Okay—let’s go back to Bowie. Oh! How I loved you, David Bowie! Even though the first time I knew of you was as Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and so I had a bit of a shock when I found out you’d done “Rebel Rebel” AS WELL. It was like finding out Kermit used to be in the Beatles. Which actually, if I think about it, is the fan-fic project I would like to work on next.
Imagine if you didn’t like David Bowie. Wouldn’t that be weird? Not to love David Bowie. Not to love David Bowie—one eye blasted, hair dyed ginger in the sink, gaying it up with Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops for “Starman.”
Not to love David Bowie—pale like bone, voice like ice breaking—singing “Heroes” in Berlin: the sound of mankind giving itself a standing ovation.
Not to love Bowie—stalking towards the microphone during the intro of “Let’s Dance”—looking as sharp as any human’s ever looked; an albino leopard whispering, “You know what? In three years, I’m going to play Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, in an outfit so tight my knackers will look like two badgers having a fight down my trousers—and I’m going to be fucking badass in that, too.”
People who don’t love David Bowie? I don’t even know what such a person would look like. Perhaps the person in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
On Saturday night, then, every person of reasonable mind in Britain watched BBC Two’s Five Years—a feature-length documentary on David Bowie, made up of “unseen outtakes and unused footage,” telling the story of five key years in Bowie’s life—’71–72, ’74–75, ’76–77, ’79–80, and ’82–83.
Chronological and prompt, we started in ’71, when Bowie had spent nearly a decade studying mime, acting, writing songs, walking around London in a dress, being a “thing”—trying to work out which one of the things will make David Bowie big.
Nineteen seventy-one is the year he realizes he never had to choose: the point of David Bowie is that he will do all of these things—and that is the big thing. What will free him up is realizing that, for him, it’s actually easier to create something dazzlingly, grindingly, blastingly new—to take pop to the Kabuki theaters of Japan, the German avant-garde, into space—than it is to try and just be some kind of redux Anthony Newley. He’s not going to fit in anywhere—he’s going to terraform a whole new world, and take pop with him.
One of the first people he tries to explain this to is Andy Warhol—and Warhol’s having none of it. In black-and-white footage you can’t quite believe you’re seeing, in ’71, in New York, Bowie and Warhol have a standoff, on camera.
Warhol is trying to direct Bowie in a film he’s making—Bowie tries to direct him back. In the end, because it’s his film, Warhol shuts Bowie down. Bowie retaliates by filing a take where he mimes how he feels about this: ripping open his guts, spilling his entrails on the floor, and then pulling out his still-beating heart and throwing it up into the sky. Man, these are the pop-cultural moments I live for—David Bowie bitching off Andy Warhol with an angry mime. When the gays take over the world, all wars will be conducted like this.
But fuck Warhol—it’s ’71–72. Bowie’s not messing around. He’s got other fish to fry. He’s back to the UK for Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, “Moonage Daydream.”
Rick Wakeman—rubicund, crumpled; a keyboard Falstaff—appears, telling us about playing piano on “Life on Mars.” How absolutely illogical and astonishing the chord sequence is—on both “But the film is a saddening bore” and “Sailors! Fighting in the dance hall,” the song goes somewhere no one else on earth would ever take it: a violent, swooningly vertical takeoff into genius.
“It really is a piano player’s dream,” Wakeman says—newly agape at how confounding it is. He stares down at his hands. “I must go home and learn it.”
More footage, all previously unseen—Bowie in lapis lazuli trousers with his tits out, singing “Queen Bitch”—“Oh, God! I could do better than that!” Lots of shots of him putting makeup on, going crackers on the Rimmel as you murmur, “Rewind on the blusher, love.” He kills Ziggy at the end of ’73. His scale is vast, fast—how is he doing this while being so utterly off his tits?
“He even ate breakfast like a superstar,” Woody Woodmansey, the Spiders from Mars drummer, recalls, which is quite a commitment if Bowie was eating, say, shredded wheat, or kippers.
’74–75: “David Bowie was never meant to be. He’s like a Lego kit. There is no definitive David Bowie.”
This new Bowie, six months later, is pale, cadaver-like—so thin his teeth look fat. He doesn’t look like he’s eating breakfast like a superstar anymore. He doesn’t look like he’s eating breakfast at all. You’ve never seen anyone look more ill on cocaine. It practically crystallizes on his skin, like salt on salt fish.
“He was the whitest man I’d ever seen,” his new guitarist, Carlos Alomar, says. “I’m not talking pink-white. I’m talking translucent. I said, ‘You look like shit. You need food. You need to come to my house.’”
But Bowie’s driven—“I was tumbling over myself with ideas.” These are his soul years: the heart is warm, even though his face is frozen. “Young Americans,” “Fame,” “Golden Years.” He appears on The Dick Cavett Show, coked to the gills—sniffing constantly. At one point, you can see a sniff dislodges an old nugget from his nose—it hits the back of his throat, and you can see him register the acrid blast before chewing on it. He has a cane, with which he traces patterns on the ground.
“What are you drawing?” Cavett asks, clearly scared of Bowie. Bowie is so blasted he can’t even look him in the eye. “Don’t look on the carpet. I drew something awful on it.”
Cracked Actor, The Man Who Fell to Earth: “I knew Bowie had serious problems at the time—I just told him to put his clothes on and walk right through it,” director Nicolas Roeg says. Have I said before how amazing all the footage is? Bowie being interviewed by Russell Harty, and Harty getting the song titles wrong: “Your new song, ‘Golden Tears.’”
“‘Golden Years,’” Bowie corrects—a face on a wooden-cased TV screen on a table on Harty’s show, with a poor transatlantic connection.
Bowie ends up introducing the song himself, in his cut-glass voice. Los Angeles is not good for him.
“People took so much coke they couldn’t talk. They’d just . . . whistle.”
’76–77. LA exited. Berlin. Bowie stripped down in jeans, riding around on a bicycle. The cold, clean air of Brian Eno’s production—the introduction of new instruments, and Robert Fripp’s high, spiraling exposed-wires solo on “Heroes.” Co-producer Tony Visconti calls Bowie and Eno—he has a new toy for the studio, called a Harmonizer.
“What does it do?” Bowie asks.
“It fucks with the fabric of time,” Visconti replies. They book him onto the next flight, and make Low—a new reset button for pop. Half instrumental, pistons hissing on “Sound and Vision.” Always crashing in the same car.
’79–80. Bowie on The Kenny Everett Video Show in extreme close-up, still with his Steve Buscemi teeth, looking astonishingly beautiful, playing “Ashes to Ashes” and pretending to be scared. Or perhaps he is scared? You still can’t tell when Bowie’s being Bowie—or Bowie. It’s endlessly beguiling. If you were never actually in love with him before you see this clip, you will be afterwards. Still only thirty-three, and he’s regenerated ten times, all alone: no George, John, or Ringo to hang out with. His only bandmates are his massive genitals, which in these trousers seem even bigger than before: as if a small Shetland pony were living in his knickers. Maybe one was. Hot tramp! I love you so.
It ends with ’82–83—Bowie on the Serious Moonlight Tour, where he comes onstage and attacks “Let’s Dance” like a matador putting a sword right through a bull’s heart. How did Andy Warhol not think this would work? Couldn’t he see all of this even then, in Bowie’s blasted pupil?
’71–72, ’74–75, ’76–77, ’79–80, and ’82–83. The date stamp for the invention of much of modern pop culture. Duran Duran, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Daft Punk—whenever pop is ambitious, whenever pop is odd, whenever pop dresses up, whenever pop looks like nothing you’ve seen before, it is using tools and a framework largely built by one man from Bromley with tombstone teeth, and his name borrowed from a fixed-blade fighting knife. Did I say I love David Bowie? I love David Bowie. I loved this hour and a half with David Bowie.