Bowie unplugged
David Bowie’s cocaine habit forced him to “strip back everything” during his fabled years in Berlin, as a fascinating profile reveals
Getty
- Graeme Thomson
Bowie in Berlin is on Saturday at 8pm on Radio 4. Add it to your collection.
Ad
What is left to say about David Bowie? Plenty, says Francis Whately who, having made three acclaimed TV documentaries about him (Five Years, Finding Fame, The Last Five Years), now presents a radio programme exploring Bowie’s life and work in Berlin between 1976 and 1978.
Bowie in Berlin uses previously unheard archive audio and the testimonies of three women who, for the first time, talk about sharing aspects of his life: artist Clare Shenstone, performer and nightclub owner Romy Haag and journalist Sarah-Rena Hine.
Whately wanted to dig deeper than standard accounts of Bowie’s life. “There’s been a great deal of mythologising since he passed away in 2016. He’s become more distant than he was in his lifetime, taking on a role as an idol that I think he’d feel uncomfortable with. It’s as though he’s not human any more – and he was all too human! Doing something about a period in his life where he really did strip back everything to become himself again is an important statement.”
Strung out on cocaine and in significant psychological peril, Bowie left Los Angeles in 1976 having recorded Station to Station in the guise of the Thin White Duke. He returned to Europe, recording Low near Paris before moving to Berlin. The city had long held a fascination for him. “He talked about reading Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin as a teenager in Bromley,” says Whately. “He met Isherwood shortly before he left Los Angeles, and Isherwood told him that the Berlin of his books never really existed. So Bowie was going somewhere that was already mythologised, hoping to find that place. And I think in some ways he did.”
With Iggy Pop as his flatmate – Hine recalls the pair wearing shorts and little else most of the time – Bowie rented a cheap first-floor apartment at Hauptstraße 155 in the unglamorous Schöneberg district. He cycled to parks, visited art galleries, shopped at the department Listen store KaDeWe, frequented bars and nightclubs, tempered his drug use and strived to live an ordinary life. “He came as a sort of casualty and left as a very much recovered man,” says Whately. “He used Berlin as a sanatorium.”
Getting three of Bowie’s closest female friends to contribute was a coup. Shenstone, an artist, model, actor and muse to Francis Bacon, attended Bowie’s wedding to Angie in 1970 and remained a confidante for decades. In the documentary, she tells a poignant story about the day she and Bowie spent together in Berlin, which throws new light on the anthemic Heroes.
He came as a casualty and left as a recovered man
“Clare goes right back,” says Whately. “She’s a very private person, so getting her trust took years.” The same was true of Hine and Haag. “These are people who haven’t been part of the Bowie story. I wanted to talk to them not because they were his lovers but because they were artists in their own right and had something to say about his art.” In Berlin, Bowie dressed in work shirts, flat caps and jeans, cultivating a slightly sheepish-looking moustache. “David had this extraordinary way of hiding himself,” says Whately. “He clearly liked putting on costumes, so it’s not surprising that he might have tried to blend in by looking like a German working-class person.”
Whately concedes that aspects of this period remain hazy. Only one of Bowie’s so-called “Berlin trilogy” of albums – Heroes – was recorded in the city, and he was away as often as he was there. “The idea that he locked himself in some garret isn’t right, but he did use Berlin very much as a base, and he did go down to basics.”
By 1978, he was gone. “Romy Haag said that he sucked the life out of Berlin,” says Whately. “That’s what he did with the music he was interested in, with cities, with countries, with people. He would explore them, absorb himself in them, live that life, then move on.”
Ad
Whately hopes to make a visual documentary about this period. “It has the potential to be the most interesting film you could make about him, because it’s a pivot point in his career. I think the fact that there isn’t much footage is in some ways an advantage, because you can evoke the Berlin that he saw.”
Authors
Graeme Thomson
Ad
Ad
Subscribe for £1 per week
Too much to watch this autumn? Let Radio Times magazine and app do the choosing, with expert picks across TV, streaming and film.
Loading...
Ad
Loading...