlled rush of a broadcast that has just concluded, David Bowie and Keith Richards stood to one side of the main traffic.
Keith Richards has never discussed what David Bowie said in that conversation. The conversation has been described by one other person who was present at its edges, a production assistant named Helen Marsh who was 22 years old and had been working her first live television broadcast and who was close enough to observe the two men but not close enough to hear the words.
As lasting approximately four minutes, conducted with the quiet intensity of two people who are saying something important and are both aware that what they are saying is important. Helen Marsh said that neither man raised his voice. Helen Marsh said that David Bowie did most of the talking in the first two minutes and that Keith Richards did most of the talking in the second two minutes.
Helen Marsh said that when the conversation ended, both men were nodding. Helen Marsh said that Keith Richards looked like a man who has been given something he did not know he needed until it was given. Keith Richards quoted what David Bowie said that evening exactly once to a friend named Alan Parsons who was a musician and producer and who had known Keith Richards for several years by that point and understood the context in which the quote was being offered.
Alan Parsons has described the conversation without repeating the specific words because Alan Parsons understood that Keith Richards had shared it in the specific confidence of a private conversation between two people who trusted each other and that the privacy was intentional and deserved to be maintained.
What Alan Parsons has said is that the words David Bowie said to Keith Richards in that backstage corridor were generous in a way that cost something, not the easy generosity of a compliment from a position of security, but the harder generosity of someone who had said something publicly that was wrong and was saying so privately to the person it had been wrong about.
Alan Parsons said the words acknowledged that being wrong about a musician of Keith Richards’ standing is not a small thing, and that acknowledging it directly, rather than allowing it to go unaddressed, was the correct response. Alan Parsons said that Keith Richards did not appear surprised by what David Bowie said. Alan Parsons said Keith Richards appeared instead grateful, which is not a state Alan Parsons had associated with Keith Richards before that conversation.
David Bowie and Keith Richards appeared together on two subsequent occasions in the years that followed, and people who observed them together on those occasions have noted a specific quality to their interactions, a mutual respect that seemed to carry something in it beyond the ordinary professional regard of two people who had known each other a long time.
Neither man ever discussed the September 1983 evening publicly. David Bowie never mentioned it in any interview. Keith Richards never mentioned it. The evening exists in the broadcast archive, in the memory of Steven Clark and Helen Marsh and the studio aud.i.ence who were present, and in whatever Keith Richards carries from the four minutes he spent in a backstage corridor with David Bowie after the program ended.
David Bowie d.i.ed in January of 2016. Keith Richards learned of David Bowie’s d.e.a.t.h from the same news that the rest of the world learned it from, and whatever Keith Richards thought in that moment is not something Keith Richards has shared. What is known is that when Keith Richards was asked in an interview conducted several months after David Bowie’s d.e.a.t.h to name the musicians whose opinion had mattered most to him across his career, Keith Richards included David Bowie in the answer.
Keith Richards did not elaborate. Keith Richards moved on to the next question. Some answers require no elaboration at all. The tradition David Bowie declared finished in September of 1983 is not finished. Keith Richards is still playing. The 6 minutes and 14 seconds are still in the archive. David Bowie stood up at the 40-second mark and did not sit back down until it was over.
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