This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

David Bowie certainly knew how to spring a surprise. In 2013, ten years into a recording silence many feared might be terminal, he caught us all on the hop with The Next Day, his hugely-acclaimed penultimate album. Scroll back another 30 years, and his Let’s Dance collection turned the former nabob of glam rock into an unlikely icon of post-disco, scoring him his career bestseller.

Ten years before that — five decades ago this month, on 3 July 1973 — he staggered just about everyone, including two of his bandmates, by telling an audience at Hammersmith Odeon it was witnessing “the last show … we’ll ever do”.

It’s no surprise, however, that since Bowie’s death in 2016, his legend has been embellished in book after book. Simon Goddard’s rambunctious, stylishly-presented Bowie Odyssey 73 is the latest in a series of volumes taking us “year by year … through Bowie’s greatest decade”. In this one he duly reminds us that back there at Hammersmith, it was only Ziggy Stardust — Bowie’s first and still perhaps best-known on-stage alter ego — who was being retired.

We now know that new guises awaited — from Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke through to the Blind Prophet video character for the last album of all, Black Star. Tantalisingly suggestive rather than representational, these lurid cameo-personas could at times seem endearingly homespun, too. Bowie himself described Ziggy’s look as “Nijinsky meets Woolworths”, and the red-and-blue colour coding of his Halloween Jack phase evoked — for some of us at least — the home strip of League Division Three’s Aldershot FC.

Goddard, in what amounts to a novelisation, captures well the feel of the chilly, strife-torn Britain which Bowie bestrode before taking on the rest of the globe. They’re all here: Don Revie, Gary Glitter, the IRA, Princess Anne on her first wedding day, Lord Lambton.

The last-named is quoted as saying, “I think … sometimes people like variety.” Cometh the hour, cometh Bowie. Anyone who within nine months could propel “The Jean Genie”, “Life on Mars?” and “The Laughing Gnome” into the top ten hardly lacked range.

Bowie’s presence throughout Goddard’s book is necessarily empyrean. For readers seeking a slightly more domestic portrait, Geoff MacCormack’s Rock’n’Roll With Me offers the perspective of a lifelong friend who’d shared Bowie’s Wimpy Bar childhood in Bromley, then enjoyed a professional relationship with him during the mid-1970s.

Also known as “Warren Peace”, MacCormack sang vivid backing vocals for Bowie, danced around decoratively, and even co-wrote the song on Diamond Dogs that gives his book its title. Self-deprecating to the point of parody, he writes himself up as a kind of human comfort blanket for his old chum, repeatedly just happening to be in the right place at the right time (The Man Who Fell On His Feet?). He also peppers his text with period photos that don’t exactly give Linda McCartney a run for her money but do help to document how very peculiar, in different ways from today, our world was five decades ago.

Whilst this is an intimate account — on the Trans-Siberian Express they shared some pretty cramped quarters — Bowie remains in part unrevealed. If the line from “The Jean Genie” “sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile” can be taken as self-reference, MacCormack nails that seated man whether knocking back a can of Skol or catching Biff Rose at Max’s Kansas City.

As in Goddard’s pages, however, the smiling reptile stays stubbornly out of sight: the creative genius who, after years of striving, suddenly couldn’t stop hitting the spot with wholly irresistible songs. Neither book will disappoint Bowiephiles, but my hunch is that none of us will quite find the main man therein.

Ultimately it’s the music which brings to each of us our personal Bowie — and his constituency has always been remarkably broad. At my own state school, the first fellow sixth-former I saw displaying the freshly-released Hunky Dory album under his arm is now a Conservative MP and knight of the realm.

An Alexandrian library full of Bowie books couldn’t really speak to us as persuasively as just one Bowie song. Whatever media stunts he pulled between the burn-out of The Beatles and the advent of Adam Ant, the fact remains that 70s Bowie seldom put a foot wrong on his records. We will go on playing them until the apocalypse envisaged in his sublime “Drive-In Saturday” comes about. Maybe after that, too.