Each year, as Chris Connelly prepares to sing the music of David Bowie, he weighs his song selections “quite deeply.” Makeup and clothes come later in the transformation.
“I think about him. I think about his movements. For me, it’s easier to think about being someone else during the performance,” Connelly said. “Much the same as him. He wasn’t David Bowie. He was [born] David Jones.”
Such careful deliberation is what makes Sons of the Silent Age — the nine-member band Connelly co-founded with drummer Matt Walker in 2013 — so unique. Built around some of Chicago’s most accomplished musicians, the band dives deep into the British auteur’s rich catalog, going beyond the familiar hits. They bring some of his most challenging works to life onstage, featuring periods that Bowie himself never or rarely performed live.
This year’s annual showcase is Saturday at Metro. The performances are so riveting and multifaceted, you can imagine the band as one Bowie himself would take on the road.
“We don’t feel like it’s a cover band,” said Walker. “The musicianship is interactive. We’re not just playing the parts because that’s how they are on the record. We’re modifying them, so it’s reactive live. Each show gets deeper and deeper.”
Sons of the Silent Age’s potency stems from its high caliber of musicianship. In the 1980s, Connelly moved to Chicago from his hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland. He became a pivotal figure in the industrial rock scene, playing in such formative bands as Revolting Cocks, Ministry and Pigface. Connelly’s Bowie is a response less to the man itself but to the music. Still, with a lanky frame and wide eyes, his physicality is one of the greatest instruments of each year’s performance.
Walker, a longtime Chicago drummer, sports Smashing Pumpkins, Morrissey, Filter and Garbage on his resume. The Bowie project includes keyboardist Carolyn Engelmann, guitarists Steve Gerlach and Robert Byrne, saxophonist Rich Parenti, bassist Alan Berliant and percussionists Claire Massey and Marcus Johnson. All have performed with Chicago luminaries including Plush, Mavis Staples, The Chamber Strings, Wilco, Michael McDermott and Dovetail Joint.
Walker and Connelly first met at Double Door for a charity benefit concert in the late 1990s, when Connelly performed with Walker’s power-pop band Cupcakes. At another event at Park West, Connelly joined Cupcakes for a cover of Bowie’s song “Fashion” and realized there could be more to mine together. The shared connection was a passion for Bowie’s so-called “Berlin trilogy”: Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979), which greatly influenced post-punk and New Wave in their experimentation with electronic and ambient music.
For Walker, Sons of the Silent Age was born to take on the challenge of performing the records live, something Bowie rarely did himself. “The music maintains a mystique for me,” said Walker. “It’s such an interesting blend of soul and abstract and electronic music. It seems to have everything in it, yet remains mysterious to this day.”
For Connelly, the jumping-off point started with Bowie’s 1976 record Station to Station. “That’s when I really knew that David Jones was playing the character of David Bowie, and he wasn’t interested in repeating himself,” he said. The period found Bowie “soaking up culture and spewing it out into these records. But nothing prepared us for Low a year later. There’s a futurism about it that you can’t catch up to.”
Years before forming their own band, Walker and Connelly met Bowie in separate encounters. When Bowie toured with Nine Inch Nails in 1995, Connelly was introduced backstage, where he handed the singer one of his own solo albums. Bowie had just released Outside, a concept record influenced by industrial rock and elements of hip-hop. “He was far more informed by what was going on in modern art than in music,” said Connelly. “He expanded my mind again.”
Walker’s Bowie encounter came in a New York dressing room in 2005, while on tour with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. The British rock and fashion icon stopped in to wish the band good luck, and Walker recalls finding him “shockingly approachable and disarming.”
Sons of the Silent Age’s Metro event remains a staple of January in Chicago. Scheduled each year close to Bowie’s Jan. 8 birthday, the shows typically focus on a specific phase of his career, along with the hits. (The 50th anniversary of the 1975 album Young Americans will see a full performance of its tracks; the show also benefits Endeavor Health’s Integrative Medicine Program.)
Guests are common. In 2016, Sinéad O’Connor, who was living with Walker’s family at their house in Wilmette at the time, agreed to join the band to sing “Life on Mars” and “Sorrow.” Also featured on the same show: Ava Cherry, Bowie’s longtime back-up singer.
“We were shocked she was up for it,” Walker said of O’Connor, who died in 2023. “When she walked out, the crowd reaction to her presence, even before we played a note, was just incredible.”
The band also has established a relationship with Chicago actor Michael Shannon, who now performs short musical sets by stars in Bowie’s orbit. He’s channeled Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in past turns; this year, Shannon will open the show as John Lennon.
While the Metro sets are their own attraction now, Sons of the Silent Age has occasionally performed elsewhere, like the opening of the “David Bowie Is” exhibit a decade ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art. An acoustic incarnation of the band, billed as the Cracked Actor Cabaret, has appeared at SPACE in Evanston and Madame ZuZu’s in Highland Park.
For Connelly, performing these songs is an immersive experience. Inside each, he can hear entire genres it influenced. When Bowie died in 2016, “you realized how much he really informed modern culture and was not just a rock star,” Connelly said. “He was an important figure that decided where culture was going.”
The pop hits, the experimental detours, the visual fashion pronouncements, all ahead of their time — “no one else was able to do that,” said Walker. “He was able to push boundaries no one else pushed. He was the guy.”
Mark Guarino is a journalist based in Chicago and the author of Country & Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival.
