Simon Goddard’s latest in his series of brilliant Bowie biogs is set in 1976, when Britain’s long hot summer brought racial tensions to the boil helped by the lies of Enoch Powell and the idiocy of rock stars like Eric Clapton and David Bowie (among others): Bowie with his Nazi salutes (and obsession with Nazis generally) and Clapton with his rants about the National Front and kicking “foreigners” out of the country. All of which Goddard writes about with his usual pithy wit and face-slaps of brutal truth, “And so, a day that [Berlin Bowie] began playing schoolboy Gestapo games in his black trench coat and ‘Sieg Heil!’ing on Hitler’s grave, ends in the warm sheets of a Dutch transsexual who forty years ago would have met their fate in a Nazi concentration camp”.

And Bowie’s music in 76? Fitful to say the least as he was coming down from years on the coke, booze, sex and a lifetime obsessing about what or who he was. But he wasn’t so dazed that he didn’t see the value of Brian Eno and oversee the rebirth of the ‘new’ Iggy Pop (“sing like Dietrich”) in a Berlin that proved to be a convenient bolt hole from which to reinvent. To reinvent and figure out who he might eventually become off the drink and drugs. And the obsession with Nazis? Some kind of weird power kick? An aberration? Whatever it was, he was given rather a large pass (even years later when stuff like that could permanently bruise a musical legacy). Cancellation permanently postponed. Some guys get all the luck. “A close one, David. But looks like history will let you get away with that”. If 1976 was an ugly interregnum, it was also a rebirth as 1977 will show, and, with Simon Goddard as guide, I can’t wait.

Bowie Odyssey 76 – Simon Goddard

– Publ. by Omnibus - £17.99

Steven Long