Bowie in Berlin: how the German city changed him

Anew radio show explores how David Bowie disappeared into the city to reinvent himself. Dylan Jones has a first listen

- Dylan Jones

AS some one who has invested so much of his professional career in dismantling and examining the life and work of David Bowie, I find the seemingly exponential release of substandard rarities and entry-level biographies depressing.

Enough already. Sometimes it seems as though Bowie’s corpse was left to rot on a piece of wasteland near Sundridge Park in Bromley, to be pecked away by a committee of increasingly low-brow culturevultures. Francis Wh a te ly, however, is neither vulture nor bottom feeder, and the three documentaries he directed about Bowie for the BBC will still be being watched and appreciated in a hundred years’ time. Five Years, Finding Fame and The Last Five Years are peerless, contextualising the star in ways both idiosyncratic and probing.

His latest Bowie project has been produced with the help of another BBC veteran, the great John Wilson, this time as a radio programme: Bowie in Berlin. Even though Whately is still attempting to turn this period of Bowie’s life into a film, the lack of any meaningful archive footage makes a radio show completely understandable. It doesn’t disappoint. For many years, Bowie’s Berlin sojourn between 1976 and 1978 has been mythologised and romanticised by writers, filmmakers, critics and often by David Bowie himself. Driven to the brink of madness by cocaine, overwork, marital strife, and a paranoid obsession with the occult, Bowie fled Los Angeles in 1975 and ended up in the divided city, symbolically on the frontline between communist East and capitalist West.