When one thinks of ‘odd’, one might imagine the bizarre but not the boring. Yet odd thingscan indeed be boring – as Peter Carpenter’s book shows.
First, a word about my admiration for David Bowie, which began when I was 12. He was a vastly gifted artist as well as being a supremely ambitious man, who once floated himself on the stock exchange and appeared in an ad for bottled water when already a millionaire many times over. He also had sex with children, helping himself to the virginity of a 13-year-old girl as part of the ‘Baby Groupies’ circle. I think of myself at 13. Would I have had sex with Bowie, given the chance? You bet! Do I think it was creepy he seduced 13-year-olds? Without a doubt.
No such paradoxes are explored in the pedestrian plod that is Bowieland. Indeed it has the air of Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (there’s even an omnipresent friend called Nigel), although the author is somewhat older than Sue Townsend’s fictional hero and has a heart problem. Here are some examples of his prose:
Very often I didn’t know where I was going… but I can promise it was never boring.
I had been brought up in Epsom, following a short move from the high street in Ewell village where my father’s family had run the bakery.
It was decidedly uncool to win prizes at school. In fact, potentially dangerous. Yet I knew how to win the Elizabeth Blanchett Prize for Literature year in, year out.
It’s a straightforward proposition: Carpenter sets off to visit those places in which his hero was formed and influenced. So he goes to Berlin, where Bowie worked and played with Iggy Pop. But in the interests of ‘keeping it real’ there’s a lot of dawdling in less divinely decadent locations.
There is Tolworth, Surrey – where Bowie first introduced himself as ‘Ziggy’ at the Toby Jug pub. Lovely Mole-isms from Carpenter include: ‘What did a Tudor court look like? And who were the Tudors anyway?’ And: ‘I was standing at the top of a precipitous wrought-iron fire escape… nobody appeared to notice or care.’
Then Hastings, where the Ashes to Ashes video was filmed, gives a lovely hook for Bowie’s quote (after being called ‘a cunt in a clown suit’ by a bystander who refused to move when asked ‘Do you know who that is?’): ‘It put me back in my place and I realised “Yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit”.’
Then there’s Croydon. Carpenter writes: ‘Bowie couldn’t wait to escape its clutches. By the time I was 14 I couldn’t get enough of it.’ And Chislehurst: ‘Zest, the local dry cleaners, promised “Same Day Alteration… Invisible Mending”. If only it were that simple with people, I reflected.’ And finally Southend, where a young Bowie played a Shelter benefit for free while the vile John Peel demanded £180 for presenting the acts – a lot of money in 1970. By this last chapter, it appears that glory by association has gone to our superannuated perambulator’s head when, unsolicited, he autographs a menu for a young waiter. I was hoping he might have gone full tonto and signed his hero’s name instead.
Considering the way Bowie used his sexuality to advance his career (extremely keen on the ladies he was when moving from his parents’ home to ‘lodge’ with his first manager, Ken Pitt), a book called Bowierandy: Around a Life in Eighty Lays might have been more interesting. It could have explored the influence on his career of the women he slept with, from Hermione to Iman. But please, any convalescing Adrian Moles out there who are also Bowie fans, don’t do it.
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