He is considered the chameleon of pop music: David Bowie has mastered the game with different characters and identities like no other musician. Above all, it was a fictional character that gave him his breakthrough: Ziggy Stardust.
This is exactly what the Berlin-based illustrator Reinhard Kleist tells in his graphic novel “Starman – David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust Years”: How a moderately successful musician at the time, who threatened to go down in history as a one-hit wonder, became a world star. Kleist describes the influence of Bowie’s trip to the USA in 1971 and his encounter with Andy Warhol on the creation of this new figure. Which has a hybrid identity: on the one hand it appeared to be an alien, but at the same time a celebrated rock star. Above all, he put the game with sexual identity and gender roles on the agenda.
What is widespread today was a revolution back then. The time for such experiments had come in the early 1970s – and Ziggy was there. In parallel, the real Bowie, who was married at the time with a son, announced that he was bisexual.
David Bowie becomes Ziggy Stardust
The book starts in 1971, Bowie has just finished his album “Hunky Dory”. One of his great masterpieces, but hardly recognized at the time. An alter ego is still missing for the real breakthrough to become a world star. He’ll find it shortly afterwards in Ziggy Stardust – who will be immortalized on his upcoming record. From then on everything goes by itself. “You are an alien who takes you into another world, out of Birmingham, Stratford or wherever” – that is an explanation given in the book, why Ziggy Stardust can inspire so many young people.
The wonderfully drawn book (coloring: Thomas Gilke) also describes the dark side of fame: Bowie’s increasing eccentricity, his excessive alcohol and drug excesses and also his sexual escapades. Numerous well-known personalities appear in it. Including the musicians Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, whose solo careers Bowie is helping to push, as well as the legendary producer Tony Visconti.
In numerous retrospectives interlaced in the course of the plot, Reinhard Kleist tells of Bowie’s childhood in the cold parental home in the London suburb of Bromley. His love for his half-brother Terry, and his enthusiasm for music and his unsuccessful first steps into the London music scene. How David Robert Jones finally becomes David Bowie, who starts his solo career and finds his own style via detours.
A second part is already on the way
The reader also learns a lot of other things that are worth knowing. Like how the musician got his trademark: the different colors of his eyes. As a result of an injury sustained in a fight, the left eye had become discolored and the pupil remained permanently dilated. Bowie also knew how to use this skillfully for his image.
“Starman” is only the first of a two-volume biography by Bowie. “Low – David Bowie’s Berlin Years” will then be about the years in Berlin that he himself once described as his “happiest times”. So if you got a taste for it after reading it, you can look forward to an early supply.
Reinhard Kleist: “Starman – David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust Years” was published by Carlsen and costs 25 euros. More under www.carlsen.de