More than any other rock star, David Bowie was intent
on writing his own story, and fostering his legend, through his careful control
of his musical output and image. Starman, Paul Trynka’s unfussy 2011 biography gets behind the mystery and presents him as a
cultural sponge whose lack of natural musical talent was compensated for by a
genius for marrying styles and for coming up with grand concepts.
The book records
a life packed with incident and activity, detailing the various false starts of
the 1960s, his eventual ‘sudden’ emergence as icon and innovator in 1972, the
frequently addled years of super-charged creativity that characterised the rest
of that decade, the moribund eighties, the reinvigorated nineties, the more
reclusive domestic years of the new millennium and the late creative and
commercial resurgence in the three years prior to his final disappearance.
There is a lot of fascinating material in this compulsively readable book which creates a
beguiling picture of an intellectually restless and ferociously driven
individual who, in common with many great artists, was addicted to taking risks,
to following impulses (and to taking the ‘contrary’ action) and who tended the
get phenomenal results from his various collaborators.
Trynka gives credit
to Mick Ronson for fuelling the sound that made him a major star, to Tony
Visconti’s production wizardry on his most daring records, to ex-wife Angie for
helping a reluctant Bowie to go for broke with his extraordinary image in the
early to mid-1970s. Brian Eno, Nile Rodgers, Carlos Alomar, Mike Garson, the
other Spiders and manager Tony de Fries are also given their dues. While many
musicians feel they were not properly acknowledged for their input into his
greatest recordings, Trynka does make the fair observation that few of them
produced anything as interesting without Bowie’s encouragement and the
experimental atmosphere he created in studio. And there is much made of his
successful role in helping to rehabilitate the careers of Lou Reed and
especially Iggy Pop, whose chaotic 1980s provides an intriguing counterpoint to
the carefully-planned and tightly-controlled world of Bowie at the same time.
His hunger for success
and artistic experimentation is complemented by a hunger for physical
gratification in the form of sex, cigarettes, coffee, cocaine and alcohol and
like so many successful people, one is left marvelling at his physical
strength. There are moments when he appears to teeter on the brink of mental
collapse (a period spent holed up in L.A. with cocaine paranoia in 1975 is
perhaps the nadir) but unlike many others is able to haul himself up and move
onto the next project.
Like all human
beings, he is a complex and it will take years before a genuinely definitive
biography will be written about him, and Trynka gives him the benefit of the
doubt whenever some contentious issue emerges such as his aunt’s accusation
that he neglected his mentally unstable step-brother, his long-term falling out
with Iggy Pop, his ex-wife Angie’s scornful remarks about his behaviour, his
refusal to play at the Mick Ronson tribute concert, his sometimes cruel
dismissal of musical partners (often attributed to drug problems), and his early embrace of the type of security
entourage that became de rigeur for
superstar musicians in the 1980s. It’s possible that Trynka, a working
journalist, hoping someday for an interview with his reclusive subject, decided
that it might be in his favour to be even-handed in his approach. The last two chapters of the revised edition,
written shortly after Bowie’s death, in which Trynka gives a brief account of
his re-emergence from domestic semi-retirement with two acclaimed albums before
dying, feel understandably rushed, – there will be much more to say about this
extraordinary late period in which the artist embarked on one final act of
self-mythologising.
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