The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s

by Peter Doggett

* No artist offered a more incisive and accurate portrait of the troubled landscape of the 1970s than David Bowie. Through his multi-faceted and inventive work, he encapsulated many of the social, political and cultural themes that ran through this most fascinating of decades, from the elusive promise of scientific progress to the persistent fear of apocalypse that stalked the globe.* In The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie and the 1970s, cultural historian Peter Doggett explores the rich heritage of the artist's most productive and inspired decade, and traces the way in which his music reflected and influenced the world around him. * The book follows his career from 'Space Oddity', his dark vision of mankind's voyage into the unknown terrain of space, to the Scary Monsters album. It examines in detail his audacious creation of an 'alien' rock star, Ziggy Stardust, and his own increasingly perilous explorations of the nature of identity and the meaning of fame, against the backdrop of his family heritage of mental instability.* Among the book's wider themes are the West's growing sense of insecurity in the age of oil shortages and terrorism; the changing nature of sexual roles, as represented by Bowie's pioneering adoption of a bisexual persona; the emergence of a new experimental form of rock music that would leave an indelible mark on the decades to come; and the changing nature of many of the world's great cities, including London, New York, Los Angeles and Berlin, each of which played host to Bowie during particularly creative periods of his career. * Mixing brilliant musical critique with biographical insight and acute cultural analysis, The Man Who Sold The World is a unique study of a major artist and his times.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, 21st Century, British Literature, Pop Culture, Art

432 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Peter Doggett has been writing about popular music, the entertainment industry and social and cultural history since 1980. A regular contributor to Mojo, Q and GQ, his books include The Art and Music of John Lennon, a volume detailing the creation of the Beatles’ Let It Be and Abbey Road albums; the pioneering study of the collision between rock and country music, Are You Ready for the Country? and, most recently, There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of 60s Counter-culture.

Reviews

[Don Gerstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Music lovers and those who love to read about musicians will find much to celebrate in “The Man Who Sold the World.” Fans of David Bowie might find themselves in thrall. Musicians will find the extra treats nestled within the stories and anecdotes. Put it all together, and you have an excellent book that is a delight on many levels.

Author Peter Doggett targets 1967 – 1980, preferring to focus on Bowie’s early years and some of his most prolific work. While there are chapters devoted to filling in some of the blanks, most of the story is related through the individual songs Bowie wrote. After presenting us with a brief background of Bowie and his family life, Mr. Doggett shares an overview of the musician’s early attempts to make a name for himself in the music business.

What I found wonderful in the book was the author’s communication with the reader, emphasized by the book’s layout. Although there are periodic short essays to help understand a larger event or a particular album, the songs are the stars, and every song receives its own sub-chapter and explanation. Each opening description of a song includes when it was written, if it was recorded (and by who, if not by Bowie), and released on which album (if released at all). The basic info is followed by portraits of what was happening in Bowie’s life at that time, who or what inspired him to write the song, and related influences that can be heard in the music. It was extremely interesting to learn the back stories and hidden meanings (for instance, I always thought of the son “Queen Bitch” as a story concerning two transvestite lovers, and the explanation that the song was aimed at Marc Bolan of T. Rex fame was a shock but made perfect sense).

Mr. Doggett’s understanding of composition adds another level of enjoyment. In many of the song descriptions, he describes how the music was produced and what some of the musicians were creating. This includes (for those who understand basic composition) descriptions of chord patterns, including how Bowie and the accompanying musicians might have created them.

I have to add that the author is not one to pull his punches, and while sharing his many stories, Mr. Doggett manages to offer them up with point-blank honesty. When dealing with the retirement of the Ziggy Stardust persona and the possibility of this happening to other musicians and groups, the author notes that “…in the hands of the Stones, the /who, and countless others, rock would pass almost without notice, from an embodiment of youthful rebellion into a highly rewarding pension plan.” A wry truth that would be hard to argue.

Overall, this is not your normal invitation to romp through the decadence of a musician’s offstage life, nor a basic homage to what has been presented to the musical table. “The Man Who Sold the World” is a straightforward and informative look at a man who was, in most instances, either ahead of his time or running alongside everyone else but on a slightly skewed track. Five stars.

[Michael Legge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shame he dies in the end.

[Edmole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many years ago when I was in my late teens/early twenties I was obsessed with the Beatles and I would rattle on about the Beatles all the time. My local library had a lot of Beatles books, to the extent that they had TWO Yoko Ono biogs, both of which I read. So I thought I was pretty up on the Beatles. But then Ian MacDonald's Revolution In The Head came out. Rather than the usual rock-biog arc (form, fun, fucking, signed, success, snorting, bored, broke, boring, slips, switch, splitting) it went song by song and looked at how they were recorded, the contemporaneous inspirations, vogues and references that went into them, and some of the technical detail of why they did and didn't work. It was brilliant, and rather than reveal the songs as a squat Oz behind the curtain, actually gave you a deeper and richer experience of the songs as achievements made by people in a particular time before nostalgia and legend left their heavy footprint.

So, when I heard about this book, and that it was going to be a Revolution In The Head for the only other British artist with as strong a golden age as The Beatles, I was very excited.

Does it live up to the claim? I'm not sure. The author, Peter Doggett, acknowledges that the book is a deliberate attempt to write a RITH for DB (as Ian MacDonald died a few years ago having discussed doing a Bowie version). It is absolutely packed with very interesting info about each song, but there isn't as much focus on how different things were achieved in the studio. Doggett doesn't have the access that MacDonald had, where he was listening to the huge cache of tapes EMI shared with MacDonald, he is relying on listening to the albums, extra tracks and bootlegs. What he does have is a tremendous knowledge of 60s and 70s brit-pop, and can show how Bowie's work was a conversation with his peers and the artists who were ahead of him throughout the sixties and early seventies and who he motored away from and left for dead as the decade progressed. As someone with no great affection for the reedy ersatz Sounds of the Sixties Carnaby Street 45s, and little idea of how they fit in the story of that time, this was really interesting and useful for me. On the other hand, Doggett is a Beatles expert, and I think he hears a lot more Beatles (and solo Beatles) influences and allusions in all of Bowie's work than I do.

Throughout the book Bowie interviews from the time have him disavow his last work, make up heaps of lies, forget whole days at a time, pretend he is working on any number of other things, and generally cast doubt on everything. So with such an unreliable subject, can we expect a reliable narrative? No. But Doggett does make the best of it, and weaves that unreliability in throughout, using Bowie's boredom with 'truth' and his latest incarnation a central theme.

The best best best thing about a book that takes the time to address every song is that it makes you do the same. This has meant me finally getting the whole Man Who Sold The World LP, seeing even deeper colours in Hunky Dory, getting Diamond Dogs (a rescued stab at a stage play of 1984, sabotaged by Orwell's uptight wife) and, like I was hoping, having a deeper relationship with these songs. And what more can you want, really?

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Via my work as the book buyer at Book Soup, I received a galley of Peter Doggett's mega book on David Bowie - "The Man Who Sold The World." I know, another new book on Bowie, but gosh darn it he's a fascinating figure. And Doggett goes through all the songs by Bowie (including unreleased tunes) through out the 70's and also including the more obscure 1960's material. So the book is a biography on Bowie as well as a critical analysis of Bowie's work. Or a narrative via his songs

And yeah I guess this book is for the Bowie geek, but it is also a fascinating read on a man and his work - and his 'work' is extremely impressive. And one can say he said it all in the 19i70's from Space Oddity to Scary Monsters - which is an incredible range for an artist within a ten year span. But you know I love all his work -even his so-called horrible albums (I won't tell!). And again what I find the most interesting time period of Bowie is his 1960's era. He was searching up and down to fit in or to make it into the music biz. Hustler (and that is a compliment) galore and a quick study on the world around him. Its pretty impressive that it took Bowie at least 8 or 9 years in the slogs of music business before he made it big -and yeah, Bowie is really the ultimate show-biz figure who to this day has the touch of pure gold - or genius. Bowie fans do buy!

[Lindig · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I think Bowie is a genius, I am no musicologist so a discussion of a song and its chord changes means nothing to me. On the whole, the author has managed to make Bowie boring, which he never was. Too bad.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm very rarely David Jones anymore...I think I've forgotten who David Jones is."
--David Bowie, 1972

I

It's that time of year: post-Christmas weekend, for me an annual retreat into isolation, paranoia, and a diet consisting wholly of cookies, egg nog, and cocaine holiday cheer, so I figured, hey, why not revisit some old favorites by the man who took up similar practices to make one of the greatest albums ever (Station to Station)? With Peter Doggett as my guide, I began doing just that, reading this song-by-song chronology of Bowie's most illustrious decade, and listening to each song as I went along. I quickly grew impatient with this method and began skipping around to my favorite albums and tracks.



Doggett had this to say about my favorite Bowie song, "Golden Years" (which you can and should listen to here):

Seductive and knowing, he sounded like the most arrogant and yet attentive of lovers, promising a full millennium of fidelity. But in the wake of the occult excursion of "Station to Station", "Golden Years" began to display another face. "Invoke often," wrote Aleister Crowley of the holy names, and in his belief system, the "higher self" was represented by the Holy Guardian Angel. Sure enough, it was an "Angel" that Bowie invoked throughout the song, each time cloaking the word in an otherworldly echo. In this light, the most innocent of lines began to assume menacing proportions: the thousand years sounded Hitlerian; the instruction to his love to rise suggested that he/she was actually dead. No wonder that the supposedly pure message of love carried a darker (literally) subtext: "run for the shadows," Bowie insisted repeatedly, as if only in darkness could he feel truly safe.

Until now I had not been aware of the extent of Bowie's flirtation with fascism, not only its imagery (seen in the Thin White Duke character), but its ideology [1]. Doggett, quoting Bowie:

Bowie uttered [borderline fascist] phrases in several interviews during late 1975 and early 1976: 'I could have been Hitler in England...England's in such a sorry state...You've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up...I believe very strongly in fascism...Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.

Much of this is just the cocaine talking--Bowie retracted all of this after he sobered up--but the last bit is revealing. Hitler was nothing if not a self-made man (or monster), and the theme of self-creation is what defined 70's Bowie, most obviously in Ziggy Stardust but also in the desperate occcultism of Station to Station or the ground-up rehabilitation of the Berlin albums [2]. Bowie, whether he knew it or not, seemed to value fame and beauty more than morality itself. This is completely consistent with his probably misguided admiration of Nietzsche, whose Ubermensch ideal Bowie would allude to repeatedly, in "The Supermen" on The Man Who Sold the World and in "Oh! You Pretty Things"--Gotta make way for the Homo superior.

That Bowie ultimately failed to achieve his goal--to reject his past and decide, with complete authority, exactly who he was, to become an Ubermensch--does not make him an artistic failure. It makes him an artist of failure, and, as Doggett points out in the biographical section TMWStW, both a chronicler and prime example of society's collective attempt to disappear up its own asshole amid the unbearable disappointment of watching 60's idealism amount to a sweet nothing.

I think the artifact which illustrates the failure of 70's artifice most ironically--which is to say most appropriately--is Bowie's performance of "Golden Years" on Soul Train (watch here). It's a surreal scenario: here's little white boy Bowie imitating the big black funk sound, in front of an audience being paid to look like they're enjoying themselves for a TV show that opportunistically swooped in on black culture just as it was becoming cool, Bowie looking firmly coked-out-of-his-mind--and most deliciously, it's painfully obvious that he's lip-syncing! He is literally pretending to partake in black culture, as his critics had accused him of figuratively doing since Young Americans came out.

Everyone loves Ziggy, and Ziggy and his/her/its development get extensive coverage here. What makes Ziggy cool as an entertainer is obvious, but things get even more interesting when viewed through a biographical lens. Ziggy was the creation of David Bowie (who was himself a creation of David Jones), and Ziggy brought Bowie the fame he was desperate for. But Ziggy was also the starting point of a decade-long journey through the bowels [3] of stardom which would end in the toilet of 1980 (am I extending this metaphor too far??. Ziggy Stardust's ability to give its creator exactly what he wanted while simultaneously spinning his life out of control is a testament to how little care that generation, or parts of it, had about what it wished for: a solipsistic wasteland of burnouts playing with their bellybuttons. [4]

And then we have the failure of the 80's, which was (for Bowie but also for the West) a selling-out point where we became too lazy to attempt to invent ourselves and gave that responsibility to others. That is (wisely) beyond the scope of Doggett's work.

[1] It's probably saying something about our culture that when Bowie began giving interviews to promote his string of albums from the late 90's and early 00's, the question that kept popping up wasn't whether he regretted sympathizing with Hitler but whether he regretted calling himself gay.

[2] Which were produced by Tony Visconti, and NOT Brian Eno. Like seriously.

[3] You might say Labyrinth....am I right, folks?

[4] Am I being a bummer? I think I am. Sorry.


II

Doggett instead chooses to end on Scary Monsters (1980), a high note in Bowie's career, and there isn't a hint of contrarianism in me when I say that it's his best album. Don't hurt me! Hear me out!



Consider the album’s opening track, “It’s No Game (No. 1)”, which begins with a set of lyrics spoken (not sung) by some Japanese woman. Imagine the incredulous listener just home from the record store: Is this the right record? they would ask themselves, if it weren’t for those basslines; unmistakably Bowie. (Silly listener!) The record spins two more times, and then the agonizing caterwaul of a man performing his own lobotomy:


Silhouettes and shadows

Watch the revolution

No more free trips to Heaven!

It’s no game!


The lyrics alternate between Bowie's and the Japanese woman speaking translations of Bowie's, and like a Polaroid photo coming into focus, we get a snapshot of a rock star driven by ego and vanity, derided by the press and adulated by an increasingly small pool of fans, some turned off by his commercially-disastrous “Berlin” trilogy of albums, some of them simply grown-ups now, heralding the commercialized 80's with a hearty handshake and leaving their youths behind.

The deliberately grating tone of Bowie’s voice assures us that this is just another character, but Doggett knows otherwise, sagely labeling this iteration as "Bowie having shed his skins." The lyrics, like always, are deeply personal, but this is different; gone are the cut-ups, the surreal imagery, the occult references. The second track, “Up the Hill Backwards”, even dares to deal (albeit opaquely) with Bowie’s recent divorce, and the media’s coverage of it:


The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom

And the possibilities it seems to offer

(It’s got nothing to do with you

If one can grasp it)(2x)


In the album’s title track Bowie adopts a Cockney accent and delivers the monologue of a man who uses and abuses a girl (a groupie?). In “Fashion” he draws parallels between the fashion industry’s strict and ever-changing rules of conformity [5], and the fascist movements he invoked in Station to Station:


Fashion!

Turn to the left

Fashion!

Turn to the right

We are the goon squad

And we’re coming to town

Beep-beep


“Ashes to Ashes” serves as a sequel to Bowie’s most famous tune, 1969’s “Space Oddity.” We follow up on that song’s Major Tom and the ensuing four minutes become high tragedy:


Ashes to ashes, funk to funky

We know Major Tom’s a junky

Strung out in Heaven’s high

Hitting an all-time low


It’s clear that Scary Monsters is Bowie at his most ironic and most bitter. He had poured his artistic heart into the Berlin trilogy; their wellspring was the brutal withdrawal from cocaine addiction, and the public’s response was to dismiss it as pretension.

It is no wonder, then, that in Scary Monsters is a sustained streak of emotion unmatched in the rest of Bowie’s discography, and it is no paradox that it comes in an album which holds its audience at arm’s length. It might be a tad paradoxical that such an album was so commercially successful, but this is easily explained by the pop catchiness of so many of the tracks. It achieves a delicate balance between Berlin art rock and the commercial pop in Bowie's future.

Perhaps most important to the album’s success is its musical independence. Bowie made a career of taking a musical genre and giving it a new spin. Listen to Young Americans (or watch Soul Train) and hear a rail-thin Briton transform American soul. As that album is to soul, so The Man Who Sold the World is to metal, so Diamond Dogs to rock opera, and so on. Scary Monsters bucks the trend. It is a sound uniquely Bowie’s, a what-have-we-learned retrospective that transcends the decade it comments on.

It's tempting to compare SM to Blood on the Tracks, Dylan's masterpiece and album-length middle finger to his ex-wife. Rather than Angela Bowie, however, David sets his scope on the Queen Bitch that walked out of his dreams and into his life, and shook him cold: fame, with all its trappings.

[5] Movements like the "Mod" movement, which Bowie had apparently been a follower of in the mid-60's.



III

For my reference and anyone who might be interested, the following is a list of albums, songs, books, movies, TV shows, and other work mentioned in TMWStW that inspired Bowie, or which Bowie was involved in. It is not a complete list, including only the ones I underlined while reading.

The Image (1967), silent short film Bowie acted in
Orpheus in the Underworld, an opera
The "satanic novels" of Dennis Wheatley
"The Man Who Sold the Moon" by Robert Heinlein
The Man Who Bought the World, 1968 Brazilian political satire
Odd John by Olaf Stapledon
Herostratus, a 1967 BBC-TV film
The 1974 Latin remix of "Rebel Rebel"
Steve Reich's composition "It's Gonna Rain"
Frank Zappa's "Help I'm a Rock"
"She's a Friend of Dorothy's", an unreleased John Lennon song, believed to be about Bowie
The Return of the Thin White Duke, an (unpublished) book of stories by Bowie
The Tempest
The writing of Aleister Crowley
"Darkness (11/11)" by Ver Der Graaf Generator
Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night, a 1973 Peter Hammill album
Kirlian photography
Crash by J.G. Ballard
The performance art of Chris Burden (an aptly named man)
Fuck, a series of canvases by the artist Salome
"Auto-Destructive Art", a 1960 manifesto by Gustav Metzger

[Daniel Brockman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really enjoyed Doggett's previous book, "You Never Give Me Your Money", a fascinating tome about the Beatles that actually covered Things I Didn't Already Know, ie the band's slow and lumbering breakup and decade-long post-Beatles solo-period torment. In that book, Doggett managed to dish about the band's personal lives, give a behind-the-scenes of their business dealings with a detail that was both interesting and revelatory, and save some fairly unique insight into the music, both group and solo, that the Beatles produced. It was critical in every sense of the word while telling a story and being gripping.

By contrast, Doggett's new book, detailing the rise and fall (and rise and fall and rise and fall) of David Bowie in the "1970s" (really from the early 60s through to the 90s) manages to give precious little sense of who Bowie was/is while also being tedious and repetitive. Doggett sets out at the start to not delve into Bowie's personal life (who he slept with, etc.), although he breaks that self-imposed writing limitation over and over; while he gives the occasional rumor-mill tidbit, he sidesteps getting into Bowie himself, sticking to a tiresome formula of going through Bowie's entire discography, song by song, in chronological order, including outtakes and non-recorded songs and every last little fart that Bowie every thought of recording.

Part of the difficulty in getting through this book, as it has this particular conceit of detailing Bowie's song-by-song oeuvre, is that this exact exercise has already been done, and done far better, by Chris O'Leary on his online blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame (you can find it at http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com). O'Leary has been studiously poring over Bowie's long, long song list, starting with his early 60s novelties-- he's currently wrapping up the Tin Machine era. Unlike Doggett, O'Leary is able to take a track that he may have little interest in and still spin a tale worth reading. O'Leary's blog entries mix not just commentary and criticism of Bowie's music but historical and sociological perspective as well as a deep and thorough understanding of how Bowie's music works, on a music theory level as well as on an emotional level.

Doggett's analyses, by contrast, get samey after a while-- too often, he brushes past pivotal Bowie tracks, spending a few paragraphs detailing the chord changes of the tune, for example, without really delving into the essence of the music, and/or why we should care about it. There are, of course, many great entries in here-- it's more the cumulative effect, as Doggett clearly becomes fatigued at around the midway point. Perhaps his fatigue is intended to match Bowie's own by the mid-70s, as the greatness of late-70s albums like "Low" and "Lodger" hinge less on Bowie's intense artistic effort than on the intriguing juxtaposition of Bowie's calcified ennui and the cold experimentalism of the music itself. Still, it is possible to write effectively and engagingly about this music, as O'Leary has proven time and time again on his site-- it's too bad Doggett wasn't entirely up for it. In a sense, it's kind of a shame that this collection beat O'Leary's to book stores (supposedly O'Leary's book, or at least the first volume, is supposed to hit shelves in '13)-- it's hard to imagine the audience for multiple chronological book-length critical analyses of Bowie's entire 70s discography being able to handle a book a year!

[Darren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Doggett's book about the break-up of the Beatles (You Never Give Me Your Money) and I am a diehard Bowie fan, so expected to get a lot out of this.

Perhaps it's because I've read so much about Bowie that this was such a disappointment. Doggett is not a Bowie scholar of the calibre of Kevin Cann or Nicholas Pegg (or Chris O'Leary, with his superlatively detailed and intuitive blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame). His reading of Bowie's work was often based on half-baked interpretation or, seemingly, willful misunderstanding. Neither was this sociological, which you might expect from a book whose title suggest it would examine the link between the greatest popular artist of the 70s and the decade itself.

The song-by-song approach did not fit the sociological definition either. Much better were the little focus pieces that littered the book, discussing Bowie's appropriation of contemporaries, Aleister Crowley, Krautrock etc.

Books about Bowie are increasing all the time, probably because the man himself seems to have retired but the appetite for him is still there. This is firmly in the 'meh' camp (with the absolutely terrible song-by-song approach of Chris Welch).

Doggett mentions in the foreword that Ian MacDonald was originally going to write this book, but he died. MacDonald wrote Revolution in the Head, possibly the best book about Beatles songs, so it can only be imagined how much better this could have been.

[Murray · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book about 2 years ago and, with the recent passing of David Bowie, felt it was time to finally read it. I made the mistake of watching the 90 minute documentary "Sound + Vision" a few days before starting the book and, admittedly, learned more about David Bowie in the documentary than this entire book. Although I rarely do this, I skipped large portions of this laborious book just to get to the end.

Doggett's book contains a 'scholarly' look at each Bowie song from about 1969 to 1980. A lot of Doggett's analysis is conjecture and taxing at time, although there are, admittedly, other parts that are informative and enlightening. Sprinkled between these analyses are essays or recounts of various aspects of Bowie's career that comprise the most interesting part of the book. In the end, readers don't really learn as much about Bowie as his large lifestyle had to offer. This book isn't written for the casual hardcore fan, like myself, that owns nearly every Bowie album. Instead, it is written for the fanatic who knows every song and lyric by heart and can relate to Doggett's deep discussions of each song's nuance and meaning.

[Jason Coleman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doggett was brought in to do this book after the death of the originally contracted author, Ian MacDonald, and adopts the same song-by-song format as MacDonald's great Beatles book, Revolution in the Head. He alters the formula by inserting small, contextualizing chapters at various points—mini-essays on things ranging from Philly soul, Krautrock, and androgyny in glam rock to Friedrich Nietzsche, Andy Warhol, and occultist Aleister Crowley. I'll take a wild guess and say these asides probably annoy some readers, but in the case of a compulsive synthesist like Bowie they're extremely useful. Doggett does more than simply acknowledge Bowie's many influences; he sheds real light on how they came to him and shaped his work. Where the book falters a bit is in the song critiques themselves, which are always intelligent but which often fail to convey the immediacy of a real listening. They're oddly distant. The fact that Doggett was denied permission to quote from Bowie's lyrics doesn't help.

[Sade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before beginning this book, I recommend you get your Bowie musical library dusted off (whatever format or formats it currently resides in) and in order. Although I've listened faithfully over the years, some songs I just could not bring to mind - for instance, I can easily visualize the cartoon for "Sell Me A Coat", but what the hell does it sound like?? No idea.

Non-musicians will probably be at more of a loss, as terms like I-iv-IV-V and Fsus7 are used with only a cursory explanation given early on. However, the detail given for the creation of each tune - including some you've never heard of, little say heard - makes this a worthwhile study for the serious Bowiephile.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't read the whole book, just browsed the sections that appealed to me. A detailed accounting of all of Bowie 's recordings 1969-1980, along with overview info and evaluations. For the researcher or hardcore fan, full of information. For most of us, more than we need.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems that in deciding to allow the books I read to come to me more or less by chance, 2016 started out as the year of Buddhism, Britain and Bowie… And right in that take-off period came January 10, when Bowie was suddenly no more, so that led to even more Bowie books. The good news is that they have all been improvements on the Bowie books that I ended up reading a couple of years back. Peter Doggett's book is avowedly and unashamedly a version of Revolution In The Head by Ian McDonald, giving us a song-by-song overview of Bowie's career from 1969 to 1980. Then there's a coda with all his pre-1969 songs, but only a short essay dealing with the lengthy period post-Scary Monsters. This is - I suppose - the career that many UK critics (and possibly fans) seemed to want Bowie to have had, but while it obviously lavishes the spotlight on his truly iconic glory years, it does serve to truncate the story and leave it rather incomplete. And separating off a Part 2 would seem anti-climactic. So this is a tailored rather than a definitive work.

That being said, Doggett writes very well and has some sharp insights to offer, as well as delving into some of the source works in order to report on what Bowie was bringing into the pop world from his reading (arcane and otherwise). The result - for the reader interested in the music and how it was put together - is rather superior to certain "more definitive" works. This is a pure distillation of Bowie's restless and relentless search for ways of saying and showing things. The fact that he seemed to grow tired of all this ducking and diving on Scary Monsters is what Doggett uses to set out his tent pegs. Many will agree wholly with the assessment, and even many who don't might be forced to concede some truth in it whenever they are forced to sit through Tonight, Never Let Me Down or Black Tie White Noise. Or Tin Machine. But make no mistake, however bad the 1980s and early 1990s got in terms of output, there was still a questing soul in there who had things to say and I think it is likely that his later albums will receive a certain amount of reappraisal in the years to come, now that his life can be defined by its facts in place of the morass of tendentious opinions.

No one needs to cleave to a Gospel on Bowie; the man himself has been self-mocking, self-mythologising, self-lacerating and ultimately rather an unreliable narrator. This means that a good biographer is able to call upon books (Bowie has never hidden the fact of being a voracious reader), gossip (Bowie has never hidden his pre-Iman libido from view) and cultural resonance (Bowie has always been a trendsetter par excellence and managed to attract listeners of all levels of bigotry and otherwise). The biographer can treat Bowie like a character, like a force of nature, like a force of intellect, like a mirror, like an expression of the post-1960s search for rampant synthesis, like a politically and sexually ambiguous expression of the UK's suburban lower middle class, like a rampant Lothario or an emotionally cold and calculating figure. A book on Bowie is a wine with an infinite number of possible combinations, hence the attraction of seeing different approaches to it.

This book's approach is focused on Bowie's musical and lyrical prowess.

How did he turn things around after so many years without success? There are several good answers to that one. His hunger was heightened and his reading had caught up, so his themes were myriad; his ideas about how to encompass all his musical interests in one entity mixed happily with his attempts to use the simplest forms of colour chords he could (semitone movements in diminished chords and lots of sixth chords). His melodic sense grounded all his more out-there ideas. His childlike tone and lyricism helped to defuse the frontal attack of his bisexuality and his often rather graphic gay-themed lyrics. He no longer sought the family entertainer tag, so he was able to be a lightly dangerous figure for the cool and closeted kids at once. There was Mick Ronson, who gave him the perfect eclectic foil for his guitar band period. There was the practically simultaneous (1970-72) implosion of the Beatles, tax exile of the Rolling Stones, spiritual searching by the Who, wound-up whimsy of the Kinks and the diversion of much attention onto the hard rock behemoths (Zeppelin, Sabbath, Purple) and their focus on albums, thus leaving the pop charts relatively free of big fish. Here, Bolan and Bowie could duke it out dandily with the inferior likes of the Sweet or Mud or Slade.

Now Bowie, who Bolan had also recently patronised as an inferior, quickly took over and soon made T. Rex seem just as 'ordinary' as Slade. The androgyny also had tunes and attitude. There was a sci-fi vein running through his work. Bowie was both modern and timeless, dropping in bits of culture that kept the wheels turning. And he had created a character (Ziggy Stardust), who he now killed off, resurfacing as another character (Aladdin Sane) and then the Thin White Duke. His moves were dizzying, pure instinct ramped up by the coke, Bowie was running so fast from himself that he was almost turning into a blur. But he sold all of these characters with the savviest packaging. They seemed bigger than they really were and they all sunk in immediately. Even his immersion in R&B and soul music paid off with a pretty impressive "plastic soul" album with a classic title track. Then, on the run from the cocaine and the magick and the desert inside and outside of LA that had informed Station to Station, Bowie ran back to Europe, this time to Berlin, where over three albums he carved out a whole new space within rock for ambient sounds and the nexus between electronics and rock. This led to Scary Monsters, where he brought back Major Tom, binged on groove and cacophony, played with more voice textures than you could care to count and dressed up as a Pierrot. He was 33 going on 34, with at least 9 musical guises/personae behind him.

Doggett tells this whirlwind story with detail and sympathy, but not without a critical eye and ear. He sells his thesis that Bowie had worn himself out and run out of characters to use as the conduits for his cultural ingestion, that Scary Monsters was the sound of an artist peering into the void, with the galling MainMan hand in his pocket, earning big percentages of Bowie's every sound. He decided to look outside rock, for different stimuli, before coming back with a rather unexpectedly mainstream venture…

[SHUiZMZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend reading if a fan of Bowie's music.

[James Lark · Rating 4 out of 5]

As thorough and insightful book as has ever been written about Bowie's work, this is an excellent read and made me revisit Bowie's music in a completely new way. In particular, the incredible leaps in Bowie's development from 'The Man Who Sold The World' to 'Aladdin Sane' were brought home in a way I've never appreciated before. There are conclusions that some people might have a problem with - I know people who would be incensed by the suggestion that 'Lodger' is a record that didn't need to be made - but his arguments are logical and tightly constructed.

Where I feel they fall down - and where this book loses a star - is in musical analysis. There is undoubtedly a weighty tome yet to be written about Bowie from a musicological perspective, but this is not it: in his introduction, Doggett confesses to a limited understanding of musical terminology, so it's a little baffling (and, speaking as a musician, rather awkward) when he attempts to use it. The patchy, inconsistent and occasionally inaccurate efforts to explain the melodic and harmonic content in the songs adds very little to his discussion and also rather undermine the criticisms (even when he has a valid point, it feels rather rich for somebody with such a clumsy understanding of harmony to point out awkward harmonic shifts). Moreover, he misses other musical features along the way which may go some way to explaining his particular take on Bowie's career.

On musical grounds I would certainly take issue of his basic 'rise and fall' premise, which sees the height of Bowie's achievements as the point at which his work achieved most social and cultural 'relevance', hence the conclusion that by the early 1980s Bowie was producing entirely professionally constructed material but had little to say (to my mind the quality of the songwriting alone on 'Scary Monsters' makes it much harder to write off than that). It's a narrative which enables Doggett to acknowledge the artistic success of Bowie's 90s creativity, especially '1. Outside', whilst dismissing its significance because it only reached a niche audience, whereas I consider that album to be one of the richest musical outpourings of Bowie's career and as such worth considering as an entity regardless of how many people heard it.

In any case, it's a narrative that has been blown out of the water since the book's publication by Bowie's surprise reappearance last year. Far from stepping into a discreet retirement, as Doggett's book has Bowie's career elegantly fade away, Bowie has shown that he still has a few surprises up his sleeve (including musical ones) and the ability to connect with a huge audience. It'll be interesting to see what the next edition of this book makes of that...

[Paul Harris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh dear, where to start?

Firstly, I freely admit that there are parts of this book that went right over my head. When the author writes about how a song uses F# to G flat and blah blah blah... well, I'm no musician and I'm lost. That I can put up with, as, although that kind of remark is used often, it doesn't dominate what the author is talking about.

Far, far worse for me was the dismissive tone of the whole book. Bowie's earliest songs are described in terms of how derivative they are - fair enough, anyone starting out in a creative field is likely to copy until the build the knowledge and skills to do something new. What is unbelievable though, is how Doggett then keeps this up for the whole of the book. Every song (according to Doggett) seems not to have roots in its inspiration from something else, but to be simply taken wholesale from it. Throughout he portrays Bowie as little more than an OK singer who had little to do with the music. Whoever his collaborators were at the time are given all the credit - Mick Ronson during the Spiders era, Eno for Berlin... He does at least admit that Bowie wrote the lyrics, but somewhat predictably is then either dismissive of the words or has a go at them for being incomprehensible.

I finished this book through sheer persistence and left it with the feeling of "Why write it, considering you seem to think David Bowie is a talentless hack?", a sentiment I certainly don't agree with.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Doggett's "The Man Who Sold The World" is a musicological examination of what the author calls David Bowie's "long 1970s": the period from 1964-1980.

Doggett looks at every song individually, then the context of each album and even the films in which Bowie appeared during the time. In discussing the complexities (and sometimes the simplicities) of each song from a scholarly perspective, he demonstrates Bowie's versatility and challenges as an artist. Not everything Bowie did hit the mark as a chart-topper, but he was wildly experimental.

I have been a Bowie fan for more than 30 years, and this book gave me an addiitonal appreciation for both Bowie's bandmates and his vocals. Per Doggett, many of Bowie's songs were composed on the piano or saxophone, resulting in intervals that were almost impossible to match on guitar. Furthermore, many of his compositions required 1- or 2-octave vocal leaps. Bowie's upper register has been gone for awhile due to a variety of abuses, so it's particularly interesting to read about the modes and keys that were employed in his younger days.

The casual Bowie fan may not find much to enjoy here, but musicians and avid admirers will find the detailed examination of each piece fascinating.

(Review based on uncorrected advance proof.)

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a David Bowie fan.

After reading Doggett's chronicle of Bowie's iconoclastic decade of creativity and stardom I have been converted to a David Bowie fanatic. Reading through this account of Bowie's prolific period spanning 1969-1980 I listened to each of the albums discussed and rediscovered the many voices of Bowie's artistic imprint. The singles that I've loved are now fleshed out in context with their albums and the ground-breaking efforts that motivated Bowie and inspired his would-be followers. Amazingly, during this period Bowie released 13 diverse and influential albums and the progression of the artist to superstar to minimalist is as profound as the many personae he wore to promote his music. The many changes of the faces of Bowie were apparent as he became the glam rock alien Ziggy, the American inspired glam Aladdin, the soul singing Thin White Duke, and the minimalist Bowie of the Berlin period. In constantly recreating himself and in recreating his sound Bowie set the stage that defined super-stardom and remains the icon that defines all of 1970's music.

Read more here: http://hardlywritten.wordpress.com/20...

[Roger Blakesley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely horrible book. While it contained a lot of information on individual songs and Bowie's history, it was spliced together in a most unpleasant way. But one has to admire the extensive footnotes and appendices; those were at least useful for me to catalogue my Bowie vinyl, FLAC and CD collections.

The book was full of pretentious, precious linguistics; it read like the back liner notes of a 1970s Dylan album. I think the author used every single pompous music review buzzword except, "insouciance"; and, even then, I might have missed it.

David Bowie has an excellent set of pipes, but his musical compositions don't make him the Philosopher-King Doggett portrays him as.

When asked about the cultural significance of the 1960s and the impact music had on the world, Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones said, "What the hell are you talking about? We're just a bunch of guitar players."

And so is Bowie. The book paints him as some sort of musical titan who shifted the planet's orbit. It's just music.

The book might serve as an almost encyclopaedic reference for Bowie's corpus, but it's hardly an enjoyable read nor a good rock biography.

[Matthew · Rating 1 out of 5]

By all accounts Peter Doggett has written one of the most respected books about the Beatles, it seems a bit of a shame that he decided to do the same here. Honestly a page doesn't go by when he doesn't mention the fab four in one way or another, if you can't find enough of interest to write about Bowie then really you shouldn't be writing this book. At times he seems to almost loathe the man as well and you really feel that he wrote this book because he could, rather than because he actually wanted to. It's not a biography and it's not a reference book either, rather an odd examination of all of Bowie's songs from the 70s. These take the form of either pretentious and frankly embarrassing interpretations or dull technical analysis, this sort of thing: '...Bowie ranges from C Minor right up to A Sharp in this verse trailing down to a flat D by the song's conclusion...' Zzzzz... The odd thing is that all too infrequent box excerpts of text when he actually talks about Bowie's life at the time suddenly become interesting. A real missed opportunity.

[Terry Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive study of the official releases, and the rarities, of David Bowie from the start of his career under his real name of David Jones, to the close of the seventies with "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)." An incredible undertaking to understand the messages of the songs, but also the man and where he was personally (mentally, physically and emotionally) during the composition and recording of the music. Attention is also paid to events in society and the artistic scene during the creative high spots of Bowie's career. Doggett even digs deep into the actual chord structures and arrangements of the music. At over 500 pages, this is NOT a quick read for a new or just curious aficionado (I've been savoring the book for months now), but for the hardcore Bowie fan, you'll learn new information and enjoy applying your own impressions and thoughts about the singles and the albums (I agree with Doggett more than I disagree).

[Stevo B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not at all satisfying. After a meandering introduction that feels over-intellectualised and over-written, the book continues as a song by song exposition of Bowie songs from the 1970s.

If you know little about Bowie’s life, you won’t know a lot more after reading this book. Biographical details are almost nonexistent. Which begs the question, what’s the point of this book? I suppose it’s great for completist fans. Personally I wasn’t interested in the pages on tonality and chord progressions, but musical aficionados might be.

The pervading tone of the book suggests the author does not seem to like Bowie. His descriptions of classic Bowie songs and albums are incredibly downbeat.

Where were the selection of Bowie anecdotes? Definitely didn’t feel this book told the story of Bowie’s 1970s.

[Jennie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Close to Nicolas Pegg's book, but not as complete.

The attention to detail and fact finding would stump even Mr. Bowie himself. I wasn't around to see this decade but really enjoyed the musical references and cultural happenings noted. I was sad to see Mr. Doggett's gloss over his Labyrinth role, and pan most of his 80s and 90s music. I discovered David in the 80s and find that time in his career both uninspired and inspiring; carefully planned I'm sure.

Great gift for a major Bowie fan, specifically the 70s. For most it would be a slog through, song by song, of his work during that time. An in depth look at an artist who changed so much and influenced many.

[Fiona Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this read - examining the meaning of Bowie's songs of the '70's. Had to take some of the stories with a pinch of salt because, as the author atests, Bowie has many different stories about the same event/song. Very well written and researched.

[Knox Bronson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing, song-by-song analysis of Bowie's incredible body of work. The author looks at a song in a musicological sense: chord changes, key changes, melodic, rhythmic, and so on, including Bowie's singing and societal context of the song, and also what was going on in Bowie's life.

[Misty · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I found it tedious at times, and therefore boring

[Odrán de Bhaldraithe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really good book in terms of understanding the music of Bowie, in terms of musicology, which I suppose is what Doggett was going for here, it really can’t be faulted and it’s very interesting in that sense.

I note that Doggett is a former Green Party candidate in England which tells you what you need to know about him politically and so it’s not surprising that the politics of Bowie is where he falls down. For someone to conduct such a comprehensive study of Bowie but dismiss the line “this ain’t rock and roll; this is genocide” with one line calling it silly seems crazy to me; few times was Bowie as forthright with his views on his conception of mass-culture entertainment. That Doggett then shows an inability to grapple with the Thin White Duke character and instead seeks to weasel around it by dismissing it as a kind of naive mistake by a badly addled coke head is fairly unforgivable if you ask me.

Long before the Thin White Duke, Bowie was trying to elucidate what he saw as the connection between the fascist personality cult and rock stardom. I don’t think it was lost on Bowie that the most successful candidates he took on in the 70s were the godlike alien Ziggy Stardust and the would-be fascist Thin White Duke. Doggett correctly notes that the characters were dropped for Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger, but especially on Scary Monsters where Bowie, stripped of character both screams and whispers in terror that it’s no game. Doggett’s take in the afterword that 80s Bowie was devoid of any character is also correct.

This is why Doggett’s inability to wrestle with the political content of Bowie’s work on any satisfactory level is a letdown; he can correctly observe the before and after but doesn’t understand what happened with the Thin White Duke. Bowie had long theorised that people wanted fascism and as the National Front and Enoch Powell made inroads in England, he unveiled the Duke and then enjoyed the most success he had had since Ziggy. Bowie was undoubtedly a huge coke head at this point and so his thinking obviously wasn’t that straight but I think Bowie thought that he had proven himself right, that rock stardom and fascist cults of personality were not all that far apart and he had scared himself by proving himself right and terrified himself with what he was doing. You can call that dramatic, but well he was dramatic and was at that point, a seven stone coke addict, so it’s understandable. This is why, on the next album, he abandoned the characters and on some songs abandoned the idea of voice at all. For the next few albums, he persisted with just being Bowie rather than a character and then took a break from music before returning with music that featured no character, not even his own.

Doggett seems to doubt Bowie’s sincerity with regard to characters; I don’t. I suppose that’s the difference. This book is very good on Bowie’s music but Bowie was much more than that, an actor, a conceptual artist, a paranoiac, and an incredible theorist of pop culture. It’s a good book about Bowie’s music, but music was only half the story for Bowie.

[Brian Manville · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you were to construct a Mount Rushmore of artists from the 1970s, the vast majority of those making that list would have the name of David Bowie on it. And for good reason, as Bowie not only sought to melt art and music in new ways, but he was to influence to artists that came after him such as Prince and Madonna.

Except for a brief section on his youth, this biography is limited to his works of the 70s, and encapsulating his albums from Space Oddity (released in the US as "Man of Worlds/Man of Music") through Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). What makes this biography unusual is the fact that Doggett goes through each album track by track and tells the story of Bowie's voyage through rock's most turbulent decade. The weakness to this approach is for readers such as myself who cannot read music as it impairs one's understanding of the narrative. However, it is not an insurmountable obstacle, as most readers can easily queue the particular song in their head as they read Doggett's account.

Bowie no doubt had issues with his stardom and obvious made several unforced errors during that time (notably his interview where he seemingly endorsed a fascist takeover of his native England). The book does show which songs were illustrative of his disillusionment. However, the common refrain in the midst of these song reviews is that it illustrate rather than illuminate.

Events of the 70s, such as the Vietnam war or the Nixon administration are tangentially mentioned in the book, only because Bowie himself stood both personally and artistically outside of the world around him. Given the hyper-politicization by people everywhere these days, Bowie's actions can be seen either as refreshing or naive. It was an era that allowed artists the freedom to just be a musician and not have to flash their "woke" bona fides. The one artist today who maintains this similar attitude is Taylor Swift, who probably recognizes the wisdom of Michael Jordan's statement that "Republicans buy shoes, too."

Fans of David Bowie will get suitable treatment of their favorite iteration - Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke - and will see how those personas influenced the making of each album. The afterward detailing his days during the 80s will feel like a letdown, perhaps because by the release of "Lets Dance" Bowie had transformed himself from artist to product. This transformation, sadly, produced much of the state of current musical artists.

BOTTOM LINE: A solid addition to the bookshelf of any David Bowie fan.

[Malcolm Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book to read in a linear fashion. For that go to Doggett's latest book on Crosby Stills Nash and Young, which is a riveting read about the same era from another-very very different-perspective. This is a book to dip into and enjoy the pages you have selected, and then dip in at another point, and then read between where you have dipped into until by the end you will have read all of it, but not 'in the right order'. You will also in this fractured process have looked up some of the material you will have read about on youtube vevo and spotify etc where the writing has piqued your interest-particularly about the songs that never got official release but have escaped the control of their author. At some levels it is a biography of Bowie in the years it covers (1969-80 with extra articles on Bowie's life before and after those years) through the notes about the songs and the recording of them. To an extent writing the biography of somebody who was the cultural emblem of their age and who wrote and lived a fractured narrative, if not many smaller fractured narratives discontinuously, will make it that there is no 'right order' to their lives or their career. Nor was Bowie 'making it up as he went along', though the William Burroughs cut-up technique for writing did mean effectively that he was cut up the narrative as he went along when he used that technique. I was intrigued by Bowie cutting up and rejoining the guitar solo in the song 'DJ', with razor blades the way The Beatles did their recorded collage work and sad to note the end of the sense of the physicality of working with music that way with advent of digital recording. The author does no speculate, but I will, that one reason for the creative decline of Bowie in the 1980's was because he would have been more engaged by the analogue recording process, which had previously allowed him to mine himself and be more creatively contradictory; digital recording denied him that. I also liked the way Doggett saw in Bowie's career the five year narrative arc rule in popular music, as he explored Bowie's songs from 'Space Oddity' to 'Diamond Dogs', with what came after being variations and revisions with new musicians of what had gone before. I did wonder if, since it was published in 2011, there would at some point be in a revision/update of the book where some of the material in the main body of the book would be updated. In the extra articles the last two Bowie studio albums would be included, along with a list of the posthumous releases, re-releases, and revisions of his work. I would like to have read more directly about the deceptive relationship between Bowie and MainMan management where each side had assumptions about what the other would for them, and about how much agency they had that they didn't actually have. How each side coped with a soured relationship where all that was left was to argue about money. What price/value a narration consisting of two unreliable narrators? Will I 'finish' the book? Up to a point, yes, when I start reading another book and put this one down. But a book that is about incomplete and fractured narratives can be read from end to end but will never be 'finished'. It is a puzzle with no picture on the cover as to what it is meant to look like, where the bits you fit together are the picture that you want them to be at the time you stop trying to fit more bits together. Other pictures will come other readers at other times.

[Woogie! Kristin! · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, but it's NOT a biography. It's more a song by song analysis of his music in the 70's. Very little of his personal life is included. For example, Iman is not mentioned once (again, it's about the 70's) and his first marriage very little. There is a lot of chord analysis, mentions of influences and his relationships with collaborators and management team. At times I was confused if the author actually LIKED Bowie, so this is obviously written from a music critic's perspective. The aftermath was nice, so perhaps the author did like Bowie. The appendix is incredibly long- 129 pages. I skipped that. A Bowie music fan who knows something about music will enjoy it, but if a reader wants to know about his life, I'd skip it. Also, this is definitely a book that you can stop and read intermittently with short chapters. It's a book I could read during a commercial break or in a waiting room, which is why it took so long to read (I read other books while reading it, which is something I rarely do). Lastly, I recommend YouTubing songs the reader is not very familiar with or haven't heard in a long time. That really made the book more enjoyable.