Two Bowie biographies shed new light on the career of pop's greatest chameleon, but the man himself remains elusive
In 1971, David Bowie's bullish new manager, Tony Defries, walked into the office of RCA in New York for a meeting with the heads of a record label whose biggest star was Elvis Presley. "You've had nothing since the 1950s," Defries informed them, employing a confrontational stance that may well have been borrowed from one of his role models, Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, "but you can own the 1970s, because David Bowie is going to remake the decade, just like the Beatles did in the 1960s."
Defries, for all his bluster, was right. David Bowie's golden years lasted from November 1970, when he released his first cohesive album, The Man Who Sold the World, until September 1980, when he released Scary Monsters...and Super Creeps, which is generally regarded as the last great album by an artist who, despite the relentless attention-seeking of Lady Gaga, remains the greatest shape-shifter in pop music. In between came a run of albums that saw Bowie adopt and, just as quickly, cast off a range of personas that kept both fans and critics guessing about the nature of his identity, his sexuality, and his complex relationship with pop stardom.
Bowie's breakthrough album, the glam sci-fi fantasy that was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), precipitated a wave of fan hysteria that, indeed, harked back to Beatlemania, but also signalled the darker, often sexually ambivalent, energies of the punk-rock revolution of the late 1970s. By then, Bowie had explored the contradictions of celebrity (Aladdin Sane, 1973), made a dystopian concept album based on George Orwell's 1984 (Diamond Dogs, 1974), reinvented himself as a blue-eyed soul singer (Young Americans, 1975), tentatively embraced electronic experimentation on Station to Station (1976) and emerged, on Low and Heroes, both released in 1977 as punk challenged rock's old guard, as an experimental art-rocker without peer.
Nothing that Bowie has done since has come close to equalling the artistic momentum and relentless reinvention he achieved during that decade, but he remains one of the key, and defining, figures in pop, and one whose influence can be detected in most of the groundbreaking music that has been made since, from the U2 of Achtung Baby and Zooropa to Arcade Fire on their most recent album, The Suburbs, from Joy Division to Lady Gaga in all her guises. Yet, David Bowie, the great chameleon of pop, as both these books attest, remains somehow unknowable.
Paul Trynka has done a stalwart job of tracing Bowie's many musical shifts and performing personas, but the man himself remains alarmingly elusive, just as he did in the last major biography, Marc Spitz's David Bowie: A Biography, published in Britain last year. Like Spitz, Trynka did not have direct access to his subject, nor to some important Bowie friends-come-collaborators such as Brian Eno, who helped shape Bowie's vision on Low and Heroes.
For Starman, the press release asserts, Trykna interviewed "over 200 friends, ex-lovers and fellow musicians". As befits an erstwhile editor of Mojo, a magazine that tends to approach rock music as first and foremost a heritage industry, he is good on the musical development of a pop star whose early albums, David Bowie (1967) and Space Oddity (1969), were both little more than confused collections of ill-matched songs, and showed little hint of the confidence and brilliance that was to follow. Beginning with Bowie's childhood as plain David Jones in post-war Brixton, Trynka tells a tale that has perhaps been told too often to surprise anymore, but that nevertheless intrigues in its mixture of ruthlessness, shifting loyalties, monumental drug taking, decadent behaviour and, for a while, undiminished musical invention.
The cast of characters is colourful-going-on-exotic, and includes Lindsay Kemp, the mime artist whose hold on Bowie was such that he almost forsook pop music for interpretative dance; Iggy Pop, Bowie's long-time friend, rival and a performer whose unlikely artistic resurrection in the late-70s was orchestrated by Bowie as well as Angie Bowie, nee Barnett, his first wife, would-be manager and fellow sexual adventurer. There are also several less well known but no less intriguing walk-on characters such as Daniella Parmar, an androgynous beauty whose cropped and dyed hairstyle seems to have been the template for Ziggy Stardust's barnet, and Vince Taylor, the 50s rocker whose fall from grace underpinned the album's overall concept.
Trynka also delves deeply and illuminatingly into Bowie's prolonged cocaine addiction, which, at its height, shocked even Iggy, whose own appetite for destruction was legendary. You can catch a glimpse of Bowie at his most strung-out in Alan Yentob's film Cracked Actor, first shown on the BBC in 1974 and now available via YouTube. Trynka trails an unravelling Bowie though his cocaine-fuelled obsession with the occult and his cocaine-addled outburst of megalomania during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1976, in which he name-checked Hitler and said, "I'd adore to be prime minister. And, I believe very strongly in fascism... I dream of buying companies and TV stations, owning and controlling them." (That same year, Bowie was captured on camera giving what looked like a Nazi salute, but which was more likely an innocent wave, to a crowd of fans at Victoria station. The photograph, alongside Eric Clapton's drunken onstage eulogy to Enoch Powell, precipitated the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement that same year.)
One of the inbuilt problems with any David Bowie biography is how to broach the long decline that began with the mediocre Let's Dance album in 1983 and continues to this day. Trynka fares no better than Spitz in his attempts to make sense of what is, after all, the natural order of things in pop apart from a few exceptions such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Bowie's last notable appearance was a walk-on part in an episode of Ricky Gervais's comedy-of-cruelty sitcom, Extras, in which he played a heartless manipulator unaware of his own monumentally self-centred personality. As Trynka acidly notes, "'The Little Fat Man (With the Pug-Nosed Face)' would be the most significant new Bowie song of an entire half-decade". Perhaps, though, David Bowie, now 64, is simply ageing gracefully, having successfully reinvented himself, after his marriage to erstwhile supermodel Iman, as a family man.
Conversely, Any Day Now by Kevin Cann casts an obsessive eye over Bowie's early years and, thus, is very much a Bowie fan's dream book. Ranging from the year of his birth, 1947, until the release of Diamond Dogs in 1974, it is a diary-come-scrapbook of information and trivia. The photographs alone are extraordinary, a pictorial history of the young David Jones's dalliances with Mod subculture and hippiedom, and the renamed David Bowie's embrace of glam, gender-bending and sci-fi fantasy. Tour posters, ticket stubs, magazine covers and myriad snapshots of the fledgling star add to the general sense that this is a book for Bowie obsessives made by a Bowie obsessive. Entertaining, then, and oddly illuminating in its own completist way. A book for anoraks ? if your anorak was geometric, glitter-encrusted and sequin-studded.
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