Showing posts with label David Bowie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Bowie. Show all posts

Monday, 26 May 2025

BOOK REVIEW: Bowie Odyssey 75 by Simon Goodard

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2025.

Bowie Odyssey 75, Simon Goddard, out now, Omnibus Press, £17.99



In the year of our Dame 1975, David Bowie was a sleepwalking cadaver in the blizzard-grip of cocaine addiction. Lost between New York and LA, and nowhere near reality, his psychotic, paranoid delusions were fuelled by a growing obsession with the Third Reich and all things occult.


A coven of witches haunted his every move. Satan lived in his swimming pool. The fridge was stocked with bottles of his own urine, lest the forces of evil steal it (for reasons only known to himself).

This is the David Bowie we meet in Bowie Odyssey 75, the sixth volume of Simon Goddard’s monumental year-by-year account of our hero’s eventful golden decade.

For those unfamiliar with the series, do not expect a conventional biography. Prepare yourselves instead for an utterly riveting and beautifully written piece of expressionistic docu-fiction all told in the propulsive present tense. Goddard places us inside Bowie’s addled mind while exploring – in meticulously researched and sometimes harrowing detail – thematic parallels with certain key events of 1975.

Nestling amid this swirling rotten funk of fame, fascism, murder, drugs, madness, mass unemployment and rampant Rollermania are the book’s other main characters: Bowie’s long-suffering and LOUD wife Angie; his agonisingly lonely and worried mother Peggy; nascent punk Svengali and shameless opportunist Malcolm McLaren; Tory leader Margaret Thatcher marching towards her everlasting reign of terror; Hitler-obsessed serial killer Patrick Mackay; and the leather mask-wearing ‘Cambridge Rapist’ Peter Samuel Cook.

Goddard ties these strands together to conjure up a vivid hellscape in which Bowie created his latest blurred lines persona, the fascistic, foppish Thin White Duke, while not really having to act at all in the role of a burned-out alabaster alien in Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.

If that all sounds rather dark, well yes, it is, but it’s often very funny in an unflinching tragicomic way. A deadly serious, dirt-encrusted pop culture farce. Goddard is an irreverent yet fundamentally empathetic socio-political historian and storyteller. He’s a Bowie fan who isn’t blind to his subject’s faults, but who can also wax rapturously, and perceptively, about his art (Bowie somehow made one of his greatest albums, Station to Station, in 1975). Hyperbole be damned, Goddard’s unfolding odyssey is an idiosyncratic masterpiece.

Sunday, 9 July 2017

TV Review: MELVYN BRAGG ON TV: THE BOX THAT CHANGED THE WORLD + ROCK 'N' ROLL GUNS FOR HIRE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE SIDEMAN

This article was originally published in The Courier on 8 July 2017.


MELVYN BRAGG ON TV: THE BOX THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: Saturday, BBC Two

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL GUNS FOR HIRE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE SIDEMAN: Friday, BBC Four

It’s no exaggeration to claim that the birth of Melvyn Bragg triggered a cultural revolution of staggering importance.

That much I gleaned from MELVYN BRAGG ON TV: THE BOX THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, a two-hour muse-a-thon in which the veteran arts nabob examined the myriad ways in which British television has reflected, challenged and transformed society over the last 60 years.

Clips from his own - admittedly unforgettable – interviews with Dennis Potter and Francis Bacon were included among the wealth of familiar archive material, lest we forget that Lord Bragg has played a major role in bringing culture to the masses.   

The programme spliced a series of Bragg-narrated essays on various key areas – news, documentary, drama, comedy – with sensible round-table discussions from broadcasting luminaries such as Joan Bakewell, Michael Grade and Ken Loach.   

They didn’t have to work particularly hard to support the overarching point that television is the most important technological innovation since the Industrial Revolution.

This window to the world has expanded our horizons via explorations of inner and outer space while chronicling the ways in which society has developed over the last seven decades.

It’s brought truth to power by making politicians more accountable. It’s challenged lies and prejudices, broken down class, race and gender barriers, and brought news of vital historic import into our homes with increasing speed.

However, as Bragg observed, it’s also undermined these noble egalitarian achievements by presenting simplified, reactionary and sometimes dangerously irresponsible reflections of society past and present.

Most of the points raised were sound and reasonable. But they were also blatantly self-evident and unchallenging, especially for viewers with even a passing interest in or knowledge of television history. Which is most of us, right?

I’m a television critic – you may have noticed – so this is my field of so-called expertise, but I doubt that anyone over the age of 35 learned anything new. So who was the programme aimed at? Young media students? If that’s the case, then a superficial overview involving dry discussions between Melvyn Bragg and the author of Foyle’s War probably wasn’t the ideal approach.

I’m not suggesting that it should’ve been replaced by a dumbed-down clip show hosted by Nick Grimshaw and a wacky talking iPad, but the comfortably old-guard, Radio 4-ish tone of the programme was at odds with the theoretically wide-ranging, pan-generational, democratic spirit of the medium it sought to examine.  

It reminded me of seminal news spoof The Day Today’s classic ‘Attitudes Night’ sketch, which so perfectly skewered the well-meaning pomposity of these sociological TV essays over 20 years ago. I dare say Bragg has never seen it.  

Still, I can’t thank him enough for giving us another chance to enjoy that rarely-seen footage of Del Boy falling through the bar. 

The secret to exploring well-worn avenues of popular culture is to approach them from a niche perspective. ROCK ‘N’ ROLL GUNS FOR HIRE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE SIDEMEN did just that.

This enjoyable documentary featured revealing contributions from a handful of notable payroll musicians – those unsung heroes whose job it is to support the vision of spotlight-hogging artists – such as Wendy and Lisa (Prince), Bernard Fowler (The Rolling Stones) and our endearingly rock ‘n’ roll cliché of a host, Earl Slick (David Bowie).

The pathos and insecurity of a life spent sublimating your ego to the whims of musical icons was sympathetically captured in this warm odyssey into the shadows of stardom. 

Thursday, 30 May 2013

TV preview. UP THE WOMEN, PSYCHOBITCHES, and DAVID BOWIE: FIVE YEARS

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 25th May 2013.
 
 
UP THE WOMEN
Thursday, BBC Four, 8:30pm

PLAYHOUSE PRESENTS... PSYCHOBITCHES
Thursday, Sky Arts 1, 9pm

DAVID BOWIE: FIVE YEARS
Today, BBC Two, 9:20pm

Paul Whitelaw

From Monty Python and The Holy Grail to Blackadder, it's long been established that one of the give-or-take rules of historical comedy is to subvert the period setting with knowingly incongruous nods to the present day. Which is all well and good when employed as part of a wider comic arsenal, but cheap and wearying when overdone.
 
Unfortunately, that's the fatal undoing of Jessica Hynes' Edwardian-era sitcom UP THE WOMEN, which drills away at the supposedly hilarious spectacle of characters from the past failing to comprehend things we now take for granted.

Thus we have Adrian Scarborough's hapless caretaker getting into a pickle over the installation of a light bulb, and Rebecca Front's bullying snob sniffily dismissing electricity as a fad that'll never catch on. These moments, I should point out, are clearly regarded by Hynes and her five co-writers as rib-tickling conceits of massive comic import. Given that Hynes is a fine actress and co-writer of fondly regarded sitcom Spaced, the unrelenting weakness of her latest effort is hugely disappointing. It's not unreasonable to expect more from one of Britain's foremost comedy performers.

The only truly notable aspect of Up The Women is that it's a traditional studio-bound sitcom accompanied by a live laughter track (and the last, alas, to be recorded in Television Centre). It's an ancient form new to “high-brow” BBC Four. But that presents its own problems; you can clearly hear the underwhelmed audience almost willing themselves to laugh as gag after gag falls flat.

Lines such as “I've had to swaddle mother again, and she really does put up quite a fight” and “Does your husband know you're cavorting with skirted anarchists?” have the rhythmic cadence of funny dialogue, but they're not actually witty in themselves. A sense of embarrassingly forced whimsy hangs over its attempts to revel in florid language a la Blackadder. But Hynes and co aren't in the same league as Curtis & Elton at their peak.

The characters speak in a combination of BBC Edwardiana and anachronistic contemporary argot, which, if one were feeling charitable, could be regarded as a parody of Andrew Davies' penchant for dropping contemporary terms into his period dramas. But the paucity of wit on display means it's all for naught.

As for the set-up, Hynes plays a timid yet worldly-wise idealist whose belief in the suffragette movement throws her into sharp conflict with Front's stubbornly immovable conservative. And that's about it. All concerned – including an almost unrecognisable Vicki Pepperdine from Getting On as a daffy, buck-toothed housekeeper – deliver game performances, but no amount of gusto can compensate for such poor material. Having wasted such a fine cast, Up The Women merely wanders along to unremarkable effect.

Even taking into account the inherent difficulties of introducing a brand new sitcom over the course of thirty minutes, this lifeless groaner has to be regarded as a failure.

A somewhat more successful attempt at female-fronted comedy is PSYCHOBITCHES, in which Rebecca Front crops up again as a therapist whose patient roster consists solely of famous women from throughout history. Essentially an excuse for a fast-paced series of disconnected sketches, this simple premise is only semi-successfully executed by co-writer/director Jeremy Dyson from The League of Gentlemen.

Resembling a surreal parody of the great In Treatment, the series begins with a neat visual gag involving Rosa Parks – I suspect that's the first and last time I'll ever place those words in that order – before roaring into gear with Front's Grandma's House co-star Samantha Spiro delivering a pitch-perfect evisceration of Audrey Hepburn's irritatingly kooky screen persona.

Unfortunately, it then devotes far too much time to a mirthless series of Bronte sisters sketches – no, it wouldn't be hilarious if they were portrayed as gruff, foul-mouthed northerners – and Julia Davis as Sylvia Plath, which, while beautifully performed, hammers its one joke into the ground. 
 
Elsewhere, Frances Barber and a dragged-up Mark Gatiss (Dyson's League of Gentlemen cohorts crop up throughout the series) sell the hell out of a warring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but without banishing memories of French & Saunders' superior take on their feud. The only other sketch that really takes flight is Sharon Horgan as a glamorously self-obsessed Eva Peron.
 
As an excuse for a cast of talented, funny women to show off their versatility, Psychobitches is a success. But reducing Front to a straight role feels like a waste of her abilities, which merely adds to the overall air of mild disappointment.

The Dame receives his due in DAVID BOWIE: FIVE YEARS, a globe-trotting, pan-dimensional documentary charting pivotal moments in his career. Gloriously awash with rare archive footage – thrill as our man mimes his own disembowelment while Andy Warhol coos off-camera! - it's narrated by a disembodied Bowie culled from old interviews, while various music journalists pontificate earnestly in artfully deserted warehouses. Key collaborators, including Brian Eno (chasing after his cat, no less), Tony Visconti, Nile Rodgers and, resembling a gnomic bank manager, Robert Fripp also crop up to discuss his creative process in some depth. It's a lovingly assembled tribute to one of rock's most restlessly innovative artists.