Who really was David Bowie?

He redefined 1970s pop/rock culture via his multiple personalities, says the author, but this biography does little to enlighten readers about this elusive persona

BOWIE THE BIOGRAPHY
Author: Wendy Leigh
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 699

If the 1950s were the decade of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and the 1960s were the decade of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, then the 1970s were the decade of David Bowie. No other rock figure of that era had the kind of impact that Bowie had on music, popular culture, fashion and, indeed, society itself.

For instance, Bowie was the first pop/rock star to boast about being gay at a time when the likes of Elton John were cowering in the closet. He started the trend for rock stars to wear make-up onstage, a trend that became so pervasive in the 1970s that even Mick Jagger and Keith Richard began to line their eyes and glitter their noses.

Till Bowie came along, most rock concerts consisted of young white men shaking their legs awkwardly in front of a mike while belting out their hits (only a few copied the dance moves of such black stars as Tina Turner). It was Bowie, with his theatrical training, who converted the rock show into a spectacle.

Then, there was his influence on fashion. One of his first album covers had him wearing a dress to the horror of his American label, which demanded a new cover picture. By the time Bowie had created his famous personas — Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke and so on — designers were lining up to contribute to his vision.

To his credit, Bowie usually eschewed the obvious big names and went for lesser-known designers. He was the first major popular culture figure to recognise the importance of the Japanese aesthetic, bringing the designer Kansai Yamamoto to global attention. Every look Bowie created for himself was imitated by other designers and filtered down to the high street.

 And then, there was the music. Bowie had no one style. He started out performing novelty songs that could have been recorded by such titans of the 1960s musical theatre as Anthony Newley. He moved on to folkier material (“Starman”, “Life on Mars”) before creating the entire glam rock genre basing it on simple but heavy riffs (“Jean Genie”, “Diamond Dogs”)

By the mid-1970s, he had established that he could master any genre, from Stones-style rock (Rebel, Rebel) to soul (Young Americans) to electronic music, which he brought to public attention through his Berlin trilogy, which contained his masterpiece, “Heroes”. And that’s not including his stab at dance music with “Let’s Dance”, his most commercially successful album.

If anything characterised Bowie, it was his chameleon-like ability to go from one avatar to another. There was nothing of “Ziggy Stardust”, his most famous 1970s creation, in the beige-suited guy who sang “Let’s Dance” in the 1980s. They could have been two entirely different people. The looks, the music and even the man himself, kept changing beyond recognition.

Take, for instance, his claim to be gay. By the end of the 1970s, he was already qualifying it (“only Japanese men”, he told one interviewer). And by the 1980s, he claimed to be straight, suggesting that the gay period had only been a phase, or even, as some suggested, a pose. Certainly, he lived the last decades of his life in happy and entirely heterosexual domesticity with his second wife, the model Iman.

Any biographer of Bowie must begin his or her task by trying to answer the fundamental question of who the real Bowie was. Or perhaps, there wasn’t one: the poses themselves were the reality.

Bowie receives the Webby Lifetime Achievement award in 2007

  How, for instance, did Bowie, who had never before displayed any financial acumen, launch what came to be known as Bowie bonds? He issued $55 million worth of these bonds and promised buyers a return of 7.9 per cent annually against the royalties from his pre-1990 back catalogue. The bonds were freely tradable and they gave Bowie cash upfront while creating a new kind of financial instrument, unprecedented in both the music and the financial markets.

You won’t find any answers to those questions in this tawdry little book, seemingly put together entirely from Google searches and trawls through clipping files. Wendy Leigh never met Bowie nor was she given access to those who knew him well. Nearly everything here is third-hand.

Moreover, Leigh has no real interest in the music or, indeed, in finding the real Bowie. Worse still, she seems to have typed “David Bowie Sex” into her search engine because most of the book is about Bowie’s sex life.

But even in this rather restrictive and sordid area, there is little that has not been published before. And people who want to read these stories about groupies and orgies are better off with Backstage Passes, a tell-all memoir by Bowie’s first wife Angie, which includes the now famous story of her returning home one morning to find Bowie in bed with Mick Jagger (the unshockable Angie says she went off to the kitchen to make them breakfast).

Bowie launches into his first solo song of a six-week concert tour of North America in 1995

Leigh wrote her book when Bowie was alive. But now that he has gone, there is a perfect opportunity for a serious biographer to get his friends and family to finally open up and tell us about the real Bowie, the man behind the personas. His wife Iman once said she was not married to David Bowie but to David Jones ( Bowie's real name). We can only guess what she meant and speculate about how different Jones was from Bowie.

Hopefully somebody is already at work on a book that solves the central mystery of David Bowie: who was he, really?