Interview: Julian Shah-Tayler

With his original music, U.K.-born/L.A.-based Julian Shah-Tayler (a/k/a The Singularity) masterfully creates dark electro-pop – and when he fronts the tribute act The Band That Fell to Earth: A David Bowie Odyssey, he convincingly channels the Thin White Duke. Shah-Tayler combines both skills with his latest release, Hunger City, for which he covers Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974) album, along with several other tracks from across Bowie’s career. He also includes one of his own songs, the mesmerizing “Lights Out,” featuring two of Bowie’s former collaborators, pianist Mike Garson and bassist Carmine Rojas (as well as Bauhaus / Love and Rockets bassist David J). Shah-Tayler makes it clear he reveres Bowie’s work – but he’s also bold enough to put his own evocative, seductive (and sometimes sinister) spin on things. Calling from his Los Angeles home recently, Shah-Tayler explains why he finds Bowie so compelling, and how this has informed his own adventurous approach to music.

How did you know that you should do this project in the first place?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: Last year, I did [Bowie’s 1973 album] Aladdin Sane with a bunch of friends. I basically sent a message out to all my friends who are Bowie related in some way. I [also] asked Michael Aston from Gene Loves Jezebel and Michael Ciravolo from Beauty in Chaos, and a whole other bunch of friends, to contribute a song. So we did the whole of Aladdin Sane. I produced and vocalized “Lady Grinning Soul” and produced three tracks, and then my friends produced the other ones. It was such a huge job corralling all of that stuff that when it came round to [covering] Diamond Dogs, I just thought, “I’m not asking anybody else to be part of this because I don’t want to have to get everybody’s tracks, hold everybody to a deadline, do all that stuff – I’ll do it myself.” I got the tempos together, played all the songs all the way through on acoustic guitar, filled in the lead vocal, then everything else on top. So that’s how I made the record, and it was a lot easier and quicker doing it on my own than it would have been getting everybody else in.

What makes this particular Bowie album such a special one for you?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: Diamond Dogs was the first cassette tape I had by Bowie. It was the first album I ever listened to in its entirety, so it has a massive place in my heart. And it’s the goth Bowie album. It’s the reason Suede exists, which is another one of my favorite bands. I feel like Suede would not exist in the form that they were without Diamond Dogs because it’s got that kind of grating, punky guitar that [former Suede guitarist] Bernard Butler borrowed hugely from, I think.

How did you make sure that you honored the original material while still putting your own stamp on it?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: I mean, I hope I managed to do that. “Rebel Rebel,” I didn’t want it to sound anything like the original, because the original is quite repetitive, honestly. Obviously, it’s one of the signature Bowie songs, and the one song that makes Diamond Dogs really still a relevant record, because people who aren’t into the goth sound will still know that song. So it makes the album a hit record, whereas normally I think that album would have been a bit like [Bowie’s 1970 album] The Man Who Sold the World, which has a massive, heartfelt place in all Bowie fans’ hearts, but doesn’t have any hits on it. I know [my version] can’t even come close to the brilliance and genius of the original recording, but I just knew that if there was a record by Bowie that I had to cover in its entirety, it was going to be Diamond Dogs.

What is it about David Bowie that makes you so interested in covering his work?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: The variation. I do the Bowie tribute [concerts], and my six-piece band are the best musicians that I’ve ever played with – you have to be, to cover Bowie’s oeuvre in its entirety. You learn a lot about songwriting when you study Bowie’s songs. Nobody else approached songwriting like Bowie.

Has covering his work impacted your own songwriting style?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: It’s obviously had immeasurable impact. I’m very heavily influenced by his left turns. The first song that ever impacted me by Bowie properly was “Loving the Alien,” because the very first time you hear it, the time change and the strange chord changes are quite jarring. And you think, “Wait a minute, that’s not how songs are supposed to go.” And then you listen to it again because you want to figure out why that works. And then once you’ve heard it three times, you can never imagine a time when you haven’t heard that song. I’m always about novelty in music because I studied music deeply, classically, from seven to eighteen [years old] – and there are very few left turns in that same way in classical music. I mean, maybe you’ve got some strangeness, like Stravinsky. Or you’ve got some very sweeping and bombastic stuff like Wagner. But you don’t have these strange melodic twists and turns. And Bowie kind of invented it, it seems to me. So it’s fascinating. That’s Bowie’s genius, to me.

Tell us about “Lights Out,” your original song that’s included on this release.

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: I recorded it with Mike Garson and Carmine Rojas, who played with Bowie. I absolutely do not understand what Mike Garson does, and how he can make something so brilliant. Carmine Rojas is one of the finest bass players I’ve ever worked with, and I love the guy, he’s a real sweetheart. The problem that I have sometimes with being in tribute bands is that a lot of people will always come up to me and say, “Why are you ripping off Bowie? How dare you make money off of somebody else’s music? Why don’t you make your own music?” Which is a little unfair, because obviously I have so much of my own music, which has also had success in its own sphere. So I thought, “Okay, I have a good excuse to put this song on there because there are two Bowie people on it,” as well as David J, who also has a connection with Bowie because Bauhaus were the band who appeared with Bowie in [the 1983 horror film] The Hunger, and Bauhaus covered “Ziggy Stardust.” That’s the first time I ever heard Bowie, actually, was Bauhaus’ version of “Ziggy Stardust.”

Did you ever meet Bowie?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: I met him once. I was the special projects manager for Virgin Megastores in London, and he was doing a signing for the Hours album [in 1999]. He was supposed to do the signing in my store, which was the Piccadilly store, in which case I would have been the guy organizing the whole thing. But they moved it to the Tottenham Court Road store because they didn’t realize how many people would turn up – it was thousands of people. So I got to meet him briefly before the signing started. I got a few things signed myself. And he was very kind and very generous, but he was clearly pressed for time, so it wasn’t a conversation, so to speak. But that was the one time I met him in the flesh. And I’ve got to tell you, there are two people in the world I’ve met who have that radiance and aura. It was him, as the bright sun of existence. And Courtney Love, who is the black hole of the opposite radiance. I then went on to work with Courtney for a week. And that was interesting, also. But Bowie, he did not disappoint in his radiance. And I don’t know whether that’s too Pollyanna of me, just because maybe he was just a normal human being. But I have an inkling he probably wasn’t.

Do you have plans to do more Bowie-centered work after this?

JULIAN SHAH-TAYLER: I’m probably going to do [Bowie’s 1976 album] Station to Station, as well. I’m not attempting to make something better [than the original]. I just need to try to do something that will feed my love for these albums.

Hunger City is available digitally via Shah-Tayler’s Bandcamp page (https://julianshah-tayler.bandcamp.com/). Physical CDs are also available by private messaging Shah-Tayler via his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/thesingularitymusic/).