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The Age of Bowie
Author and industry insider Paul Morley explores the musical and cultural legacies left behind by “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”
Respected arts commentator and author Paul Morley, an artistic advisor to the curators of the highly successful retrospective exhibition David Bowie is for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, constructs a definitive story of Bowie that explores how he worked, played, aged, structured his ideas, influenced others, invented the future, and entered history as someone who could and would never be forgotten. Morley captures the greatest moments from across Bowie’s life and career; how young Davie Jones of South London became the international David Bowie; his pioneering collaborations in the recording studio with the likes of Tony Visconti, Mick Ronson, and Brian Eno; to iconic live, film, theatre, and television performances from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, as well as the various encounters and artistic relationships he developed with musicians from John Lennon, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop to Trent Reznor and Arcade Fire. And of course, discusses in detail his much-heralded and critically acclaimed finale with the release of Blackstar just days before his shocking death in New York.
Morley offers a startling biographical critique of David Bowie’s legacy, showing how he never stayed still even when he withdrew from the spotlight, how he always knew his own worth, and released a dazzling plethora of personalities, concepts, and works into the world with a single-minded determination and a voluptuous imagination to create something the likes of which the world had never seen before—and likely will never see again.
Respected arts commentator and author Paul Morley, an artistic advisor to the curators of the highly successful retrospective exhibition David Bowie is for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, constructs a definitive story of Bowie that explores how he worked, played, aged, structured his ideas, influenced others, invented the future, and entered history as someone who could and would never be forgotten. Morley captures the greatest moments from across Bowie’s life and career; how young Davie Jones of South London became the international David Bowie; his pioneering collaborations in the recording studio with the likes of Tony Visconti, Mick Ronson, and Brian Eno; to iconic live, film, theatre, and television performances from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, as well as the various encounters and artistic relationships he developed with musicians from John Lennon, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop to Trent Reznor and Arcade Fire. And of course, discusses in detail his much-heralded and critically acclaimed finale with the release of Blackstar just days before his shocking death in New York.
Morley offers a startling biographical critique of David Bowie’s legacy, showing how he never stayed still even when he withdrew from the spotlight, how he always knew his own worth, and released a dazzling plethora of personalities, concepts, and works into the world with a single-minded determination and a voluptuous imagination to create something the likes of which the world had never seen before—and likely will never see again.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published July 28, 2016
121 people are currently reading
1245 people want to read
About the author
Paul Morley
32 books75 followersPaul Morley is an English journalist who wrote for the New Musical Express from 1977 to 1983, during one of its most successful periods, and has since written for a wide range of publications. He has also has been a band manager and promoter, as well as a television presenter.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 124 reviews
July 21, 2021
Long time Morley admirers, and I am most definitely one, will know what to expect, this is a characteristically impressionistic biography in which he lucidly and provocatively discusses his relationship with the illusion that is David Bowie. Which is your David Bowie? This stunning biography will help you to make your mind up.
The Age of Bowie is not a conventional biography, but who wants another one of those? I've probably read more than most and, whilst it's always a good story, a rote chronological biography will never get to the essence of Bowie (or the multifarious versions of David Bowie, as Morley has it) and it is here that this refreshing and absorbing biography is so successful. Morley has always been an original thinker who makes thrilling cultural connections and which, for music obsessives like me, is a joy to read. You can also have your cake and eat it because "at the end of a book about him there is only one way through his life". Paul Morley runs through each year's "headline" highlight.
Paul Morley is both a passionate Bowie fan, and an expert, which is a winning combination. Morley's meandering, confused thoughts about being asked to comment on news programmes in the aftermath of Bowie's death are worth the price of admission on their own.
Paul Morley was also an artistic advisor to the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum from back in 2013, and which, in late 2016, continues to tour the world. I had very mixed feelings about that exhibition but there was no denying the attention to detail and rigour that went into it.
If anything I would have preferred an even more radical biography, one that played more fast and loose with chronology, and which brought in yet more context and Morley's own musings on his subject. The early sections dealing with Bowie's childhood and the pre-fame 1960s felt a bit too conventional and maybe even a bit laboured. That said, there are still enough of Morley's unique insights to make it worthwhile and, stay with it, because The Age of Bowie really picks up when Paul Morley gets to the 1970s - or, to be exact, "David Bowie’s 1970s in 140 scenes featuring certain deletions, omissions and oversights".
Paul Morley once again side steps the chronological approach at the end of the 1970s for a more free-form narrative, in which he (rightly) considers Bowie's work and influence in a very different context, and how it was often Bowie's extra curricular activities, collaborations, acting and other non-musical work, that showed him at his most relevant and creative. Bowie’s albums after Let’s Dance and before Black Tie White Noise were patchy and Morley barely mentions these albums. Paul Morley has some inventive musings on the rationale for the awful Tin Machine how, if I remember right, it presages a post-rock age of mediocrity where noise and empty gestures are what's coming down the line. Nice try Paul. Really though, what was Bowie thinking?
In conclusion, Paul Morley gets to the essence of Bowie far more skilfully than a rote chronological biography could ever hope to achieve. Paul Morley has surely written the only possible new Bowie biography anyone could want or need in 2016 and if you like Paul Morley's writing, and/or you’re a hardcore David Bowie fan, then I confidently predict you will love this biography. That said, I have seen some very negative reviews of this biography, so proceed with caution but, for me, Bowie and Morley is a match made in heaven. I loved it and look forward to reading it all over again.
5/5
The Age of Bowie is not a conventional biography, but who wants another one of those? I've probably read more than most and, whilst it's always a good story, a rote chronological biography will never get to the essence of Bowie (or the multifarious versions of David Bowie, as Morley has it) and it is here that this refreshing and absorbing biography is so successful. Morley has always been an original thinker who makes thrilling cultural connections and which, for music obsessives like me, is a joy to read. You can also have your cake and eat it because "at the end of a book about him there is only one way through his life". Paul Morley runs through each year's "headline" highlight.
Paul Morley is both a passionate Bowie fan, and an expert, which is a winning combination. Morley's meandering, confused thoughts about being asked to comment on news programmes in the aftermath of Bowie's death are worth the price of admission on their own.
Paul Morley was also an artistic advisor to the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum from back in 2013, and which, in late 2016, continues to tour the world. I had very mixed feelings about that exhibition but there was no denying the attention to detail and rigour that went into it.
If anything I would have preferred an even more radical biography, one that played more fast and loose with chronology, and which brought in yet more context and Morley's own musings on his subject. The early sections dealing with Bowie's childhood and the pre-fame 1960s felt a bit too conventional and maybe even a bit laboured. That said, there are still enough of Morley's unique insights to make it worthwhile and, stay with it, because The Age of Bowie really picks up when Paul Morley gets to the 1970s - or, to be exact, "David Bowie’s 1970s in 140 scenes featuring certain deletions, omissions and oversights".
Paul Morley once again side steps the chronological approach at the end of the 1970s for a more free-form narrative, in which he (rightly) considers Bowie's work and influence in a very different context, and how it was often Bowie's extra curricular activities, collaborations, acting and other non-musical work, that showed him at his most relevant and creative. Bowie’s albums after Let’s Dance and before Black Tie White Noise were patchy and Morley barely mentions these albums. Paul Morley has some inventive musings on the rationale for the awful Tin Machine how, if I remember right, it presages a post-rock age of mediocrity where noise and empty gestures are what's coming down the line. Nice try Paul. Really though, what was Bowie thinking?
In conclusion, Paul Morley gets to the essence of Bowie far more skilfully than a rote chronological biography could ever hope to achieve. Paul Morley has surely written the only possible new Bowie biography anyone could want or need in 2016 and if you like Paul Morley's writing, and/or you’re a hardcore David Bowie fan, then I confidently predict you will love this biography. That said, I have seen some very negative reviews of this biography, so proceed with caution but, for me, Bowie and Morley is a match made in heaven. I loved it and look forward to reading it all over again.
5/5
January 3, 2017
According to Paul Morley, he chose to write the “only sort of book that he could have written about Bowie: part love letter, part biography, part autobiography, part theoretical framework for life”. (He also chose to write the book in 10 weeks – the idea being that this was around the same period of time that Bowie took to record some of his key 1970’s albums).
This is a particularly challenging book to read as well as to review – more particularly if, like Paul Morley, like me and like many of us, you are a huge fan of David Bowie.
As a read, it is for the most part somewhat verbose and heavy going, it is very much a very personal and honest account of what Bowie means to Paul Morley, whilst also acknowledging that Bowie means so many very different things to so many very different people in so many very different ways – it’s almost written as a stream of consciousness.
The book attempts to identify how Bowie changed not only himself but also how he changed the world around him and concentrates for the most part on perhaps his most influential, prolific and perhaps important period up to 1980.
This is not the sort of book that you should read if:
A) you are not a fan of Bowie
B) you cannot appreciate the style in which Morley writes (whilst I don’t, many may find in pretentious and contrived in the extreme) or
C) you are wanting to find out about Bowie, his life and work in the normal manner expected from a biography – i.e. in detail, more often than not chronologically ordered and presented in an allegedly objective / truth-giving manner.
As a big fan of David Bowie’s work, as someone who was never lucky enough to see him perform live, but did have the privilege of seeing the fantastic ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition at the V&A in London in 2013 (to which Morley was an artistic adviser) – and whilst not agreeing by any means with all of Morley’s analyses (which I guess is not the point) I found the book very informative, fascinating, moving, challenging, satisfying, at times frustrating but ultimately definitely well worth reading. Recommended – if only for David Bowie fans…..?
This is a particularly challenging book to read as well as to review – more particularly if, like Paul Morley, like me and like many of us, you are a huge fan of David Bowie.
As a read, it is for the most part somewhat verbose and heavy going, it is very much a very personal and honest account of what Bowie means to Paul Morley, whilst also acknowledging that Bowie means so many very different things to so many very different people in so many very different ways – it’s almost written as a stream of consciousness.
The book attempts to identify how Bowie changed not only himself but also how he changed the world around him and concentrates for the most part on perhaps his most influential, prolific and perhaps important period up to 1980.
This is not the sort of book that you should read if:
A) you are not a fan of Bowie
B) you cannot appreciate the style in which Morley writes (whilst I don’t, many may find in pretentious and contrived in the extreme) or
C) you are wanting to find out about Bowie, his life and work in the normal manner expected from a biography – i.e. in detail, more often than not chronologically ordered and presented in an allegedly objective / truth-giving manner.
As a big fan of David Bowie’s work, as someone who was never lucky enough to see him perform live, but did have the privilege of seeing the fantastic ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition at the V&A in London in 2013 (to which Morley was an artistic adviser) – and whilst not agreeing by any means with all of Morley’s analyses (which I guess is not the point) I found the book very informative, fascinating, moving, challenging, satisfying, at times frustrating but ultimately definitely well worth reading. Recommended – if only for David Bowie fans…..?
February 28, 2017
At first, I wasn't so sure about this biography. It seemed too focused on the author, not enough on Bowie himself.
However, once it got going, it was great! A really novel take on the biography format, almost veering into fiction in places, which might not be for everyone, but I personally thought it worked very well.
Did I learn anything new? No. However, I enjoyed it immensely, and in places, it made me view David Bowie in a new light. I very much enjoyed it.
However, once it got going, it was great! A really novel take on the biography format, almost veering into fiction in places, which might not be for everyone, but I personally thought it worked very well.
Did I learn anything new? No. However, I enjoyed it immensely, and in places, it made me view David Bowie in a new light. I very much enjoyed it.
August 26, 2016
Despite the cover photo and title, this book has NOTHING to do with David Bowie. This book is about Paul Morley, who is clearly in love with his own voice and believes in using 150 words when one would do. Think I'm kidding? Consider the following sentence:
He is a romantically irrational, already acutely self-reflexive 23-year-old, loftily rehearsing creative genius, as horny as Lucifer, a gawky manic electric obsessed with the provocative joys of juxtaposition, naturally attracted to excess and outrage, anxious he might be accused of some mental infirmity, blatantly relishing the alleged thin line between mental illness and artistic creativity, between mere eccentricity and absolute delirium, understanding the instabilities of the categories of male and female, preoccupied with his own physical sensations and the tortured history of his own soul, helplessly infatuated with the highfalutin, keen on acknowledging and addressing a strange world that is not exactly reassuring, intensely fascinated by the apocalyptic, mortality and religious ecstasy, dazzled by the mongrel interconnection between human destinies, crazily ambitious to rise above mediocrity, sincerely believing that art can transform the world, beginning to follow the voice of his nature and impulses which wildly oppose prevailing laws, rules and conventions, struggling to work out how to sonically represent constantly coalescing internal perceptions and his belief, using pop music, that time is a living thing only made sense of by death.
One sentence, hundreds of words with absolutely no point. And that is this book - just an author vomiting words while saying nothing. Now imagine 405 pages of this pretentious, overwrought, overwritten word vomit. Simply an appalling book.
He is a romantically irrational, already acutely self-reflexive 23-year-old, loftily rehearsing creative genius, as horny as Lucifer, a gawky manic electric obsessed with the provocative joys of juxtaposition, naturally attracted to excess and outrage, anxious he might be accused of some mental infirmity, blatantly relishing the alleged thin line between mental illness and artistic creativity, between mere eccentricity and absolute delirium, understanding the instabilities of the categories of male and female, preoccupied with his own physical sensations and the tortured history of his own soul, helplessly infatuated with the highfalutin, keen on acknowledging and addressing a strange world that is not exactly reassuring, intensely fascinated by the apocalyptic, mortality and religious ecstasy, dazzled by the mongrel interconnection between human destinies, crazily ambitious to rise above mediocrity, sincerely believing that art can transform the world, beginning to follow the voice of his nature and impulses which wildly oppose prevailing laws, rules and conventions, struggling to work out how to sonically represent constantly coalescing internal perceptions and his belief, using pop music, that time is a living thing only made sense of by death.
One sentence, hundreds of words with absolutely no point. And that is this book - just an author vomiting words while saying nothing. Now imagine 405 pages of this pretentious, overwrought, overwritten word vomit. Simply an appalling book.
August 5, 2016
BOTW
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m58f9Description: Paul Morley was thirteen when he first heard the music of David Bowie, played late at night by DJ John Peel. Before long, Bowie was taking the 1970s by storm and changing the face of pop music with his Ziggy Stardust tour, and Morley was a dedicated schoolboy fan. Many years later, Morley would be an artistic advisor for the V&A's acclaimed Bowie exhibition, 'David Bowie is', which was still attracting huge visitor numbers around the world when Bowie died at the beginning of this year.
Now, Morley has published his personal account of the life, musical influence and cultural impact of his teenage hero, exploring Bowie's constant reinvention of himself and his music over a period of five extraordinarily innovative decades.
Episode 1/5: Becoming Bowie: In this first episode Morley describes how when he first heard Bowie's music his world 'suddenly became something else', and explores Bowie's childhood and his early attempts to make his name. Major Tom: Morley describes Bowie's move from support act to novelty hit, from acoustic whimsy to more complex composition, and his immersion in the music, culture and artistic excitement of 1960s London Ziggy Plays Guitar: Morley remembers the excitement of first seeing Bowie in concert as the Ziggy Stardust tour cut through the country trailed by headlines. The Berlin Years: After the fast and furious years of the late sixties and early seventies, Bowie moves to Berlin, where his music, and his life, changes once again.Shape-shifters: As he embraces new technology and takes on roles beyond the simply musical, Bowie steps back from the limelight until he emerges at the end of his life to stun the musical world with his final album. 
August 27, 2024
Als Taylor Swift’s bullshit lyrics die al 10 albums onveranderd bleef een vak verdient aan de UGent, dan verdient David Bowie een hele fucking richting of zelfs faculteit. Ja Elly, ik kijk naar jou.
Een biografie die zich concentreert op wat ertoe doet, de muziek en creativiteit van een artiest die de persoon overstijgt.
Een biografie die zich concentreert op wat ertoe doet, de muziek en creativiteit van een artiest die de persoon overstijgt.
August 5, 2016
From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Paul Morley was thirteen when he first heard the music of David Bowie, played late at night by DJ John Peel. Before long, Bowie was taking the 1970s by storm and changing the face of pop music with his Ziggy Stardust tour, and Morley was a dedicated schoolboy fan. Many years later, Morley would be an artistic advisor for the V&A's acclaimed Bowie exhibition, 'David Bowie is', which was still attracting huge visitor numbers around the world when Bowie died at the beginning of this year.
Now, Morley has published his personal account of the life, musical influence and cultural impact of his teenage hero, exploring Bowie's constant reinvention of himself and his music over a period of five extraordinarily innovative decades.
1/5: Becoming Bowie
In this first episode Morley describes how when he first heard Bowie's music his world 'suddenly became something else', and explores Bowie's childhood and his early attempts to make his name.
2/5: Major Tom
Morley describes Bowie's move from support act to novelty hit, from acoustic whimsy to more complex composition, and his immersion in the music, culture and artistic excitement of 1960s London.
3/5: Ziggy Plays Guitar
Morley remembers the excitement of first seeing Bowie in concert as the Ziggy Stardust tour cut through the country trailed by headlines.
4/5: The Berlin Years
After the fast and furious years of the late sixties and early seventies, Bowie moves to Berlin, where his music, and his life, changes once again.
5/5: Shape-shifter
As he embraces new technology and takes on roles beyond the simply musical, Bowie steps back from the limelight until he emerges at the end of his life to stun the musical world with his final album.
Abridged and produced by Sara Davies.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mm4c1
Paul Morley was thirteen when he first heard the music of David Bowie, played late at night by DJ John Peel. Before long, Bowie was taking the 1970s by storm and changing the face of pop music with his Ziggy Stardust tour, and Morley was a dedicated schoolboy fan. Many years later, Morley would be an artistic advisor for the V&A's acclaimed Bowie exhibition, 'David Bowie is', which was still attracting huge visitor numbers around the world when Bowie died at the beginning of this year.
Now, Morley has published his personal account of the life, musical influence and cultural impact of his teenage hero, exploring Bowie's constant reinvention of himself and his music over a period of five extraordinarily innovative decades.
1/5: Becoming Bowie
In this first episode Morley describes how when he first heard Bowie's music his world 'suddenly became something else', and explores Bowie's childhood and his early attempts to make his name.
2/5: Major Tom
Morley describes Bowie's move from support act to novelty hit, from acoustic whimsy to more complex composition, and his immersion in the music, culture and artistic excitement of 1960s London.
3/5: Ziggy Plays Guitar
Morley remembers the excitement of first seeing Bowie in concert as the Ziggy Stardust tour cut through the country trailed by headlines.
4/5: The Berlin Years
After the fast and furious years of the late sixties and early seventies, Bowie moves to Berlin, where his music, and his life, changes once again.
5/5: Shape-shifter
As he embraces new technology and takes on roles beyond the simply musical, Bowie steps back from the limelight until he emerges at the end of his life to stun the musical world with his final album.
Abridged and produced by Sara Davies.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mm4c1
January 12, 2019
"The Age of Bowie" is not a tragic book, in any sense. Paul Morley's style feels too snobish and pretentious though. The first half of the book describing Bowie's pre-fame life felt too long and boring at times. The second part of the book documenting the times between 1970 and 1980 was okay-ish, it was entertaining but contained nothing new. The last part of the book documenting his post 1980 career felt too short and not detailed-enough. Overall, Paul Morley is an author that's not everyone's cup of tea, I guess. Apart from that, I learned nothing new from the book and have read far better books on Bowie's art.
July 20, 2017
Surprisingly, most of this book was actually about David Bowie, and very interesting on his early and late career, but I bloody love Paul Morley so I really enjoyed the chapters which were him writing about himself writing about David Bowie. The combination of his melancholy inquisitiveness and David Bowie's restless invention was exactly what I wanted to read right now. (Sadly, 'The Laughing Gnome' gets dissed again though - will I ever find a rock critic who agrees that it is a towering work of greatness?)
August 10, 2016
30 JUL 2016 - a recommendation through Bettie. Many thanks.
Listen here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m58f9
A fantastic listen-to. Many Thanks, Bettie, this is/was SUPER!
Listen here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m58f9
A fantastic listen-to. Many Thanks, Bettie, this is/was SUPER!
May 23, 2017
Ok, i would read anything about David Bowie, but Paul Morley's writing style at times can get very irritating.
August 28, 2024
Finished - at last! Can't say that I'm not glad to see the back of this one, even though I persevered to the bitter end hoping for some improvement!!
I'm afraid that the writing style just wasn't for me - very lengthy and convoluted paragraphs, many of which I either had to re-read to get a sense of or found myself drifting off and not really concentrating on. It just seemed that the author liked the sound of his own voice and, rather than give a portrayal of Bowie as an artist, it was more a diatribe of the author's thoughts on Bowie - which are not the same thing at all!
There was certain information which I would expect to get from a biography which was either lacking in this one or had to be plucked out from the midst of a plethora of irrelevant text. The bits that I did like were the sections at the end of the 'year' chapters when, having described in painful detail what Bowie was up to, the author then detailed what other artists, albums and singles were popular in that year. Sadly, this was only a small part of the book and the only saving grace for me is that I borrowed it from the library rather than spending good money buying it! - 4/10.
I'm afraid that the writing style just wasn't for me - very lengthy and convoluted paragraphs, many of which I either had to re-read to get a sense of or found myself drifting off and not really concentrating on. It just seemed that the author liked the sound of his own voice and, rather than give a portrayal of Bowie as an artist, it was more a diatribe of the author's thoughts on Bowie - which are not the same thing at all!
There was certain information which I would expect to get from a biography which was either lacking in this one or had to be plucked out from the midst of a plethora of irrelevant text. The bits that I did like were the sections at the end of the 'year' chapters when, having described in painful detail what Bowie was up to, the author then detailed what other artists, albums and singles were popular in that year. Sadly, this was only a small part of the book and the only saving grace for me is that I borrowed it from the library rather than spending good money buying it! - 4/10.
July 30, 2016
I received an advance reading copy of this book, for free, through Goodreads First Reads program in exchange for my honest review.
The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference, by Paul Morley, is among the first (surely not the last) in a slew of books looking to profit from the unexpected death of David Bowie in January. There is no denying that Morley is a Bowie superfan. His knowledge of all things Bowie led to him being asked by Bowie’s management to be the curator for a David Bowie exhibition in London. Morley is more than qualified to write a David Bowie biography.
Though classified as a “biography”, The Age of Bowie does not have the feel of a biography in the classical sense. There are very few quotes from those who knew Bowie, and even fewer from Bowie himself. Instead, it reads: He (Bowie) did this; he did that. This inspired him; he inspired that. He thought this; he thought that. How the author was able to know what Bowie was thinking at times, and what inspired Bowie’s actions, was not explained; there were no citations. Did Bowie reveal this in an interview at sometime, or is the author simply making assumptions? One of the few quotes from David Bowie in the book was, “Sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen of some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input I put in.”
Though I did learn some interesting facts about Bowie, it seemed I had to sift through a lot of information to find them. Morley has a tendency to be wordy. What could have been summed up in a paragraph, often took Morley three pages to describe. Also, there was simply too much Morley in the book. Near the beginning we learn of how the author first heard about Bowie’s death. This seemed fitting, and set the stage for recapping the story of Bowie’s life. Later we hear more and more about the author’s life. Being a music critic, he offers his commentary about what was going on, year-by-year, in music during the 1970s. Later, as the Bowie story is finally hitting its stride (1980/1981), it is derailed by Morley recounting a story of how he was asked to write a book over the course of a weekend while sitting in the lobby of a museum. By the time he finally returned to Bowie’s life, it was time to wrap things up. The last 35 years of Bowie’s life were rushed through in just over 50 pages.
Morley argues that David Bowie is different to everyone. We each have our own personal Bowie. My Bowie is not your Bowie. Your Bowie is not mine. The Age of Bowie reflects the author’s Bowie. Due to his knowledge of the subject, The Age of Bowie is an interesting read. Bowie was such a fascinating, enigmatic figure it would be difficult to tell his story and not have it come across as being interesting. I gave the book a four star rating, however, if Goodreads allowed half star ratings to be given, three-and-a-half stars would be more accurate.
The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference, by Paul Morley, is among the first (surely not the last) in a slew of books looking to profit from the unexpected death of David Bowie in January. There is no denying that Morley is a Bowie superfan. His knowledge of all things Bowie led to him being asked by Bowie’s management to be the curator for a David Bowie exhibition in London. Morley is more than qualified to write a David Bowie biography.
Though classified as a “biography”, The Age of Bowie does not have the feel of a biography in the classical sense. There are very few quotes from those who knew Bowie, and even fewer from Bowie himself. Instead, it reads: He (Bowie) did this; he did that. This inspired him; he inspired that. He thought this; he thought that. How the author was able to know what Bowie was thinking at times, and what inspired Bowie’s actions, was not explained; there were no citations. Did Bowie reveal this in an interview at sometime, or is the author simply making assumptions? One of the few quotes from David Bowie in the book was, “Sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen of some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input I put in.”
Though I did learn some interesting facts about Bowie, it seemed I had to sift through a lot of information to find them. Morley has a tendency to be wordy. What could have been summed up in a paragraph, often took Morley three pages to describe. Also, there was simply too much Morley in the book. Near the beginning we learn of how the author first heard about Bowie’s death. This seemed fitting, and set the stage for recapping the story of Bowie’s life. Later we hear more and more about the author’s life. Being a music critic, he offers his commentary about what was going on, year-by-year, in music during the 1970s. Later, as the Bowie story is finally hitting its stride (1980/1981), it is derailed by Morley recounting a story of how he was asked to write a book over the course of a weekend while sitting in the lobby of a museum. By the time he finally returned to Bowie’s life, it was time to wrap things up. The last 35 years of Bowie’s life were rushed through in just over 50 pages.
Morley argues that David Bowie is different to everyone. We each have our own personal Bowie. My Bowie is not your Bowie. Your Bowie is not mine. The Age of Bowie reflects the author’s Bowie. Due to his knowledge of the subject, The Age of Bowie is an interesting read. Bowie was such a fascinating, enigmatic figure it would be difficult to tell his story and not have it come across as being interesting. I gave the book a four star rating, however, if Goodreads allowed half star ratings to be given, three-and-a-half stars would be more accurate.
August 25, 2016
I for one am very grateful to live in the 'Age of Bowie." I can't think of another artist who either took me to other places, or I felt I could have a discussion with this artist about those places. I never had an eye-to-eye chat with Bowie, except to recommend a Japanese bookstore in Downtown Los Angeles - still, such a remarkable music maker and cultural advisor. Paul Morley's book on Bowie is exactly what one would think, if you have read Morley's other books and articles on the subject matter of pop music. Morley is not a 'it has a nice beat, and I give it a five' type of commentator - he's more of a Walter Benjamin, but happily placed in the world of the pop music world.
There is nothing new to read in "The Age of Bowie," if you're a long-term fan of David's work - nor is there any really new insights into the Bowie world, if you read the many (and many) books that are out there on Bowie, and which to be honest, are pretty good. What you do get is the unique voice of Morley, and in a sense this book is more about Paul Morley than David Bowie. And this, is a very good thing. For one, this book was written quite quickly, in honor of Bowie's passing, but it is also a reflection on the pop eras that has passed for Morley as well. most of the chapters, he lists records that were released during Bowie's own releases - and it gives the book a really nice framework.
It also focuses on Bowie's obsessions and interests - and how that sneaked or became part of his music. Morley has a really good understanding of Bowie's work, and he's a fan, but he's not an emotional lunatic fan like me. He's like a detective going through the evidence and cooly remarking on each item that is on file. The book will not please all Bowie fans, but it's a must for Bowie fans to read. One of the many things I like about this book is that it's not a closed conversation, but a very open one - where readers can add their own thoughts and commentary. It is also not an album-by-album critique - but clearly an over-all approach to the Bowie magic. David Bowie was (and still is,) a superb adventure. This book is one of a few that take that adventure and go with it.
There is nothing new to read in "The Age of Bowie," if you're a long-term fan of David's work - nor is there any really new insights into the Bowie world, if you read the many (and many) books that are out there on Bowie, and which to be honest, are pretty good. What you do get is the unique voice of Morley, and in a sense this book is more about Paul Morley than David Bowie. And this, is a very good thing. For one, this book was written quite quickly, in honor of Bowie's passing, but it is also a reflection on the pop eras that has passed for Morley as well. most of the chapters, he lists records that were released during Bowie's own releases - and it gives the book a really nice framework.
It also focuses on Bowie's obsessions and interests - and how that sneaked or became part of his music. Morley has a really good understanding of Bowie's work, and he's a fan, but he's not an emotional lunatic fan like me. He's like a detective going through the evidence and cooly remarking on each item that is on file. The book will not please all Bowie fans, but it's a must for Bowie fans to read. One of the many things I like about this book is that it's not a closed conversation, but a very open one - where readers can add their own thoughts and commentary. It is also not an album-by-album critique - but clearly an over-all approach to the Bowie magic. David Bowie was (and still is,) a superb adventure. This book is one of a few that take that adventure and go with it.
February 4, 2017
The Age of Bowie is a heavy going, verbose, semi-stream-of-consciousness biography which, if it wasn't for the excellent mid-section covering Bowie's seminal years in the seventies and it's distillation of Bowie's allure and artistic integrity, then the whole thing would've probably been a bit too much for me.
Morley says he wrote the book in about ten weeks, and it shows; I daresay the whole thing needed another month or two for editing. Arguably, my (lack of) appreciation for the plump, over-written pre-Hunky Dory chapters might be down to my 'knowledge deficit' of the sixties, and admittedly it was interesting to gain an understanding of Bowie's influences, such as The Velvet Underground and Shirley Bassey. But, these parts were just made so inaccessible by Morley's navel gazing, that you found yourself 'pushing through' the book. Is it not the job of the biographer to entertain as well as inform?
Not all was bleak, however, for Morley's ability to capture the essence of what makes Bowie so special as an artist and not just a performer - that is, Bowie's spirit of experimentation and non-conformity to genre and time - turned the book into something worth reading. It's fascinating to read how his contemporaries (Mick Ronson, Mark Bolan, the Stones, etc.) fail to conform, and succumb to the failings of rock (expulsion from glamour and innovation to plain, old Dad Rock) whilst Bowie continues to wow with genre-splitting and era-defining LPs.
Plus, Morley manages to explain, in about a few pages, just exactly why Station to Station is the best Bowie album - also my favourite - in the best way I've yet read: that transitional album between Ziggy, Young Americans and the Berlin trilogy, that manages to showcase the best of each. Definitely a 4/5 book, but likely only if you're a Bowie fan.
Morley says he wrote the book in about ten weeks, and it shows; I daresay the whole thing needed another month or two for editing. Arguably, my (lack of) appreciation for the plump, over-written pre-Hunky Dory chapters might be down to my 'knowledge deficit' of the sixties, and admittedly it was interesting to gain an understanding of Bowie's influences, such as The Velvet Underground and Shirley Bassey. But, these parts were just made so inaccessible by Morley's navel gazing, that you found yourself 'pushing through' the book. Is it not the job of the biographer to entertain as well as inform?
Not all was bleak, however, for Morley's ability to capture the essence of what makes Bowie so special as an artist and not just a performer - that is, Bowie's spirit of experimentation and non-conformity to genre and time - turned the book into something worth reading. It's fascinating to read how his contemporaries (Mick Ronson, Mark Bolan, the Stones, etc.) fail to conform, and succumb to the failings of rock (expulsion from glamour and innovation to plain, old Dad Rock) whilst Bowie continues to wow with genre-splitting and era-defining LPs.
Plus, Morley manages to explain, in about a few pages, just exactly why Station to Station is the best Bowie album - also my favourite - in the best way I've yet read: that transitional album between Ziggy, Young Americans and the Berlin trilogy, that manages to showcase the best of each. Definitely a 4/5 book, but likely only if you're a Bowie fan.
January 14, 2019
Paul Morley is setting himself the task of writing a book about David Bowie within a mere 10 weeks. Paul Morley is spewing out an unending stream of superlatives in lieu of any coherent analysis of David Bowie’s career. Paul Morley is presiding over an utter shambles of a narrative, seemingly cobbled together in an ill-advised homage to Bowie’s cut-up/collage technique and Brian Eno’s oblique strategies. Paul Morley is writing in the present tense about Bowie (but primarily himself) in order to convey his self-importance and sense of gravity. Paul Morley is not just teetering on the edge of self-parody, but eagerly jumping headlong into it. Paul Morley is obsessed by the size of David Bowie’s lunchbox. Paul Morley is rapidly disappearing up his own fundament. Paul Morley is giving every impression of being a colossal spoofer.
If you’re irritated by that kind of stylistic affectation, you will be infuriated by Paul Morley’s “The Age of Bowie”. This is a book so insufferable, so bloated with pretentious piffle, that even the most ardent-Bowie fan will find it almost impossible not to hurl it out the nearest window. David Bowie’s extraordinary life is well served by a plethora of superior biographies, so there is no need to waste your time with this waffle.
If you’re irritated by that kind of stylistic affectation, you will be infuriated by Paul Morley’s “The Age of Bowie”. This is a book so insufferable, so bloated with pretentious piffle, that even the most ardent-Bowie fan will find it almost impossible not to hurl it out the nearest window. David Bowie’s extraordinary life is well served by a plethora of superior biographies, so there is no need to waste your time with this waffle.
February 24, 2025
In the early 80's, Paul Morley was a writer for the NME. His reviews and articles were often irritatingly pretentious. ("Ian Curtis is the Voice of God.")
I don't know why I thought he might have changed in the last 40 years. His prose is still littered with gushing superlatives and endless diversions. He is particularly keen on lists:
David Bowie is showing us where time goes.
David Bowie is glad to be moving on to something better.
David Bowie is thinking about the world to come.
David Bowie is moving like a tiger on Vaseline.
It's all very silly.
There are sections of the book that do provide interesting information and insights (particularly about Bowie's early life), but I found myself sifting through the annoying narrative to find them.
If you want to read a straightforward biography of Bowie, avoid this book. If you love Paul Morley's writing, then this one's for you.
I don't know why I thought he might have changed in the last 40 years. His prose is still littered with gushing superlatives and endless diversions. He is particularly keen on lists:
David Bowie is showing us where time goes.
David Bowie is glad to be moving on to something better.
David Bowie is thinking about the world to come.
David Bowie is moving like a tiger on Vaseline.
It's all very silly.
There are sections of the book that do provide interesting information and insights (particularly about Bowie's early life), but I found myself sifting through the annoying narrative to find them.
If you want to read a straightforward biography of Bowie, avoid this book. If you love Paul Morley's writing, then this one's for you.
June 24, 2022
a really good biography about one of the most fascinating people that has ever lived. my only criticism is that it tends to romanticise bowie’s life at points where he should be described more as a real person than as a seemingly flawless icon. i mean, if there’s anyone who’s an icon it’s david bowie, but i knew that already going into it. still, this was such a wonderful read and i will continue to read everything i can find about him!
July 22, 2020
I have come to the realisation in the last couple of years that there is something rather addictive about biographies of David Bowie. Publishers seem to agree with me, pumping them out from all angles. But many of the books end up occupying similar ground, and curiously seem to all agree on the artistic value of practically all of the albums in his canon (only The Man Who Sold The World, Buddha of Suburbia, 1. Outside and Earthling seem to inspire any controversy). We've had obsessive completists, media commentators, philosophers, fashion watchers, actors, gay rights campaigners, prurient stickybeaks, fellow musicians and record producers all taking up their cudgels and their light from under bushels to write about him. Here we get an addition to that torrent that has actually come after Bowie's death, written by Paul Morley, famed music journalist and half of the briefly notorious duo behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood in the 1980s, and the man to whom Bowie turned when planning the David Bowie Is exhibition. Morley brings his trademark breakneck musing style to spread out the entire artistic quilt he has knitted from the wool of Bowie since Morley was a young teenager thinking about just maybe becoming a writer. It is a different approach that gives those of us who are many Bowie books down the line something new to dig into. Of course, this means that is probably not the place to begin for those who are looking to read their first Bowie bio. You possibly need to know something already about the edifice that Morley is scraping and chipping at to be content to follow these literate scrapings for so many pages. Morley takes Bowie (too?) seriously, something which is clear from the very title of the book.
The Bowie exhibition got it right: Bowie is so many things at once. Deliberately so, wilfully so, necessarily so. He split himself into several constituent artistic parts and glued them together in different ways while following the dynamic rapids of contemporary culture. No one else from the time tried to do such a thing, or could have even made a decent fist of it. All those changes could not have been attempted by a Jagger, a McCartney, a Lennon, a Townshend, an Elton John or (insert name here). The closest equivalent is the aimless Protean suit-changing of Neil Young when he sought to encompass 50s rock n' roll, old time country and electronic music within a few years. But he was doing all this as a grizzled hippie and fashioning it from the ditch. Apart from the suit and the hair cream, there was little of a true change going on. Bowie inhabited his changes in a way that was not just homage but also trailblazing. Of course he couldn't keep it up for the rest of life. He lasted until 1980. Then he decided he needed a payday following finally breaking free of the usury of his manager Tony DeFries and after that - Faustian pacts being what they are - lost his artistic compass for rather a long time. Indeed a period (1981-1993, some would say later) rather longer than his purple patch (1971-80). But he still had all or most of his talents intact. So what happened? Indeed, after reading so many books about Bowie, it remains truly baffling how he could have made Never Let Me Down with a straight face. Tonight and Tin Machine can be explained away (repeat the gold dust and take on a new skin, respectively), but Never Let Me Down still cannot.
Morley, like Peter Doggett, "solves" the Bowie arc problem by focusing most of his book on 1970-80 and then treating the rest like something of an increasingly complex coda, almost as if Bowie became a monk meditating on his own value to modern culture after having laid down so many flourishing shoots in such a short time. In this view, he almost couldn't face creating more things and having to include them in his meditations… I'm not sure that is really the case, and indeed, Bowie still looked to create during those years. However, it cannot be ignored that the type of concentrated media saturation that accompanied music in the 1970s was no longer true of the 1990s and 2000s, and Bowie seemed well aware of this. He entered into a number of cutting-edge ventures at a time when just curating the influence of the output from his years of pomp occupied a certain amount of time. He managed to play the hermit role while participating, even in the 10 years that passed without new albums (2003-2013). And then he roared with a final flurry before being whisked off, a moment he somehow managed to make sad, disorientating, fitting, numbing, frustrating and transcendent all at once. Morley gets all of that across, indeed, you could argue that this whole book is his 400-page version of that last sentence I just wrote. With all of the pluses and minuses that could entail.
And the Bowie books keep coming…
The Bowie exhibition got it right: Bowie is so many things at once. Deliberately so, wilfully so, necessarily so. He split himself into several constituent artistic parts and glued them together in different ways while following the dynamic rapids of contemporary culture. No one else from the time tried to do such a thing, or could have even made a decent fist of it. All those changes could not have been attempted by a Jagger, a McCartney, a Lennon, a Townshend, an Elton John or (insert name here). The closest equivalent is the aimless Protean suit-changing of Neil Young when he sought to encompass 50s rock n' roll, old time country and electronic music within a few years. But he was doing all this as a grizzled hippie and fashioning it from the ditch. Apart from the suit and the hair cream, there was little of a true change going on. Bowie inhabited his changes in a way that was not just homage but also trailblazing. Of course he couldn't keep it up for the rest of life. He lasted until 1980. Then he decided he needed a payday following finally breaking free of the usury of his manager Tony DeFries and after that - Faustian pacts being what they are - lost his artistic compass for rather a long time. Indeed a period (1981-1993, some would say later) rather longer than his purple patch (1971-80). But he still had all or most of his talents intact. So what happened? Indeed, after reading so many books about Bowie, it remains truly baffling how he could have made Never Let Me Down with a straight face. Tonight and Tin Machine can be explained away (repeat the gold dust and take on a new skin, respectively), but Never Let Me Down still cannot.
Morley, like Peter Doggett, "solves" the Bowie arc problem by focusing most of his book on 1970-80 and then treating the rest like something of an increasingly complex coda, almost as if Bowie became a monk meditating on his own value to modern culture after having laid down so many flourishing shoots in such a short time. In this view, he almost couldn't face creating more things and having to include them in his meditations… I'm not sure that is really the case, and indeed, Bowie still looked to create during those years. However, it cannot be ignored that the type of concentrated media saturation that accompanied music in the 1970s was no longer true of the 1990s and 2000s, and Bowie seemed well aware of this. He entered into a number of cutting-edge ventures at a time when just curating the influence of the output from his years of pomp occupied a certain amount of time. He managed to play the hermit role while participating, even in the 10 years that passed without new albums (2003-2013). And then he roared with a final flurry before being whisked off, a moment he somehow managed to make sad, disorientating, fitting, numbing, frustrating and transcendent all at once. Morley gets all of that across, indeed, you could argue that this whole book is his 400-page version of that last sentence I just wrote. With all of the pluses and minuses that could entail.
And the Bowie books keep coming…
Read
August 22, 2016I know a lot of people who had a lot of reactions to the loss of Bowie, but even so I'm not sure any of us managed to get the best part of 500 pages out of it. Though of course it's at least as idiosyncratic as it is monumental, not just because this is Paul Morley but because any book about Bowie which pretended to tell the whole and single story of such a prismatic figure would be dead on arrival. Which means, among other things, that Morley devotes as much time to Peter and the Wolf as to Lodger. The Elephant Man and performing with Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live get more than either; lest you think Morley is being wilfully obscure, Labyrinth then gets more space than either (in particular the Bulge, which Morley quite correctly emphasises as every bit as much of a sexual watershed as the arm around Ronson on Top of the Pops, but one taken less seriously because it spoke more to the pop girls than the rock boys). There's more on the jazz influence than you might expect; Bowie's stuttering sixties failures to launch get examined in greater detail than I've seen before. And for those who think Paul Morley books always contain too much Paul Morley...well, yes, we get a lot on what it feels like to be one of the people contacted about celebrity deaths, but I found that fairly interesting anyway. And we also get the bit where he describes himself as "a dull rock journalist, a mere critic, essentially yet another overexcited fan". Which is true, but no more or less so than his observation that 'David Bowie' was ultimately a collaborative project in which Bowie took the lead but we all participated a little. The sections you couldn't do the story without are here too, of course, Ziggy and Berlin and 'Space Oddity', but even there Morley finds new perspectives, suggesting that Bowie not only predicted the classic rock trajectory with The Rise and Fall, but also helped prefigure the celebrity culture from which he then withdrew just as he put every other mask on the shelf once it had served its purpose and the followers moved in. Bowie as Internet and business pioneer was another of the less-told stories when he went, but being reminded of Bowie Bonds and BowieNet it's hard to deny that they were every bit as prescient as Low or Station to Station, even if they're not artworks one can treasure and revisit in quite the same way.
The book was written in a hurry, though not precisely the hurry you might think - a part of it was begun as live writer-in-residence at the V&A's David Bowie Is exhibition, which Morley helped to curate. Accordingly, there are still large chunks where every section begins with the words "David Bowie is"; whether this works for you will be very much a matter of temperament. But obviously it's all filtered through the lens of that final magic trick, which opened the curtain on this tragic year and put a certain pressure of time on the release of any Bowie book which might have been somewhere approaching fruition anyway. And it's interesting seeing what Morley's prose looks like when he's slightly rushed, when there wasn't quite the usual time for editing - still those teetering sentences which spiral and turn in on themselves and dance along the precipices, but they do fall off a little more often than formerly. Every so often the mouth and the tail don't quite connect, the bits left hanging aren't the bits which were meant to be, and you realise how much the final polish has always done for him, that nobody can write like Paul Morley and pull it off all the time, not even Paul Morley. Though needless to say the prose is still a damn sight better put together, and fizzier, than most music writers manage at their best. And in the end, whatever else this book is or isn't, it pulls off what must surely be a key aim of music writing and sends you back to the music with fresh ears for the strangeness and wonder of songs which are months or years or decades old and yet still sound like they come from some barely-imaginable future.
The book was written in a hurry, though not precisely the hurry you might think - a part of it was begun as live writer-in-residence at the V&A's David Bowie Is exhibition, which Morley helped to curate. Accordingly, there are still large chunks where every section begins with the words "David Bowie is"; whether this works for you will be very much a matter of temperament. But obviously it's all filtered through the lens of that final magic trick, which opened the curtain on this tragic year and put a certain pressure of time on the release of any Bowie book which might have been somewhere approaching fruition anyway. And it's interesting seeing what Morley's prose looks like when he's slightly rushed, when there wasn't quite the usual time for editing - still those teetering sentences which spiral and turn in on themselves and dance along the precipices, but they do fall off a little more often than formerly. Every so often the mouth and the tail don't quite connect, the bits left hanging aren't the bits which were meant to be, and you realise how much the final polish has always done for him, that nobody can write like Paul Morley and pull it off all the time, not even Paul Morley. Though needless to say the prose is still a damn sight better put together, and fizzier, than most music writers manage at their best. And in the end, whatever else this book is or isn't, it pulls off what must surely be a key aim of music writing and sends you back to the music with fresh ears for the strangeness and wonder of songs which are months or years or decades old and yet still sound like they come from some barely-imaginable future.
August 24, 2016
Having grown up with Paul Morley, reading his enthusiasms in the New Musical Express in the late seventies, I knew what to expect. I remember reviews where the band or album was barely mentioned. But his writing always intrigued, provoked, and introduced me to a whole number of exciting bands. With this book, there is a lot of information on Bowie but it certainly isn't for those who want to know how many overdubs were used on a particular track. Chunks of Bowie history are under referenced (the eighties/nineties). But then Morley himself says that this is what Bowie is to him, it is not a dry Wikipedia look at the man. Surely, as Morley says, Bowie is different things to different people. And I really enjoyed reading about his Bowie. My Bowie is someone, who from the time I was twelve, has produced music which has delighted me. The Age of Bowie respects that.
February 4, 2017
Paul Morley's thesis appears to go thus: David Bowie was so protean and mysterious an artist, so adept at keeping outside and ahead of fashion and cultural development, that any attempt at reducing him to a conventional biography is doomed in advance to failure. All a putative biographer can do is write about the David Bowie(s) who affected him or her, and how, and why. The result here is therefore necessarily more a book about Paul Morley than it is about David Bowie, and being *by* Mr Morley, it is verbose, showy, egotistical, indirectional, vacuous, and ultimately boring.
I didn't think it was possible to write boringly about Bowie. I was wrong.
I didn't think it was possible to write boringly about Bowie. I was wrong.
August 9, 2016
Everyone's Bowie is different.
That's what it comes down too and this is very much Paul Morley's Bowie.
Reading about Bowie, through Morley's eye's, his interpretations and assumptions on Davids think and feeling.
I feel it read like Morley reporting on interviews he has read and encounters he has had. It was interesting and you did get an insight into the world of Bowie, but you know if it's the real one.
That's what it comes down too and this is very much Paul Morley's Bowie.
Reading about Bowie, through Morley's eye's, his interpretations and assumptions on Davids think and feeling.
I feel it read like Morley reporting on interviews he has read and encounters he has had. It was interesting and you did get an insight into the world of Bowie, but you know if it's the real one.
December 17, 2018
As a huge Bowie fan I was excited to listen to this audiobook to find out more about my idol. I feel really let down by this. Didn’t find it as insightful as I wanted. Just a bit ploddy.
June 22, 2019
Don’t get this if you’re looking for a hard fact bio - this is a collection of images and impressions, like an abstract poem. As that, it’s lovely.
Read
November 16, 2017Paul Morley is writing a book about David Bowie.
Is it possible to write a biography of Bowie that is not also autobiographical? One of his qualities, since his first rise to stardom, has been his ability to work his way into the very heart of his fans’ lives, to appear to be something unique to each individual: to talk about Bowie is, even more now that he is dead, to talk about what Bowie means to you. Of course there are books which study the music itself, more or less objectively (usually less, I have to say): but this is not that kind of book. In fact Morley is not all that interested in discussing the music itself – he assumes a knowledge of the songs, or lets the songs speak for themselves, instead exploring the idea of the songs, the idea of Bowie himself. At times it is hardly a biography, more an appreciation, an exploration, a fiction. To be fair, it doesn’t claim to be anything else.
What it is without doubt is Paul Morley’s book. Explicitly acknowledging that the prism through which Bowie is viewed is unavoidably incomplete and individual, the book spends an alarming amount of time discussing Paul Morley before it really moves on to Bowie. What follows is often every bit as much about Paul Morley, albeit in a subtler way: because this is a book that constantly seeks to find meaning, it can only ever find the meaning that Paul Morley finds. Which is fine – the book’s strength, in fact – but it does mean that what we have here is one perspective, one Bowie, neither definitive nor comprehensive. It is the perspective of someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s, which results in a rarely-seen focus on Bowie’s early years, his upbringing and initial repeated failures to find the success he craved, then places the weight squarely on the 70s the fruition of these experiments.
And many would agree that this is sensible enough: nobody would question that the 70s represent, apart from anything else, the most prolific period of Bowie’s creative output. But Morley is taken by surprise to discover that there’s a generation of us who were introduced to Bowie by a Jim Henson film, and that our first (and lasting) impression of the man was seared into our minds by a Tina Turner wig and a bulging pair of tights. My first Bowie album – of sorts – was the soundtrack to Labyrinth, my subsequent journey of discovery moving both forwards and backwards from the mid-80s. I discovered Ziggy Stardust at the same time as Earthling (and why not, given the thematic and visual similarities?), I was listening to the Berlin trilogy for the first time even as he was releasing a brand new album called Heathen (again, it sort of made sense). Soon we will surely get a biography written by someone who grew up in the age of Thatcher, as curious about the clean-cut stadium Bowie as the glam Bowie, as searching about his sell-out, superficial years as his experimental ones (I have a weird obsession with bad Bowie, much of which is still pretty good by any other standards, and there’s plenty to say about the aesthetic of 80s pop and whether Bowie in fact subverted it more than we like to admit.) Even more fascinating will be the biography by the millennial who discovered Bowie all in one go, whose first exposure to the vast expanse of the man’s opus is from the vantage point of now, where any new releases will still be old releases, an objective view of the music without all of the personal relevance that clings to so much of it for those who were there at the time.
This is not that book. In fact everything after 1980 gets pretty short shrift, the 80s half packed into a stream-of-consciousness chapter using ideas from visitors to the Victoria and Albert museum’s Bowie weekend to understand the perspective of those who came to Bowie in a different decade and half dismissed in a chapter more interested in Bowie’s non-musical activities, as if to claim that Bowie continued to reinvent himself in his ‘bad’ decade, just not in his music. The 80s albums don’t really fit the conceit of this book, which makes the mistake (and I think it is a mistake) of treating Bowie’s significance as inevitable, giving Bowie a godlike awareness of his own potential and importance. Even his disappearing into a crowded scene of bland musical copycats is portrayed as deliberate: his decision let Nile Rodgers produce the Bowie that Nile Rodgers wanted is seen as a statement rather than, to entertain a couple of other possibilities, commercial pragmatism or sheer complacency. There’s a hell of a lot of laziness in Bowie’s weakest years, even if he was still working pretty hard by any normal standards, but Morley doesn’t quite allow his Bowie to have that kind of human limitation. So we miss out on a discussion of Tonight and Never Let Me Down, which is a pity because in some way’s they’re more interesting than the bloodless clinical precision of Let’s Dance (and personally I’d rather listen to their flawed grandeur).
More surprising is the omission of any detailed examination of the artistic reinvigoration of the 90s, where again Morley prefers to dwell on the periphery, examining Bowie’s forays into the growing world of the internet with far more interest than any of the albums from that period. Of course it can (and has) been argued that Bowie’s later musical output has less social significance, less relevance, less ‘meaning’ than anything he did in the 70s; as a musician I am constantly frustrated by this perspective, because Bowie the musician continued to evolve and experiment and indeed, in a subtler but still mammoth way, influence. The omissions stretch as far as the musical Lazarus, arguably as much a swansong as Blackstar and as curious and compelling a piece to dissect artistically. But by this stage Morley has moved beyond Bowie the artist: he is interested in the legend, what Bowie did to perpetuate and grow Bowie the product, what Bowie meant rather than who Bowie was. Even his eventual apparent retirement into domesticity is implied to have been part of a plan.
The problem with this omniscient, calculating idea of Bowie is that it eliminates the tantalising possibility that he might have failed, or succeeded in a different way – ended up a children’s presenter, or a writer of musical theatre. The belief that runs through this book is that Bowie always had to become Bowie, that he was too unique not to, that we can trace it back to the twelve-year-old who stood out amongst his peers at school – when there are plenty of twelve-year-olds who stand out from their peers, who have a mysterious and unique potential, and who end up disappearing into the faceless crowd of adulthood all the same. With hindsight, we can feed all kinds of significance into the formative years of Davie Jones, and Morley relishes the opportunity to flesh out the little we know about him – it makes for a thrilling chapter, the best in the book, breathing life and colour into his adolescence in a way nobody has come close to doing before. But there is some artistic licence involved. Morley knows it and plays on the heightened reality he is creating. It is an entirely appropriate way of exploring an artist whose reality was always in a rather heightened state anyway, but I did experience the unnerving sense of Bowie the legend becoming bigger than ever before, galvanised by Bowie’s death and taking on a new layer of mystery and significance.
What struck me was this: Bowie is now, without question, popular music’s closest equivalent to Beethoven. The myth is bigger than the man, the meaning of the music bigger than the music. And we’re just getting started.
Paul Morley is using the present tense.
Taking as a starting point the ‘David Bowie is…’ statements he wrote for the V&A exhibition of the same name, Morley narrates as if the story is happening as he tells it. It gives the text an immediacy which is especially successful in the pre-fame sequence I’ve already mentioned. In the next chapter he takes the motif even further, breaking the 70s up into a series of ‘scenes’, each beginning with what David Bowie ‘is’ doing.
Reader, it gets annoying.
Paul Morley is setting himself a ten-week deadline.
This is set out as part of his artistic mission, to complete the book in the same time that Bowie might have completed an album at the height of his productivity, though quite why is not clear. One suspects it is because a publisher wanted it that quickly in the wake of Bowie’s death. Whatever the actual reason, it explains why the book has a tendency to ramble and free-associate; it is not always a disciplined piece of writing, for all that it is always a heartfelt one. It also explains why this is a book more interested in impressions than facts – this is a narrative that has been remembered, not researched. As such it is a tremendous achievement, though there are some (acknowledged) omissions, some questionable statements, a few inaccuracies. I don’t think Morley had any desire to write a textbook, but in case you’re looking for somewhere to get the full run-down of dates, names and locations, this isn’t it.
That is not to say that the book is short on information. The opposite, in fact: it is packed full of details, plenty of which I have never seen elsewhere. The effect is kaleidoscopic – there is a huge amount to take in, insights and observations alongside snapshots, montages and tableaux, all of which paint a rich, involving picture of Bowie’s crowded and complex life. I also love how Morley hones in on some of the less visited aspects, finds significance where others have not thought to: his enthusing over Bowie’s underrated narration of Peter and the Wolf is wonderful, and so right.
Incorporated into the book-written-within-ten-weeks is a chapter-written-within-two-days, another memento from Morley’s contribution to the V&A exhibition and associated events. I am not convinced by the value of this writing-as-art-installation approach. Undoubtedly, Morley can ramble on about Bowie more knowledgably and entertainingly than most, but it’s still rambling (as Capote quite rightly said of Kerouac, ‘that’s not writing, that’s typing’*). A book attempting to pack Bowie’s life into under 500 pages would be better served by more discipline, when bits of this feel like a writer’s notes, musings that should have been filtered before hitting the editor’s inbox.
Is it also cynical of me to suspect that a looser deadline might have resulted in a more satisfying couple of chapters on the later years? It almost feels as though Morley doesn’t rate the music from this period, though the references littering the book tell a different story. Perhaps the later years are harder to process, perhaps they’re still too fresh to analyse in the way the 70s can now be dissected, but a mention of the ‘few, precious hours’ Morley gave himself to understand Bowie’s bold capitalist ventures of the 90s speaks of a writer running out of time to do the job properly. (I didn’t want any more detail on the Bowie Bonds, by the way. But I’d have appreciated some acknowledgment the unique improvisatory atmosphere of the 1. Outside recording sessions, or Bowie’s attempt to record a new album of early songs, or the significant contribution of the band he built up around him in those years, or… or…)
Paul Morley is experimenting with style.
He makes the demonstrably absurd assertion that each era ‘needs to be written in a different way, to reflect where he was,’ so the relatively straightforward, if knowingly fictionalised, account of Bowie’s youth gives way to a deliberately fragmented, non-linear account. It is entertainingly fragmented and never dull, but occasionally it is frustratingly inconsistent. At times, so engrossed in his subject (who we all know could be wilfully, cheekily pretentious at times), Morley almost becomes too wrapped up in his wordsmithery, and the book becomes as much a comment on the way we comment on Bowie, a whirlwind of ideas deliberately left wrapped up in the kind of high fallutin’ language Bowie himself dabbled with when he wanted to avoid the subject. There are passing references to things you might have heard about – or might not. He teases with suggestions that may be rumours or may be things he dreamt or imagined. He references the lyrics and songs with the mastery of someone who has long been immersed in them, but he often forgets to let us in on the joke. Facts lose their clarity amidst the wordplay. As a fellow Bowie obsessive, I found this all quite enjoyable, or at least tantalising, but I do wonder whether this works at all for the uninitiated.
Paul Morley is only scratching the surface.
He knows it. He knows he’s only writing about a version of Bowie, his version of Bowie, and as an unashamedly personal assessment of the man, his work and his significance, this book offers something quite special. Certainly as a way of processing Bowie even as the shock of his death hasn’t really faded, it ticks a lot of boxes. But there are plenty of other things to be said, other books to be written.
This is exactly as it should be.
*I know that Bowie himself stood by On the Road to the end. But the man made mistakes – listen to ‘Shining Star (Makin’ My Love)’…
Is it possible to write a biography of Bowie that is not also autobiographical? One of his qualities, since his first rise to stardom, has been his ability to work his way into the very heart of his fans’ lives, to appear to be something unique to each individual: to talk about Bowie is, even more now that he is dead, to talk about what Bowie means to you. Of course there are books which study the music itself, more or less objectively (usually less, I have to say): but this is not that kind of book. In fact Morley is not all that interested in discussing the music itself – he assumes a knowledge of the songs, or lets the songs speak for themselves, instead exploring the idea of the songs, the idea of Bowie himself. At times it is hardly a biography, more an appreciation, an exploration, a fiction. To be fair, it doesn’t claim to be anything else.
What it is without doubt is Paul Morley’s book. Explicitly acknowledging that the prism through which Bowie is viewed is unavoidably incomplete and individual, the book spends an alarming amount of time discussing Paul Morley before it really moves on to Bowie. What follows is often every bit as much about Paul Morley, albeit in a subtler way: because this is a book that constantly seeks to find meaning, it can only ever find the meaning that Paul Morley finds. Which is fine – the book’s strength, in fact – but it does mean that what we have here is one perspective, one Bowie, neither definitive nor comprehensive. It is the perspective of someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s, which results in a rarely-seen focus on Bowie’s early years, his upbringing and initial repeated failures to find the success he craved, then places the weight squarely on the 70s the fruition of these experiments.
And many would agree that this is sensible enough: nobody would question that the 70s represent, apart from anything else, the most prolific period of Bowie’s creative output. But Morley is taken by surprise to discover that there’s a generation of us who were introduced to Bowie by a Jim Henson film, and that our first (and lasting) impression of the man was seared into our minds by a Tina Turner wig and a bulging pair of tights. My first Bowie album – of sorts – was the soundtrack to Labyrinth, my subsequent journey of discovery moving both forwards and backwards from the mid-80s. I discovered Ziggy Stardust at the same time as Earthling (and why not, given the thematic and visual similarities?), I was listening to the Berlin trilogy for the first time even as he was releasing a brand new album called Heathen (again, it sort of made sense). Soon we will surely get a biography written by someone who grew up in the age of Thatcher, as curious about the clean-cut stadium Bowie as the glam Bowie, as searching about his sell-out, superficial years as his experimental ones (I have a weird obsession with bad Bowie, much of which is still pretty good by any other standards, and there’s plenty to say about the aesthetic of 80s pop and whether Bowie in fact subverted it more than we like to admit.) Even more fascinating will be the biography by the millennial who discovered Bowie all in one go, whose first exposure to the vast expanse of the man’s opus is from the vantage point of now, where any new releases will still be old releases, an objective view of the music without all of the personal relevance that clings to so much of it for those who were there at the time.
This is not that book. In fact everything after 1980 gets pretty short shrift, the 80s half packed into a stream-of-consciousness chapter using ideas from visitors to the Victoria and Albert museum’s Bowie weekend to understand the perspective of those who came to Bowie in a different decade and half dismissed in a chapter more interested in Bowie’s non-musical activities, as if to claim that Bowie continued to reinvent himself in his ‘bad’ decade, just not in his music. The 80s albums don’t really fit the conceit of this book, which makes the mistake (and I think it is a mistake) of treating Bowie’s significance as inevitable, giving Bowie a godlike awareness of his own potential and importance. Even his disappearing into a crowded scene of bland musical copycats is portrayed as deliberate: his decision let Nile Rodgers produce the Bowie that Nile Rodgers wanted is seen as a statement rather than, to entertain a couple of other possibilities, commercial pragmatism or sheer complacency. There’s a hell of a lot of laziness in Bowie’s weakest years, even if he was still working pretty hard by any normal standards, but Morley doesn’t quite allow his Bowie to have that kind of human limitation. So we miss out on a discussion of Tonight and Never Let Me Down, which is a pity because in some way’s they’re more interesting than the bloodless clinical precision of Let’s Dance (and personally I’d rather listen to their flawed grandeur).
More surprising is the omission of any detailed examination of the artistic reinvigoration of the 90s, where again Morley prefers to dwell on the periphery, examining Bowie’s forays into the growing world of the internet with far more interest than any of the albums from that period. Of course it can (and has) been argued that Bowie’s later musical output has less social significance, less relevance, less ‘meaning’ than anything he did in the 70s; as a musician I am constantly frustrated by this perspective, because Bowie the musician continued to evolve and experiment and indeed, in a subtler but still mammoth way, influence. The omissions stretch as far as the musical Lazarus, arguably as much a swansong as Blackstar and as curious and compelling a piece to dissect artistically. But by this stage Morley has moved beyond Bowie the artist: he is interested in the legend, what Bowie did to perpetuate and grow Bowie the product, what Bowie meant rather than who Bowie was. Even his eventual apparent retirement into domesticity is implied to have been part of a plan.
The problem with this omniscient, calculating idea of Bowie is that it eliminates the tantalising possibility that he might have failed, or succeeded in a different way – ended up a children’s presenter, or a writer of musical theatre. The belief that runs through this book is that Bowie always had to become Bowie, that he was too unique not to, that we can trace it back to the twelve-year-old who stood out amongst his peers at school – when there are plenty of twelve-year-olds who stand out from their peers, who have a mysterious and unique potential, and who end up disappearing into the faceless crowd of adulthood all the same. With hindsight, we can feed all kinds of significance into the formative years of Davie Jones, and Morley relishes the opportunity to flesh out the little we know about him – it makes for a thrilling chapter, the best in the book, breathing life and colour into his adolescence in a way nobody has come close to doing before. But there is some artistic licence involved. Morley knows it and plays on the heightened reality he is creating. It is an entirely appropriate way of exploring an artist whose reality was always in a rather heightened state anyway, but I did experience the unnerving sense of Bowie the legend becoming bigger than ever before, galvanised by Bowie’s death and taking on a new layer of mystery and significance.
What struck me was this: Bowie is now, without question, popular music’s closest equivalent to Beethoven. The myth is bigger than the man, the meaning of the music bigger than the music. And we’re just getting started.
Paul Morley is using the present tense.
Taking as a starting point the ‘David Bowie is…’ statements he wrote for the V&A exhibition of the same name, Morley narrates as if the story is happening as he tells it. It gives the text an immediacy which is especially successful in the pre-fame sequence I’ve already mentioned. In the next chapter he takes the motif even further, breaking the 70s up into a series of ‘scenes’, each beginning with what David Bowie ‘is’ doing.
Reader, it gets annoying.
Paul Morley is setting himself a ten-week deadline.
This is set out as part of his artistic mission, to complete the book in the same time that Bowie might have completed an album at the height of his productivity, though quite why is not clear. One suspects it is because a publisher wanted it that quickly in the wake of Bowie’s death. Whatever the actual reason, it explains why the book has a tendency to ramble and free-associate; it is not always a disciplined piece of writing, for all that it is always a heartfelt one. It also explains why this is a book more interested in impressions than facts – this is a narrative that has been remembered, not researched. As such it is a tremendous achievement, though there are some (acknowledged) omissions, some questionable statements, a few inaccuracies. I don’t think Morley had any desire to write a textbook, but in case you’re looking for somewhere to get the full run-down of dates, names and locations, this isn’t it.
That is not to say that the book is short on information. The opposite, in fact: it is packed full of details, plenty of which I have never seen elsewhere. The effect is kaleidoscopic – there is a huge amount to take in, insights and observations alongside snapshots, montages and tableaux, all of which paint a rich, involving picture of Bowie’s crowded and complex life. I also love how Morley hones in on some of the less visited aspects, finds significance where others have not thought to: his enthusing over Bowie’s underrated narration of Peter and the Wolf is wonderful, and so right.
Incorporated into the book-written-within-ten-weeks is a chapter-written-within-two-days, another memento from Morley’s contribution to the V&A exhibition and associated events. I am not convinced by the value of this writing-as-art-installation approach. Undoubtedly, Morley can ramble on about Bowie more knowledgably and entertainingly than most, but it’s still rambling (as Capote quite rightly said of Kerouac, ‘that’s not writing, that’s typing’*). A book attempting to pack Bowie’s life into under 500 pages would be better served by more discipline, when bits of this feel like a writer’s notes, musings that should have been filtered before hitting the editor’s inbox.
Is it also cynical of me to suspect that a looser deadline might have resulted in a more satisfying couple of chapters on the later years? It almost feels as though Morley doesn’t rate the music from this period, though the references littering the book tell a different story. Perhaps the later years are harder to process, perhaps they’re still too fresh to analyse in the way the 70s can now be dissected, but a mention of the ‘few, precious hours’ Morley gave himself to understand Bowie’s bold capitalist ventures of the 90s speaks of a writer running out of time to do the job properly. (I didn’t want any more detail on the Bowie Bonds, by the way. But I’d have appreciated some acknowledgment the unique improvisatory atmosphere of the 1. Outside recording sessions, or Bowie’s attempt to record a new album of early songs, or the significant contribution of the band he built up around him in those years, or… or…)
Paul Morley is experimenting with style.
He makes the demonstrably absurd assertion that each era ‘needs to be written in a different way, to reflect where he was,’ so the relatively straightforward, if knowingly fictionalised, account of Bowie’s youth gives way to a deliberately fragmented, non-linear account. It is entertainingly fragmented and never dull, but occasionally it is frustratingly inconsistent. At times, so engrossed in his subject (who we all know could be wilfully, cheekily pretentious at times), Morley almost becomes too wrapped up in his wordsmithery, and the book becomes as much a comment on the way we comment on Bowie, a whirlwind of ideas deliberately left wrapped up in the kind of high fallutin’ language Bowie himself dabbled with when he wanted to avoid the subject. There are passing references to things you might have heard about – or might not. He teases with suggestions that may be rumours or may be things he dreamt or imagined. He references the lyrics and songs with the mastery of someone who has long been immersed in them, but he often forgets to let us in on the joke. Facts lose their clarity amidst the wordplay. As a fellow Bowie obsessive, I found this all quite enjoyable, or at least tantalising, but I do wonder whether this works at all for the uninitiated.
Paul Morley is only scratching the surface.
He knows it. He knows he’s only writing about a version of Bowie, his version of Bowie, and as an unashamedly personal assessment of the man, his work and his significance, this book offers something quite special. Certainly as a way of processing Bowie even as the shock of his death hasn’t really faded, it ticks a lot of boxes. But there are plenty of other things to be said, other books to be written.
This is exactly as it should be.
*I know that Bowie himself stood by On the Road to the end. But the man made mistakes – listen to ‘Shining Star (Makin’ My Love)’…
April 5, 2019
I read this book slowly. I savored it over two months. I loved it, and I didn't want it to end.
Rock journalist Paul Morley not only writes a loving biography of David Bowie, but interweaves it with a chronicle of his own fandom. In the process he looks at Bowie as a consummate performer and self-marketing guru, but also at Bowie's effects on culture.
The book is not a gossipy, superficial tell-all, like Stardust: The David Bowie Story, which I devoured (as I do with all Bowie biographies). This is a deep dive into what Bowie was up to, and why. It's such a deep dive that it includes a list of Bowie's 100 favorite books (I've read five of them ...).
What we get is a picture of a complicated autodidact with a desire to rise above modest circumstances by becoming the stereotype of a rock star, combined with a sharp intellect and a desire to have a life of relative normalcy.
Part of the book was written while Morley was writer-in-residence at the David Bowie Is ... exhibit, and that part is where the fans start telling personal stories about what Bowie meant to them. This serves as a lovely memorial to a man who was a distant but important step-parent for many whose lives were troubled but could look to Bowie and his music for comfort.
I know.
I was one of them.
Rock journalist Paul Morley not only writes a loving biography of David Bowie, but interweaves it with a chronicle of his own fandom. In the process he looks at Bowie as a consummate performer and self-marketing guru, but also at Bowie's effects on culture.
The book is not a gossipy, superficial tell-all, like Stardust: The David Bowie Story, which I devoured (as I do with all Bowie biographies). This is a deep dive into what Bowie was up to, and why. It's such a deep dive that it includes a list of Bowie's 100 favorite books (I've read five of them ...).
What we get is a picture of a complicated autodidact with a desire to rise above modest circumstances by becoming the stereotype of a rock star, combined with a sharp intellect and a desire to have a life of relative normalcy.
Part of the book was written while Morley was writer-in-residence at the David Bowie Is ... exhibit, and that part is where the fans start telling personal stories about what Bowie meant to them. This serves as a lovely memorial to a man who was a distant but important step-parent for many whose lives were troubled but could look to Bowie and his music for comfort.
I know.
I was one of them.
May 20, 2024
Soo good. I really like the writing style. Also the amount of info in this book was kinda crazy, not like Oppenheimer crazy, but still! Also it was so cool to see how David Bowie transformed over time. It was also incredible to see how much happened between 1970 and 1980!
February 2, 2022
Početak je užasan, dio o 70ima je u redu obrađen, ali nakon toga je sve nabacano samo da se napiše. Uzmite bilo koju drugu knjigu o Bowieju, ova je meni bila gubljenje vremena.
May 13, 2022
Man ska nog vara ett superfan av Bowie för att verkligen tycka att det är spännande att läsa nästan 500 sidor om honom, skrivna av ett superfan. En del intressanta, fina, sorgliga, absurda anekdoter - en hel del rabblande av topplistor och rockgubbar. Det är dock ett nöje att få ta del av Morleys otroliga skrivkonst!
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