David Bowie

UPPING YOUR ZIGGY: HOW DAVID BOWIE FACED HIS CHILDHOOD DEMONS – AND HOW YOU CAN FACE YOURS

Oliver James

(KARNAC) www.karnacbooks.com

ISBN 978-1-7822049-0-9 Softcover. 192 pp.

This is a tale of two half-brothers. One of them, Terry, became schizophrenic and committed suicide. The other, David, reinvented himself and became one of the biggest rock stars of the last fifty years. There was a history of mental illness in the family – three maternal aunts also went mad – and a toxic legacy of shared childhood from which David emerged as the favoured son and Terry as the emotionally neglected sibling.

James’s book is part psychobiography and part self-help manual. The author is a practising therapist and a firm believer in ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’. Genes play little part in determining who we are, he says: childhood adversity causes psychosis, not genes. Believing his family cursed by madness, Bowie avoided the same fate for himself by inventing ‘personas’ – Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – and playing them out on the public stage until he reached a state of psychic equilibrium in midlife and made peace with himself. This is a model, James argues, for how we can all develop a dialogue between different parts of the self and reintegrate them, producing new personas and pushing old ones into the background.

James began writing his book before Bowie’s untimely death in 2016, so he cannot be accused of ‘cashing in’. He traces effectively how Terry’s experiences surface in his brother’s lyrics and how personas, Ziggy in particular, enabled ‘David Bowie’ (another assumed identity) to reconnect with David Jones (his birth name). I was less convinced by James’s efforts to turn Bowie’s psychodrama into everyone’s struggle to keep it together. Many of us find something to identify with in Bowie – be it the sense of alienation, the gender-variance, the self-questioning, the restless need like the whale shark’s to keep swimming in order to stay alive. But there was only one Ziggy.

[First published in RnR] 

John Lennon in Bermuda

LENNON BERMUDA
Scott Neil and Graham Foster
(FREISENBRUCH BRANNON) www.doublefantasybermuda.com
ISBN 978-1927750-02-5 Softcover. 120 pp.

The summer before his death, John Lennon hired a 43-foot yacht and, with a small crew, sailed to Bermuda for a little R&R. Arriving after a storm-tossed passage, he rented a house on the island and reconnected with his muse. The result was his final album, Double Fantasy, named after a freesia he spotted on a visit to the local botanical gardens.

It’s hard to believe there’s any cranny of Lennon’s life that hasn’t been picked over, but journalist Scott Neil has found one of the less-explored and tracked down those he met in Bermuda. The Lennon recalled by islanders was not the self-obsessed star they expected. He was polite, laid-back, into healthy eating and clean living. A generous, companionable man who returned favours and remembered kindnesses shown him. After five years out of the limelight, he relished going incognito as ‘John Greene’ and rewarded those who respected his privacy.

The book’s style is a little feverish at the outset, as the “former Beatle” battles crashing waves, alone at the helm against a “storm of Shakespearean proportions”. But once the prose settles down, the story is well-told and the reminiscences deftly woven into a highly readable narrative. It’s a tale about negotiating celebrity and finding the quietude to write. Songs like ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Watching The Wheels’ – Neil shows how both were inspired by events in Bermuda – may not be Lennon’s greatest but they fulfil his aim of writing for people of his own age group.

The sensitive artwork is by Bermudian artist Graham Foster, who also designed the memorial sculpture to Lennon in the Bermuda Botanical Gardens. Best of all are the scattered photos of the singer, some with son Sean in tow. He looks relaxed, like a man ‘starting over’ (another song-title), blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.

First published in R2 (Rock'n'Reel)