Extracted from STARMAN: David Bowie ~ The Definitive Biography

STARMAN: David Bowie

Extract 1: How Bromley Dave became David Bowie 

In the first extract from his biography Starman, Paul Trynka describes Bowie’s south London childhood in Brixton, schooldays at Bromley Tech — and the fight over a girl that caused his famously odd-coloured eyes

It was a cold, wet November in 1991, like the cold, wet Novembers of his childhood, when David Bowie asked his driver to take the scenic route to the Brixton Academy. The smoke-filled coach pulled slowly down Stansfield Road, and paused outside a large, anonymous three-storey Victorian house. Bowie remained silent for a few minutes as he gazed out of the window. Then he turned around, and guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, sitting next to him, could see tears trickling down his employer’s cheeks. “It’s a miracle,” Bowie murmured. He was unashamed of his vulnerability. “I probably should have been an accountant. I don’t know how this all happened.”
Bowie has described himself as a “Brixton boy” more than once. Although his stay was brief, it’s an apt term. Brixton in 1947 was a unique location: the cultural focus of south London, blessed with its own racy glamour, battered but unbowed by the Luftwaffe, whose destruction was visible wherever you walked.
It was natural that David’s father, Haywood Jones, should gravitate towards Brixton, for its music-hall traditions matched his own fantasies. Brought up in the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster, Haywood had a tough childhood: his father died in the First World War, and his mother soon afterwards. Raised by the local council and an aunt, Haywood came into an inheritance from the family footwear business when he was 18. “So he bought a theatre troupe. What a wise idea!” David recounted years later.
The enterprise lost Haywood much of his fortune and he invested what was left in a nightclub in London’s West End that catered to boxers and other exotic characters. He also acquired a wife, pianist Hilda Sullivan. When the nightclub burnt up most of his remaining cash, Haywood came down with a stomach ulcer. The idea of working for a children’s charity came to him in a dream. In 1935 he started work at Dr Barnardo’s at Stepney Causeway in the heart of the East End, a refuge for homeless children since the 1870s.
When the Second World War broke out, Haywood was among the first to enlist. When he returned to a battered but victorious London in October 1945, Haywood immediately rejoined Barnardo’s as general superintendent to the chief of staff. Like many wartime marriages, Haywood’s didn’t last — it was doubtless damaged by an affair with a nurse which produced a child, Annette, in 1941.
Haywood met Margaret Burns, known as Peggy — a waitress at the Ritzy Cinema — soon after his return, and his divorce from Hilda only came through in time for him to marry Peggy eight months after the arrival of his second child, David Robert Jones, at the family’s new home at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, on January 8, 1947.

 David Bowie with his mother, Peggy

David loved his father — to this day he wears a gold cross given to him by Haywood when he was in his teens — but when asked about his relationship with his mother in 2002, he quoted Philip Larkin’s famously bleak This Be the Verse: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
The “madness” of Peggy Burns’s family would one day become part of the Bowie legend, but as far as the young David Jones was concerned, it was remoteness that characterised his relationship with his mum. Yet according to family lore, Peggy was good with children in her youth, working as a nanny before falling in love with the handsome Jack Isaac Rosenberg, son of a wealthy Jewish furrier. Rosenberg promised to marry Peggy, but disappeared before the birth of their son, and David’s half-brother, Terence Guy Adair Burns, in 1937.
There were darker shadows in Peggy’s past too. Her and her sister Pat’s three siblings — Nora, Una and Vivienne — all suffered from degrees of mental instability, according to Pat; what one writer termed the Burns’ “family affliction”.
Peggy had a third child, Myra Ann, born in 1941, before she met Haywood — the result of another wartime romance. The child was given up for adoption and by the time she met Haywood, Peggy was ready to settle down and agreed to marry the Yorkshireman on the condition that he accept Terence as his son. So for the first nine years of his life, David had an older brother to look up to; and when Terry left home in 1956 to join the Royal Air Force, he remained the object of David’s hero-worship.
As David grew into a toddler, austerity continued to keep a tight grip, but glimmers of hope started to appear. 1953 marked an end to sweet rationing and the advent of television. Haywood was one of thousands who bought a new set so the family could watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. A few weeks later, the six-year-old David snuck downstairs for another TV landmark — The Quatermass Experiment, a pioneering BBC science-fiction series that had all of Britain glued to the screen. This “tremendous series” would leave its mark on David, who remembers how he’d watch each Saturday night “from behind the sofa when my parents had thought I had gone to bed. After each episode I would tiptoe back to my bedroom rigid with fear.” It sparked a lifelong fascination with science fiction and — through its theme tune: the dark, sinister, Mars, Bringer of War from Holst’s Planets Suite — the emotional effect of music.
Brixton was the perfect breeding ground for a future Ziggy Stardust. Waterloo, the Mecca of music-hall artists, was just down the road, while Brixton’s own Empress Theatre hosted Tony Hancock and Laurel and Hardy.
David’s home at 40 Stansfield Road was a roomy, three-storey terraced Victorian house, shared with two other families. In later years, with conventional rock-star spin, Bowie described his Brixton youth like a walk on the wild side, with gangs roaming the street.
The Jones family kept themselves to themselves. Most kids played out on the street, but David generally remained with his mum. In 1951, David started at Stockwell Infants, three minutes’ walk away on Stockwell Road. He remembers wetting his pants on the first day; happily, milk lady Bertha Douglas kept a supply of clean knickers.
Stockwell Infants’ lofty Victorian building looked severe, with its characteristic aroma of disinfectant and rubber plimsolls, but the staff were mostly loving. “The teachers used to tell us things like, “You’re special, Jesus loves you”,” says Bowie’s schoolmate Sue Larner.
Larner was one of the only children who did notice David; now a sculptor, she recalls noticing the nice-looking, well-scrubbed boy’s skill at art. “None of us had much to do with boys, but I do remember showing him a few tricks on the drawing board — and he showed me even more. He showed me how to draw a woman’s bonnet, with the neck, without having to draw a face first. He was good.”
In 1954, Haywood Jones and family packed up for suburbia. Their new home in Bromley, a small but neat Edwardian terraced house in Plaistow Grove, was perfectly in keeping with their modestly respectable status.
David joined Burnt Ash School a couple of years after most of his classmates and didn’t particularly stand out during the first few terms. Within a year or so, however, David was part of a small gang, including John Barrance, who lived nearby and was invited to David’s eighth birthday party. Even at this age, many kids noted the cramped interior of the Jones’ modest two-up, two-down house. Barrance thought the family seemed restrained, quiet. “They were perfectly pleasant, but I think they had a ‘don’t touch this, don’t touch that’ attitude.”
Though few of his contemporaries remember it as being anything out of the ordinary, in later years David’s background would be portrayed as dysfunctional — mostly by David himself. He loved to proclaim, “everyone finds empathy in a nutty family”. Peggy, in particular, was singled out as the perfect exemplar of repression and eccentricity, but the most damning recollection of others is that she was a snob.
At ten, David had delicate features, hair cut in bangs, was average in height and slightly skinny. But there was an energy about him that seemed to win over his headmaster George Lloyd and others. He was a good-looking boy — a fact his female classmates noticed later — and even by his teens he was developing a talent for using charm “as a weapon”, says a later confidante, writer Charles Shaar Murray. “Even if you’d fallen out, when you met David again you’d be convinced within five minutes that he had barely been able to function in the years he hadn’t seen you. I know for a time I developed a kind of platonic man-love for him.”
It was this charm, this ability to be whoever his confidante wanted him to be, that would be the making of Bowie. Well scrubbed, polite, every suburban mother’s dream son, the ten-year-old David Jones also stuck to middle-class conventions by enrolling in the local scout pack and Church of England choir. The weekly pack meets and services became a crucial part of David’s life, because it was there that he met Geoff MacCormack and George Underwood, who would prove the most enduring friends of his life. The three donned cassocks, surplices and ruffles for church services, as well as the frequent weddings that would become the future David Bowie’s first paying gigs.
Tall for his age, good-looking with an easy, relaxed but passionate air about him, Underwood would become the closest friend of David’s youth. Their relationship would go through some rocky patches, but would be a formative one. For the glue that held their friendship together was rock’n’roll.
For most of their generation there was a eureka moment when rock’n’roll exploded into their consciousness, an escape route from their grey world. For both boys that moment hit in 1955.

Haywood arrived home with a bag full of singles. David played each of the records: Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. “Then,” he says, “I hit gold: Tutti Frutti by Little Richard — my heart nearly burst with excitement. I’d never heard anything even resembling this. It filled the room with energy and colour and outrageous defiance. I had heard God.”
For all the kids raised in postwar austerity, this was a moment they’d somehow anticipated for years. “We’d waited and waited for something fabulous to happen,” says Underwood. “And it did happen. And from then on music was the one thing we talked about constantly.”
It was Underwood who got his rock’n’roll act together before everyone else. He’d already bought a huge Hofner acoustic guitar and formed a duo with a family friend by the time he met David. The two travelled down to the 18th Cub Scouts summer camp on the Isle of Wight in 1958. “We put a washboard bass in the back of the van, and David’s ukulele, and between us we managed to conjure up a couple of songs around the camp fire. And that was our first public performance. Neither of us had any claim to virtuosity — but we wanted to sing.”
That tentative first show, with David strumming and George singing,was not the only rite of passage that year. The previous autumn David had sat his 11-plus. Later in life, David would advise one of his closest friends to “do the contrary action” and he first did that himself at 11. Though David’s results were good enough for the grammar school, against all expectations, he opted for Bromley Tech,and talked his parents into supporting his decision.
Some of the inspiration for this precociously unconventional move undoubtedly came from Underwood, who was also heading for Bromley Tech. The Tech’s links with the nearby Bromley College of Art also meant that he would join a wider community, of the art school kids who would ultimately come to define postwar Britain.
Owen Frampton, the head of the art department, was the school’s best-liked teacher. David describes him as “an excellent art teacher and an inspiration” — but no pushover.
David paid rapt attention during Owen’s classes, sketching with charcoals or simply hanging out in the art department, but year by year his interest in other subjects declined, to the point that in his third year his report described him as “a pleasant idler”. At 14 he had succumbed to the obsessions that would define the years to come: music and girls. He would feed both these addictions after school, in a quintessentially suburban location on Bromley High Street: Medhurst’s department store, which boasted one of south London’s best gramophone departments, overseen by a discreetly gay couple named Charles and Jim. They were aficionados of modern jazz music and specialised in American imports.
Nearly all the Bromley Tech pupils from this time seem to recall George and David as a pair, and of the two, George is the better remembered. He was ebullient, lovable, expansive; David was cool — people noticed his clothes, his hair, his possessions, mostly, rather than his personality. When his first band became known around school, he was kind to younger kids, but several of his contemporaries share the impression of Len Routledge, who remembers, “I think I envied him, or resented him, as kids do. Because he had a better lifestyle than us, and a father who’d bring him things some of us could never expect: a full American football kit, the saxophone, etc.” As Haywood progressed in his career at Barnardo’s, the one area where he was generous — profligate, even — with money was David.
For a short time, David managed to “blag” saxophone lessons with Ronnie Ross, who’d played with the bandleader Ted Heath. Even though peers like Underwood overshadowed David as a musician, his confidence got him noticed. David describes his behaviour once he’d discovered girls as “terrible”, a quintessential smooth operator.

One example of David’s duplicity would become famous in Bromley Tech folklore, and subsequently in rock’n’roll history, an outward sign of what was later taken to be his alien nature.
George Underwood was involved in the celebrated fracas, incited to violence by an act of outright skulduggery by his friend in the spring of 1962, when both boys were 15. George had arranged a date with a Bromley school girl, Carol Goldsmith, only for David to tell him she wasn’t coming. Soon George discovered that David, who fancied Carol himself, had lied — Carol had waited in vain for George before going home, distraught that she’d been stood up.
David’s plan was to swoop in on the abandoned girl, but when Underwood discovered the dastardly scheme there was an altercation. Underwood, enraged, impulsively punched his friend in the eye, and by some mishap scratched his eyeball. “It was just unfortunate. I didn’t have a compass or a battery or various things I was meant to have — I didn’t even wear a ring, although something must have caught. I just don’t know how it managed to hurt his eye badly . . . I didn’t mean it to be like that at all.”
The damage was serious. David was taken to hospital and his schoolmates were told he was in danger of losing the sight in his left eye. Underwood, mortified, heard that Haywood and Peggy Jones were considering charging him with assault. With David absent from school for several weeks, George eventually plucked up enough courage to go and see Haywood. “I wanted to tell him it wasn’t intentional at all. I didn’t want to maim him, for God’s sake.”
The injury to David’s eye resulted in paralysis of the muscles that contract the iris, leaving the pupil permanently dilated and giving it the appearance of being a different colour from his other eye. His depth perception was also damaged. “It left me with a wonky sense of perspective,’ David explained later. ‘When I’m driving for instance, cars don’t come towards me, they just get bigger.”
By the summer, their friendship was repaired, although Underwood suffered pangs of guilt for years. “I was always looking at him, thinking, ‘Oh God, I did that.’ ” Eventually, David would thank George for the injury — “He told me it gave him a kind of mystique.”

Bowie’s first public performance with the Kon-Rads took place on June 12, 1962, at the Bromley Tech PTA school fête. David, his hair arranged in a blond quiff, stood with his cream sax slung to one side, next to Underwood, who picked out Shadows riffs on his Hofner guitar. David looked “cool, well dressed” according to schoolmate Nick Brookes. It was a pretty impressive debut, but there was a consensus among the audience about who would go on to stardom: David’s taller, better-looking, more popular friend. “It was George who was the singer, who did a great Elvis impression,” says Tech pupil Roger Bevan, who remembers Underwood’s dark, glossy hair and Elvis sneer. “Everyone reckoned he was going to be big.”

 David Bowie in 1966

Copyright © Paul Trynka 2011, extracted from STARMAN: David Bowie — The Definitive Biography published by Sphere, £10.99. Available from the Times Bookshop for £9.89 (free p&p) on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk

Starman Extract 2: The rise and rise of Ziggy Stardust

 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972

In the second of five extracts from his revelatory biography Starman, Paul Trynka describes how David Bowie’s futuristic alter ego began life as a last-minute bodge-job

In later years, David Bowie would claim the idea of Ziggy Stardust came to him in a dream — gifted by the same god who had told his father to find a job at a children’s charity. David had experimented with a “rock opera” in 1968, when he’d worked on a sequence entitled Ernie Johnson — a bizarre, camp, cockney epic which culminated in the titular hero’s suicide. Ziggy Stardust wasn’t really an opera, more a collection of snapshots thrown together. The notion that Ziggy would be David’s own alter-ego emerged only at the last minute; it was a bodge-job, later refined into a concept.

 Iggy Pop, the singer with whom David was obsessed, and the main inspiration for Ziggy Stardust

Ziggy was David’s homage to the outsider; the main inspiration was undoubtedly Iggy Pop, the singer with whom David was obsessed and whose doomed, Dionysian career path had already built its own mythology. David was well aware, though, that Iggy, too, was a mere creation. Vince Taylor, the other inspiration, was an “American” rocker, who was actually born Brian Holden in Isleworth, and had made it big in France. By 1966, when the teenage David had bumped into him, Vince was washed up, claiming he was the messiah and pointing out UFO sites on a crumpled map.

 The other inspiration was the “American” rocker Vince Taylor

Hence Ziggy was a tribute to artifice, a play on identity, alter-ego placed on alter-ego, a vehicle for rock’n’roll which would allow David, if everything failed, to announce that this was all ironic, just a pose. Ziggy’s surname, a reference to the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, was just as nuanced. The name encompassed David’s enchantment with glamour and glitter, referenced Hoagy Carmichael’s best-known song and even the relatively recent realisation that, as Carl Sagan put it, “we are all stardust”, all of our atoms recycled via supernovae. And what was Ziggy Stardust, but old vital rock’n’roll matter, recycled, but fresh as a new world?
Ziggy Stardust’s message was explicitly about sexual liberation: “Henry . . . I can’t take you this time” and “The church of man, love”. Images like “tigers on Vaseline” or the “mellow-thighed chick put my spine out of place”, made up their own manifesto: theatrical, yet sleazy, all delivered with an arched eyebrow.
It was in the closing weeks of 1971, as the final details of Ziggy’s mythical career were pencilled in, that the hero was given his own costume. The aesthetic was half futuristic, half thrift-shop chic, masterminded primarily by Freddie Buretti. Freddie himself cut an exotic figure — with his high-waisted peg-leg trousers, skinny shirts and, occasionally, oversize shades — but when he and David cooked up their new look, they based the designs on the Droogs, the futuristic teenage thugs in Stanley Kubrick’s film version of A Clockwork Orange.
David’s wife, Angie, encouraged the next phase of his makeover; within a few days, the flowing gold locks were shorn. Thus, the final link with the 1960s was severed. Many of David’s contemporaries — including Marc Bolan — had already glammed themselves up. But their flared trousers and wavy hair were an evolution of the hippie look. The Ziggy persona — with its cropped hair and skinny silhouette — marked a ruthless break with the Sixties. It was finely calculated, but impromptu; done in a rush.

 David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust in 1973

David developed his manifesto line by line: this was a new era, factory jobs were obsolete, and so were the Victorian values that defined their parents’ lives. The coming generation would not be restricted by work or conventional sexuality. This bisexual, glittering generation was the homo superior — and David would be their spokesperson. David needed someone to spread his message. The old Sixties writers, people who’d written about David already, were out. Then Dai Davies, newly recruited as David’s press mastermind, told David about the new generation of journalists, writers who were interested in theories, in manifestos, not in a pint and a chat in the pub. Together, they would approach Michael Watts first; he’d read Norman Mailer and was developing a new, long-form feature style at Melody Maker. David, Davies says, “was building a brand — before that language had even been invented”.
Watts met Bowie upstairs in the Regent Street office of his label, Gem. There was a sense that David had “something to get off his chest”, and a hope that Watts would get a scoop, which is exactly what happened. Watts remembers Bowie being “slightly flirtatious” all the way through the interview; and indeed there was a delicious coyness about the whole piece, with Watts feigning a worldly, unshocked demeanour, as David holds forth, self-consciously messianic. “I’m going to be huge,” he tells Watts, “and it’s quite frightening in a way.”

When he tells Watts, “I’m gay — and always have been, even when I was David Jones,” Watts comments that there is “a sly jollity about how he says it”. It was obvious that Watts was transfixed by what Bowie’s next interviewer, Charles Shaar Murray, describes as “a genius for inducing a powerful, platonic man-crush in fundamentally straight guys”. For all the playfulness, this was a momentous announcement; utterly without precedent and ravishingly brave.
Gay sex had been nominally decriminalised in July 1967, but arrests for “gross indecency” had tripled over the following three years, while many of David’s contemporaries would remain firmly in the closet for decades to come. Gem staff attempting to get Bowie airplay at the BBC had already encountered the objection that “we don’t have perverts on this show”. There was a precedent for David’s announcement, of which he was almost certainly aware, namely David Hockney’s overt declaration of his own sexuality with his We Two Boys Together Clinging painting, back in 1961, when gay sex could land a man in prison. Bowie’s move was more flagrant, aimed at the mass market rather than a coterie of critics. David’s sexual and image makeover had already been anticipated by Bolan — who’d proclaimed, “I’ll go up and kiss guys if I think they’re nice,” in Sounds. But Marc lacked David’s chutzpah, his willingness to gamble everything, and David, of course, was in second place and needed to outdo him.

In later years, gay-rights activists would criticise Bowie’s coming out as mere “androgyny as chic”. Some of their cynicism was probably justified, given that after David outed himself, he inned himself a few years later, complaining about the commercial damage that his image had caused him in America. Rarely has such a spontaneous act of courage been followed by such a considered act of cowardice. Yet David’s later retraction is irrelevant: he had let a genie out of the bottle and it would never fit back in. This was a generational shift.
David was careful to have his cake and eat it in the interview — pointing out his “good relationship” with Angie and their son, Zowie. In the 1990s, Bowie claimed that the excitement of hanging out in the Sombrero, a sexually diverse nightclub in Kensington, outweighed anything physical, which was “something I wasn’t comfortable with at all”. This pained recollection seems to confirm the criticisms of those who regard his gay phase as a pose, a marketing stance. Yet for David, the marketing, the pose, was part of his essence. Witnesses such as Tony Zanetta conclude that David’s gay stance was primarily about culture, rather than sex. “He was bisexual, but what he really was, was a narcissist — boys or girls, it was all the same,” says Zanetta. “He was attracted to the gay subculture because he loved its flamboyance.” Watts today says simply, “He knew exactly what he was doing.”

The accompanying album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was released in the same year, 1972. “RCA told us that it was great — but we needed a single,” says sound engineer Robin Mayhew. “So David went off and wrote what he called ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. His Starman song.”
In stories of the songwriting of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, with whom David would soon be compared, I Want to Hold Your Hand has been singled out as an early peak, a knowing song that packs in so many arresting songwriting devices that its hit status was inevitable. Starman represents the same euphoric peak in Bowie’s writing. If it feels like the music has gone from monotone to Technicolor, that’s because the starman waiting in the sky so closely matches Judy Garland’s evocation of somewhere over the rainbow — note for note. It draws on the same emotion — a yearning for escape, from the depression and monochrome of 1939 or 1972— and the listener’s response is instinctive, drawn in by the familiar, intrigued by the alien.

 David Bowie on Top of the Pops in 1972

But Starman still languished at No 41 when David and his band the Spiders from Mars walked into the Top of the Pops studio on July 5 , 1972. The song had actually made its TV debut on the kids’ teatime show Lift Off with Ayshea on June 15 — Bowie and his Spiders followed an owl puppet named Ollie Beak — but it was the Top of the Pops performance, broadcast on July 6, that transfixed the nation’s youth, and horrified their parents. Bowie was clear-eyed and joyous, his come-to-bed eyes inviting both girls and boys. As Mick Ronson approaches the microphone for the chorus, the sight of David “casually” draping his arm around the platinum-haired guitarist had a visceral impact.
Bolan had camped it up on Top of the Pops first, but he was cute, unthreatening; David and the Spiders were dangerous, a warning to lock up not only your daughters, but your sons too. The moment David put his arm round Ronson, teenagers around the country shared “a moment of epiphany”, as ballet’s enfant terrible Michael Clark puts it. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, maybe other people are a little bit like I feel inside.’ ”
In just three minutes, David Bowie laid out his claim as a glam messiah.

23 Heddon St, Mayfair, London W1B 4BQ

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © Paul Trynka 2011, extracted from STARMAN: David Bowie — The Definitive Biography published by Sphere, £10.99. Available from the Times Bookshop for £9.89 (free p&p) on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk

Starman Extract 3: Bowie and Iggy in Berlin

 Iggy Pop and David Bowie in 1977

Checkpoint Charlie, the fabled gateway between West and East Berlin. Tony Visconti, sitting alongside David Bowie and Iggy Pop, watches nervously as the guard scrutinises their passports, while his colleagues cradle their machine pistols ominously, all of them overseen by a low, glass-fronted watchtower.
Suddenly, the guard calls for assistance: “Friedrich, kommen Sie hier!” The party freezes, looking on as the second guard flips through the passports — both of the Prussian-grey-uniformed figures, sidearms at their hips, break into laughter.
Visconti steps out of the Mercedes, and the guards point out the passport photos. “Iggy had this platinum hair, and Bambi eyes,” says the producer. “Bowie had that dreadful curly perm from around Space Oddity.” The two remade, remodelled, crop-haired stars, far from home, are forced silently to endure the ridicule, before finally driving out to the east, with its ruined buildings, derelict train tracks, women sporting Fifties-style beehives, and the countryside beyond.
What might have surprised the guards even more was that for both rock stars, abandoning the hedonism, excess and silly haircuts of the West — ie, exactly those values being kept out at gunpoint at Checkpoint Charlie — had brought David Bowie and Iggy Pop to a new “joy of life”, as David put it. “It was an education,” says Iggy Pop, “always there was the idea, we’re trying to learn something here. And to be pretty disciplined about it.”

In Berlin, play and so-called work were intertwined. It was a rare week that involved no recording or administration, but there were plenty of days when they could ramble however they chose. David and Iggy might spend such a day wandering around the antiques markets on Winterfeldtplatz, or bookshops and cafés down by St Matthias Kirche.
Iggy would often rise early and walk for five or eight miles; eventually he claimed to have explored every nook and cranny of the city. In winter, they’d sometimes take the S-Bahn train to the Wannsee, a lake resort on the Havel River, for long lunches under the glass roof, not far from the villa where senior Nazis mapped out the Final Solution. David showed Iggy how to prep a canvas or apply acrylic paint; both of them spent time on artwork. David completed a portrait of Iggy rendered in a convincing expressionist style reminiscent of the works they’d seen at the Brücke, a tiny, modern museum shaded by the pine trees of the Grunewald forest. Most of all, they’d simply walk, often dropping in on friends without warning just to say hello, like they used to back in the Sixties, before most people owned a phone.
Compared to their previous existence, this was a life of monk-like restraint. But both men were realistic about their regime. Occasional excess was acceptable, but heroin, Iggy’s old bête noire, was out of bounds.

One evening, David took a cab back home to the Hauptstrasse when the taxi driver mentioned he had “the dooj” ready for his friend. David warned the cabbie, coldly, there would be dire consequences if any of “the dooj” — heroin — should reach his friend, but didn’t mention the incident to Iggy, careful not to appear too controlling. Both men tried every brand of German beer on offer, but in the city, rather than the omnipresent American drug scene, “there was an artsy-crafty weekend drug culture,” says Iggy. “So on the weekends we’d go meet an eccentric character who was interested in the arts, and maybe you’d have a little coke and get drunk and go till four in the morning to three or four clubs.”
Many locals knew who Bowie and Iggy were; but, naturally polite, they’d pretend not to recognise Bowie when they saw him in regular haunts, like the city’s two Zip record stores. Instead, fans would sneak up to the cashier once David had left with a bag full of records and ask, “Was hat Bowie gekauft?” (What did he buy?)

Visitors came and went regularly over this period, most of them staying at the Schlosshotel. [His wife] Angie was among the first, arriving soon after the completion of Low, in November 1976. It’s difficult to pinpoint, from her point of view, the point at which she realised her marriage was irrevocably doomed, but her disdain for her husband and his friend’s attempt to sort themselves out indicates their relationship was now poisoned by indifference and contempt.

“A lot of people love the idea of going and making nice to the people you’ve defeated so you can treat them like slaves. That was David’s going to Berlin story: ‘Let me lie with you in case there’s something we didn’t take from you that I haven’t learnt yet’ — it’s pathetic.” Angie’s distaste extended to Low, and [Iggy Pop’s 1977 album] The Idiot, too. Unsurprisingly, the Bowie family Christmas, spent in Switzerland, would be their last together. Bowie was back in Berlin by January 8, 1977, for his 30th birthday, celebrated with Iggy and Romy Haag, the transgender cabaret performer. Low was released the next week.

David Bowie – The Man Who Fell to Earth

Low’s reception was oddly in context with the record’s sleeve — the title and photo, of David in profile, made up a visual pun: low profile. [His record label] RCA’s reaction to the album was simple incomprehension. As Robin Eggar, RCA’s press officer at the time, remembers, the company “didn’t really know what to do with Low or Heroes. They only put them out because they were Bowie albums — and the attitude totally was, ‘What are we going to do with this?’ ” Equally, David’s failure to promote the album meant press coverage was modest. Yet the myth that Low was greeted with widespread disdain is just that, for most reviewers realised this was a major event in Bowie’s career. Tim Lott, the future Whitbread prize-winning novelist, spoke for many in declaring Low “the most difficult piece of music Bowie has ever put his name to”. The writer ended his preview for Sounds with an appropriately fractured procession of adjectives, which ended: “So. This album might be Bowie’s best ever. Eno’s best ever. A mechanical classic.”
Lott cited Sound and Vision as the “pinnacle” of the album; his verdict anticipated its success as a single, reaching No 3 in the UK (but stalling at 69 in the US). Its success further confused RCA, who were also, Eggar points out, intimidated by Bowie, accepting his refusal to tour the album without argument, and likewise caving in to his persuasion that the company should release Iggy’s The Idiot, which came out on March 18, 1977.
David took over all the arrangements for Iggy’s tour, calling in Hunt and Tony Sales, the sons of the comedian Soupy Sales. They’d earned their Musicians’ Union cards when the drummer Hunt was 12 and the bassist Tony was 13, hung out with Frank Sinatra, the sax legend King Curtis and other hepcats, and recorded their first album with Todd Rundgren when Hunt was just 16. Loud, hell-raising and formidably talented, from the moment they arrived in Berlin in February, they ensured that David and Iggy’s weekend debaucheries became seven-day affairs. Their routine normally involved a late breakfast at the Schlosshotel, rehearsals from 11 until 5, goulash for dinner, a quick sleep, then trips to Romy Haag’s, or an old bar frequented by the SS, where patrons could use the phones on the table to find conversational or sexual partners, or clubs in Kreuzberg where, says Tony Sales, “I saw a real-life re-enactment of that Doors LP cover, with a midget with an umbrella standing on the bar.”
In the brief, intense rehearsals at the old UFA film studios, filled with old filing cabinets crammed with film canisters and ancient Weimar and Nazi-era paperwork, through which all the band members riffled, the brothers watched the two oddly complementary singers chat, work and relax. “It was two schoolboys hanging out; chums,” says Tony Sales. “It was a very loving relationship in a sense. David was at a place where he needed to recharge and got behind Iggy — and in return that helped him, taking the pressure off being David Bowie.”
The brothers were among the first outsiders to see the two singers in their new hideout. As word had leaked out in the autumn that David had holed up with the ex-leader of the Stooges, rumours had started to spread. Back in 1976, supporters like the Iggy fanzine editor Harald Inhülsen were writing letters to fellow fans, speculating that David had kidnapped Iggy and was keeping him “under his thumb”. The implication that Iggy was being exploited as David’s sex slave was widespread, entertaining, and has made its way into print. Iggy himself laughs, and denies such hanky-panky; even Angie Bowie, always prone to seeing her husband in the role of exploiter, believes otherwise, asking, with her unerring eye for practical detail, “Who would be on the bottom?”
A more plausible interpretation for cynics was that Iggy’s main purpose was to give David credibility, but by the time of The Idiot there was a selflessness to David’s behaviour that, says Hunt Sales, is rare in the jaded world of rock music. “David really loved him as a friend. Giving something to someone is not giving something and expecting something in return. You just give it.”
The centrepiece of Bowie’s so-called Berlin trilogy [Low, Heroes and Lodger], Heroes was the only album of the three entirely recorded in Berlin. The city permeated both the sound and the ambience of the album, in a location that, according to Tony Visconti, was both “a dream . . . and [a place] where everything said, ‘We shouldn’t be making a record here.’ ”

 Robert Fripp, Brian Eno and Bowie during the recording of Heroes

It was Hansa Studios that best embodied Berlin’s grandeur and menace. The main building, on the Köthenerstrasse, was built as the Meistersaal in 1910, a beautiful, stern clubhouse to showcase the skills of Berlin’s master masons. But in 1976, it looked like a forlorn wreck, in a forgotten sector of the city. Its elegant Ionic pillars were bullet-scarred, the lofty pediment blown off, the upper windows bricked up, with pigeons roosting within; a quarter of its courtyarded block had simply collapsed. All around, streets retained their gap-toothed look, like Brixton in 1947, and from the second storey the section of the Wall leading up to Potsdamerplatz was clearly visible.
“This was clearly an ex-war zone,” says Visconti, “and now it was an international boundary, which was really scary. We recorded 500ft from barbed wire, and a tall tower where you could see gun turrets, with foreign soldiers looking at us with binoculars.”
For all of the tiny crew, their time in Berlin during Heroes would result in a series of unforgettable images: the day that Visconti cropped Iggy and David’s hair and they wandered around looking like old men; visits to an antiques shop whose proprietor had known Marlene Dietrich; the frenzied warehouse parties with local tearaways like the artist Martin Kippenberger; the day Visconti saw a huge black tank rumbling down the Kurfürstendamm; or the time [the Hansa sound engineer] Edu Meyer saw a guard on a DDR machine-gun post surveying them though his binoculars and attempted to dazzle him with an Anglepoise lamp, causing Bowie and Visconti to duck under the control desk, terrified.

But even in the act of creation, Bowie’s joy was always controlled. In this, he was a complete contrast to Iggy, who would swing from euphoria to depression — indeed, just when Heroes was being completed, Iggy succumbed to a manic-depressive cocaine jag, for which David and his personal assistant Coco [Schwab] arranged an “intervention”, asking Barbara and Tim Dewitt to whisk him away to Capri. David was “an educated thinker — so that would rescue him from the depressions”, says Carlos [Alomar, Bowie’s longtime guitarist]. But David also thought “way too much”. His enjoyment of the now was always overshadowed by the thought it wouldn’t last.
Later, describing this time in Berlin as one of the happiest periods in his life, David would pick up this poignant note. “In some ways, sadly, [the three albums] really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.”

Copyright © Paul Trynka 2011, extracted from STARMAN: David Bowie — The Definitive Biography published by Sphere, £10.99. Available from the Times Bookshop for £9.89 (free p&p) on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk

Starman Extract 4: David Bowie in the Eighties

 David Bowie appealing for Live Aid donations

During the summer of 1985, David called the guitarist Kevin Armstrong, who went on to work with Bowie for years. “I’m doing a concert for Bob Geldof for charity. It’s going to be a big deal. Do you want to help me out?” Armstrong agreed, as David continued: “I’ve got this extra idea for a record to support it. Would you meet me at this film company in Soho at 10 o’clock and bring an acoustic?”
Armstrong arrived in Wardour Street at the appointed time. When David walked in, he was accompanied by Mick Jagger. The pair explained that they had planned a transatlantic duet for the upcoming concert but the delay caused by the satellite link made it impossible, so they’d decided to pre-record and video their number, a cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street.

 Bowie and Jagger vie for attention in the video accompanying their Live Aid single Dancing in the Street

When the band convened at Westside [studio, Holland Park], they enjoyed a fascinating glimpse of Britain’s two best-known rock singers at work. Bowie arrived first, with a copy of Springsteen’s Born in the USA and told the rhythm section to match that feel. Then bassist Matthew Seligman and drummer Neil Conti felt a “whirling dervish” presence behind them, as Jagger whisked in, with his 14-year-old daughter Jade in tow. Once the backing track was nailed, the ten or so people present watched the pair camping it up and competing as they recorded their ludicrously over-the-top vocals. The two old friends got on well, but their rivalry was obvious. “My gut reaction was to feel a bit protective of David,” says Seligman. “Mick was much more vocal, mouthy — more rockist. David was the smiling indulgent one, more good-natured about the whole thing.”

The “big deal” charity show would of course turn out to be Live Aid — July 13, 1985 — an infinitely bigger deal than anyone could have imagined; the event brought out a new, non-competitive side of David. It was the first time he’d worked with a younger band, now featuring keyboard player Thomas Dolby, and before the Wembley concert he bustled around like a mother hen, despite the fact he was busy filming at Elstree for another new project, the movie Labyrinth. Hearing that his sax player, Clare Hirst, had confessed to her local paper that she was nervous about the show, he phoned her up and reassured her. Then he sweetly requested if the band could all wear turquoise for the performance and asked Hirst if it would be OK if he grabbed her hand during “Heroes”.

On the day, David was “very up — it hit home, as it did for everyone what a great event this was”, says Armstrong. David showed them the waistband of the Young Americans suit he was wearing, sharing his delight that, at nearly 40, he could still fit into it. The band drove by Stansfield Road [Bowie’s childhood home in Brixton] on the way — a couple of them had lived in a squat there — and noticed the streets were quiet, all the residents glued to their TVs. As he squeezed into Noel Edmonds’s helicopter, David’s hands were shaking, cigarettes constantly on the go — the pilots complained the smoke was obscuring the instrument panel.

Queen, according to posterity, stole the show, but on the day no one knew or cared. David had chosen one of the youngest, most under-rehearsed bands of his entire career and treated them as if they were doing him a favour, joshing them along, especially Seligman, whom David had nicknamed “Brenda” in revenge for the bassist mentioning that Blue Jean was boring. Before they hit the stage, the band heard him shout, “Remember, no monitors for Brenda!”
There were flurries of nerves: David fluffed a line, introducing singer Tessa Niles as “Theresa”; sax player Clare Hirst stood holding her hand out at the scheduled moment, like a lemon, as David danced around on the other end of the stage; Armstrong started Rebel Rebel way too fast. Yet throughout, David’s joy was infectious, pushing forward the band who were totally focused on remembering the songs they’d rehearsed exactly three times. Somehow, it was perfect, says Dolby. “To my astonishment, I felt like I was on a magic carpet ride. These songs were like our teenage anthems — my fingers were just wafted along.”
 Of every artist, Bowie was the most focused on pushing the cause, not himself, cutting short his set — which until the penultimate rehearsal included Fascination — to save time for a harrowing video of starving Ethiopian children, which raised donations to a new peak.
His tribute to the band — “I’ll be forever in their debt” — was repeated off-stage after the performance, when they all hugged, overcome with emotion. Later he dropped in on the Royal Box, and cheekily asked Princess Diana: “Will we be getting you up on stage for the grand finale?”

Recorded at Mountain Studio in Montreux the following year [1986] and completed at New York’s Record Plant, Bowie’s next album, Never Let Me Down, was neither as good nor as bad as its predecessor Tonight. In his efforts to ensure the album was a hit, David worked out each song carefully with [the multi-instrumentalist] Erdal Kizilcay beforehand, thus excising any hint of the random. It featured no cod-reggae, nor any songs that, while derivative of his own work, were memorable, like Loving the Alien had been. Instead, the album was filled to the brim with conventional music, lyrics and sounds. Never Let Me Down was startlingly reminiscent of the opening section of John Lennon’s Starting Over; the same breathy counter-tenor delivery, confessional feel and a similar chord sequence. Glass Spider was preposterous, and hence at least noticeable. The utter dearth of inspiration was epitomised by the sole cover version: Iggy Pop’s Bang Bang. The original had been an act of desperation on Iggy’s part when he’d been told by Arista to deliver a hit or leave the label. David’s rendition of the plodding, predictable chord sequence and coke-addled lyrics represents the very nadir.

The reviews, when they came, were dreadful. That was not the main problem, for plenty of Bowie’s contemporaries had made poor albums. More serious was the way that this album seemed to damn all his previous work by association. As Rolling Stone’s Steve Pond commented, “[Bowie] has reached a startling level of influence and status while making few genuinely groundbreaking records.”
The subsequent Glass Spider tour, based on the album’s silliest track, would become notorious, a celebrated disaster in David Bowie’s career. Such is the distaste in which it is held that its one transcendent moment has been forgotten. It took place on the Platz der Republik, Berlin, just north of Hansa Tonstudio 2, on June 6, 1987.
David had dropped in to see his friend Edu Meyer, who was working on a session with David’s band, two days before. “He was still the same guy I remember from Lust for Life, still a worker.” The city was already filling with West Germans who’d made their way out to the isolated enclave of Berlin for the show: “A big event for the whole country,” says Meyer, “and the [East German] government was pretty upset that it was happening so close to the Wall.”

That night, David launched into “Heroes” in the shade of the Wall, five minutes from where the song had been conceived, and realised the song was being redefined. “As we got into it, we could hear the thousands of kids who had gathered on the other side, the Berlin side,” he says, “all joining in [the song]. It was terribly emotional. He let them do the singing and the DDR government tried to get these people away from the Wall . . . but with no success.” Fifteen years later, when David played in Berlin, he suddenly became aware that many of the audience had been the voices he’d heard: “the ones on the other side”. It was one of the few happy moments on the tour.
Previously, David had always chosen his key collaborators then left everything to them. Now, he was becoming a control freak, fussing over every detail, always “very, very tense”, says Kizilcay. After the third date, Chip Monck, stage designer for the Rolling Stones, who’d been commissioned to build the huge glass spider prop that loomed over the stage, left the tour: “I got the thing built and only saw the first few shows. That was enough.”

 The giant stage prop dwarfs Bowie on the Glass Spider tour

The contempt for Glass Spider is often seen as being the product of hindsight, part of a reaction against the obese over-production of the late Eighties; indeed, the tour was, according to press reports, the most successful of Bowie’s career, out-grossing Serious Moonlight, with 3 million tickets sold over its 86 shows. But for the Bowie fans who’d seen his previous tours, the memory of the Glass Spider shows is still traumatic. Tony Horkins, then editor of International Musician magazine, was one of many who walked into Wembley Stadium and caught sight of the spider. “It wasn’t just that they were obviously trying too hard; it was that they hadn’t spent the money to hit what they were aiming for. The spider looked pathetic.” David was simply dwarfed by this huge spectacle.

Bowie on the Glass Spider tour

Copyright © Paul Trynka 2011, extracted from STARMAN: David Bowie — The Definitive Biography published by Sphere, £10.99. Available from the Times Bookshop for £9.89 (free p&p) on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk

Starman Extract 5: He proposed to Iman twice in Paris — once on stage

Bowie with Iman in 2005

The end of the Sound + Vision tour in 1990 marked a life-changing encounter for Bowie, one whose significance he realised a couple of weeks after the final date at River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires on September 29. A hairdresser friend, Teddy Antolin, had arranged a blind date for him. Later, David would comment it was love at sight, although in fact he been introduced to his date three or four times before, at the theatre and backstage at his LA show in May. 
Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid was an 18-year-old political science major at the University of Nairobi when wildlife photographer Peter Beard, a friend of the writer Isak Dinesen, happened to spot her in 1975; she eventually agreed to her first photoshoot in return for having her tuition fees paid, and caused a sensation on her arrival in New York when she signed with the prestigious Wilhelmina Models agency. Iman worked closely with Thierry Mugler, and became a muse for Yves Saint Laurent. She established herself in the pre-supermodel era, when her main counterparts, says Marie Claire’s then-beauty director, Emma Bannister, were “Christie Brinkley, of Uptown Girl fame, and Carol Alt — real American cheese. Iman really stood out — she was striking, strong and African.” Iman finally became a household face, if not a household name, through an advert for Tia Maria: she smoulders and smiles briefly, her cheeks striped in fluorescent green – a true world citizen selling ersatz exoticism and, by most accounts, reviving the brand. At her peak, her earnings were exceeding $2 million a year, but by 1989 she decided she had outstayed her welcome on the modelling scene.
Iman was attracted to David straight away, but later said she truly fell in love when she found he adored reading to people, just like her father — who was the Somali ambassador to Saudi Arabia — and was good at doing funny voices. As for David, he later said he started thinking of children’s names the night they met. The couple spent a few months together in LA, where they both owned houses, followed by an idyllic six-week trip up and down the Italian coast. If Iman had ever wondered what it would be like being married to a rock’n’roller, she got a true taste of it that summer. Tin Machine hit the road for another tour in August 1991 and continued playing, almost night after night, all the way through to the final show at Tokyo’s Budokan in February 1992. It would be David’s longest period on the road since his Spiders days. Iman would travel with David for many of the shows in America and Europe.

He proposed to Iman twice, both times in Paris, in October 1992 — the first on the Seine, to the strains of April in Paris; the second at L’Olympia, Paris, where he repeated his proposal on stage, in French, then played saxophone as his fans cheered. It could have been hokey “but he was pretty amazing”, says his friend Eric Schermerhorn. David married Iman in a private civil ceremony in Montreux; once more, his simultaneous yearning for privacy and publicity was reflected by the public celebration at the American St James’ church in Florence that followed. The nuptials were celebrated in a 23-page Hello! magazine cover story. David wore white tie; Iman a Hervé Léger oyster dress with train. His son, Duncan,was best man, Geoff MacCormack [long-time friend and musician] read Psalm 121, and Peggy [his mother] had her photo taken with Bono. Yoko Ono and Brian Eno were among the guests.
There were many flashes of humour in the accompanying interview, as well as instances of history being rewritten: “I don’t think I ever really had what we could call a proper marriage,” he says, of his days with Angie [his first wife]. There was a conventional, happy air, as if he were grateful finally to put aside his days of androgyny and transcending moral codes, and start over. While many of the sentiments were standard Hello! fare — David’s comments on how his friend Thierry Mugler had done “a delightful job” of designing his suit — there were many moments of insight, more than in some of the more probing interviews to which David had been subjected. His open statement that, while he is not formally religious, “God plays a very important part in my life”, as well as his admission that he spent his first few weeks with Iman worried that his “silly sense of humour” might put her off, were both illuminating demonstrations of how, in his forties, he was happy to admit to the strong streak of conventionality that had always run through him.

By 1994, David had apparently expended almost as much energy in transforming himself into an underground artist as he had in transforming himself into a star. Yet no one could have possibly confused his lifestyle with that of a musician struggling to make ends meet. David and Iman largely divided their time between Los Angeles, Lausanne and Mustique, where he retained an immaculately groomed house, furnished in the airbrushed ethnic style purveyed by the most expensive international interior designers. There, he posed for Architectural Digest magazine atop an antique Indian mahogany lounger. “My ambition,” he told writer William Buckley, “is to make music so incredibly uncompromised that I will have absolutely no audience left whatsoever — and then I’ll able to spend the entire year on the island.”
On August 15, 2000, Alexandria Zahra Jones was born at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. David and Iman celebrated the event in the now obligatory cover feature in Hello!, sharing with the public their bliss, their fantasies of later having a boy they could name Stenton, after David’s father, and the universal frustration with builders, whose delays prevented their move to their bigger, new apartment in Chelsea, New York, in time for the birth. Iman mentioned that David was doing his share of nappy changes for Alexandria — her name inspired by the ancient Greco-Egyptian seat of culture — but apparently the novelty wore off, for three years later, in blokeish mode, he announced, “I don’t do nappies.” A year after Alexandria’s birth, David was still describing his main job as “daddyfying”, his excitement at the new experience just as all-consuming as the obsessions of his youth.
The public perception was still of him as a culture buff, always visiting the ballet or a new exhibition, or hanging out with local musos such as Moby or Lou Reed, all of which he did. But he was just as happy googling randomly in “the bunker” — his computer and work room — waking up at 6am and dealing with emails before taking Lexi for a walk around SoHo in her buggy, or sitting chatting to Iman over a bowl of pasta by a restaurant window, the two of them smiling graciously if they happened to be interrupted by a fan.

David Bowie in 1999

In his first few years as a New Yorker, he still considered moving back to London; it was a part of who he was. But over the next couple of years he came to detest British celebrity culture, the prospect of having to endure “having a camera lens stuck in either my face or my wife and child’s face every morning”. He had reverted to much the same sentiments he’d expressed in 1980, the feeling that New York was the perfect place to wander, seek out interesting book or antique shops, pick up the urban buzz without being hassled.
The sense that, as a new father, David was becoming reconciled to his own past deepened in the aftermath of his mother’s death. It was announced in April 2001, and for David had come “out of the blue”. Several faces from his youth were at the funeral, including Pat Antoniou, the aunt who had publicly accused David of callousness to his half-brother, prolonging the feuds that had blighted the Burns family for half a century. When David saw her, he “walked straight over, threw his arms around her”, says Bowie’s former manager Ken Pitt the one man who had stayed in touch with all the disconnected branches of the family. “He was absolutely wonderful.”
In the autumn of 2003 David embarked on his biggest tour in five years. The following summer he cut short his set in Prague, complaining of what felt like a trapped nerve in his shoulder. He played one more show, in Scheessel, Germany, two days later, before collapsing backstage in agony. Only when David was back in New York, on July 8, 2004, did his US publicist announce that he had undergone emergency angioplasty surgery for a blocked artery. Two days later, press reports quoted a tour insider who asserted that David had suffered a heart attack backstage, and had undergone surgery the night of his collapse: “The heart surgery wasn’t routine. It was a lot more serious than anyone is letting on.” David’s friends would later be told that the procedure involved stents — tubes fitted inside an artery to keep it open — a less invasive alternative to bypass surgery.
On July 28, David was photographed walking around Chinatown in New York, wearing a Stetson and a green T-shirt. One year later, Iman told friends that he was still busy with writing and recording: “We’re not retiring people,” she said. But even David’s virtual appearances were becoming infrequent. The updates in his BowieNet journal became more desultory, before, on October 5, 2006, Bowie penned the most enthusiastic entry in years: “Yesterday I got to be a character on — tan-tara — SpongeBob SquarePants. We, the family, are thrilled. Nothing else need happen this year, well, this week anyway.” And nothing else did.

With son Duncan Jones in 2009

As Bowie disappeared from the music scene, the assumption that this was the calm before a new burst of activity was natural, given what had been a prodigious work rate in the previous 40 years. The prospect of a permanent retirement seemed unthinkable — except that retirement was an option for which David had been longing, for at least 20 years. In their conversations over 1987 and 1989, Bowie had shared with the film-maker Julien Temple a desire to “escape: to parachute out, to find a strategy that would give a glorious exit”. For well over a decade, at least part of Bowie had still been seeking to make that glorious exit, that one grandiose explosion behind which he could disappear. Ultimately, mortality provided its own less glamorous escape mechanism.
In an age of celebrity, was there ever an artist who abandoned his public for a near decade? For in the years that David Bowie read his emails, studied books on medieval history or walked Lexi to school, his absence became more and more palpable. This was indeed the magnificent disappearing act, and as the smoke drifted across the auditorium, the audience was left whispering in shock and awe. The decision to drop off the radar underlined a rare artistic bravery. “He showed no fear,” says Nicolas Godin of the French duo Air, who discovered the Berlin trilogy while training as an architect in Versailles. Air were inspired by how Bowie mixed electronics and rock, but Godin says his influence goes far beyond this: “He’s the total artist — the look, the voice, the talent to compose, the stage presence. The beauty. Nobody is like that any more. Everybody is reachable; he was unreachable.”
Postscript: After a decade out of the limelight, Bowie did return, without warning, in 2011, releasing a new album, The Next Day, to positive reviews. He followed it on January 8, his 69th birthday, with his last album, Blackstar, which was also received warmly. He died two days later.

Copyright © Paul Trynka 2011, extracted from STARMAN: David Bowie — The Definitive Biography published by Sphere, £10.99. Available from the Times Bookshop for £9.89 (free p&p) on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk