David Bowie wanted to be famous. He also insisted he preferred to be invisible.
That dogged and impossible quest, one of several factors that placed him among the most intriguing and elusive of pop music stars, continued right to the end, suggests HBO’s new documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which premieres Monday at 8 p.m.
Bowie in those final five years.
Produced and directed by Francis Whately, this loving and reverential feature focuses on Bowie’s impressive artistic output from 2011 until he died on Jan. 10, 2016.
He was suffering from terminal cancer over those years, a fact he hid from much of the world while he completed two albums and wrote the Off-Broadway musical Lazarus.
He didn’t tour, he didn’t do interviews, he didn’t appear in public. He did make a final video, the eerie Lazarus, in which he tosses about in bed blindfolded, with button eyes and a shock of grey hair.
It was raw and stark, the flip side of the Bowie who for decades presented himself in spacesuits, sparkles and whatever would require his audience to wear industrial-strength sunglasses.
An old clip shows Bowie musing that he was the first to present full-on glam-rock, and if he wasn’t the first, he certainly was a founding father.
Bowie in his blue period.
For two decades he was the man of a thousand faces, costumes, masks and hairstyles – part of his plan, he admits in an old interview, to become famous. But not, he insists, because fame per se interested him. Only because fame would give him the platform to reach the largest possible audience with his art and his ideas.
Whately returns repeatedly to this notion and fully embraces it. His Bowie comes off as an artist whose driving obsession was that people hear what he had to say and find themselves moved or even changed by it.
Because Bowie made few public comments during his last five years, Whately taps Bowie’s musicians and collaborators to suggest he never wavered from this mission.
The Last Five Years nominally begins with the 2011 sessions for The Next Day, his penultimate album.
The Next Day marked a resurfacing, since Bowie had largely dropped out of sight after suffering a heart attack on stage in 2004. The twist: He didn’t want anyone to know he was back in action, swearing members of his band to secrecy. With no deadline pressure, he had the time he needed to fine-tune the music.
The Next Day became a No. 1 hit, and Whately’s witnesses say it marked a maturation in Bowie’s music and message, revisiting and rethinking subjects he had explored years earlier.
Lazarus, the stage show, similarly evolved into a series of vignettes built around the character Bowie played 40 years earlier in The Man Who Fell To Earth.
His final album, Blackstar, was released two days before his death. One of things it did, suggests Whatley, was bring peace to Major Tom, the character Bowie made famous in a lost spaceship decades earlier.
Whately, and his witnesses, make a convincing case that Bowie not only had a remarkably creative burst over the last five years, but brought much of his earlier work full circle – not wrapping it up in neat bows, but putting it into a new and forward-looking perspective.
Title notwithstanding, The Last Five Years also features extensive footage of the younger Bowie performing many of his most popular songs, from “Rebel Rebel” to “All the Young Dudes.”
In that process, it also inevitably brings the story back to Bowie’s relationship with fame.
In one early interview clip he matter of factly admits that when it comes to a public persona, an entertainer is often a bit of a con man. So let’s just say it’s possible he was a little more taken with the persona and the fame than he let on.
True or not, that wouldn’t diminish his work, and Whately makes an impressive case that Bowie remained artistically vital to the end.
Whoever he was or wasn’t.