A SIMPLE descriptive line in David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God made my heart leap. “The cover of Aladdin Sane, one of the most genuinely iconic images in all popular music, shows Bowie’s face split by a bolt of lightning.” This transported me back to when I first saw it as a schoolboy. Its strangeness, arousing fear and excitement in equal measure, opened up new worlds of imagination. This was an early encounter with something transcendent in popular culture, the animated spirit at the heart of Bowie’s lifelong work in music, film, theatre, and art.
Peter Ormerod’s book (Feature, 9 January) is the first to approach the musician’s career from a perspective that Bowie himself believed was crucial to his work: his spirituality. Ormerod knew that Bowie had written a hymn, had dabbled in black magic, and had knelt to recite the Lord’s Prayer on stage at Wembley Stadium. Bowie described “a search for a spiritual foundation” as a thread running through his work. Ormerod contends that spirituality was essential to an artist who addressed “matters of God” in the weightiest, deepest, and most meaningful sense.
Bowie linked his spiritual quest to the creative process: “Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable; all those things comes into being a composer, and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.” Ormerod gives a close reading of many of Bowie’s key works, such as “Space Oddity”, in which Bowie draws from Kierkegaard in exploring Major Tom’s space launch as “a leap of faith”, “a teleological suspension of the ethical”, like Abraham’s setting out to sacrifice Isaac.
Bowie’s spiritual interests through the years were many and varied, including Buddhism, occultism, witchcraft, messianism, and Kabbalah. Interestingly, there is an Anglican context to this book. Ormerod is the son of an Anglican clergyman, and his opening chapter reflects on the decline of the institutional Church just as Bowie’s star was rising.
The young David Jones was a choirboy at St Mary’s, Bromley, in 1957, when the C of E was “at its post-war zenith”. A touchstone for Ormerod is the song “Word on a Wing”, recorded in 1975 for the Station to Station album, and described by Bowie as a “signal of distress” and a “call for help” at a time of deep personal crisis. It is probably the closest Bowie comes to a conventional statement of faith: “Lord, I kneel and offer you my word on a wing / And I’m trying hard to fit among your scheme of things”.
In Lazarus: The second coming of David Bowie, Alexander Larman seeks to redress “an unwillingness of biographers to treat Bowie’s latter-day career with the gravitas that it merits”, following a perceived loss of direction after the commercial successes of his 1980s Let’s Dance era. Larman interviews many musicians, filmmakers, and other collaborators, who provide convincing evidence that Bowie continued to create vital and innovative work throughout this period, in a spirit of warmth and generosity.
The remarkable final Blackstar album was released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, two days before the shock announcement of his death on 10 January 2016. Showing that Bowie was innovative to the end, Larman describes Blackstar as “a complex rock album performed by jazz musicians — and Bowie himself”. Recorded while Bowie was in the later stages of liver cancer, the album blends many of his career themes and spiritual influences, in a profoundly moving set of meditations on morality and the afterlife. “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” he sings, in the persona of Lazarus. Given its context, this statement is as electrifying as any of his other classic lines.
Both books, though different in focus, successfully affirm Bowie’s “resurrection”: the continuing influence in our culture of his restlessly exploratory spirit.
The Revd John Davies is Vicar of Clapham with Keasden and Austwick with Eldroth in the diocese of Leeds.
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God
Peter Ormerod
Bloomsbury £20
(978-1-3994-2282-6)
Church Times Bookshop £18
Lazarus: The second coming of David Bowie
Alexander Larman
Simon & Schuster £25
(978-1-917923-44-6)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
