Alexander Larman is the author of a biography of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and of Byron’s Women. Reading Larman’s new biography of David Bowie, one gets the sense that this could have been the end of a trilogy, given all three men’s talent and excesses. In fact, Bowie once considered playing Byron in a movie.
Larman’s focus in Lazarus is on Bowie’s career from the end of the 1980s through to his final works: the musical Lazarus and the album Blackstar, the artist’s last gift to his fans, released on his 69th birthday – two days before his death from liver cancer in 2016. This is a thorough account of Bowie’s more thoughtful and reflective days; as Larman writes in his introduction, “Lazarus is, if you will, the pensive B-side to the triumphant A-side of [Bowie’s] heyday.”
This is a professional biography of a multitudinous artist, a genius and a man of good humor
Every fan knows of the zany early years, from David Jones and his blonde bowl haircut to “Space Oddity” to Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars; the pale cocaine-fueled leader of the Diamond Dogs pack; the Thin White Duke and his high points on Low and ‘Heroes’; and the commercial musician of the 1980s who gave us “Let’s Dance” and the Glass Spider tour. But Larman starts by throwing us right into the tour bus, in the company of Bowie’s band Tin Machine on a poorly received 1991 tour.
As Bowie told Chris Roberts of Uncut, “The whole being-in-a-band experience was good for me… I wasn’t allowed to lord it, which I recognized as a situation I wanted. To be part of a group of people working toward one aim. Success was rather immaterial. I needed the process, to acclimatize myself again to why I wrote, why I did what I did – all those issues that an artist going through ‘a certain age’ starts to think about.”
Larman introduces us to the motley Tin Machine crew as they rattle along, revealing both Bowie’s bravado and his distress at a failing tour. It contains some brilliant flashbacks, too, to his earliest musical days. For example, there’s the “friendship with Marc Bolan when the two were teenagers,” when the boys “would sit in Bolan’s front room while his mother brought them tea, and… systematically analyze sheet music of Broadway musicals, working out how they fitted together and what made a classic song a classic.”
Lazarus is not a biography of Bowie’s wild personal life. During Larman’s chosen period, Bowie met and married the love of his life, Iman, with whom he had a daughter, Alexandria. This is a professional biography of a multitudinous artist, a genius – that overused word, but Bowie merits it – and a man of good humor. The book includes informative, sometimes very funny, interviews with Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels, jazz pianist Mike Garson and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey. These interviews shape Lazarus as surely as these musicians shaped Bowie’s writing.
The best thing about the Outside tour of 1995 was the debut of Dorsey as Bowie’s bassist. They would remain bandmates, collaborators and friends until Bowie’s death. The European leg of the tour was less pleasant thanks to Morrissey being the opening act – though Larman’s writing about it had me laughing, especially a footnoted anecdote of “the Mancunian miserablist” which reads: “Over breakfast one morning, Bowie confided in Morrissey, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’ to which the eternally suffering one replied: ‘You know, I’ve had so little sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive.’”
Bowie, though demanding and occasionally irascible in the studio, was always a committed worker – a perfectionist, to which many, including Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, attest. His listening was capacious: in a list of influences Bowie prepared for some of his liner notes are Pink Floyd, Harry Partch, Pet Sounds, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk (and Neu), T. Rex, Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, the O’Jays and Philip Glass.
His interest in non-musical arts, too, was vast, particularly when it came to painting. Bowie began collecting art seriously in the late 1980s, after the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat (he played Warhol, catlike, campy and strangely sympathetic, in the movie Basquiat). Bowie proved to be an excellent investor in art. His collection ranged from medieval martyrs to Modern British and a small Louis Le Brocquy head of James Joyce. (I bid on the last one and did not get it during the three-part exhibition-auction by Sotheby’s after Bowie died. Sales totaled more than $40 million.)
The book contains an interview with William Boyd, who joined the board of Modern Painters magazine when Bowie did in 1994. He recalled “an ‘achingly thin’ and ‘gaunt and ravaged’ figure who was both a chain smoker and a chain espresso-drinker ‘because he couldn’t take any other drug in the world.’” Bowie interviewed Polish-French artist Balthus for the magazine and evidently loved doing so, penning several more pieces for Modern Painters. Larman writes: “His subjects included everyone from Tracey Emin and Julian Schnabel to Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, and his writing is devoid of the self-conscious artfulness that could be found in his other published journalism for Q and Time Out.”
Bowie was an untouchable, kinetic stage performer in concert and used some of those powers in movies, playing Jareth the Goblin King in the cult 1986 film Labyrinth and, a decade earlier,an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth. In the period covered by Lazarus, Bowie starred in neo-Spaghetti Westerns (Gunslinger’s Revenge, 1998), appeared as both Nikola Tesla and Pontius Pilate, wrote the soundtrack for The Buddha of Suburbia and had cameos in Twin Peaks and Zoolander. Larman is fair about Bowie’s onscreen work, calling it “hit and miss.” I wish Bowie had been in more plays. I saw him in New York as John Merrick in The Elephant Man in 1980 – so thin and pale. How cold he must have been in the bath, I thought.
While very English, Bowie became a New Yorker after a brief and ugly flirtation with Los Angeles
While very English, Bowie became a New Yorker after a brief and ultimately ugly flirtation with Los Angeles. Larman rightly points to his 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden as proof; the Cure’s Robert Smith was one of the very few non-Americans on that stage. “By this point in his career, Bowie was tearing through ideas and personae with the vigor of a Renaissance man in a hurry. If he suggested that the artist’s most profound dread was, indeed, to be mediocre, he did everything in his considerable power to fight against such a fate through sheer eclecticism of interest and accomplishment,” Larman writes. Bowie collapsed on stage in Scheessel, Germany in June 2004. He had emergency heart surgery, but never toured again.
After that, Bowie lived between Manhattan and Woodstock, New York, where his daughter was in school, and where we locals would run into him at Catskill Art Supply. If you introduced yourself, he’d reply “Hello, I’m David Jones.” Bowie, according to Larman, “acted, made high-profile guest appearances with other musicians, was photographed at parties and film premieres and generally appeared to enjoy the life of a wealthy retired man-about-town. The question remained – which would be answered definitively a few years later – whether retirement was enough for him.”
The Next Day (2013) was that answer, and fans rejoiced that he was back in the studio. His cancer diagnosis, which remained private until his death, came the next year. Bowie was possessed of an intense vitality as he was dying, much like William Butler Yeats, who also died in the January cold. Both men wrote their own elegies. Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, for me constantly recalls Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben”: the conjuring, spellcasting beginning; the chronicling of various arts and artistic pursuits; and that ringing, singing line, “By his command these words are cut.” Bowie’s command of his own last days is a lesson in grace and power for us all. He managed to attend the Lazarus premiere in New York and, in the last few days before he died, filmed the music video for “Lazarus,” disappearing, fiery-eyed, into a tall wardrobe.
Larman begins his biography by asking what would have happened if Bowie had died on that German stage in 2004. The overwhelming “what if” for me is what if Bowie had lived? What if he’d beaten, or never suffered from, liver cancer? What if he’d just turned 79, still in this world, still creating, still full of savage beauty? Larman’s elegant, unsparing but admiring Lazarus makes me wish that we could know.
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