On 11 January 2016 Paul Morley was awoken by an urgent voicemail from the Today Programme. Could he talk about the life and — news just in — the death of David Bowie? (The researcher apologised if this was how he’d heard.) Resistant to gnashing his teeth for a few minutes of radio rent-a-commentary, Morley uncharacteristically ignored this and sundry other requests. Instead he wrote these 500 pages in ten weeks. The same time, he says, that Bowie needed to cut albums at his cocaine-powered peak.
The Age of Bowie is not strictly a biography, with such things as dates and sources and supporting quotations. Want to know about the day Rick Wakeman laid down the piano track for ‘Life on Mars’, or when Robert Fripp blew into Berlin to supply the howling guitar line for ‘Heroes’, or about Tilda Swinton shooting the video to ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’? These and a thousand other nuggets are not here.
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