Preview: Emm Gryner, Bowie, NetAid and Wembley

This post is an update and adaptation of an earlier version from last month. I’m revising it by way of previewing my interview tomorrow, which itself is an adaptation from a video that previewed on Emm Gryner’s Patreon. Emm is a highly accomplished and multi-talented artist from Canada whose paths crossed with David Bowie’s around 1999-2000 when she sang backup for him. She has more than 20 albums of her own and continues to release great new music. Earlier this year, for instance, she released “Touch The Sky” to honor Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s role in the Artemis II space mission. Emm has appeared on my show several times, and I am a regular participant in her Patreon.

Emm Gryner invited me to join her on her Patreon last month because she was back in London and was going to a concert at Wembley Stadium with her son. She was reflecting on how she sang backup for Bowie at the old Wembley Stadium in 1999 for the NetAid concert that, at the time, was a groundbreaking charity event that was supposed to be the new technology follow-up to Live Aid, at least in spirit.

At the time, the concert, which took place in three cities—New Jersey, Wembley Stadium in London, and Geneva, Switzerland—was covered as a mixed success as a fundraiser. The New Jersey concert had poor attendance, and the event raised much less money than Live Aid. That said, I don’t think people at the time understood that it was a groundbreaking event in terms of technology.

Bowie was one of several musicians to participate, but he was already at the forefront of trying to figure out how art and the internet should be related. The previous month, he had become one of the first major artists to release an entire album online. That was Hours… He was also one of the first major artists to release a single online, all the way back in 1996, which was “Telling Lies” from Earthling.

Less than two months after the NetAid concert, Bowie would give his famous interview with Jeremy Paxman, in which he predicted the future of the internet. This interview has gone viral in more recent years, and the most often quoted part is where Bowie refuted Paxman’s assertion that the internet was simply a tool and instead said that it was “an alien life form.”

I reviewed the interview and found a less frequently quoted passage in which Bowie recognized that the internet allowed for a new type of relationship between artist and audience. It occurred to me that that’s how this conversation was happening at all with Emm Gryner, whom I have never met in person.

Bowie was always fascinated with the relationship between the artist and the audience, but before the internet, that relationship was much more one-sided. I’ve had the great privilege and honor to interview many of the musicians and other collaborators who worked with Bowie, which was just something that, unless I were an actual music journalist, would not have been possible 35 years ago.

The NetAid concert was organized in part by Bono, the United Nations, and Cisco. Some people involved were critical of Cisco for really using the event to show off its technology, but in retrospect, the technology was something to show off. Cisco’s press release about the event is still online, and it touts that the event broke a streaming record at the time with 2.4 million online viewers.

This was before Netflix, before YouTube, before Facebook, before Instagram, before TikTok. Live Aid was basically a televised event, whereas NetAid charted the future for how we experience music and events like this if we’re not there in person.

So I thought that this was yet another example of how Bowie was at the forefront of changes that were happening in the world.

Emm was reflecting on how she participated in a concert with more than 80,000 people in attendance. As I was doing a little research before I joined her on her show, I found a quote from Mike Garson, who also played with Bowie, saying that he was nervous. Bowie’s set consisted of only six songs, the first of which was “Life on Mars?,” and, don’t you know, he screwed up the words twice. So he probably was nervous as well. It’s not like he hadn’t sung “Life on Mars?” before.

As a concert itself, it was one of the largest audiences Bowie had performed before in a long time, and in some ways it was a precursor to Glastonbury the following year, which really served as a catalyst in reestablishing Bowie as a relevant artist.

That’s the other thing about 1999. Although Bowie had been putting out some really strong records, he was still burdened with the reputation that he was no longer on the musical forefront. But in part by combining strong new music with a re-embrace of some of his greatest hits, like “Life on Mars?,” I think people around this time started realizing that Bowie was indeed very special.

So Emm, my buddy Emm Gryner, was very much a part of this. She wasn’t just a witness; she actually sang with Bowie onstage in front of more than 80,000 people while also reaching an online audience of approximately 2.4 million viewers, in a way that nobody had performed before and in a way that no audience had ever experienced a concert before, at least not on that scale.

So that’s cool.

Come back tomorrow to hear from her yourself.

And, by the way, it’s LAKE ONTARIO!

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Check out Emm’s Patreon HERE.