Après Bowie, le déluge

On the 10th anniversary of David Bowie’s death, three books consider the rock star from new angles.

By Colin MarshallFebruary 24, 2026

• Music

• Biography & Autobiography

WE NOW FIND ourselves living through one of those periods when everything seems to be going wrong. Economic troubles, the COVID-19 pandemic, two separate elections of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, large-scale destruction grinding on in places like Ukraine and Palestine, the proliferation of ever more trivial and addictive forms of social media, the pollution of the intellectual commons with meaningless content generated by artificial intelligence—to certain minds, this unfortunate streak began exactly 10 years ago, with the death of David Bowie. “The progressive intellectual life of moral critiques and ethical idealism that Bowie savoured, a romantic view of the world, turned to ash,” writes Paul Morley, a music journalist who contributed to New Musical Express in the late 1970s and early ’80s, in Far Above the World: The Time and Space of David Bowie (2025). “The kind of thoughtful, articulate and radical celebrity like Bowie started to seem as out of place as a silent movie star, as though ideas and complicated thinking were now as quaint as Chaplin and Keaton.”

Far Above the World is Morley’s second book about Bowie. The first, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference, came out in July 2016, just six months after its subject shuffled off this mortal coil—or, as some fans would no doubt prefer to put it, returned to orbit. Written, in a kind of challenge to himself, in just 10 weeks’ time, the earlier book benefited from a degree of first-mover advantage, vulnerable though it was to charges of excessive speculation and self-indulgence. The intervening decade has given Morley ample time to write a more levelheaded meditation on his idol, indulge though his new book does in hyperbole of its own. “When David Bowie died, the universe itself groaned,” he writes in his introduction. “It too needed time to mourn. It slumped, lost in thought.” Yet not long thereafter comes an acknowledgment:

The world didn’t take a turn for the worst because he died, but he represented a time when his kind of thinking and curiosity, his kind of art and music, seemed at the centre, holding reality together. For those born at a certain time, this was how things should be, and it would take unimaginable insanity to challenge its apparent certainties and destiny.

Precisely when one was born inevitably comes to bear on one’s view of—and inclination to worship—David Bowie. Undisciplined though they may be, Morley’s books are valuable as reflections of the consciousness of an Englishman who had arrived at just the right stage of adolescence by the summer of 1972 to have his worldview reorganized by Bowie’s appearance on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, an event generally considered to have set him on the road to superstardom, at least in the United Kingdom. Miming his song “Starman” in the flame-haired, psychedelic-bodysuited character of the bisexual outer-space rock star Ziggy Stardust, front man of the Spiders from Mars, he exuded an inviting, futuristic flamboyance that must have seemed alien indeed amid the punishingly drab browns and grays of early seventies Britain. Though it could hardly have made an epochal impact on popular culture before the advent of color television, the spectacle also left its mark on young viewers whose families hadn’t yet made the upgrade: Dylan Jones, whose own books on Bowie include one just about his “Starman” turn on Pops, writes of having long treasured the memory of witnessing the broadcast’s polychromatic brilliance, only for his father sheepishly to remind him that their household had still had an old black-and-white set at the time.

To those who’d tuned in (or claimed to have done so), it feels as though Bowie’s younger fans who first encountered him in other venues will never enjoy quite the same relationship with his work. In The Age of Bowie, Morley writes of his weekend stint as a kind of writer in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2013 exhibition David Bowie Is, on which he served as an artistic adviser. It clearly startled him how many young women reported having been awakened to Bowie by Labyrinth, the kitschy 1986 children’s movie in which he plays a codpieced goblin king surrounded by Muppets. Most writers of the books about Bowie published for the 10th anniversary of his death also had yet to be born in 1972. “In a blue room looking out over a fading industrial landscape in the northernmost part of the English Midlands, I was weeping and I didn’t know why,” writes the cultural journalist Peter Ormerod, opening David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God (2026). “It was 1996, shortly after 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 27 March. My brother, eight years older than me, had a lot of old albums in his room, and I would sometimes listen to them. Some I liked more than others, but none had done anything like this to me. The album was Hunky Dory by David Bowie.”

Surprisingly, the slightly younger Alexander Larman, a writer of books on British historical subjects from the Restoration to the royal family, doesn’t recount his own first experience of Bowie in the introduction to his book Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie (2026). He does, however, make his bona fides clear even earlier, with a dedication to his “beloved daughter Rose Evelyn Bowie Larman, REBL herself.” Not that this deep respect for Bowie, whom he credits with “the greatest body of work that any individual British musician produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” impairs his judgment: if anything, his readiness to criticize what he sees as Bowie’s weaker projects would probably verge on sacrilege to the Paul Morleys of the world. But then, that’s part of the natural mandate of his book, which examines the latter phase of Bowie’s professional life, starting at the turn of the 1990s. For a reader such as myself, for whom middle-aged superstars hold out much more fascination than young ones, this is a highly appealing choice, but many of Larman’s Bowie-loving compatriots—not least Simon Goddard, author of the still-underway 10-book Bowie Odyssey series (2020– ) focusing exclusively on the 1970s—would find it perverse to skip over the era that produced his most beloved work. That “imperial phase” begins with “Space Oddity” in 1969 and encompasses the critically acclaimed likes of Hunky Dory (1971), the Ziggy Stardust years (1972–73), the transformative Young Americans (1975) and Station to Station (1976), the late-1970s Berlin Trilogy (1977–79), and his last widely agreed-upon masterwork, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). Even the calculated commercial breakthrough of Let’s Dance (1983), which put him on MTV and into stadiums, is already years in the past.

Rather, Larman starts off with Tin Machine, the deliberately bog-standard rock band Bowie assembled with guitarist Reeves Gabrels and a rhythm section consisting of Soupy Sales’s thuggish sons, Tony and Hunt. “Listened to today, the album is an ugly, hectoring, noise devoid of melody and subtlety,” Larman writes of their self-titled 1989 debut. In their short life, Tin Machine also put out a superior but practically unheard follow-up, as well as a reviled live recording culled from their dingy, combative tours. The standard narrative about this episode, to which Larman also seems to subscribe, holds that Bowie had realized the extent to which he’d lost his way by the end of the 1980s, a decade that had seen him attempting to capitalize on the mainstream success of Let’s Dance with ever more meager artistic results, squandering the enormous cultural cachet he’d amassed throughout the 1970s. Critics soon came to consider Never Let Me Down, which came out in 1987, his worst-ever album. The album’s theatrically elaborate Glass Spider Tour was ridiculed as a bewildering, misconceived spectacle. (An older friend of mine remembers a classmate coming back from one of those shows in tears, and not because she was moved.) Yet it did, at least, put him in contact with Gabrels, who was married to the tour’s press agent, and who proved to be an adventurous and bracingly unimpressed musical collaborator.

For Bowie, their lambasted side project constituted a kind of artistic cleansing. Or perhaps it was a voluntary humbling, one that would allow him to return to his solo career in his mid-forties—and newly, prominently married to the Somalian supermodel Iman—sans the baggage of the previous few decades. What he came out with on the other side was Black Tie White Noise (1993), his first solo album in six years. Critics responded at the time with fairly high praise, but in Larman’s judgment, the record “represents one of the most audacious bait-and-switches that Bowie ever participated in during his career, elevating a series of mediocre-to-good songs into the pantheon simply through charm and by telling people that it was an important, enduring album: his best since Scary Monsters.” (That comparison, as every Bowieologist well knows, became the defining cliché of his press coverage in the 1990s and 2000s, routinely applied to all but his most indefensible work.) Gabrels, whose collaboration with Bowie continued for about a decade after Tin Machine, also worked on the project, and he speaks to Larman about it with a candor that is one of the book’s highlights: “I think it’s a period piece. Some things are timeless. And some things aren’t. That one isn’t.”

Though saying so may destroy my Bowie credibility at a stroke, Black Tie White Noise is my favorite of his albums, at least according to the standard—to my mind, the only meaningful standard—of which one I’ve listened to the most. (Rich a cultural-historical symbol though he is, Ziggy Stardust never did anything for me, and with the notable exception of Hunky Dory, many of Bowie’s recordings from around that era sound sludgily uncompelling. If I never again heard, say, the ode to slattern petulance that is “Rebel Rebel,” I wouldn’t miss it.) Some of Black Tie’s appeal has to do with the very datedness cited by Gabrels: released in 1993, it vividly exhibits the aesthetics of what might be called the “high CD-ROM era.” Some of this has to do with the fact that its most risible choices appeal strongly to my sense of incongruity: take the 1992 Los Angeles riots–inspired title track, a bizarre duet with R & B also-ran Al B. Sure! (whose name, younger readers may not realize, actually includes that exclamation point) that laments the state of American race relations while sneering at other songs’ attempts to do the same. (It should be noted that I also enjoy, almost unironically, the song on Never Let Me Down featuring a rapping Mickey Rourke.) More broadly, Black Tie White Noise, in all its incoherence, also has an askew charm that evidences an admirable if self-defeating bloody-mindedness on Bowie’s part: having reenlisted disco hitmaker Nile Rodgers, the producer responsible for getting Let’s Dance to the top of the charts, he ceded only the most minor control of the project, insisting that the album be about his wedding.

However much of his music they keep in their personal rotation, practically everyone recognizes Bowie as standing well apart from the other major pop or rock musicians of his generation—in large part, as Morley writes, because he “wasn’t really a pop or rock musician. He played at being one, made some of it part of what he did, but mostly got that out of his system, even at the risk of losing fans and critics.” This unusual trajectory began when David Jones from the London suburbs simply decided, as a young teenager, that he would be a star (a surprising declaration of intent, says David Bowie Is co-curator Geoffrey Marsh in Dylan Jones’s 2017 book David Bowie: A Life, at a time “when celebrity culture, if it existed at all, was the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh going round the Commonwealth and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and that sort of world”), then spent a decade jumping somewhat opportunistically from band to band and manager to manager. Along the way, he picked up the stage name David Bowie, a smattering of skills in everything from playing the saxophone to performing mime, and a lifelong compulsion to pursue an ever-widening field of cultural interests. (“Magpie” is by far the most common descriptor used in reference to his compulsive, not always discriminating incorporation of trends in music, fashion, and art.) An unsuccessful debut album put him forth as a disconcertingly superannuated-sounding music hall performer, an Anthony Newley barely out of his teens. Even then, he didn’t sound young, he didn’t really sound like a rocker at heart, and he certainly didn’t sound American.

Two years later came “Space Oddity,” inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and given a boost by the Apollo 11 moon landing. That song’s lyrics were most visibly quoted when Bowie died nearly 50 years later, an event that prompted even those who’d never heard one of his albums in full to post earnestly about how “the stars look very different today.” For all the dramatic changes of image he managed to pull off in his career, resulting in the standard but somehow unsuitable comparison to a chameleon, Bowie could never quite cast off the space alien thing. Much of that, of course, must have to do with the image of Ziggy Stardust, conflated with that of his other characters, the lightning-bolted Aladdin Sane (“Ziggy goes to America” in the singer’s own half-dismissive description) and Thomas Jerome Newton, the impossibly fragile-looking, corrupted extraterrestrial innocent he played in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Nicolas Roeg, that film’s director, was inspired to cast Bowie upon seeing him in Cracked Actor, a 1975 BBC Omnibus documentary on his touring in Los Angeles and Philadelphia that plays for all the world like the last footage of a rock-and-roll suicide. He did ultimately manage to kick the host of unhealthy habits he’d developed while, as Morley puts it, “trying to function as a shy person who suddenly became very famous,” a strenuous effort much assisted—at least for a time—by characters and cocaine. The first step away from his own early death was to kill Ziggy Stardust, which he famously did by a surprise declaration, toward the end of a set at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, that it was the last show he and the Spiders would ever do.

Seen today, as captured in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1979 documentary Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, that moment can hardly feel as powerful as it must have then and there. More startling are the shots at the beginning of the film, which capture a surprisingly dumpy crowd milling outside the theater, many still clad in the shapeless remains of hippie fashion. The fans in Cracked Actor don’t look much different on the whole, suggesting something more than a local phenomenon. Yet, however starkly it contrasts with the public persona of the man himself, this unglamorousness makes sense in light of Bowie’s strong appeal, much remarked upon after his death, to young people who felt alienated, misunderstood, and alone. That wasn’t so much the situation of the charismatic young David Jones, despite an unhappy home life and a motivating terror of what we would now call mental illness (his schizophrenic counterculture- and underworld-savvy half brother, a formative influence, was eventually institutionalized). By nearly all accounts, in fact, the adult he became seems to have given most who knew him the impression of thorough, almost studied normality, less an ethereal, otherworldly androgyne than a quipping English bloke who left school with an O level in art, albeit one who read as voraciously as he smoked.

In being “undereducated” yet regarded as conspicuously intellectual by the standards of his field, Bowie bears comparison to the late Tom Stoppard, whose plays (2002’s The Coast of Utopia, for instance, which Bowie included on his list of 100 favorite books) entered into ever more direct confrontation with political, historical, and scientific contexts over the course of his career. Framed, on occasion, as a would-be painter who chose instead to make music due to its greater relevance to and influence on his time—Morley writes that Bowie “wanted to use rock and roll as a medium as one would use paint”—he nevertheless kept up the pursuit of his personal interests in philosophy, religion, and especially art, to the point that he joined the board of Modern Painters magazine in 1994. Larman quotes the novelist William Boyd, the closest thing to a friend Bowie had on the board, describing their relationship thus:

We’d meet in Bernard Jacobson’s art gallery off Cork Street, drink coffee and talk very seriously about art. He’d ask searching questions about particular artists, and say “Why are there no great women artists?” I rather wanted to say “Dave, lighten up. It’s a bit early in the day,” but it was the passion of the autodidact, and that’s what got him ticking over.

In Jones’s David Bowie: A Life, the fashion photographer David Bailey describes Bowie as “the personification of an actor actually. He always took things very seriously, which I don’t.”

Bowie’s impulsive seriousness about religion in particular constitutes Peter Ormerod’s subject in David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God. The book amounts to a highly readable biographical overview, suitable for the non-Bowieologist, with a special focus on the overtly or potentially religious references in certain song lyrics and remarks in his many interviews. I get the impression that Ormerod may not have even begun the project, which took the earlier form of a Substack newsletter called Bowie/God, had Bowie not been asked on Dutch television in 1996 if a thread ran through his body of work and responded that it was “a search for a spiritual foundation.” Less than a decade later, in an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, he recounted this journey in a little more detail, if jokingly: “Tibetan Buddhism appealed to me—I thought, there’s salvation. It didn’t really work. Then I went through Nietzsche, Satanism, Christianity, er, pottery—and ended up singing. It’s been a long road.” That interview took place in 2004, during what would turn out to be his final tour, in support of the less-beloved Reality (2003), an album Ormerod hears as dealing with themes of “ageing, mortality, and reflecting on how a life has been lived.”

Though he’d adopted a youthful (if slightly uncanny) look at that stage of his career, Bowie was 56 at the time of the recording—not a particularly advanced age but one perhaps suspect for a man already an icon when, as Morley puts it, “30 seemed old for any relevant pop and rock musician, and 40 a kind of madness.” As Larman notes, a song on Reality called “Never Get Old” became “the subject of much discussion in interviews, with speculation that it contained autobiographical overtones.” Bowie tended to claim he was just having a laugh: “The image of a rocker in his fifties singing petulantly ‘I’ll never get old’ is ludicrous and funny.” Still, these 20 years on, I wonder if that track wasn’t what motivated the reviewer at my college newspaper to address the artist directly while trashing the album: “Face it, you’re a geezer” (in the American sense). Reading that comment, I felt a defensiveness on Bowie’s behalf that was more than faintly ridiculous, given that he had already achieved the rare resecuring of both his mainstream-adjacent popularity and his artistic respectability—not to mention that I wasn’t even a particularly dedicated fan of his myself.

In truth, Bowie interested me far less than his occasional collaborator Brian Eno, the self-described “nonmusician” who had first drawn attention by adding synthesizer noise to the early Roxy Music albums, then went on to popularize the genre of ambient music and bring his gently provocative art-school sensibility to the production of records by acts like Devo, Talking Heads, and U2. Eno joined Bowie in Berlin to work on Low (1977), Heroes (1977), and Lodger (1979); much later, in 1995, he officially took the producer’s role on Outside (1995), an ambitious if bewildering and overlong narrative concept album inspired by Twin Peaks (1990–91) and the exhilaration and foreboding of the end of the millennium. By 2002, while out promoting the more straightforwardly acclaimed Heathen, Bowie seemed more rueful: “I had rosy expectations for the 21st century, I really did […] The whole idea was lifting my spirits quite a lot during 1998 and 1999. But it has become something other than what I expected it to be.” Yet those who regard Bowie as having been, in Morley’s words, “a consistently present and visible living symbol of the progressive minded, democratic, reality-supplying stability that seemed to stumble and crumble after January 2016” surely now regard the early 2000s as a relative golden age.

At that time, the record album was still the dominant form of music product. Yet it had already lost most of the primacy in the zeitgeist it had enjoyed in the mid-1970s, when an ambitious artist could use it to construct, Morley writes in his earlier book, “a distinct work of art that can be as specifically riveting as a painting, as three dimensional as a sculpture, as packed with incident as a film, as intense and open to interpretation as a dream.” We miss David Bowie, but perhaps we miss even more the conditions that could give rise to David Bowie. Not that he expressed any such sentiments himself: during his most publicly technophile period of the late 1990s, he declared, “If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet.” Even at the end of his life, he operated with an understanding of the way culture worked in a fully connected world that compensated for the diminishment of his medium. He made that clear when he scored an unheard-of publicity coup by secretly recording and suddenly putting out The Next Day (2013), the comeback album that broke almost a decade of near-silence following a heart attack during the Reality tour. Three years later, he illuminated the esoteric, sepulchral qualities of his final work, the jazz-inflected but ultimately uncategorizable Blackstar, by dying within days of its release. Each time, it felt just about possible to believe that a televised pop song had ever altered the course of cultural history, that a record had ever changed a life.