FILTER BOOKS
Bowie Odyssey 75
★★★★
Simon Goddard
OMNIBUS PRESS. £17.99
Sixth instalment in this intense evocation of Bowie’s ’70s.
Loving the alien: Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, walking the tightrope between disaster and triumph.
In 1975 Bowie had his first US Number 1 – the single Fame, co-written with John Lennon. But, here, Bowie’s fellow travellers also include Margaret Thatcher, the Cambridge Rapist and serial killer Patrick Mackay. Thatcher’s neurotic self-possession mirrors 1975 Bowie. The Cambridge Rapist and Mackay represent Britain’s bleakest margins – and have glancing connection with Bowie and popular culture. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood produced a Cambridge Rapist T-shirt. Bowie talked of Hitler as rock-star prototype, but Mackay is a more disturbing kind of Führer-fixated nutcase, his psychosis eclipsing Bowie’s cocaine-blasted mania. Yet, such is Bowie’s reliance on medical grade neurotoxicity, it’s amazing he managed to star so magnetically in The Man Who Fell To Earth and also record a masterpiece in Station To Station, the film and the album both made in 1975 and released in 1976. The book compellingly captures the tightrope walk between disaster and triumph.