Now in paperback, the “ultimate oral history” (Billboard) tracing the life of superstar David Bowie through the words of those who knew him, loved him, worked alongside him, and made unforgettable music with him
By turns insightful and deliciously gossipy, David Bowie is as intimate a portrait as may ever be drawn. It sparks with admiration and grievances, lust and envy, as the speakers bring you into studios and bedrooms they shared with Bowie, and onto stages and film sets, opening corners of his mind and experience that transform our understanding of both artist and art. Including illuminating, never-before-seen material from Bowie himself, drawn from a series of Jones’s interviews with him across two decades, David Bowie is an epic, unforgettable cocktail-party conversation about a man whose enigmatic shapeshifting and irrepressible creativity produced one of the most sprawling, fascinating lives of our time.
David Bowie’s spectacular two-hour show from Glastonbury 2000, shown in full for the first time on television. Featuring familiar hits including Ashes to Ashes, Starman and Let’s Dance.
Not sure why I was unaware of this performance and its history, but I came upon it watching the documentary Bowie: The Final Act. It must have been a strange experience for promoters as nobody knew which Bowie would turn up. Clearly a Bowie willing to lean into his legacy. I really love the sound of the songs and the modern tinge that a number of them get, especially ‘Let’s Dance’. Also could not help laugh about the Laryngitis comment only to be smoking a cigarette next moment.
By the 1990s, critics wrongly thought Bowie was creatively exhausted. His albums flopped and promoters couldn’t give away tickets. But what followed was the most remarkable artistic resurrection in music history.
Although the title, Bowie: The Final Act, gives the suggestion that it focuses on his final album, instead it reviews Bowie’s lengthy career with the end in mind. Subsequently, it jumps around and addresses various aspects of his career, before discussing his ‘final act’, Black Star, and lasting legacy. It was certainly interesting going back and listening to the album again.
Bowie is a fascinating topic. I remember watching Moonage Daydream, although there are elements that cross-over, sometimes it feels like this documentary is about a different person. It was interesting reading through the reviews collected in the Wikipedia page. Although I enjoyed the documentary enough, I felt that Ed Power’s captured some of my frustrations and confusions.
In The Telegraph, Ed Power gave 2/5 stars, writing: “A decade on from his death, the story of David Bowie’s last years is reduced to a haphazard highlights reel in the underwhelming David Bowie: the Final Act … After starting with Blackstar, the film quickly loses focus, hopping across Bowie’s career in fits and starts. It lingers inordinately on his critically panned Tin Machine project, jumps back to his final concert with the Spiders from Mars at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, then pings forward to his mid‑1990s drum‑and‑bass phase (likewise loathed by critics). … Amid the zigzagging, the film at least lines up some impressive interviewees.”
An ecstatic voyage through the creative and spiritual universe of David Bowie, Moonage Daydream is a fittingly unclassifiable tribute to the shape-shifting rock iconoclast and his singular sound and vision. Exploding the conventions of the music documentary, director Brett Morgen remixes dazzling, never-before-seen footage of the artist throughout his career, reveling in his otherworldly presence while revealing the restless philosophical inquiry that guided his myriad metamorphoses. Graced with soulful narration by Bowie, this immersive audiovisual head rush transmits the essence of a phenomenon that cannot be explained—only experienced.
Part documentary, part experience, Moonage Daydream provides more than a recount of the life of David Bowie. In particular, it brings in various archival material to support the story.
We’ve seen trippy documentaries before, but Morgen seems to have created this movie to be rock ‘n’ roll. That’s part of its colliding-image irreverence. Watching “Moonage Daydream,” there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was.
So, Scary Monsters was one ending. It took Bowie back down to Earth, even though he still sounded like nobody else; it was lurid and vibrant and emotional all at once; it filtered his past through a new present and crafted a wholly contemporary sound. Maybe it’s too contrarian to argue for it as the best Bowie album, even with its feel of an imagined greatest hits collection. But Scary Monsters is where everything coexisted and still mutated further. It was the album that best captured everything Bowie was about — and it will always be the conduit through which everything travelled, all of his old selves folded in and carried forward through the rest of his life.
Watched
Nile Rodgers explains how he helped mold Let’s Dance from a folk track to the song we know today. For a different perspective, Tom Breihan has unpacked the track, including where it sits within Bowie’s career.
Three years before he died in January 2016, David Bowie made a list of the 100 books that had fuelled his creative life – from ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ to ‘A Clockwork Orange’, from Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ to John Cage’s ‘Silence’. UK writer John O’Connell has done the reading for us, and in ‘Bowie’s Books’ he explores this list in the form of 100 short essays, revealing their influence on many of Bowie’s greatest songs.
Anna Goldsworthy is a concert pianist, member of the Seraphim Trio and sometime festival director. She has published two volumes of memoir – the best-selling Piano Lessons (2009) and Welcome to Your New Life (2013) – and now her first novel. Melting Moments is not about music, but music is never far away. For one thing, Schubert’s Moments musicaux provide not only the novel’s title, but also its structure.
Celebrating RN’s Big Weekend of Books, Andrew Ford speaks with Anna Goldsworthy about her new book and how it connects with the music of Schubert. He also discusses the books that influenced David Bowie’s thinking with author John O’Connell.
Goldsworthy discusses the development of a book that is a series of opening, of moments, rather than a narrative arch. This fragmented structure is taken in part from the music of Schubert and the way in which a piece may start in minor only to end in major. Asked about what makes a successful music piece:
Goldsworthy: I wonder whether the mark of a really successful piece of art is that it allows you to dismantle the critical apparatus. You are no longer thinking, how did they do this? You’re just submitting to the experience and then subsequently you might go back to it and look for the mechanics. But I guess I’m just like everybody else, I’m yearning for those moments of transport, of forgetting all the stuff you might bring to your own practice, when you can see the cogs, when you can see the process. There are some very celebrated writers who I still feel when I see their prose that there very much the product of maybe a creative writing program or maybe a whole lot of planning, there is a quality of painting by numbers. I can see the work, and I don’t like seeing the work. But there are some pieces of writing that are just driven and utterly disarm you and take you by surprise. And subsequently you go back and think, how did they do that? Can I do that? Could I learn something from that? But ideally you wish to surrender to the experience in the reading of it, I think.
Ford: Yes, it’s like there’s actors you see them acting, and it can can be thrilling, but then there are actors you don’t notice the acting at all. You just believe.
Goldsworthy: I think that’s the ultimate, the invisibility of technique is probably what we all aspire to on some level. My teacher, Eleonora Sivan, used to say, “A compliment is not that it looks difficult, a compliment is that it looks easy.”
The rest of the world experiences music. They don’t care if I’m technically good, they just want to feel something.
In the second half of the podcast, Ford speaks with O’Connell about his book Bowie’s Books: The Hundred Literary Heroes who Changed his Life. He also recounts how David Bowie used to take a library on tour. For example, while filming The Man Who Fell to Earth he had a collection of 1500 books.
On what would be David Bowie’s 72nd birthday, relive one of his best and biggest parties – his star-studded 50th bash at New York’s Madison Square Garden
This is a fascinating concert. Recorded during the time Bowie was exploring industrial sounds, many of the tracks therefore take on a new sound to match with this.
Added to this are the wealth of guests.
‘Little Wonder’
‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’
‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ (with Frank Black)
‘Fashion’ (with Frank Black)
‘Telling Lies’
‘Hallo Spaceboy’ (with Foo Fighters)
‘Seven Years In Tibet’ (with Dave Grohl)
‘The Man Who Sold The World
‘The Last Thing You Should Do’ (with Robert Smith)
‘Quicksand’ (with Robert Smith)
‘Battle For Britain (The Letter)’
‘The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)’
‘I’m Afraid Of Americans’ (with Sonic Youth)
‘Looking For Satellites’
‘Under Pressure’
‘Heroes’
‘Queen Bitch’ (with Lou Reed)
‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ (with Lou Reed)
‘Dirty Blvd.’ (with Lou Reed)
‘White Light/White Heat’ (with Lou Reed)
‘Moonage Daydream’
‘Happy Birthday To You’ (performed by Gail Ann Dorsey)
‘All The Young Dudes’ (with Billy Corgan)
‘The Jean Genie’ (with Billy Corgan)
‘Space Oddity’
