Legendary David Bowie guitarist Earl Slick has spoken to NME about reuniting his classic Glastonbury 2000 line-up for an upcoming charity gig, as well as sharing memories of his time playing with the late icon.
Bowie’s headline set in 2000 has become renowned as one of the greatest in Worthy Farm’s history, opening the 21st Century with the pioneer reinstated as a mainstream icon after spending the ’90s travelling more of an obscure and experimental road.
The line-up from that show, who would go on to play with Bowie throughout his final tours in the 2010s, was made up of Slick along with keyboardist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, multi-instrumentalist Mark Plati and drummer Sterling Campbell.
Now, they’ll be playing together once again to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death at the special charity weekend Live On The Loch at Loch Lomond in Scotland on November 7 and 8 in aid of Save The Children.
Speaking to NME at the London launch event at Denmark Street’s Regent Sounds (formerly the legendary Regent Studios) Slick explained why he hadn’t done any Bowie tribute events since 2019 and what made this event different.
“It got to the point where it felt like we were doing Bowie-oke, so I stopped,” he admitted. “You can only do that so many times without David there. There’s more to it this time. It’ll be a multimedia thing, there will be a nice set, we’ll have a great dinner with a multi-Michelin star chef, we’ll have movies and photos, you’ll get to talk to us, and you’re in a beautiful resort in Scotland. As opposed to just a bunch of blokes getting up there and blowing through a set – that’s boring.
“It was OK at the beginning. When David first left the planet, it was good therapy for us and the crowd. We’re past that now. Now I feel a lot better about doing this. We can do something cool and we can help people. This is a great charity that David loved.”
Slick first started working with Bowie at the peak of his glam era stardom on the 1974 ‘Diamond Dogs’ tour, before going on to record on the classic albums ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Station to Station’ before returning for the 1983 stadium-filling ‘Serious Moonlight’. After Glastonbury 2000, he would be with Bowie for his ‘Heathen’ and ‘Reality’ eras, as well as playing on his 2013 surprise comeback album, his penultimate ‘The Next Day’.
Looking back to his first time on stage with Bowie in ’74, Slick said it was daunting to be filling the shoes of Spiders From Mars’ Mick Ronson.
“I wasn’t nervous about anything other than the fact I was replacing one hell of a guitar player, who I was a big fan of,” he said. “Mick was a star, man. It felt like replacing Keith [Richards] or something. I shat my pants. I thought everyone was going to hate to me, the crowd was going to trying to kill me and the press would murder me.
“The next day we got the reviews and the reaction for the fans. I was like, ‘Phew! I did it!’ After the first gig I was fine, but that’s where the stress came from.”
Asked if Bowie gave him any advice on entering his orbit in those heady days, Slick replied: “One thing I’m really lousy at is that I cannot copy other people note-for-note, so I don’t really do a lot of sessions. I didn’t want him to want me to be Mick. I said, ‘How do you want me to approach this?’ He said, ‘I hired you because I like what you do. Do what you do’. Obviously, there are key things that Mick did that I couldn’t do any better so I did those, but the rest of it I just did like me.”
As for the home-run of game-changing records he played on from’David Live’ through to ‘Station To Station’, Slick said his mission was to bring “some good rock’n’roll energy” and his “street sensibility”.
“On ‘Young Americans’, David and I always talked about R&B, but I don’t think our understandings of the terminology were on the same page,” he said. “When I think about R&B, I’m talking about Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Steve Cropper and some Motown, but all David was thinking about was Philly. That just wasn’t anything I did. So on ‘Young Americans’, most of the playing is Carlos [Alomar]. It’s that pop thing and I don’t do that. I really didn’t enjoy making that record very much at all apart from a few of the tunes.
“Then when we got to ‘Station To Station’, that was a whole new ball game. It was every man for himself with us all coming up with ideas and it was very spontaneous. Going into the studio, half the shit wasn’t even written so it gave me the opportunity to just play. Whatever came out, came out. That’s why I loved it so much.”
Leaving before the ’80s pomp that followed the ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour, Slick would reunite with Bowie in 2000 for the hallowed Glasto performance, when the star wanted to reignite something from his classic eras.
“He tried a few guitar players after Reeves [Gabrels] left and he couldn’t find anybody that was worth a shit, to be honest. No one worked for him,” Slick told NME. “They weren’t bad guitar players, just the wrong ones. In American baseball you have a pinch hitter: he’s the one that when you’re having trouble you say, ‘We better bring our boy in’. That’s what I was, I was the failsafe. When he got in the shit, he called me.”
Slick added: “The ‘90s for David was a very experimental period. There weren’t really any hit records, per se, like the old ones. When we got to the 2000s, he kind of went back in this other direction. That’s why I was there.”
Describing the alchemy of this line-up and the chemistry between the musicians, Slick said it was simply “perfect.”.
“I don’t count The Spiders [From Mars] because that’s early days and kind of a band, but after that I think the best configuration of people he ever had was that 2000s band, hands down,” he said.
After illness forced Bowie from the road at this final full show in 2004, Slick wouldn’t play for him again until he signed an NDA to work on ‘The Next Day’, shrouded in secrecy. Even then, the guitarist said “the hope was always there” for more live shows – “but it didn’t take long for me to figure out he wasn’t touring”.
“It was a song called ‘(You Will) Set The World On Fire’, and it was a pretty heavy rocker,” Slick recalled. “I had just finished a solo and David went, ‘God damn it, this would be great live’. I looked at him, he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t even think about it’. I saw his eyes, and that was it, we ain’t gonna tour any more. That took care of that.”
Still playing and recording today, as well as penning the autobiography Guitar in 2024, Slick said that his continued life in music was fruitful but he was yet to find another artist with the same spark and idiosyncratic vision as Bowie.
“It’s hard to find new stuff sometimes and I despise Spotify. I get it from kids,” he said. “I’ve done some masterclasses and I copped some things from them. Once in a while, I’ll hear something. It’s just like everything else. You’re still going to hear Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley and David Bowie in every band in some capacity. I don’t gravitate towards anything that doesn’t make me feel good.”
Now, he’s focussing on what will make it into the setlist at Live On The Loch. “I want to keep it upbeat and do the stuff we always enjoyed playing,” he added. “I don’t know yet, but I don’t really want to get ethereal. I’m not saying we’ll only play the Number One hits, but I want it to be a good, uptempo, happy show – a feel-good show.”
As well as the performance from the Glastonbury 2000 band featuring special guest singers, other events at Live On The Loch will include a black-tie gala dinner with food from Michelin-starred chef Graeme Cheevers, and a guitar auction hosted by Earl Slick offering a collection of signed, collector-grade instruments from guitarists including Peter Frampton and Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan.
Bowie: Live On The Loch will be held at Cameron House on the banks of Loch Lomond in Scotland on November 7 and 8. Tickets are available here.
In the meantime, a series of events celebrating Bowie have been announced in London, with the likes of Anna Calvi, Adam Buxton and Carlos Alomar set to appear. The ‘Bowie Nights’ season is due to take place at Lightroom in King’s Cross, London, between May and September. It’ll form part of the immersive venue’s major new production, ‘David Bowie: You’re Not Alone’, which opens on April 22.