Conscious disguises - the life and times of David Bowie

David Bowie. The gift to this blog that keeps on giving. The occasion is Moonage Daydream, the much-anticipated feature-length documentary by director Brett Morgen, which opens today. As this channel has regularly recorded, the posthumous Bowie industry has never ceased to turn in the six and a half years since the icon’s death, with a bounty of re-releases, box sets, books, pop-up shops and exhibitions all pumping the legacy of a rock star like no other. While cynics might see it as exploitation, fan - and we are many - will see it as justified deification of one of the singularly most influential artists of the 20th century, one who crafted, controlled and curated his image so consciously while alive, and even as he knowingly approached death.

Moonage Daydream is, though, the first ‘official’ documentary to be sanctioned by the Bowie estate since his passing in January 2016. Appropriately, five years in the making, Morgen’s 135-minute epic does for The Dame what Peter Jackson’s even longer Get Back film did for The Beatles. Whereas Jackson’s production distilled 21 days’ worth of consecutive footage of the Fabs trying to make what would become their Let It Be album, Moonage Daydream painstakingly pieces together “thousands” of hours of film and video - some from Bowie’s personal archive - along with 48 newly remastered live music. It is a labour of love by Morgen, a Bowie fan all his life, which attempts to penetrate the creative ambition that made the singer who he was, single-handedly defining glam rock and, magpie-like, grabbing at any genre that took his fancy - from folk to progressive rock, Philly soul to drum and bass, trite pop to, in his final outing, the prescient album Blackstar, complex jazz.

Within this broiling sea of reinvention, Morgen reflects the theatrical guises Bowie adopted throughout his musical journey, as he evolved from suburban folkie David Jones to David Bowie, the vessel for the various phases he would pass through - the alien Ziggy Stardust, the glam prince, the soul boy, even the 1980s pop star (“my Phil Collins period”). “Becoming a pop act was no different than being Aladdin Sane or being Ziggy,” says Morgen. ”It was by design. He was going to enter the mainstream. It was just another challenge.” This point blew the director’s mind. The conventional wisdom is that Bowie made the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums out of weariness (or laziness). It wasn’t, argues Morgen. It was simply another conscious disguise to be that commercial.

“I think he would like this film,” keyboard player and frequent Bowie collaborator Mike Garson said of his late friend in The Times recently. “Three quarters of it he would really enjoy,” the remaining quarter being Morgen’s visually erratic style that will bombard the viewers with a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery, zig-zagging its way through the Bowie timeline. The film was conceived while Bowie was alive, with Morgen pitching the idea to the star unsuccessfully, and before his apparent evaporation into what felt like partial retirement in 2004. Morgen turned his attention to the Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Kurt Cobain (Montage Of Heck) to satisfy his storytelling, but Bowie wouldn’t go away. At the same time, he had the desire to create music films for the IMAX format.

On hearing that Bowie had died, on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday, Morgen contacted Bill Zysblat, who’d looked after the star’s business affairs. Zysblat revealed that his client had archived a treasure trove of content. Over the next five years Morgen worked his way through boxes of footage and still images - some five million assets in all, setting himself up with the near-impossible task of turning it all into something compelling. “Not because I wanted to,” he explained recently to the NME, explaining that he was, at that stage, completely unfunded. Working 18-hour days on his own, his dedication almost cost Morgen his life. “I had a massive heart attack on January 5, 2017,” he told the NME, revealing that he flatlined for three minutes, just five days shy of the first anniversary of his subject’s own death.

From today we will see for ourselves whether this near-death experience was worth the trouble. Moonage Daydream will reward us with, Morgen promises, “the missing unicorns”: never before-seen clips of Bowie performing live at Earls Court on the 1978 tour for the Heroes and Low albums. “Two nights. 35 millimetre. 24-track audio. Possibly the greatest performance on film of David’s career,” Morgen says. The film won’t just present the visual spectacle of Bowie performing live, but the aural brilliance of it too, with Morgen employing the Academy Award-winning team that worked on Bohemian Rhapsody to turn less than great quality tape recordings into something befitting the cinematic soundstage. 

Five and a half years after his death, with a plethora of posthumous biographies and retrospectives filling up shelves (especially mine...), the cold hard truth is that we still don’t know all that much about Bowie. We know the musical milestones, some of his family story, his Brixton childhood and adolescence in Beckenham. Even now, there’s precious little of Bowie actually talking if you search for it on YouTube. There are the few chat show appearances, the uncanny prediction of the Internet in his Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, but apart from Top Of The Pops clips, Live Aid and the films he made as an actor, nothing that truly reveals the artist himself. Even Alan Yentob’s legendary 1975 Omnibus film for the BBC, Cracked Actor, leaves the viewer vague as to who it was about, thanks to Bowie appearing gaunt and clearly on drugs (“I was so blocked, so stoned,” he once admitted while talking about the documentary. “It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it. I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely”).

Morgen’s challenge with Moonage Daydream is, clearly, how much new it will reveal. So much of Bowie’s career was a guise combining distinct image and music that even his hair styles formed part of a character. After spending the 1990s trying to bury his past, attempting the thankfully short-lived grunge band Tin Machine and even trying to put his creative peak in the 1970s behind him with the Sound + Vision Tour, Bowie finally embraced his popularity. His headline appearance at Glastonbury in 2000 was a joyous jukebox of hits. But if you watch the performance film, you also see a star shorn of his lofty artistic pretences. He is Dave, the blokey, jokey feller from south London. Indeed, in the four years following that set, we saw something of the Bowie you’d be happy to hang out with in the pub - a warm, self-effacing humour exuding from the stage in the brilliant A Reality Tour DVD, or being wickedly droll with Ricky Gervais in Extras. 

Perhaps, though, we don’t want Bowie to be anything more than the slightly ethereal figure he became in the late 1960s and in his ’70s pomp. Even in his final music video, for the Blackstar single Lazarus (“Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can't be seen”, embracing his impending death, but managing to remain abstract, distancing himself from the rest of us mere mortals. And that, quite frankly, is alright with me.