A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up as Ziggy Stardust (gold bindi, maroon mullet, jumpsuit run up from old curtains), then as Aladdin Sane (blue and red lightning slash daubed across face), then as the Thin White Duke (black waistcoat, black eyeliner, slicked-back hair). And so on, right through every satin-and-tat get-up of Bowie’s long career. What larks!
And yet. I don’t know whether Brooker had his mother in a whirl, but he certainly had some of us wondering what was going on in the groves of academe. Did I mention that these wardrobe antics were part of a research project? That Brooker is professor of film and cultural studies at Kingston University? That he has also written books on Batman and Blade Runner and Star Wars?
But don’t reach for the black cap just yet. Wide-ranging and closely argued, this book is one of the best Bowie has yet had. Brooker may lard his prose with post-structuralist name-drops — Jameson, Deleuze, Guattari, the gang’s all here; so too are Joyce, Yeats and even Philip Larkin (what would he have made of Blackstar’s ‘cobra-coaxing cacophonies’?) — but not once do they seem pressed into service. To be sure, Brooker occasionally overstates his case. When he remarks of Bowie’s death that ‘he stepped aside so we could take his place and bravely cry’, the Biblical parallels are ludicrous. But in the main he has the measure of his man.
He starts, as the young Davy Jones did, in the suburbs. Bowie always called himself a Brixton boy, but though he was born in the inner city his parents were off to leafier Bromley as soon as they could afford it.
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