David bowie ed kelleher essay

Sometimes a book is just a good read, even when the reader is David Bowie. Bowie’s Books is therefore tenuously buttressed by phrases such as “might have”, “it’s likely” and “it’s easy to imagine”, along with rib-nudging allusions to Bowie’s lyrics.

I n 1973, Sonia Orwell broke David Bowie’s heart by refusing him permission to adapt her late husband’s final novel into a rock musical. She had rebuffed every request since the hamfisted 1956 movie version starring Edmond O’Brien, and was never likely to make an exception for a glam-rock dandy, but he was sorely aggrieved.

In retracing the singer’s path from suburban obscurity to his first US tour, Brooker does to Bowie what Malcolm Gladwell did to the Beatles in Outliers, which is to reduce a remarkable artistic flowering to a tidy little parable about the virtues of hard work and pluck.

Only Orwell and Burgess appear twice. The bonding agent is George Steiner ’s 1971 lecture collection In Bluebeard’s Castle, which introduced Bowie to postmodernism at a crucial juncture and licensed him to make use of everything that interested him. He revelled in “this newly found pluralistic vocabulary, this whole George Steiner-ism of life”.