Eat a rock spag

David Bowie's biographer Dylan Jones on what hundreds of interviews revealed
Dylan Jones
Updated Sep 13, 2017 — 10.14am,
first published at Sep 7, 2017 — 11.00pm

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They say you should never meet your heroes, but I met mine in the spring of 1982 when I was an extra in the awful vampire film The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie. It was my job to walk up and down the metal staircase in a club called Heaven, just off the Strand in London – brushing by Bowie each time I did it – nodding along to the strains of Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus.

I thought I was in hog heaven, actually being in the same room as my idol. Even though I was 21, I still felt like the impressionable 12-year-old I had been when I'd first seen Bowie on Top Of The Pops. My day was made when, that afternoon, he asked me for a light for his Marlboro. Over the years I would meet Bowie many more times, so I suppose I've been writing this book all my life.

I would like to be able to say that the idea of an oral biography was mine, but when I heard that Penguin were interested in commissioning one, there was never any doubt in my mind that I wanted to be the person to do it.

I thought the format would allow for perhaps a more honest narrative, as it wouldn't be driven by my subjective appreciation of Bowie. What the world doesn't need is another book by an obsessive fan describing how much he had meant to them (after all, I had already written such a book, five years ago). I also knew that for it to work, I had to cast the net as wide as possible.

There are 50 people you need to speak to in order to be taken seriously as a Bowie biographer. Most spoke to me – the likes of Nile Rodgers, Mick Rock, Tony Visconti, Ava Cherry, Cherry Vanilla, Lindsay Kemp, etc. Then there are the other 50 people, from guitarists to groupies, who probably feel they have as much to say about Bowie, but who rarely get asked. Then, of course, there are the other 50, the ones you end up speaking to when someone you have just interviewed says, "Have you spoken to Kevin?"

What did I learn? So, so much. I heard claims that he had shared a bed with Mick Jagger, of his fondness for Coronation Street, and some quite extraordinary stories about his brief drug abuse in the early seventies (which I think he almost engineered as a project: Tonight, Matthew, I am going to be a drug addict).

When he was recording Station to Station, he would arrive with a huge amount of cocaine, and then walk around the recording studio, putting little piles by the mixing desk, by the guitar amps, by the speakers, in the vocal booth, everywhere. The reason? Simple, so he didn't have to walk anywhere when he wanted some.

It was important to reference the rough along with the smooth, but I didn't go looking for people who didn't like him, or who didn't get on with him. I knew there were stories that needed to be alluded to, but I wasn't interested in writing a "kiss and tell". There, inevitably, are contradictions; again, I didn't go looking for these, and they are relatively minor, but it's important to acknowledge the different ways in which people remember things.

Fundamentally, I discovered that I liked him even more than I thought I did. Often biographers look forward to finding out exactly the opposite (I thought a lot less of Jim Morrison having spent several years writing a biography of him), but Bowie's personality was so complex, so nuanced, that even stories in which he became the unwitting hero didn't turn the book into a hagiography. And who would want that anyway?

He could be callous, and he could drop people as quickly as he took up with them, but even in this respect he was remarkably honest. I interviewed dozens of people who felt as though they had, at some point, been dropped by Bowie, but remarkably almost none of them begrudged this. Simply being in his orbit for a period was often enough.

He could also be extraordinarily funny (as Ricky Gervais told me, at length). Another of his friends relayed a lovely story about Roger Moore, who appeared to be the only person who Bowie vaguely knew when he moved to Switzerland at the end of the seventies. Bowie had only been in the country for a few weeks when there was a knock at the door one day around 5pm. It was Moore, who was invited in, stayed for a cup of tea, then drinks, and ended up staying for dinner. He told lots of stories about James Bond, Hollywood, and a high old time was had by them both.

Cut to the following day: 5pm. A knock on the door. It's Roger Moore again, who comes in, stays for dinner and tells all the stories he told the night before, which were about 70 per cent less funny than they had been then. Bowie said that after two weeks, every day he could be found, hiding under the kitchen table, pretending to be out, just in case Moore came knocking.

Bowie was ambitious, relentless, expedient, ruthless, and – when he needed to be – incredibly tough (firing people on the spot for perceived misdemeanours). But from what I gather, he wasn't nasty. He wasn't mean. If you interview 150 people, you start to get the measure of the person you're discussing, and Bowie's attitude towards life, towards people, towards art, culture, religion, whatever, always seemed rooted in curiosity. Sure, he didn't suffer fools gladly (although he suffered me quite a few times), but he could tell when people had something to offer.

There are lots of quotes from Bowie himself in the book, mostly from the seven formal interviews that I conducted with him over the years. In these instances he could be funny, he could be tricky – beware displaying too much honesty with rock stars: when they ask you what you think of their new record, it's best if you say it's probably the best thing they've ever done – but he was never less than fascinating.

Some famous people, especially these days, develop a way to sound as if they're saying something, whereas in essence they're telling you nothing, but Bowie's interests were so vast and so varied, it was impossible to walk away from an interview without a large amount of material.

Not that he was above making a few things up. He always told me that you should print the myth, as the myth is almost always more interesting. One day, I took him at his word. A few years ago, I wrote a book about how important and how influential his performance on Top of The Pops was in 1972, the one on which he sang Starman. I needed his permission to use a couple of photographs, so I sent him the manuscript. I also deliberately included a few mistakes, mainly to do with his behaviour in the dressing rooms of the BBC TV centre in White City, just before the performance.

Rather conceitedly, I hoped he might read the book, see the mistakes, and then contribute by including some new facts of his own. Fat chance. I was given approval to run the pictures, and the book stayed as it was.

There will be many more books about David Bowie, and no doubt many will try to prove they are the definitive tome. I wouldn't claim that for mine, but I sincerely hope it contributes to our understanding of the man, a genuinely extraordinary man, in his own way as much of a genius as Picasso, or Fellini.