The Age of Bowie

There were two books on Lou Reed and two on Marc Bolan in the pop music section of my library and an obvious David Bowie-shaped hole. I had forgotten I'd ordered something to fill that so when it turned up it was a surprise Christmas. I had chosen the Gospel According to Paul Morley. If John Peel was the avid collector and like a watcher of the skies for all things new or arcane and Stuart Maconie was the super-annuated anorak, Morley is the pop critic as T.S. Eliot, a cultural scribe going deep into meaning and significance. He is also far too much of a devotee of Bowie not to tell us everything he thinks at some length.

We are on page 69 before the detailed biography starts and all we've had by way of preamble is Morley letting himself count the ways that he can describe how Bowie is forever 'other', not even himself for he immediately subverts and moves on from being one Bowie to being the next, having been David Jones and other names before he was that. It is excessive, if something can't be pinned down, to spend quite so long not doing so.

The biography is useful and instructive but Morley is like a student intent on making everything in his essay pertinent to his thesis. At the age of 3,  young David is found by Mrs. Jones putting on her make-up and after that every anecdote is laden with significance for how it contributed to, or was an early indicator of, the later Bowie.

Like The Beatles and Marc Bolan, he serves a long appenticeship before, after several years of obscurity and failed projects, he becomes an overnight sensation, each incarnation for Morley containing some ingredient of the eventual Bowie. And why wouldn't it. We are all the product of our DNA, where we came from and everything that ever happened to us. So, dull, emotionally distant parents, dull Bromley but a vivid imagination and, like Rodney Trotter, just one 'O' level - in Art is the perfect recipe for a rare talent to become self-obsessed and develop the ambition to escape although thousands similar presumably didn't. Needs must these days that few would have quite as long to find their way and would be consigned to the call centre or the lowly clerical job that Lou returned to after the Velvet Underground before arriving at their Space Oddity.  One thing I hadn't known is that the significant teacher that saw something in young David Jones was the Art teacher father of Peter Frampton who, after being in a teenage band with our hero, for a while sold millions more records than he did by way of some vapid soft rock and a gadget that for unexplained reason he made vocal noises come through his wah-wah pedal instead of doing a guitar solo.

Morley's account will be worth the time and effort, hagiography though it may be and probably not filling the Bowie-shaped hole as it doesn't. But maybe that failure, which tends to occur in Shakespeare biography, too, is the point. David Bowie's art was the sort of art that looked as if it was art but the quote attributed to Mark Twain that 'Wagner's music is better than it sounds' might need to be adapted to 'Bowie's music is great because it sounds great' and that, in the highly contingent, fashion-conscious zeitgeist of pop culture from Andy Warhol to Damien and Tracey, Gilbert & George that's all it needs to do. The more one says about such things the more likely one's chances of saying something unnecessarily portentous multiply themselves exponentially. It's like when we used to go out to look at the pitch before a cricket match. It's best to look and just nod sagely rather than say 'there's some runs in that' before contributing very few to 52 All Out.

Somewhere below here it says that disc 1 of Best of Bowie, especially if we could add in Heroes from disc 2, is as good a disc's worth of pop music by a white artist there's ever been. Paul Morley is right to say that for 'our generation', his and mine, he's two and a half years older than me, Bowie was more important than The Beatles. Yes, I had Beatles wallpaper in my bedroom, was excited by She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah and Ringo was the funny one and my favourite but I was 5. That wasn't like Ch-Ch-Changes, Drive-in Saturday, Station to Station and, yes, Starman, though. 

They are, like Morley suggests Bowie is, both fake and real, alienated but with some sense of community and somehow impossible to define, maybe like a Rembrandt self-portrait, so it might be a bad idea to try to define it and better to just 'know'.

Marc Bolan seemed to simply enjoy being top of the pops for a few years and said a few cryptic things in interviews but he was much more obviously joking than Bowie, who took his mystique more seriously, made himself look more 'art' than 'pop' and that is probably why it's always seemed possible to love T. Rex more than Bowie but admire Bowie more than T. Rex.