If you want to understand the weird and wacky world that David Bowie was inhabiting during what was undisputedly his golden period of creativity, a good place to begin is to watch the 1975 fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary Cracked Actor. It depicts an alien-like-skeleton-figure, with a snow-white complexion, distinctive high cheek bones, and fiery red hair, existing on a paltry diet of milk, red peppers, and cocaine—singing Motown tunes from the back of a stretch limousine driving through the Nevada desert.
The English rock icon had spent nearly four years continually performing live shows that fused avant-garde glam rock, mime, kabuki, and Broadway-style theatrics. Bowie was never truly out of character in this period, as the world witnessed the evolutionary transformation of Ziggy Stardust into Aladdin Sane, who then morphed into the satanic figure of the Thin White Duke. The latter persona epitomized all the nastier narcissistic traits of the clichéd 1970s decadent global superstar.
Now, on the second anniversary of Bowie’s death, a reader looking to better understand these incidents and any number of other zany episodes can turn to David Bowie: A Life. Edited by the British music journalist Dylan Jones, the biography spills the beans on everything from Bowie’s writing process to his love of painting and theater to bitchy gossip-like anecdotes from friends and foes alike. The book also includes seven insightful interviews that Jones conducted with Bowie himself. But its biggest appeal is the grand scope of interviewees who knew Bowie professionally, personally, intimately, and at a distance. All 182 of these figures weigh in with their subjective opinions on the enigmatic Bowie.
Bowie grew up in the postwar suburbs of Beckenham in south London. The book’s interviews touching on his early life there portray a charming, if somewhat diffident young artist, with fierce ambition; who had an innate sense that, eventually, destiny would bestow upon him global stardom.
Bowie may have grown up in the suburbs, but one of the largest and most cosmopolitan metropolises on earth was only a 20-minute train ride away. His half-brother, Terry, introduced the young David Jones, as he was then known, to the Soho district, with its colorful artists, painters, drag queens, hustlers, whores, hipsters, and queers. The seedy underbelly of London gave the young bohemian a lifetime’s worth of ideas to work with, as he feasted his eyes upon a world of carefree debauchery, alternative art, and sexual deviancy.
It took Bowie a little longer than he expected to rise from cult status to global icon. But when he finally got there, he realized that fame, coupled with serious drug-taking, could lead to dark psychological places.
Glen Hughes, the vocalist and bassist of the English rock group Deep Purple, recollects a night back in 1975 when Bowie came over to his house in Los Angeles, asking him where his knives and guns were; just in case the Manson family—who were by then all in jail—might come get him. “At the time,” Hughes said, “he thought he was possessed by the devil.”
But even amid this paranoid, drug-fueled chaos, Bowie was still frantically writing down lines in his notebook wherever he went, producing quality album after quality album in the process—a remarkable feat, considering how out of it he was on drugs most of the time. Bowie’s preferred method of writing was based on William S. Burroughs’s cut-up mode, in which sentences are arbitrarily arranged to produce a confusing language that could potentially lead to an exciting new form of artistic expression.
Hughes also recalls another incident in 1974 in which Bowie was on a three-day cocaine binge—without sleep—watching films about Hitler on repeat. “He was very confrontational. He wasn’t physical but he was verbal … smart, had an incredible wit. But he was self-righteous and he was driven at the time by an obsession with the Third Reich,” Hughes explains.
Bowie’s career spanned a half-century. Moving around the globe fairly frequently during that time, he developed a new sound and look wherever he lay his hat. The peak of his creative powers arguably came with his “Berlin trilogy”—the albums Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979). These were produced by Brian Eno, with whom Bowie was living in the city that was then divided by the Cold War.
But after the 1970s came to a quiet close, Bowie’s output slowed considerably. The ’80s and ’90s were an insecure period for him, plagued by anxiety and a sense of cultural irrelevance, as he became more mainstream stadium rocker than cutting-edge trend-setter.
Each of the 25 studio albums Bowie recorded in his lifetime—from his 1967 English folk record, David Bowie, to the 2016 self-penned epitaph and farewell note to the world, Blackstar—has its own unique, distinctive sound. But all his records have in common the belief that the politics of identity—which includes everything from sexual orientation to fashion to social mores to public and private perceptions to psychological labels—are mere constructs imposed on the individual from society. Bowie treated identity almost like a watercolor painting that he kept touching up and adding content to as the years worn on: fluid, undefinable, and constantly shifting in and out of focus, with no firm anchor as such to permanently mark the boarders of grounded selfhood.
Jones interjects sometimes with editorial commentary and personal notes that on occasion can be helpful. Other times they’re slightly pompous, self-indulgent, and run the risk of descending into hero-worship-like tacky journalese. But for the most part he lets the talking heads, well, talk. And this straightforward talk-and-tell narrative structure is the book’s greatest strength.
Certain themes emerge, such as a fear of mental illness. Bowie’s half-brother Terry, who had first introduced him to the Soho scene, was a schizophrenic, taking his own life in 1985. There were several suicides on Bowie’s mother’s side of the family, too. This left the singer with the feeling that he might go the same way, had he not channeled his own demonic energies into artistic creation.
Addiction is another leitmotif. When Bowie finally kicked his cocaine problem, he took comfort in booze, which took him considerably longer to finally wean himself from.
And this being a biography of David Bowie, there is, of course, lots of sex. Even by the hellraising decadent standards of the promiscuous 1970s, Bowie seems to have possessed a healthier libido than most. Angie Bowie, his first wife—whom he married strictly as a business arrangement but subsequently had a child with—claims he had a sexual addiction. Several others interviewed here back up this claim. Personally, I’m a bit skeptical of the concept of sexual addiction, but Bowie’s sexual conquests—both male and female—did clock up to a couple of thousand at least, at least according to the kiss-and-tell testimonies in the Jones book. The general consensus is that Bowie was more a seducer than a sleazebag, although the book’s account of Bowie having sex with a teenage girl still in high school—when he was in his 20s—certainly seems an abuse of power and privilege.
However, just as with the concept of identity, Bowie saw morality as a tangible and moveable feast. In one memorable interview from the late 1990s, he told Jones that the human species is “dependent on survival instincts, and that’s how we build up our moralities, absolutes, and truths.” Good and evil, he said, are mere constructs that humans “have created because those things help us survive as a unity and as a species.”
But one should not put too much faith in such definite party-line slogans on the philosophy of life. Bowie was just as likely to change his mind a week, month, or year later, depending on what kind of bigger, bolder, and brighter idea was on his creative horizon.
With a lifelong interest in Buddhism, Bowie took from the Eastern religion the idea that there is no such thing as a separate self but that self-expression, and life itself, is merely an exercise in the interconnectivity of all things in the universe.
As David Bowie: A Life demonstrates, it was the unlimited sense of possibility—the way that each musical project became a whole new personality—that was the most appealing quality of Bowie’s art. He strove for the future. Sometimes he got there. When he didn’t, he made something beautiful on that wayward journey.
J.P. O’Malley is a writer in London.
