David Bowie and Mick Jagger had one of rock’s great friendships — a complicated, competitive, admiring, and occasionally brutal relationship between two men who each privately believed the other was doing it slightly wrong. Friends from the 1970s who knew both men have described their dynamic as “two chess players who genuinely liked each other but could not stop trying to win.”
Sometime in the early 1980s, according to accounts from people close to both camps, Bowie called Jagger to share an opinion about the direction the Rolling Stones were heading with their recording approach. The Stones were in the process of embracing synthesizers and a polished, radio-friendly production style that Bowie felt was wrong for them — specifically, wrong in a way that would cost them their identity rather than expand it. Bowie had navigated similar territory himself, had experimented and returned, and he apparently spoke plainly about what he saw coming.
Jagger, by multiple accounts, did not respond well. He found the call presumptuous. The Rolling Stones were not a band that took direction from outside, and Jagger especially was not a man who appreciated being told what his own band was doing wrong. He thanked Bowie and ended the call.
The records the Stones released in the mid-1980s — Undercover and Dirty Work in particular — are now widely considered the weakest of their career, marked by exactly the overproduced, trend-chasing qualities Bowie had reportedly warned against. The band themselves have acknowledged this era as a low point, with both Jagger and Keith Richards giving interviews in later years that amounted to careful, qualified admissions that they had lost the plot for a while.
Bowie never mentioned the call publicly. He didn’t have to. What made the friendship survive, those who knew them say, was that neither man was small enough to say “I told you so” — even when the record sales said it for them.