Was David Bowie a fascist in the mid-1970s?
David Bowie famously adopted a procession of on-stage personas throughout the 1970s, starting with the ‘Man Who Sold the World’ in 1970. Of course, 1972’s space age left-handed guitar superstar Ziggy Stardust was his most famous creation.
However, one “character” Bowie adopted led to a stream of public scandals, the likes of which rock music had never experienced before. His ‘Thin White Duke’, the protagonist of his 1976 studio album Station to Station and its accompanying world tour, was far removed from the pop icon Ziggy had been.
The controversy with this Bowie persona began in early 1976, when at a press conference after a tour concert in Stockholm, donning a bleach-blonde short-back-and-sides haircut, he made some rather unusual comments. “As I see it, I am the only alternative for the premier in England,” he declared. “I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.” It was hard to work out who was talking: the Thin White Duke or Bowie himself.
In the months that followed, Bowie was held by Polish customs officers for carrying Nazi paraphernalia in his luggage, along with books about the prominent henchmen of Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer. According to his tour photographer Andrew Kent, there is allegedly a photo of Bowie giving a Nazi salute at Hitler’s bunker in Berlin during the same period.
And, in May 1976, Bowie was accused of standing up and giving a Nazi salute from his convertible upon arriving at Victoria Station in London. The NME published a photograph that they suggested verified this claim – although that has always been contested by Bowie’s camp.
Later that same year, the singer gave a lengthy quote during an interview with Cameron Crowe for Playboy during which he said he believed in fascism “very strongly” and thought Adolf Hitler was “one of the first rock stars”. Altogether, the picture looks pretty damning.
What’s more, Bowie had previous with this kind of sentiment. The year before, prior to his creation of the Thin White Duke persona, he’d told another interviewer, “You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up”.
How did Bowie answer to accusations of fascism?
No one else put these words in David Bowie’s mouth. Alter-ego or not, he’d spoken them himself. It’s worth noting – as many people have done since – Bowie was in a downward spiral with drug addiction at the time. He’d been arrested for drug possession for the first time in his career early in 1976, and things only got worse from there.
When he got clean and apparently came to his senses the following year, he appeared embarrassed and ashamed of his statements and behaviour. In an October 1977 interview with Melody Maker, he angrily denied the alleged Nazi salute incident at Victoria Station and stated simply, “I am not a fascist”.
Three years later, he was more openly apologetic and remorseful, telling NME, “I was out of my mind totally, completely crazed.” He added that accusations of racism were levelled at him “quite inevitably and rightly.” But also that he had gotten mixed up with one of his “own fucking characters”.
The Thin White Duke character was swiftly retired in 1977, after which he wisely resisted the temptation to play with alter egos any further. Bowie might just have been acting as he saw it. And some of his words and actions were replicated as shock tactics by certain punk bands that followed in his wake. The unsavoury Sex Pistols song ‘Belson Was a Gas’ being one of the worst examples.
But reading what he undeniably did and said, in the cold light of day, is difficult to get over. His actions may be forgivable after the remorse he demonstrated, but we shouldn’t forget them altogether.
