In the year of our Dame 1975, David Bowie was a sleepwalking cadaver in the blizzard-grip of cocaine addiction. Lost between New York and LA, and nowhere near reality, his psychotic, paranoid delusions were fuelled by a growing obsession with the Third Reich and all things occult.
A coven of witches haunted his every move. Satan lived in his swimming pool. The fridge was stocked with bottles of his own urine, lest the forces of evil steal it (for reasons only known to himself).
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This is the David Bowie we meet in Bowie Odyssey 75, the sixth volume of Simon Goddard’s monumental year-by-year account of our hero’s eventful golden decade.
For those unfamiliar with the series, do not expect a conventional biography. Prepare yourselves instead for an utterly riveting and beautifully written piece of expressionistic docu-fiction all told in the propulsive present tense. Goddard places us inside Bowie’s addled mind while exploring – in meticulously researched and sometimes harrowing detail – thematic parallels with certain key events of 1975.
- Noel Gallagher: ‘I met David Bowie and have no recollection of it’
- How David Bowie’s time spent in Berlin became the stuff of myth and legend
- John Cale on The Velvet Underground, teaching Bowie the viola and why drugs aren’t the creative stimulant
Nestling amid this swirling rotten funk of fame, fascism, murder, drugs, madness, mass unemployment and rampant Rollermania are the book’s other main characters: Bowie’s long-suffering and LOUD wife Angie; his agonisingly lonely and worried mother Peggy; nascent punk Svengali and shameless opportunist Malcolm McLaren; Tory leader Margaret Thatcher marching towards her everlasting reign of terror; Hitler-obsessed serial killer Patrick Mackay; and the leather mask-wearing ‘Cambridge Rapist’ Peter Samuel Cook.
