Coming This Saturday: Henry Hey on Lazarus and working with Bowie

This Saturday, I’ll be publishing a wide-ranging interview with Henry Hey, the musician, arranger, and musical director who worked closely with David Bowie on two of his final projects: the (then) surprise 2013 album The Next Day and the off-Broadway musical, Lazarus. Ahead of that, I want to offer a brief introduction to Hey’s collaboration with Bowie—and a glimpse into Lazarus, which many fans have heard of but relatively few have had the chance to see.

Henry Hey is a prolific keyboardist and composer whose credits range from George Michael to Empire of the Sun. In 2012, Tony Visconti called Hey about a top-secret session. He didn’t say what it was—but said Hey would want to be there. That project turned out to be The Next Day, Bowie’s unexpected return after a decade away from the spotlight. Hey played piano on “Where Are We Now?” and later described Bowie as “relaxed, humble, and generous… he put people at ease right away.”

That initial session led to a deeper partnership. Bowie personally chose Hey to serve as musical director for Lazarus, his off-Broadway musical that revisited the character of Thomas Newton, the alien he portrayed in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Working from a script by Enda Walsh, Bowie provided a song list—but insisted the music serve the story, not the other way around. This was no jukebox musical.

“David was very adamant about that,” Hey said in an interview with Jambands.com. “He wanted it to be an art piece that framed the story of Thomas Newton.”

Hey arranged nearly 20 Bowie songs for Lazarus, blending both established songs and new material, some of which made it onto Blackstar or the lesser known E.P., No Plan. He also assembled and led the seven-piece band that performed live during the New York run and later in London, where a film version of Lazarus was produced.

To set the stage for Saturday’s conversation with Henry Hey, embedded in this post is a performance of “Lazarus” by Michael C. Hall who starred in the play. Over the past decade, “Lazarus” has become known as a Bowie song in part due to its inclusion on Blackstar and in part because of Bowie’s “Button-eyes” video, but it was hall who was making appearances outside the play itself performing and promoting the song. The embedded video is from the cast recording.