Blue Jean: Did This Simple Pop Song Reveal The “Real” David Bowie?

With punchy drums and gleaming saxophone, and a nod to the stop-start rhythms of Eddie Cochran’s 1959 single Somethin’ Else, Blue Jean certainly helped Bowie achieve that goal. “It was inspired from that Eddie Cochran feeling,” he acknowledged, “but that of course is very Troggs as well.” And yet, an unexpected marimba part from Montreal-born musician and arranger Guy St-Onge, plus Bowie’s harmonised backing vocals – recorded, in his typical style, in just a couple of takes – provided melodic counterpoints that would give the song a radio-ready catchiness that all but ensured it’s pick as Tonight’s lead single. “It’s quite eclectic, I suppose,” Bowie concluded. “What of mine isn’t?”

The release: “The dynamics of classic Bowie”

Released as a single on 10 September 1984, with Tonight’s closing track, Dancing With The Big Boys, as its B-side, Blue Jean went to No.8 in the US and No.6 in the UK. Having availed himself of Hugh Padgham’s gated-reverb drum sound during the Blue Jean sessions, Bowie looked to the era’s other cutting-edge producers for Extended Dance Mixes that would help the single gain traction in the clubs: New York City DJ and Madonna collaborator John “Jellybean” Benitez took the reins on Blue Jean while hip-hop producer Arthur Baker stretched Dancing With The Big Boys past the seven-minute mark, splicing in elements that wrestled it away from Bowie’s “organic” original and placed it closer to the sound Baker had pioneered two years earlier, with Afrika Bambaataa And The Soulsonic Force’s game-changing single Planet Rock.

The video: Jazzin’ For Blue Jean

Blue Jean’s most radical reframing would be reserved for its promo video. A comedy short in which Bowie plays both Vic, a luckless teller of tall tales who spends his days up ladders, pasting billboard posters and pining for a girlfriend, and Screaming Lord Byron, a self-important rock star who subsists on pills while lackeys enable his every move, the full 20-minute Jazzin’ For Blue Jean film was directed by Julien Temple (Sex Pistols’ The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle; Neil Young’s This Note’s For You promo clip) and plotted in collaboration with Bowie, with a screenplay by Olivier Award-winning playwright Terry Johnson.

“He had a funny perspective on rock stardom and wanted to take the piss out of himself, portraying a side of himself he’d kept hidden,” Temple later told The Guardian. Elsewhere, he maintained that Jazzin’ For Blue Jean presented the closest thing to the “real” Bowie that anyone would ever see. Playfully self-referential (“You conniving, randy, bogus-Oriental old queen! Your record sleeves are better than your songs!” a frustrated Vic shouts at Screaming Lord Byron, who’s just run off with Vic’s potential girlfriend), and with Bowie turning in a performance that suggests a career in comedy could have awaited him, the short offered a creative counterbalance to Blue Jean’s lyrics, which, by Bowie’s own estimation, were a “not very cerebral” expression of “picking up” women.

“The format of Blue Jean is of a small talkie, and that’s the emphasis,” Bowie told NME. “The music takes a back seat – more or less. It’s a piece in the film.” Blagging his way into a date with a woman, Vic suddenly finds himself having to make good on his false claim that he and Byron “go back years”. Whether poking fun at his own changing fashions – “Are zoot suits in? Or out? Or in again?” Vic asks himself while getting ready for the evening – or critiquing the slavish devotion that fans show towards their pop idols, via a performance set-piece in which gig-goers copy Byron’s gestures as if in a hypnotised daze, Bowie made up for a lack of lyrical complexity with a film that, in its final moments, challenges viewers to consider the artifice of fame.

Breaking the fourth wall, Bowie complains to Temple that Jazzin’ For Blue Jean’s ending, in which the girl leaves with the rock star, is “far too obvious”. “Look, it’s my song, my concept, my neck,” he remonstrates, as a crane shot pulls back, revealing the production crew and leaving director and star to spar over their ideas. “It’s extraordinary in the music field to have someone who understands film like Bowie because film and music don’t often mix,” Temple told The Face. Praising Bowie for “getting better and better as an actor”, the director also noted that he had inspired those around him to give their all to the project: “I’ve never seen a video crew get so involved with a performer.”

The legacy: “A great throwaway single in the 1950s-throwback tradition”

Despite long being recognised as one of the most influential musicians in history, Bowie only received a single Grammy Award during his lifetime, when the full-length Jazzin’ For Blue Jean won in the Best Video, Short Form category at the 1985 awards ceremony. An edit of the Blue Jean performance segment would be used to promote the song on time-restricted broadcasts, while Bowie would court another industry panel when he filmed a separate live clip, at the Wag Club, on London’s Wardour Street, for the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards.

Maintaining a place in Bowie’s live sets throughout his Never Let Me Down/Glass Spider era and subsequent Sound+Vision Tour, Blue Jean was largely retired as Bowie turned to making more experimental music in the 90s. Twenty years on from its release, however, the song received a few airings during the tour for 2003’s Reality album, Bowie letting guitarist Earl Slick loose to rough things up with some wiry lead lines.

Vintage rock’n’roll may have been the aim with Blue Jean, but Bowie historian Nicholas Pegg would also connect the dots between the song and Bowie’s own rock’n’roll past, praising Blue Jean as “a great throwaway single in the 1950s-throwback tradition of The Jean Genie”, the Aladdin Sane-era classic that had given Bowie his biggest chart hit to date in 1973, when it peaked at No.2 in the UK. Reviewing Blue Jean upon its release, US trade publication Cash Box had also heard in it “the dynamics of classic Bowie” mixed with “the horns and back-up vocals that made Modern Love such a celebration”. It was, the magazine affirmed, “a testament to the man’s ever-changing and always on the mark songwriting and vocals”.

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