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Bowie in New York, September 1980, during his starring role in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man. Photograph: Marty Lederhandler/AP
Bowie in New York, September 1980, during his starring role in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man. Photograph: Marty Lederhandler/AP

'When I joined the NME in the 70s, Bowie was an obsession'

This article is more than 8 years old

With his endless reinvention – from alien androgyne to exiled Berliner – David Bowie provided the soundtrack for a generation. Here veteran music writer and editor Neil Spencer remembers pop’s chameleon

Read tributes to David Bowie from Blondie, Kate Bush and more

Among the first tributes paid to David Bowie after the announcement of his death last Monday morning was that by David Cameron, who spoke of Bowie as “a genius who provided the soundtrack of our lives”, citing his own days at Eton listening to a friend’s copy of Hunky Dory.

Putting aside the unlikely image of the prime minister rocking out to Queen Bitch, Cameron was shrewd enough to recognise that someone very special had checked out, and that the nation’s collective heart would face the working week sorely bruised. It made quite a contrast to the silence with which Margaret Thatcher greeted the assassination of John Lennon a generation earlier. If Cameron’s remarks show how deeply assimilated into our culture pop has become, Bowie’s death highlights how far pop’s powers of subversion and invention have atrophied. Over the tempestuous decade of his 1970s glory years, Bowie illuminated popular culture in a way unequalled since, and which is unimaginable in the X Factor era.

Bowie didn’t just entertain, he intrigued and provoked, cross-pollinating his music with painting, literature, film, fashion and stage. From the outset he maintained that he was an artist who just happened to be working in pop, and when he told the Guardian in 1986 that “Of all the art forms, rock is the living art form”, he was the proof of his words.

As Ziggy Stardust he became the first sci-fi rock star, his androgynous “alien” guise a metaphor for taboo sexuality – or simply for being a teenager. When he put his arm round guitarist Mick Ronson during a 1972 Top of the Pops performance of Starman, he beamed the sexual revolution direct into the nation’s living rooms.

This week’s deluge of tributes, tweets, anecdotes and street shrines attest to the depth of Bowie’s impact, the public sense of loss made pungent by a last album, Blackstar, released two days before his death, on Bowie’s 69th birthday, and showcased by a racked, haunting video (for the single Lazarus) that made a jaw-dropping finale to a dazzling career.

In retrospect, it’s mildly shocking to recall that even as he cut his fearsome trajectory through 70s pop – shape-shifting between Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dog, Young American, Thin White Duke and the “Berlin trilogy” of Low, Heroes and Lodger – Bowie’s career was largely off the radar of the mainstream media. Cracked Actor – Alan Yentob’s BBC documentary of the 1974 US tour, revealing a frail, coke-addled Bowie on the edge of dissolution, as weird and remote as his role in The Man Who Fell to Earth – was very much the exception.

Diamond Dog days: performing Rebel Rebel for Dutch TV show Top Pop, 1974. Photograph: Sunshine/Rex/Shutterstock

Mostly, it was left to the music press to chronicle Bowie’s dizzying pirouettes. Here he was a fixture, an obsession: when I joined NME in the mid-70s, Bowie, Roxy Music and the Stones took it in turns to own the cover. Any excuse would do – a record, a concert, a poll-win – while in writer Charles Shaar Murray, the paper had a personal hotline to Bowie that extended to hanging out at recording sessions.

When Bowie’s fractious mother, Peggy, fell out with her famous son over his alleged negligence, it was in the pages of NME, not the tabloids, that she waged war. And when Bowie returned to Britain from the US in May 1976, it was NME that published a photo (under the headline “Heil and Farewell”) suggesting that Bowie, standing in a Mercedes convertible at Victoria station, had given a fascist salute. Eyewitness accounts suggest he didn’t, but remarks he had recently made to the Swedish press – “Britain could benefit from a fascist leader… I believe very strongly in fascism” – had made him a marked man. With the National Front on the march, and protest reggae booming in Brixton and Birmingham, pop was becoming politicised and twitchy. Eric Clapton’s unsavoury observations on immigrants and the formation of Rock Against Racism were just a few months down the line.

Bowie apologised many times for his remarks, blaming drugs for bringing him “to the edge of calamity” – but absolutist notions had long haunted his work. On Hunky Dory he had warned “Gotta make way for the Homo Superior” (Nietzsche’s ubermensch) while casting a disdainful eye on the masses (“the mice in their million hordes”). An occult dabbler (“dressed in Crowley’s uniform”), Bowie clearly relished the role of “superbeing”, living on the edge, pushing himself ever harder. 1976’s awesome Station to Station found him in Wagnerian mode, imperiously gazing over mountains and oceans, declaiming “the European canon is here” while “driving like a demon” between the stations (sephiroth) of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, “from Kether to Malkuth”.

In reality he was an emaciated, snow-blind wreck, cowering in his rented Beverly Hills home in terror of psychic attack from Hollywood warlocks, exorcising an unwelcome demon from his swimming pool. Small wonder that Station to Station also included the fervent Word on a Wing, aptly described by its creator, a former Buddhist, as “a prayer”.

It’s easy to view the rest of Bowie’s career as a long retreat from the excesses and dark currents of that time. Assessing Cracked Actor in 1987, Bowie expressed amazement that he was still around. “When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it; I came so close to throwing myself away, physically.”

His move to Berlin in late 1976 was an attempt to put distance between himself and his demons. Here, living in a flat above a car parts shop in grimy Schöneberg, he planned to clean up and get healthy, a mission hopelessly compromised by the arrival of an old cohort, Iggy Pop. Berlin proved good for Bowie nonetheless. Gradually, the powders were edged out, to be replaced by booze; there was a final split with his wife, Angie; and his formidable creativity surged back.

Thin White Duke: Bowie at Wembley Empire Pool, London, May 1976. Photograph: Neil LIbbert/The Observer

Low, released in early 1977, was a startling change of direction, its bleak electronica the product of an alliance with Brian Eno. Ever obsessive, NME ran two opposing reviews of the record, the late Ian MacDonald finding it “stunningly beautiful…the sound of Sinatra reproduced by Martian computers”. Hot on its heels came Heroes, yoking Eno’s experimentalism to more conventional songcraft in its evocation of life on the cold war’s front line.

Bowie’s monochrome edginess meant he sailed through the insurrections of punk. Where other titans became “Old Farts” overnight – “No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977” as the Clash had it – Bowie stayed revered. He watched as post-punk acts like Joy Division and New Order borrowed Low for their template, and New Romantics like Culture Club, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet borrowed his clothes. Bowie’s children all.

His musical career interrupted by forays into stage and screen – The Elephant Man on Broadway, the campy first world war drama Just a Gigolo, described as “all my 32 Elvis movies rolled into one” – by the early 80s Bowie needed to reassert his authority, his brand. A label change helped him to do so, with 1983’s Let’s Dance, a calculatedly commercial offering cut with Chic’s Nile Rodgers and based on Chubby Checker’s Let’s Twist Again. The accompanying video, shot in the Australian outback with a storyline about native Australians, repositioned Bowie from spooky alien to mature humanist, the message reinforced by his tanned, healthy appearance.

Let’s Dance remains Bowie’s bestselling album. He would have other creative peaks, but not before a series of chronic, justly overlooked albums – Tonight, Never Let Me Down, Tin Machine – that found him floundering for relevance and even a decent song. His tours, for all their technical innovation and theatricality, hinted that serial experimentalist Bowie was being superseded by recycler-of-old-hits Bowie.

It was surely no coincidence that his return to form, on 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, came alongside marriage to Somali supermodel Iman Abdulmajid. Their relationship marked the start of what Bowie called his “real life”, one that saw him happy to renounce his claim to any pop crown. Speaking to the Guardian in 1997 he put it this way: “You have had an extraordinary life, one a boy from your background could never dream of, so you might as well decide you are now going to have a real, real life.”

His interviews from this era have a delightful quality, full of self-deprecation and jaunty humour. “There’s no mystique left now, not even a tattered raiment,” he told a baffled Jeremy Paxman in 1999, “and frankly, I’m a lot better for it. Mystique is not very good for one’s personal life.”

As a young man. Bowie changed his name from David Jones at 18, to avoid being mistaken for the Monkees’ Davy Jones. Photograph: RB/Redferns

Bowie met the Britpop era with a sartorial nod – a distressed union jack frock coat by Alexander McQueen – and a wave of dismissal in the shape of a new album propelled by drum’n’bass rhythms. “I thought, it’s the end of the millennium and we’re still playing like we’re the Rolling Stones,” said collaborator Reeves Gabrels of the shift, with 1999’s Hours as the post-rave chill-out album.

Bowie had other calls on his time. An early enthusiast of the internet – “an alien life form” – he launched his BowieNet platform in 1998, flushed with funds from leasing the rights to his back catalogue the previous year. The arrival of his daughter, Alexandria, in 2000 opened a joyous new dimension, though he kept working, delivering 2002’s Heathen, a dreamy confection of old and new material, and 2003’s Reality, a crafted call to “face the music and dance”.

And then silence. A heart attack during a 2004 tour of Europe required major surgery and effectively shut down public Bowie for the best part of a decade. His previous few albums had been streaked with intimations of mortality that now became more alarming. There were occasional bursts of activity – recorded duets, final onstage performances with Alicia Keys in 2006 and David Gilmour in 2007 – but mostly it was silence. Bowie retreated into the family apartment in New York, to be occasionally spotted in anonymous garb on Manhattan’s streets. There were rumours about his health, but he and Iman (who has her own cosmetics business) removed themselves from public life.

Bowie broke the silence in 2013 with The Next Day, a gnarly rock album spitting anger at warmongers, zombie celebrities and The Reaper with equal venom, as he prepares to “stumble to the graveyard and lay down by my parents”, adding archly, “just remember duckies, everybody gets got”. So this week has shown.

Few fans of The Dame would choose his last 20 years as their favourite chapter from a famously diverse career, yet for Bowie himself it was his truest era, his “real life”, partly because he was no longer obliged to be David Bowie. “I married David Jones, a totally different person,” said Iman.

Bowie kissed goodbye to David Jones at 18, changing his name partly to avoid confusion with the Monkees’ Davy Jones. In part, one suspects, he also wanted to shed the psychic burdens that weighed on his mother’s side of the family. His mother Peggy had two sisters who were sectioned, one confined after ECT treatment, another lobotomised for “nerves”. The treatment of mental health was a primitive practice back then. Bowie’s older half-brother Terry, to whom he was close (he was the subject of Jump They Say, and perhaps The Bewlay Brothers), suffered from schizophrenia and was also confined, just as Bowie was making his mark with Space Oddity in 1969. Madness became a recurring theme in Bowie’s work, providing him with the character of Aladdin Sane.

Bowie’s stage name was also part of showbiz, which had besotted him from boyhood. Like most of his generation, he became infected by the mutant spores of rock’n’roll – Buddy Holly and Little Richard were favourites – but he also loved the tinsel, glamour and artifice of old-time show business. He conceived Ziggy Stardust as a musical before realising he had to sing it himself, and would later shed his estuary yelp in favour of a neo-operatic baritone; his Presley-like cover of Nina Simone’s Wild Is the Wind became a signature song.

Those influences persisted until the end. Did David Bowie know that Elvis Presley (with whom he shared a birthday) had recorded a song, Black Star, for a 1960 western? Of course he did (the song, never issued, became Flaming Star). Is it relevant? Oh yes. “When a man sees his black star/he knows his time, his time has come/ Black star don’t shine on me… Give me time to make a few dreams come true.”

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