In 1981, at a party at Bowie’s loft in Manhattan, former Blondie bassist Gary Lachman got into an argument with the singer about Colin Wilson. “He goes around at night and traces pentagrams on people’s doorsteps,” Bowie told Lachman. “He draws down the ectoplasm of dead Nazis and fashions homunculi.” Lachman replied that he didn’t think Wilson was into that sort of thing. “Oh yes he is,” said Bowie. “I know for a fact that he heads a coven in Cornwall.” When Lachman disagreed again, he was asked to leave by two assistants.
Who is Colin Wilson? You might well ask. For about six weeks in 1956 he was the most famous intellectual in Britain. His big success was The Outsider, an ambitious study of nihilistic loners in art, literature, and philosophy from Albert Camus (see p. 5) to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky. A firm believer in his own genius, Wilson was an autodidact who left school at sixteen and avoided national service by pretending to be gay. He wrote The Outsider in the Reading Room of the British Museum while living in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath. Glowing reviews sent it to the top of the bestseller lists.
Closer inspection revealed it to be a bit rubbish—“second-rate, off-the-peg philosophy from start to finish,” as the critic Terry Eagleton recently put it in The Guardian—and Wilson’s second book, Religion and the Rebel, flopped resoundingly. But for generations of students The Outsider has functioned more or less effectively as a primer on existentialism in its most romantic-heroic mode. And the outsider as defined by Wilson does sound distractingly like Bowie, or at least how Bowie chose to project himself at various points in his career: “The Outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an ‘I’ but it is not his true ‘I’. His main business is to find his way back to himself.” Over time, Wilson’s repertoire expanded to include serial killers, UFOs, Nazis, and the occult—all big Bowie obsessions.
Disappointingly for Bowie, when the film director Nicolas “The Man Who Fell to Earth” Roeg ran into Wilson and mentioned that Bowie was a fan, Wilson replied that he was unable to return the compliment as he had no interest in rock music and no idea who David Bowie was.