How to get a handle on David Bowie ? How to write the biography of a man who changed his identity more than ten times, ceaselessly reinventing himself, someone who had been a painter, an actor, a singer, a musician and a producer ? Starman : David Bowie depicts a life so fascinating that it could certainly be read as a screenplay to some Hollywood biopic. This is the story of a man who chose to make a tale out of his own life.
In 1971, Bowie's new manager Tony Defries went into the office of the record label RCA to tell them how much they needed him and his client, claiming that « David Bowie is going to remake the decade, just like the Beatles did in the 1960s »1. Defries did not know it at the time, but he was right : in 1972 Bowie made a major breakthrough with the concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which launched the « Bowiemania », a term that described the wave of fan hysteria reminding of the Beatlemania which happened during the sixties. In this well researched biography, the British journalist Paul Trynka pays particular attention to the androgyny that made David Bowie one of the key figures of the seventies' musical landscape, and a major
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In terms of business and commercialism, Bowie dominated the first half of the 1980s, with three number-one albums and ten top-ten singles between 1980 and 1986. But only one of those albums (Scary Monsters...and Super Creeps) and three singles (‘Ashes to Ashes’, ‘Under Pressure’ and ‘Let’s Dance’) were musically worthy. Indeed, while Trynka fills three hundred pages about the thirty-two first years of the singer's life, he only writes another hundred pages to bring things up to Bowie's sixty fourth year. In 2004, the singer disappeared from public view after a major heart attack and