This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2025.
Bowie Odyssey 75, Simon Goddard, out now, Omnibus Press, £17.99
In the year of our Dame 1975, David Bowie was a sleepwalking cadaver in the blizzard-grip of cocaine addiction. Lost between New York and LA, and nowhere near reality, his psychotic, paranoid delusions were fuelled by a growing obsession with the Third Reich and all things occult.
A coven of witches haunted his every move. Satan lived in his swimming pool. The fridge was stocked with bottles of his own urine, lest the forces of evil steal it (for reasons only known to himself).
This is the David Bowie we meet in Bowie Odyssey 75, the sixth volume of Simon Goddard’s monumental year-by-year account of our hero’s eventful golden decade.
For those unfamiliar with the series, do not expect a conventional biography. Prepare yourselves instead for an utterly riveting and beautifully written piece of expressionistic docu-fiction all told in the propulsive present tense. Goddard places us inside Bowie’s addled mind while exploring – in meticulously researched and sometimes harrowing detail – thematic parallels with certain key events of 1975.
Nestling amid this swirling rotten funk of fame, fascism, murder, drugs, madness, mass unemployment and rampant Rollermania are the book’s other main characters: Bowie’s long-suffering and LOUD wife Angie; his agonisingly lonely and worried mother Peggy; nascent punk Svengali and shameless opportunist Malcolm McLaren; Tory leader Margaret Thatcher marching towards her everlasting reign of terror; Hitler-obsessed serial killer Patrick Mackay; and the leather mask-wearing ‘Cambridge Rapist’ Peter Samuel Cook.
Goddard ties these strands together to conjure up a vivid hellscape in which Bowie created his latest blurred lines persona, the fascistic, foppish Thin White Duke, while not really having to act at all in the role of a burned-out alabaster alien in Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.
If that all sounds rather dark, well yes, it is, but it’s often very funny in an unflinching tragicomic way. A deadly serious, dirt-encrusted pop culture farce. Goddard is an irreverent yet fundamentally empathetic socio-political historian and storyteller. He’s a Bowie fan who isn’t blind to his subject’s faults, but who can also wax rapturously, and perceptively, about his art (Bowie somehow made one of his greatest albums, Station to Station, in 1975). Hyperbole be damned, Goddard’s unfolding odyssey is an idiosyncratic masterpiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment