LAZARUS

The last years of a rock legend’s life.

The central conceit of this biography is that David Bowie was at his lowest point following two dismally received albums in the late 1980s. He stopped performing his best-loved songs and spent the next three decades in a phoenix-like ascent toward the creation of a new catalog and, in the year before his death from liver cancer at age 69, two masterpieces: the musical Lazarus and his final album, Blackstar. Larman, whose most recent books concern British royalty, doesn’t hide his disdain for Bowie’s musical output of the early 1990s, particularly the Tin Machine period when Bowie formed a band to record and perform with, and ostensibly to blend into as an equal. He’s barely more forgiving of the late-’90s output, when he suggests the ever-restless Bowie was struggling to get his feet on ever-firmer artistic ground. In another context, Larman writes, “The admiration that I, and millions of others…feel for Bowie is inordinate without being unconditional.” Some die-hard Bowie fans may be put off by Larman’s palpable impatience with Bowie’s bouts of “silliness.” But most readers will appreciate Larman’s mastery of his narrative as it moves with greater force toward its moving climax. Though rock music was his primary medium and the one in which he reached his highest achievements, Bowie was not just a rock star. Often accused of being a dilettante, Bowie was an unquenchably curious and exploratory all-around artist in various media, including painting, video, film, and digital realms, as his ahead-of-the-curve internet project, BowieNet, demonstrated. In this book, he comes across as more and more human, especially as he confronts his worsening health and the numbering of his days.

An essential addition to the Bowie bibliography.