The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference

Paul Morley

Simon & Schuster, £20

On Bowie

Rob Sheffield

Headline, £14.99

AND then you wake up one morning and you learn he’s gone. I didn’t buy Black Star the day it came out. I wish I had now. I wish I had given myself a weekend listening to it when it was just – as if it could ever just be “just” – the new David Bowie album. Not the last David Bowie album.

It was released on January 8, his 69th birthday. He died on January 10. Waking up the next morning, a Monday, everything had changed. The album’s meaning, yes, but also the world itself, too. Because he had so long been part of it. Or my world at the very least.

I have no Bowie epiphany to give you. I don’t recall watching Top of the Pops in 1972 to see him drape his arm around Mick Ronson while singing Star Man. I was too old and possibly sexually wired the wrong way to discover Bowie through the 1980s puppets-and-magic-and-very-tight-leggings fantasy Labyrinth (as Paul Morley discovered many young women did while he sat in the V&A museum in 2013 trying to write a book about Bowie during the exhibition David Bowie Is).

For many of us – me definitely, you? Possibly, probably – Bowie was simply always there. A voice on the radio. A soundtrack to growing up. A vision – when the time came that I realised pop music could be much more than just a voice on the radio – of pop’s possibilities, maybe of life’s possibilities, even if I was never bold or brave or brazen enough to follow the path he pursued. How many of us are?

It’s possible that the first thing I heard from him was his 1967 novelty hit Laughing Gnome, which was regularly played on Ed Stewpot Stewart’s Junior Choice on Radio 1. (Stewart died the day before Bowie. Everything is connected. Or can be if you so wish.) I can’t remember now a time when I didn’t know Life on Mars or Changes. (Hunky Dory was my entry point album; Diamond Dogs is now my favourite. Or at least it is today.)

But Bowie was also my gateway drug to art and arthouse cinema, Berlin and Brecht and Balthus – Bauhaus, too, for that matter. His greed for ideas in turn fed his fans.

More than that, more than anyone else in pop music, he stood for otherness. His greedy embrace of new ideas and new visions and new looks offered a role model for straight kids, for gay kids, for bisexual kids, for science-fiction loving kids, for kids who didn’t spend their lives on the school sports field, for kids who weren’t entirely sure they even belonged on this planet.

Bowie – the man or more precisely the idea of the man filtered through the pop press and pop videos and movie roles – was multivalent. No wonder so many of us could find a reflection and refraction of ourselves, of who we were or, more likely, who we might possibly want to be.

It’s no wonder then that when we talk about him we so often end up talking about ourselves. Because he helped shape who we are, how we look at the world.

You can see that in two new books about Bowie the man and the myth: Paul Morley’s typically Morleyesque The Age of Bowie, a huge sprawl of Bowieania that takes us from skiffle to social media, and Rob Sheffield’s fleeter-footed, American-flavoured, in-fifth-gear essay On Bowie.

Morley’s book takes its time, takes 60 pages to tell you what kind of book you can expect over the next 400 odd. Sheffield’s is less than 200 pages and comes on like a kid who can’t get the words out quick enough. Sheffield situates Bowie almost totally in the world of pop music – he charts connections to the Monkees and Courtney Love and Morrissey and Kanye West. Morley takes in Bertolt Brecht and JG Ballard and Fellini and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King.

Morley thinks about the impact of the suicide on Bowie of his stepbrother Terry perhaps because Morley’s own father committed suicide. Sheffield talks about how Bowie was the bonding agent for him and his wife. (I like his wife. He was giving a lecture on Bob Dylan when they met. She told him “Bowie is my Dylan.” I’m with her.)

Sheffield’s book has an American innocence to it. The way he works Bowie lyrics into the text goes from amusing to irritating to really irritating to actually quite charming. Will I get to the end of this review without doing likewise? Let’s see.

Sheffield discovered Bowie in the 1980s and so is rather defensive of that period in Bowie’s career that is rather in shadow to the glories of the decade before. He even hails Bowie’s appearance in Tony Scott’s vampire movie The Hunger over his role in Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. He’s wrong about this but he argues his case with passion.

In short, his tastes are more mainstream than Morley’s. Then again Morley is keen to reclaim some of Bowie’s more populist moments for art. He works hard at recasting Bowie’s earliest musical outpourings – basically the years before David Jones became David Bowie and the early years when David Bowie hadn’t quite worked out who David Bowie was – as harbingers of what lay ahead. He also seeks to claim Absolute Beginners – the Bowie song and even the much-maligned Julien Temple film it provided a title track to – as an example of Bowie’s art. I’m with him on the former and I’m willing to be convinced of the latter.

These are fans talking. Smart, engaged, but slightly starry-eyed fans. They are convinced of their hero’s genius (I have no problem with that; he was) and forgive his drug-fuelled dabbling with fascism in the mid-seventies. It was the drugs talking, they tell us. And, no, he didn’t give a Nazi salute at London’s Victoria Station in 1976.

I do wonder, though, if at times notions of chance and error in Bowie’s career are not given as much space as they deserve. In both books the man is subsumed by the myth.

Maybe that’s understandable. The myth of Bowie – the cracked actor, the drug fiend, the ominivorous assimilator of new ideas, the agent of musical change – is so seductive, and freighted with truth, and the man himself was always elusive. Of course that was deliberate on Bowie’s part. Ziggy and Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke were forms of disguise as well as theatrical vehicles.

It does mean, though, that as you read these books you fall avidly on such details as the fact that the red, spiky hairstyle of Ziggy Stardust – the breakthrough Bowie alter ego – was cut in the same hair salon as his mum used to go in Bromley, according to Morley. As Bowie himself said, Ziggy always had a touch of the “Nijinsky meets Woolworths” about him. Even myths sometimes shop in the high street.

But if it’s gossip and trash talk you’d be better off reading his first wife Angie’s biography. Both Morley and Sheffield are burnishing the canon here and extolling the man behind it. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s difficult to think of an artist who has done more to stretch and shape his art form in the last half century than Bowie. There will be many more books on him in the years to come. These two, written in the weeks after his death, are a good start.

The question now is how the signals Bowie sent out into the world will distort and echo through what are now the post-Bowie years, how they will travel out into space, singing, singing, singing. And …

I put a record on. And David Bowie sings “Oh no, love you’re not alone.”

Review by Teddy Jamieson