Fleapit revisited:Moonage Daydream

David Bowie would have received his fair share of compliments in his life. He was called a genius, an icon for sexual liberation, Sky Arts called him Britain's most influential artist of the last fifty years and Rolling Stone named him the greatest rock star ever. To some he was nothing short of a god but in Brett Morgen's new Bowie film, Moonage Daydream, one of Bowie's fans, when asked about him at the height of Bowie's imperial phase, simply replies "he's smashing".

He was too. You almost forget just how many great songs Bowie had but Moonage Daydream does a pretty good job of reminding you of quite a lot of them. Heroes, Time, Quicksand, All The Young Dudes, Aladdin Sane, Sound And Vision, Warszawa,  Life On Mars, Space Oddity, Word On A Wing, Hallo Spaceboy. There's so many of them that sometimes Morgen cuts them off half way through or overdubs them with the sound of helicopters in flight, screams, and even other songs. I think at one point I caught a scene from The Wizard Of Oz.

It can be quite jarring at first but you soon grow into it. Morgen's style of documentary making is not dissimilar to that of an Adam Curtis or Asif Kapadia. There's no narration, no talking heads, and very little chronology. Instead it's a headfuck whirr of skulls, random graphics, overhead shots of cities, scenes of Bowie drinking milk in the back of a car driving through a desert, and, of course, lots of stars, rockets, and other space age signifiers.

There's also a surprisingly large amount of Russell Harty and even a little bit of Klaus Nomi. What there isn't is any mention of Bowie's first wife Angie, his kids - Duncan and Lexi, or any of the music that perhaps didn't quite make the grade. There's no Tin Machine, there's no Dancing In The Streets with Mick Jagger, and there's (disappointingly for me) none of that Anthony Newley influenced Decca Years stuff.

No Love You Til Tuesday, no Rubber Band, and no I Dig Everything. There's a clue as to why Bowie came to almost disavow this part of his career when he's interviewed about his childhood in the film. He never says as much but it seems it was not a happy one. When asked about his parents he responds by saying that his father is dead and that him and his mother did not have a close relationship. When asked about Brixton, where he was born, he claims to feel no ties to the place.

He even mentions that, as a child, he had no time for either Winnie the Pooh or Rupert Bear! The one person from his childhood he did speak fondly of was his maternal half-brother Terry who introduced the young Bowie to free jazz, beat poetry, and the occult before succumbing to schizophrenia and spending the rest of his life, he died in 1985, institutionalised. Bowie didn't necessarily understand free jazz or beat poetry but it was that which fascinated him about those things and he soon became a collector.

Not so much of things but of experiences, of people, of places. We zoom through images of those that inspired Bowie (Aleister Crowley, Fats Domino, WS Burroughs, Nietzsche, Little Richard) and those blur and melt into footage of Bowie films (The Man Who Fell To Earth, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Labyrinth) and rehearsals for a Broadway production of The Elephant Man in which Bowie played John Merrick.

We see Bowie's art (itself, to my eyes, influenced from the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner) and we follow the man himself as he moves from London to Los Angeles and then on to Berlin. The film is most interesting when Bowie talks about the methods and motivations behind his work, what he hopes to achieve and why he thinks he wants to achieve it.

At all times, Bowie remains an enthusiastic supporter of art, a passionate advocate of experimentation, and, more than anything, a lover of life. Even as he rolls his eyes at one of Harty's inane provocations, there is a playfulness and a glee behind the facade of distance.

As Bowie ages, and his success becomes at first even bigger before receding a little, he becomes more confident in himself and feels less desire to hide behind characters like Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke. 

His undying, and total, love for Iman cures him of the cynicism he once held for love, for settling down, and for building a life and if his music is rarely as stellar or as innovative from the early eighties onwards (there are, of course, glorious exceptions like his final album, 2016's Blackstar was released just two days before he died) he seems comfortable with that.

He seemed to be, as much as anything else, a man very happy with his lot and copious footage of Bowie dancing (check those legs move) seems good evidence of this. I mean, he's got the tunes to dance to. He wrote most of them. Modern Love, Ashes To Ashes, DJ, Let's Dance, Starman, Changes. I could go on.

You'd probably need to already love Bowie to love this film, it's not an 'in' for anyone not already on board, but if you do love Bowie you will love a great deal about it. The film is good. It's really good. But can it do justice to Bowie's vast influence and his enormous talent? Of course not. One hundred and forty minutes is a good length for a feature film but it's not enough to do Bowie justice and I'm sure Brett Morgen knows that. 

What Moonage Daydream can do is give us a sense of how incredible it all was. Bowie's writing, his dancing, his view on the world, his art, his acting, his cheeky interviews, his mind, and, more than anything, the wonderful music that seems to just get better with time. The further away we get from Bowie's era it seems, the more we understand his music. The film was great but Bowie? He was smashing.

Thanks to Darren for joining me and for a quick debrief in The Clapham North pub afterwards.