“The threat of insanity”: The dark inspiration behind David Bowie’s 1972 masterpiece
David Bowie was never very close to his parents. He found their cold and distant ways a little too Victorian for his own liking.
After all, his own likings were always pretty outré. “If it’s wearing a pink hat and a red nose and it plays the guitar upside down,” David Bowie once proclaimed, ”I’ll go and look at it. I love to see people being dangerous.”
This penchant for the peculiar, perturbing and sometimes the pernicious was something that permeated all of Bowie’s art and performances. At the root of this radical outlook is his brother Terry Burns. He gave Bowie “the greatest serviceable education that I could have had. He just introduced me to the outside things,” he said. “I saw the magic, and I caught the enthusiasm for it because of his enthusiasm for it. And I kinda wanted to be like him.”
However, Burns’ explorative influence was tinged with tragedy. He suffered from crippling schizophrenia and seizures throughout his adult life. This meant that Bowie not only valued the outsider world for its strange lure, but he also looked at it empathetically, reconciling its cathartic potential to offer deliverance from the norm.
This is the Venn diagram that Bowie looked to place his own art in: the sweet spot where the shocking pizzazz of defiant singularity overlaps with the importance of using that incitement to connect and comfort in some way. With that mindset, Bowie looked to reflect the world at large in some vitally weird new manner: the outside should hold a mirror to the centre.
So, he dared to head towards the precipice. He’d said that John Lennon was a personal hero because of his ability to turn the avant-garde into something populist, and now, he looked to do the same. Ziggy Stardust, as a creation, was heaven-sent to revive youth culture just as it seemed to be waning.
In order to do that, Bowie himself would have to personify someone larger than life. That was taxing. Bowie was well aware of the pitfalls of this. Thoughts of Terry Burns’ mental decline still firmly occupied his mind. ‘Ziggy Stardust’, the song, was his eerie reconciliation of what might be.
Just as Ziggy transformed into a rock ‘n’ roll superstar, moving like a tiger on Vaseline, the shock-haired creation thrust further into the spotlight, and the mask he bore began to eat into his face. Loved by the masses, his own hubris was dawning; the drugs got stronger, the sex grew tasteless, and the messenger began shouting without picking up the phone… but boy could he play guitar!
Once a prophet who brought news from a dream that ‘the starmen’ would soon land and save us, the worship Ziggy receives transforms him from mouthpiece to false idol. A few tracks prior on the masterful concept LP, ‘Lady Stardust’, might have proved that the band had it all together and an exultant revolution was afoot. But ‘Ziggy Stardust’ finds our hero soaring too close to the sun. His end is nigh. The world may be saved, but his view of intergalactic stardom will burn out into ash.
“One puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity.”
David Bowie
Bowie both feared this and flirted with it in equal measure. “One puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity,” Bowie said of the song. “As long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music and into my work, I could always be throwing it off.”
In essence, he figured he would indulge his inner paranoia and exorcise it through the conduit of creativity. This, in part, is why he was always changing.
For instance, in Berlin, he slept under a giant portrait of the Japanese novelist, actor and nationalist civilian militia, Yukio Mishima. Most sane men entering their 30s don’t. But Bowie was positively fascinated by Mishima’s outlook on creativity. I recently spoke with the expert on all things Japanese culture, Roy Starrs of the University of Otago in New Zealand, to find out why Bowie found him so alluring.
He explained: ”In the medieval Japanese Noh theatre, the actor spends some time before he goes on stage staring at the mask he is about to put on, which may represent either a male or a female character, since both were played by male actors.” For starters, this aligned nicely with Bowie’s androgyny.
Starrs continued, ”This ritualistic moment of contemplation resembles a Shamanistic rite of spirit possession, in that the actor intends to shed his own identity and take on the identity of the character he is about to portray. Mishima was fascinated by this profoundly mystical form of theatre – he even wrote ‘modern’ Noh plays himself – and one might say that he lived his life accordingly, continually shedding his ‘own identity’ and very consciously putting on one mask after another, as if no single role could ever quite satisfy him.”
In Bowie’s case, the roles kept shifting not just because the masks grew stale, or even that they started to eat into his face, but because his own psychology had shifted over time, and with it, a new mental perturbance had arisen – one which he could always inevitably keep at bay thanks to the vessel of his vivid imagination.
So, in some ways, each chapter represents a new phase in Bowie’s own psychology, and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ might be the masterpiece that represents its darkest depths.
