Beyond ‘Warszawa’: Investigating David Bowie’s Relationship with Poland (& Central Eastern Europe)

david_bowie_forum_kol_.jpg, default, David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, 1974, in Hilversum, Netherlands, photo: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Redferns / Getty Images. Warsaw's Plac Defilad with the Pa

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He never played in Poland and, with all likelihood, he spent no more than a couple of hours in the country. So what can we say about Bowie and Poland? Here’s a look at Bowie’s both real and imagined Polish trails.

David Bowie was born in 1947 (he would have been 75 in 2022) which means that for much of his career he had little chance of striking up a relationship with Poland or Central-Eastern Europe, which between 1945 and 1989 found themselves firmly shut behind the Iron Curtain. Still, Bowie found ways not only to pick up some signals from Poland but also to send out his message, and even create his own local Central-Eastern European legend. His later story also includes some truly curious moments, like the Polish concert that never came to be and an epic photo of Bowie with the coat-of-arms of the small town of Sieradz. Just what is David Bowie doing next to it?

1. ‘Polish wanderer’?

Thumbnail — Le réfugié polonais (1831) by Hippolyte Bellangé. Source: Polona.pl

Where should one start looking for Polish tropes in Bowie? In his songs, of course. Combing through Bowie’s back catalogue in search of glimpses of Poland (beyond ‘Warszawa’ which we’ll discuss later), there’s admittedly little that could draw our attention. Well, except for that one early song ‘Janine’ (1969) from the Space Oddity album, and the little snippet of lyrics where he, quite unexpectedly, says: ‘Like a Polish wanderer I travel ever onwards to your land.’

The trope of a ‘Polish wanderer’ is certainly not an obvious one, even for a nation with a long history of emigration. Unless it’s a reference to a ‘wandering Jew’ (which would be quite a different thing), Bowie’s reference to a ‘Polish wanderer’ could link back to the 19th century, especially after the November Uprising in 1830, when Poles began marching across Europe mostly westwards (‘travelling ever onwards to your land’?), eventually forming big emigration communities in Germany, France and Britain. In fact, that was when there were actual songs about Poles being written (especially in Germany, called Polenlieder). Well, to be fair, we don’t expect David Bowie to have been a connoisseur of Polenlieder, and a veteran Polish insurgent in what is actually a love song would certainly be an odd cameo.

A more probable but still surprising antecedent may be Frank Sinatra’s 1947 song ‘Ever Homeward’, with its powerful motif of a Polish globetrotter making his way back home… (And yep, that’s also the one time Sinatra sang in Polish).

As with most of Bowie’s songs, the meaning and actual source of his phrasing isn’t easy to unpack. Nor is it any easier with Bowie’s interpretative help. Asked about the identity of ‘the Polish wanderer’ in a 1997 interview for the Polish magazine Machina, Bowie replied:

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It was a very close friend of mine who dated a girl called Janine. I had a sort of conflicted conscience about it. Ha ha!

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David Bowie interviewed by Filip Łobodziński for Machina magazine, January 1997, translated from the magazine’s Polish

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Janine (2015 Remaster)

2. Totalitarian state (in Bowie's mind)

While Bowie was rather removed from politics and even the most vague political statements, the political reality of the Cold War and the world divided by the Iron Curtain undoubtedly shaped not only his life but also his artistic interests. For one, in the 1970s Bowie was very keen on producing a film adaptation of a comic book called Octobriana, which was allegedly a tale of a Soviet underground comic heroine (the story of the book’s origin and its samizdat circulation in the USSR would later turn out to be a hoax).

For a more serious fascination, Bowie looked to Orwell’s 1984, a book about a future totalitarian regime, inspired mainly by Stalinist Russia. In the early 1970s, Bowie even planned a musical adaptation of the novel but his plans were eventually extinguished by the author’s estate. The project eventually spiralled off into the 1974 Diamond Dogs album, a grim post-apocalyptic vision that turned to William C. Burroughs for inspiration.

The 1974 Diamond Dogs tour, which was one of the most extravagant and costly in Bowie’s career, involved a gargantuan stage set of a city with angled skyscrapers that appeared to be oozing coloured paint. As the set designers later recalled, the outlines from Bowie included three cues: Power, Nuremberg, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As these clearly show, the blueprint for totalitarian dystopia in Bowie’s mind had more to do with German fascism, than the 20th-century communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Hence, again we’re still far away from Poland.

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1984 (2016 Remaster)

3. Bowie using Slavic words (via Nadsat)

Perhaps closer to Poland was Bowie’s other big dystopian fascination: his life-long love for Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation. While the book (and film) plays out in a dystopian England of the near future with little actual traces of the contemporary outside political world, the main characters, Alex and his droogs, speak a teenage jargon called Nadsat, influenced heavily by the Russian language. The use of Russian by the ultra-violent youths in Burgess’ vision certainly reflects the Cold War era’s tensions and fears.

As it turned out in January 2016 with the premiere of Bowie’s final album Blackstar, the book and its artificial idiom continued to play an inspirational role for him. The track ‘Girl Loves Me’ uses words from Nadsat (combined with Polari, a British underworld slang) to create a very unique and inspired lyric:

You viddy at the Cheena

Choodesny with the red rot

Libbilubbing litso-fitso

Devotchka watch her garbles

Of course, the fact that many Polish speakers can recognise the Slavic roots behind some of these Burgess-Bowie Nadsat words (viddy - ‘look’, choodesny - ‘wonderful’, litso - ‘face’, while cheena is short for zhenchina, ‘woman’) should not obscure the fact that Polish is not Russian, and Russia is certainly not Poland.

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David Bowie - Girl Loves Me (Audio)

4. Bowie by the wall: Berlin

Bowie’s relocation from Los Angeles to West Berlin in 1976 at least geographically put him closer to Poland. West Berlin was an island in the sea of the DDR, which was part of the Eastern Bloc, and Poland was just over the DDR’s eastern border. His Berlin years were a prolific and experimental time for Bowie which resulted in his so-called ‘Berlin trilogy’.

This immersion in a new reality and the palpable closeness of the very real Iron Curtain (Bowie was still able to make occasional visits to East Berlin) informs the atmosphere of Low, Heroes and Lodger. As he would recall at around that time, the second instrumental side of Low (1977) was his ‘reaction to seeing the East bloc, how West Berlin survives in the midst of it, which was something I couldn’t express in words. Rather it required textures’ (interview for NME, 12 November 1977).

As noted by Chris O’Leary, author of a guide to Bowie’s songs,

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Bowie gave Low's instrumental pieces a theme: a tour of an imaginary Eastern Europe by the isolate, paranoiac character of Low's manic side. Bowie called Subterreneans a portrait of those left in east Berlin after the Wall was built, ‘the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was’.

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Chris O'Leary in Ashes to Ashes. The Songs od david Bowie 1976-2016

Obviously, Bowie’s most famous take on the divided city was to be ‘for ever and ever’ ‘Heroes’ (1977). While ‘Heroes’ is certainly no political protest song, the image of a couple ‘standing, by the wall’ and kissing (‘like nothing could fall’) carried some potential political undertones (or at least that’s how it was read and listened to later). Bowie also made it clear where he stands on the issue (‘And the shame, was on the other side’).

Bowie became an important figure for (West) German pop culture, his role-model / idol figure perhaps best grasped in the cult 1981 movie Christiane F.: Wir Kinder vom Zoo Bahnhof. In 1987, Bowie returned to Berlin to give a concert at the Berlin Wall. According to some, that concert, and particularly Bowie’s performance, had an impact on the coming down of the wall two years later.

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David Bowie - Heroes (Official Video)

5. Bowie across the curtain: Warszawa

For Polish fans many of Bowie’s Eastern European links materialised only with his brief and largely legendary visit to Warsaw. This was the result of a train trip Bowie took in early 1976, travelling from Zurich via Warsaw to Moscow en route to Helsinki. It is from Iggy Pop, who travelled with Bowie, that we know how this 1970s Poland could have looked to two Western pop stars from behind the train window.

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[They] saw towns still pockmarked with bullet holes and a landscape scarred by unrepaired bomb craters; drawing alongside a goods train in Warsaw, they witnessed a worker unloading coal piece by piece in the gray, freezing sleet.

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Paul Trynka in: Iggy Pop. Open up and Bleed

The stopover at Warsaw’s Gdańsk Station allegedly afforded Bowie the chance to leave the train and take a walk to the nearby Plac Komuny Paryskiej (Plac Wilsona today). That’s where he, so the legend goes, bought an LP by the Polish folk ensemble Śląsk. It was one of the tracks from that album that would then inspire him to write the song ‘Warszawa’, which in 1977 appeared on the B side of his album Low.

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Tracing David Bowie's Walk through 1970s Warsaw

‘Warszawa’ remains a mysterious piece, with a melodic line (in its vocal part) likely borrowed from a song by the Polish folk ensemble and with lyrics written in an artificial language that is barely reminiscent of anything, and certainly not Polish (However, the creator of Esperanto lived a 10-minute walk away from Bowie’s train station before the war – we followed this link in our article, here).

The case of Warszawa remains a unique and intriguing one. As Chris O’Leary noted, Bowie made a world, or at least a city, of his scant impressions.

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He named the hymn that opens Low’s ‘night’ side not after Moscow, a city he’d visited, nor his soon to be home, Berlin, but Warsaw, a city he’d glimpsed.

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Chris O'Leary in Ashes to Ashes. The Songs of David Bowies 1976-2016

The solemn and gloomy atmosphere of that track is also perhaps our best glimpse into Bowie’s thoughts about Eastern Europe and Poland in these really dark days.

6. David Bowie & the coat-of-arms of Sieradz

This is perhaps one of the strangest Bowie photos you’ll ever see – and a real treat for all his Polish fans. Here’s David Bowie, smartly dressed (as usual) in a black overcoat and with his big wide smile (as usual), standing with a group of people in a dimly lit interior with wooden panelling… and a giant bulging white eagle behind him. The eagle placed on a red background is no doubt the Polish national emblem. Just what is it doing next to David Bowie?

The answer is quite simple. The photo was taken in April 1987 at the Irving Plaza in New York, which was the seat of the Polish American community centre but which from the late 1970s also served as a rock concert venue. The concert here in question was by Big Audio Dynamite (BAD), a band formed in 1984 by former The Clash member Mick Jones. In that photo you can also see other BAD members, along with stars like Paul Simonon from The Clash and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. But the list of celebrity guests at that show must have been much longer and more diverse. The other photo, taken likely seconds after this one, shows Mike D from The Beastie Boys passing in front of the camera, virtually photobombing the scene (David Bowie laughing and having fun, as usual).

Perhaps most curious for Polish fans are the coats-of-arms displayed along the wood-panelled walls of the room. While the two closest to the eagle are fairly easy to identify (at least for a Pole), as they show the coats-of-arms of Warsaw (the mermaid) and Kraków (the eagle in the gate [this one you can see better in another photo from that night]), the third one is perhaps less obvious. As it turns out, the eagle sitting on top of a little castle, belongs to Sieradz, a small provincial town in central Poland with certainly no ambition of ever hosting David Bowie. Well, but here they are, together.

One can easily tell that the guys in this scene, many of them Brits, are obviously enjoying themselves in the hospitable thresholds of the Polish centre and taking part in some kind of reunion. And while we can’t know exactly what they are saying (or their thoughts about the interior design), we can guess as to what songs they played and listened to. It must have looked something like this ‘E=mc2’ performance:

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Big Audio Dynamite - E=mc2 (Live on Night Network 1987)

7. The concert that never was

In 1997, Bowie was perhaps the closest he ever came to visiting Poland again. He was supposed to give his first ever concert in Poland in Gdańsk (at Lechia Stadium) on 27th July. The show was geared up as part of the centennial celebrations of the city, with the band Republika (fronted by Grzegorz Ciechowski) slated as supporting act, and some truly 1990s era visual marketing to advertise the show. Unfortunately, a couple months before the scheduled date, the concert was cancelled.

The alleged reason was poor ticket sales (only 1000 tickets sold!), but poor distribution and marketing (just look at that photo again!) certainly also affected the situation. This fiasco could also reflect a deeper problem: Bowie never gained massive popularity in Poland both before or after 1989. Was he too eccentric, chameleonic, or too queer for Poland? It’s hard to say… During his 1997 tours, Bowie was promoting his 21st studio album Earthling, a record featuring mostly drum and bass, industrial and jungle, without any obvious hits – a fact which might have further contributed to reduced interest from Polish audiences.
What Bowie was doing as an artist in those days transpires from the interview he gave to Filip Łobodziński, published by the Polish magazine Machina in January 1997:

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We [Bowie and Brian Eno] immersed ourselves in jungle music so that we could cross it with hard-rock and industrial rhythms. Naturally, a knowing ear will also grasp elements of good-old rhythm ‘n’ blues hidden underneath.

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David Bowie interviewed by Filip Łobodziński for Machina, translated from the Polish

Despite the Gdańsk concert being cancelled, Bowie did manage to play for audiences elsewhere in Central Europe, giving shows in Zagreb, Prague and Budapest that summer. In the coming years, touring with Hours (1999), Heathen (2002) and Reality (2004), Bowie did not schedule any gigs in Poland or, to be fair, any of Central-Eastern Europe (with the exception of Prague in June 2004). In 2004, he stopped touring altogether due to a serious heart condition… And thus, in 1997, Poles lost their one and only chance to see the legend live.

8. Bowie’s influence in Poland

So, to wrap up our tenuous Polish story about David Bowie: He never played in Poland, though he might (or might have not) strolled through Warsaw. He has a pic standing next to the coat of arms of Sieradz. His songs contain some Polish references and certainly some mysteries. What is more certain is that Bowie has remained an inspiration for many Polish artists, spanning quite different fields, from literature to visual arts, theatre and (perhaps least) music.

For the poet Andrzej Sosnowski (b. 1959), Bowie has been a frequent if playful reference (among, admittedly, a myriad of other allusions and tropes) in his demanding, intertextual and very ‘post-modernist’ work. References to Bowie’s lyrics can be found all over his poetic output, from the poem ‘Warszawa’ (which as Agata Pyzik says, ‘picks on’ Bowie’s song) to the Bowie-esque title of his 2012 book Sylwetki i Cienie (Silhouettes and Shadows) and the the poem ‘Po Tęczy’ (2016) which is studded with Bowie quotes and misquotes in a handful of languages. For the philosophically-inclined Sosnowski, Bowie is a Protean figure of late capitalism, an artist able to constantly reinvent himself, epitomising (but also dialectically defying) the mechanisms of our contemporary ‘society of spectacle’.

A more potential impact on Polish filmmakers can be gleaned from the story of Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s as-of-yet-unreleased Bowie project. The director and author of the award-winning 1980s-infused musical The Lure has long been planning a film project (‘a sci-fi opera’) inspired by the plot narrative found in Bowie’s 1995 album 1. Outside, a dark and unsettling tale of a detective trying to solve mysterious and gruesome art crimes.

Perhaps surprisingly though, Bowie made little impact on the medium he is famous for in Poland, be it before or after 1989. A potential but also dubious exception to the rule may be the stage persona of the 1980s pop star Izabela Trojanowska (you can find more about this potential link in Agata Pyzik’s book Poor But Sexy). Perhaps clearer Bowie-esque inspiration can be traced in the stage appearance (and make-up) of the new wave electro-punk band Super Girl and Romantic Boys.

Bowie’s presence may be more poignant only in recent years, when his persona as a musical performer seems to be an important influence on some contemporary Polish musicians, such as Monika Brodka. The Bowie influence here would also cover her fashion choices and the conscious creation of her image as an artist.

In 2021, Jemek Jemowit, a Polish musician based in Berlin, put out a Bowie-inspired album which catapults a Ziggy-Stardust-kind-of-protagonist (called Zygmunt Blask) into a less-than-glamorous People’s Republic.

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Brodka - Game Change (Official Video)

9. Bowie in Warsaw

Миниатюра — Dawid Celek's mural commemorating the late rock star David Bowie's connection with Warsaw. The artwork was commissioned by Stacja Muranów Association and unveiled in April 2016 on the 40th anniversary of the artist's alleged walk around Poland's capital. Photo: Fotolink / East News

Meanwhile, Bowie’s Warsaw legend was eventually established within the space of the city (alas, only after his death). In April 2016, on the 40th anniversary of Bowie’s Warsaw walk, a huge mural on a building in the Żoliborz district (not far from the place he allegedly visited) was unveiled. That year, a book entitled Helibo Seyoman, attempted to gauge Bowie’s impact on authors from Warsaw and Berlin, by way of presenting contemporary writing and artwork inspired by that legendary visit.

The most recent variation on Bowie’s Warsaw legend comes from acclaimed author Dorota Masłowska. Her theatre piece Bowie w Warszawie (Bowie in Warsaw) premiered in December 2021 in Warsaw’s Teatr Studio, directed by Marcin Liber. (A year earlier, Warsaw’s Capitol Theatre staged the musical Lazarus, directed by Jan Klata, a Bowie fan himself, with a long history of using Bowie’s music in his shows)

While Masłowska in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza claimed that Bowie’s role in the play was more of a triggering device, than a real persona, she also acknowledged the central position of Bowie for her narrative: ‘I needed him as a talisman or an eye which enables an eccentric, but at the same time total, universal perspective on that reality.’

‘Bowie w Warszawie’ directed by Marcin Liber – Image Gallery

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The drama tells the story of several female protagonists, including a lesbian woman, all living in 1970s Warsaw at a time when there are terrifying rumours of a murderer roaming the city at night, strangling women.

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Centred around the artist’s legendary visit to Warsaw, the play becomes an ode to love, especially one which remains unfulfilled, never reaching its full bloom.

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Press materials for "Bowie w Warszawie", Teatr Studio, trans. MG

Thus, the chameleonic, ever-shifting Bowie has been appointed yet another role, this time an even more unexpected one – that of an all-encompassing and all-understanding eye over Warsaw womens’ untold LGBT experiences. It seems that despite his death in 2016, his Polish presence is becoming a little more real. Our search for links between him and Poland, whether real or imagined, will no doubt continue to bear fruit like this for many years to come, his mercurial nature giving Poles endless ways to find links to his life and works.

Written by Mikołaj Gliński, Dec 2021

Language English

bowie's walk

marcin liber

dorota masłowska