This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978.
It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack capital of Europe’, and Bowie was about to move in with Iggy Pop.
Listening to Bowie ruminate in later years on his desperation to turn his life around, and then the temptations of his new home, you can hardly help but place your head in your hands. Could he resist the lure of a Dutch transsexual with a fabulous wardrobe and a disco club night? Of course not. If he drank too much, he could usually rely upon the German police to peel him off the floor.
One wonders whether on some level Bowie identified with Berlin as a city which was facing an uncertain future. Many people at the time spoke of its imminent collapse. ‘One fancies it is going very fast,’ observed Bowie of the divided epicentre of Cold War Europe. He might have applied the same words to himself.
The toll his mental state took on those around him is especially well-captured in the programme by Clare Shenstone, an artist he was seeing at the time: ‘I was a little rock that was there for him to come and climb on to get out of the water for a bit.
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