David Bowie wrote an entire pre-Lazarus play using a raft of false lost Bob Dylan songs, it has been revealed.
Pre-dating both the song off his swansong album Blackstar and the 2015 musical of the same name, Bowie sought out novelist Michael Cunningham to draft out a bizarre, experimental show involving a mariachi band, aliens, poet Emma Lazarus, and a “stockpile of unknown, unrecorded Bob Dylan songs, which had been discovered after Dylan died” – which had been written by Bowie.
The basic plot involved an alien who assumes human form and falls in love with an Earth woman. Cunningham explains: “They reach a point of intimacy at which he feels he must show her his true form, which is quite different from the mildly handsome guy in his 30s she thinks she’s been dating… Let’s just say that the sight of her new lover’s appearance is… challenging for the young woman.”
Roughly halfway through scripting the first draft, in 2004, Bowie suffered a heart attack and the duo never resumed work on the musical. Cunningham later went to the opening night of Lazarus, observing that the only similarity between the two projects was that they both “centered on an alien”.
