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. 

Future legend: David Bowie's Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)

As I would hope is well recognised, few bend at the knee more to the greatness of David Bowie than I. But there are some limits: the eye-watering Eur 266.99 being asked at my local record emporium for Where Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), the admittedly sumptuous second box set released today and covering The Dame's pre-Berlin, mid-Seventies career, which produced the studio albums Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station To Station.

To be fair, that Eur 266 does buy you 13 180g audiophile-quality vinyl discs, including these three albums plus The Gouster - the previously unreleased album that became Young Americans, TWO versions of the double album David Live (the 2005 reissue runs to three-discs) and the double Live Nassau Coliseum '76, plus another collection of rarities, Re:Call 2. For the digitally-minded (and those with smaller budgets) the collection is also available as a 12-CD package at a more modest Eur 129.99. Still, an expensive fortnight, following the release last week of Led Zeppelin's Complete BBC Sessions.

Of course, we're appealing to the über consumer here. Most self-respecting Bowie fans - and even those with only a casual interest - will have the three studio albums already. But, inevitably, interest in The Dame has piqued with his death, and if that brings new appreciation for his canon via these luxury re-releases, so much the better.

What makes this particular box set interesting is where Bowie was in this period. It began with his move, first to New York and then Los Angeles, to make America his base of operations. This, as Paul Tryka detailed in his excellent Starman biography, saw Bowie consumed by compulsive behaviour, including wild spending, Olympic cocaine consumption and numerous obsessions with people (Mick Jagger) and themes (post-apocalyptic dystopia). Diamond Dogs was the first manifestation of the latter: his eighth album, it was built on a fascination with George Orwell's 1984 and the bleak vision of the (then) future it depicted. 

Diamond Dogs also appeared after Bowie had theatrically 'retired' the Ziggy Stardust character, but in doing so he merely moved on to a new guise, the whey-faced Thin White Duke, eschewing the glam rock that Bowie had pursued in the previous two years. Though recorded at London's Olympic Studios (as well as some work at Ludolph Studios in Nederhorst den Berg, a tiny village in the rural Amsterdam hinterland...and just down the road from where I used to live), Diamond Dogs had a noticeably looser sound, pointing towards the 'Americanization' that would evolve further with Young Americans and its notable shift towards soul and funk.

For some of Bowie's earlier cheerleaders, the Diamond Dogs era marked a less welcome change. John Peel, who'd been one of the strongest champions at the outset of Bowie's career, remarked that Bowie's cover of the Eddie Floyd soul classic Knock On Wood, and released as a single off David Live, was "lazy, arrogant and impertinent". But it was on the tour that produced David Live that Bowie appeared in one of the most fascinating - and disturbing - documentaries ever made about a rock musician: Alan Yentob's Cracked Actor. 

Made for the BBC's Omnibus arts magazine, Yentob captured an emaciated Bowie, deep in the grip of cocaine addition, on tour in California, with semi-lucid interviews in the back of limousines interspersed with footage of Bowie performing the Diamond Dogs title track along with earlier entries from the canon like Space Oddity, Aladdin Sane and John, I'm Only Dancing (Again). Sadly, Cracked Actor has never been released on home media, although some dodgy bootlegs - recorded off the last BBC screening - lurk online. See it if you can, but be prepared to see a Bowie in a very different space to the jovial, blokey star of chat shows in the late 1990s.

Who Can I Be Now? could very easily have been called something like 'The American Years'. His desire to explore contemporary American music stretches back to the demise of Ziggy Stardust, when the singer was already looking for a new vehicle. Who Can I Be Now? is one of the tracks on The Gouster, the album that Bowie worked on immediately after the Dogs tour, and is a title reflecting his need to reinvent himself. The album took him to Philadelphia's Sigma Sound studio to immerse in the local music culture with producer Tony Visconti, with whom he had reunited to work with on the David Live release. Though The Gouster was never released, it contained early versions of Right, Can You Hear Me and Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with a reworking of John, I'm Only Dancing (Again) and an early version of Young Americans.

It would be a stretch to say that The Gouster alone warrants buying the Who Can I Be Now? package, but for Bowie completists it marks a curious bridging point between Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. It was, according to Visconti, an attempt at soul - "plastic soul", as Bowie would later waspishly brand it - and even its title (a reference to African-American fashion in the 1960s) was meant to represent a statement of attitude. 

It's eventual release is more, though, than a work in progress, but the reason why it didn't appear in its originally recorded form was partly down to Bowie recording too many longer songs to fit a single album, and also to the capricious state Bowie was in at the time. Some of the songs recorded for The Gouster were taken into a New York studio with John Lennon, who gave the prototypes outright Philly soul sound (which included guitar work from Carlos Alomar and then-unknown singer Luther Vandross) more of a pop feel. But given how much we still don't know about Bowie, even the presence of a few previously unreleased tracks interpolates gaps in the fan's understanding of the musical - and physical - state Bowie was in between 1974 and 1976.

The cocaine that Bowie was hoovering up at this point in his life may have affected his increasingly paranoid personality, but not necessarily his creativity. After Young Americans came Station To Station. Lasting only six tracks and running for just under 38 minutes, it is both a demonstration of  Bowie's impatience to release new material, but also the inventiveness with which he was still streets ahead of any of his peers at the time. Golden Years still sounds, 40 years later, box-fresh, while TVC 15 stands out for its funk and pace, and remains one of my favourite Bowie songs of all time. And his cover of Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind became so distinct it's now hard to think of how Simone recorded it to begin with (a live version on the Bowie At The Beeb limited edition three-CD set in 2000 saw Bowie - accompanied by his brilliant band of the time - teetering between torch song and rock epic).

Thematically, Station To Station found Bowie toying obsessively with yet new literary inspiration, namely the works of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche, and reflects a state of mind in some degree of turmoil. It's hard not to wonder how much of that was the result of the cocaine. But the album - which precedes the Berlin trilogy and its starker sound and vision (sorry...) - also evolves the funk that had been the hallmark of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. Ever the magpie, Bowie had become interested in German industrial rock and the synths and rhythms of Kraftwerk, the influence of which can be heard in spirit on Station To Station. However, even Bowie admitted that the album was also a statement of detachment. 

Towards the end of the album's tour (from which the Live Nassau Coliseum 76 release was culled), Bowie arrived at London's Victoria Station in an open-topped Mercedes and was photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Having previously been questioned by police for possession of Nazi memorabilia as well as being quoted saying that the UK "...could benefit from a Fascist leader", many felt that, along with his somewhat stark, black and white stage aesthetic, Bowie was indeed leaning to the extreme right. Not long after, a drunk Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell's notorious comments on immigration, leading to the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. The popular perception became that Britain's rock elite were not as cool as their fans had expected them to be.

Bowie would later dismiss the Victoria Station episode as a case of a photographer catching him at an unfortunate angle. Others would simply put it all down to a rock star's descent into cocaine-induced mania (and portrayed, inadvertently, by Bob Geldof's 'Pink' in Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall). No wonder, then, that Bowie's next move would be to decamp with Iggy Pop to Berlin - then Europe's drug gateway - though to sober up, both chemically but also creatively.

It's hard, then, not to view the music contained on the numerous discs of Who Can I Be Now? as the result of a rock star in stereotypical drug-addled exploration. But whereas the mountains of coke being taken by the rock music community in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s led to some of music's blandest output, the reason why Bowie continues to be deservedly exalted is loud and clear in this collection. Whatever his state, whatever his application of outside influences, he was, between '74 and '76, still the most unique performer in rock and roll, then or since.