A Bowie biopic? Start cringing now

No sooner have I stopped reflecting on the beatific glow created by Francis Whately's wonderful David Bowie documentary, Finding Fame, on Saturday evening that I discover - belatedly, it seems - that there are ghouls abound planning a biopic about The Dame.

I have form on such things: rock star biopics, in particular, make me cringe. Even the supposedly good ones, like What’s Love Got To Do With It, La Bamba, The Doors or Control. The trouble with them, usually, is that they attempt to animate characters who are or were, by nature, animated already. Even Bowie himself once said "They never seem to get them right." So, did we really need a biopic about Queen, a band whose lead singer took flamboyance and excess to new extremes and which were pretty much widely known already? Frankly, I could have just watched a compilation of clips of Queen playing live, as that is what counted. However salacious an existence Freddy Mercury led, the biopic that got made turned it into something of a cartoon, albeit with a strong central performance by Rami Malik. We didn’t, however, need to see Mercury's life re-enacted when a documentary of the depth and quality of Whately's Bowie trilogy would have served the purpose far better.

Later this year we will get Rocketman, described as "an epic musical fantasy about the uncensored human story of Sir Elton John’s breakthrough years." Made by the same team responsible for the entertaining Eddie The Eagle, and starring Taron Egerton (who played Eddie Edwards) as Elton John, it too smacks of the superfluous. Any serious biographer or documentary maker could do a better job of recording John's life than any live cartoon about him. Which is what fills me with absolute dread about Stardust, the film announced last month that would focus on Bowie's first trip to America in 1971. It certainly won’t be about Bowie's music: Salon Pictures, who are making the film, said in a somewhat terse statement that: "The film was written as an ‘origins story’ about the beginning of David’s journey as he invented his Ziggy Stardust character, and focuses on the character study of the artist, as opposed to a hits driven ‘music’ biopic.” The statement added: "We would like to clarify that this film is not a biopic, it is a moment-in-time film at a turning point in David’s life, and is not reliant on Bowie’s music”. Salon also make the clarification that Stardust will use "...period music and songs that Bowie covered, but not his original tracks." In other words, 'we don’t have the rights to use Bowie's music'.

Duncan Jones, Bowie's film director son, poured ice cold water on the project last month, tweeting: "Pretty certain nobody has been granted music rights for ANY biopic... I would know." followed by "I'm not saying this movie is not happening. I honestly wouldn't know. I'm saying that as it stands, this movie won't have any of dads music in it, & I can't imagine that changing." "If you want to see a biopic without his music," he added in another tweet, "or the families [sic] blessing, that's up to the audience." Bowie's lifelong friend George Underwood (who, as a schoolboy, was the cause of the singer's permanently dilated pupil, leading to the myth that he had different coloured eyes) has also waded in, telling the NME that he was dreading the film: "They never seem to get those right. Although I did like the Freddie Mercury one [Bohemian Rhapsody], but they’re never accurate. All of the books about David are copies of things that just aren’t quite right then it gets worse and worse.” Francis Whately himself has called it correctly, telling the NME that biopics like Stardust will only emphasise the "wrong aspects" of Bowie's life and career. “What I’m glad to have been able to do is make three 90-minute films on David Bowie as a musician, the artist, not anything else. That’s what’s important."

Johnny Flynn, best known for TV's Vanity Fair and Les Miserables is slated to play Bowie in Stardust. As Malek demonstrated in Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, with the right voice coaching and prosthetics, Hollywood can turn you into anyone. But Bowie - just like Mercury - was distinctive throughout his career. It’s what made his career. He went from character to character, constantly reinventing himself, adopting new masks and costumes in the process. Ziggy Stardust was, after all, one of those characters, a vessel for Bowie to play out his imagination through, musically and theatrically, and one of the most powerful memes ever devised in popular art. Frankly, we don’t need an actor impersonating that, even if with the editorial intent of informing the audience. Safe to say I, for one, will be avoiding Stardust like the plague.

Watch that man

When he died, enigmatically two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his prophetic final album Blackstar, the world re-examined David Bowie, as is the way when legends pass away. The process was both cathartic and informing, and it perhaps woke a consciousness that Bowie was more than just another dead rock star. Because he had been more than just a rock star to begin with.

The somewhat inevitable, but none the less enjoyable reissuing of his albums in a series of chronological box sets, starting with Five Years (1969–1973) in 2015 and most recently Loving The Alien (1983–1988), has enabled the ardent Bowie fan to reassess in depth the chapters of reinvention that made Bowie, over the course of the better part of 50 years as a recording artist, one of the most fascinating acts of the pop and rock age. I probably don’t need to declare my interest here: this and my previous blog plundered their titles from The Dame. But the stream of biography that has continued to flow since his death in 2016, along with the myriad re-releases, has been nothing but a celebration, though most has focused on the Bowie everyone knows, the Bowie from Hunky Dory, through Ziggy and the Thin White Duke personas, to the Berlin trilogy, the '80s pop, the '90s experimentations with “urban” music, to his settling in late middle age with some of his most pleasing work and, from what we can gather, the most personable David Bowie, comfortable in his skin, comfortable with his legacy of hits, funny, self-depreciating and quintessentially South London, a bloke you’d love to hang out with.

This latter Bowie was closer to David Robert Jones from Brixton than at any time since 1969 when his strumming 12-string guitar heralded the intro to Space Oddity, and the real David Bowie (even if he'd gone by that moniker since 1966) - the progressive Bowie - emerged. The period before that point tends to get less attention, but tonight at 9pm on BBC2, a film-length documentary addresses the period of the Jones-Bowie metamorphosis, and the path of theatrical character finding that followed. David Bowie: Finding Fame is the third and final film in Frances Whately's trilogy of superbly researched and edited retrospectives, following 2013's David Bowie: Five Years and 2017's David Bowie: The Last Five Years. Finding Fame focuses on his career at the outset of the name, David Bowie.

As David Jones, Bowie formed his first band, the Konrads, as a teenager, pretty much echoing how The Beatles and the Stones had built their reputations, playing live rock and roll at youth clubs and weddings. Shortly after leaving technical college, the young Jones joined the King Bees, building a repertoire of R'nB covers of Howlin Wolf and Willie Dixon numbers. After a stint in another blues outfit, the Mannish Boys, Jones joined a succession of beat bands, like The Lower Third, the Buzz and Riot Squad. By this time David Jones - or 'Davy' Jones, as he'd become - was growing somewhat dilettante, flirting with quitting pop music altogether and studying dance at Sadler's Wells, as well as falling under the twin influences of dance and mime artist Lindsay Kemp and the theatrical music of Anthony Newley.

Here is where Finding Fame comes in. Renaming himself David Bowie (conscious of not being confused with The Monkees' Davy Jones, drawing on American pioneer James Bowie for a name that would remain for the rest of his life), 1966 saw Bowie embark on a career that would, until Space Oddity three years later, struggle to find a form, even if the novelty single The Laughing Gnome would provide a minor hit (and a bi-product of Bowie’s affinity with Newley’s material). What emerges, however, is that Bowie was - and remained - restlessly in search of his style, and as his albums right up until, and including Blackstar, will attest, that relentless exploration was what produced such an amazing canon of work. Almost all of it was inspired by or, in some cases, pilfered from, the diverse musical and artistic influences Bowie devoured. Paul McCartney may have strayed little from the charming melodicism he brought to The Beatles, but even by the time he reached Blackstar, his 25th album, Bowie was still experimenting, that time with experimental jazz, on Let’s Dance with funk (working with Nile Rogers) or Young Americans with Philly soul. At essence, Bowie was a magpie street mod, collecting shiny trinkets as he went and feathering his nest with them, and forever changing his hair, his look, his style.

What informed and influenced this perpetual reinvention is explored by Whately in the documentary, calling on witnesses who were there at the creation of David Bowie, such as his first cousin and lifelong confidante Kristina Amadeus, and his highly influential ex-girlfriend Hermione Farthingale (yep, American friends, that’s a real name). There are also contributions from the late Lindsay Kemp, in his last on-camera interview, as well as longstanding friends like Geoff MacCormak and George Underwood, and the producers Mike Vernon, Tony Hatch and the producer who’d be most associated with him, Tony Visconti. Drummer Woody Woodmansey, the last surviving member of the Spiders From Mars also makes an appearance. Into the mix Whately adds previously unheard recordings and unpublished documents, such as the BBC’s report from a November 1965 audition by The Lower Third, in which they attempt Chim-Chim-Cheree from Mary Poppins. “Routine beat group,” sniffs one verdict, “strange choice of material. Amateur-sounding vocalist who sing wrong notes and out of tune. Group has nothing to recommend it.” That singer - then going by the name Davie Bowie, gets a bluff dismissal from another: “The singer is a cockney type but not outstanding enough.” However, another wrote: “The lead singer could interpret a beat number and a number like Chim-Chim-Cheree with equal facility.” Yep, that’ll be Bowie.

Equally anticipated in Whately's film is previously lost footage of an early '70s TV appearance. Though seemingly a bolt-on to the pre-fame (or pre-Fame?) context of the documentary, Whately has unearthed what could be considered the birth of Ziggy Stardust, a June 1972 spot on a long-forgotten ITV children's show, Lift Off With Ayshea. Most of the show's 144-edition run are believed to have been wiped, but with audio of Ziggy and the Spiders performing Starman emerging, a fragile tape was tracked down, which will hopefully make it into the final edit of Finding Fame (if it has been restored in time). Though Finding Fame concerns itself mostly with Bowie's emergence in the mid-60s, the Starman clip will be fascinating to see where that tousle-haired Brixton boy ended up, and in a TV performance that pre-dates the famous - or infamous - performance Top Of The Pops performance of the song, with Bowie outraging the nation with his arm draped around Mick Ronson's shoulder

There here will be more unearthed material to come in April when Parlophone releases Spying Through A Keyhole, a box set of seven-inch vinyl singles marking the 50th anniversary of Space Oddity, and containing nine previously unreleased recordings including early recordings of Bowie’s first meeting with Major Tom.

Drawing its title from a lyric in another early song, Love All Around, Spying Through A Keyhole includes recordings and acoustic home demos of songs like Mother Grey, In The Heat Of The Morning (an early Bowie song that some may already be familiar with), Goodbye Threepenny Joe, Love All Around, London Bye, Ta-Ta and two work-in-progress versions of Angel, Angel, Grubby Face. There are also a couple of versions of Space Oddity, including one which may be the first ever demo of the song that put Bowie firmly on the map.

As with the release of any archival material from any artist, this collection may well be one for the fans, but as a companion to the final Whately documentary, it will help sequence the DNA of the David Bowie that was to come, the Bowie that even know, three years after his death, continues to fascinate like few - if any - of his contemporaries in the rock era.