'David Bowie: The Last Five Years: Review'
Like many of you I watched the Bowie documentary ‘David Bowie: The Last Five Years’ on Saturday night. I had a few tears, as it was everything I wanted it to be, full of fascinating footage, mostly unseen, and insightful interviews with friends and colleagues. The final five years of Bowie’s life were as they should be - private, peaceful and spent in the company of those he loved. Little did we or even he know what was to come. If only we all had the gift of knowing when. The health scare a few years earlier had clearly scared him. The fear and urgency from this boosted an unprecedented creativity which still burned bright and gave us the gift of two albums, his final, and amongst his finest. ‘Blackstar’ in particular is up there with Bowie’s very best work.
The programme opened up these years providing a wonderful insight into the development of the albums, as well as the musical Lazarus, a life ambition achieved. We have the benefit of hindsight and know how this story ended. Bowie did not, at least not until the final three months. Even then he fought his death with dignity and defiance. Not even the gods can cheat death. His immortality lies in his work which will never be forgotten and cherished by generations to come. We are the blessed though. We walked the Earth in his time.
A theme explored throughout the documentary and Bowie’s career was his ambivalence towards fame. One of his many well-known songs deals with its perils. Bowie made no secret that he disliked many elements of his popularity - the intrusion, the lack of privacy, and the feeling his life and soul were being opened up and picked over by strangers. Yet there had been a strong drive and desire for success from the earliest part of his career in the sixties. Despite a number of false starts Bowie never gave up. Dogged and determined, he never stopped believing that one day people would get it and his career would take off. With Space Oddity it did.
There is an apparent contradiction here, one we often perceive with the rich and famous. They seem to crave success, but when it comes they reject it and complain. In gifting them success the public, press, and fans feel there is some entitlement, maybe even a sense of ownership. We have a right to know. That is the price you pay, the deal you struck, now it’s payback. This tension runs through the careers of many and with Bowie it was no exception. He was more famous than most, hence it seemed all the more acute. In his latter years Bowie fought to keep this privacy. The secrecy and silence made the surprise of those last two albums and even greater stroke of genius. Even his death was orchestrated to perfection, a masterstroke in marketing, contradictory to the very end.
One of the contributors made a crucial point, I can’t recall who. They stressed that Bowie was never interested in fame itself. What drove him was the need to create, and the resources to follow his dreams. He knew that fame would give him the freedom to explore, despite all he would have to sacrifice, and its many dangers. Just like Major Tom. Bowie wasn’t interested in things, he craved experiences. His was a creative energy desperate to keep moving forward, try new projects, explore different ideas. Bowie was change and reinvention, it was the very core of his creativity. As Dylan once said ‘He not busy being born is busy dying.’ Bowie understood this better than any other artist, and even in his dying he was being born again. For me, this lesson is Bowie’s greatest gift of all.
