A Life In Interviews – Book Review

Bowie At The BBC: A Life In Interviews
By Tom Hagler (Editor) 

Wellbeck Publishing – out now

Spanning more than 40 years of interviews Bowie At The BBC gives a unique insight into David Bowie’s career.

Tom Hagler has done a great job bringing together interviews from across the BBC archives, some of which have only been available through online fansites or as pirated radio recordings. The interviews range from in-depth conversations, radio documentaries and career-spanning overviews.

Hagler notes that it was Bowie’s intimate connection with a British media institution which in both senses was part of the cultural lifeblood and also an old-school club of pre-war tastes that Bowie helped to revolutionize.

The book includes a transcript of the infamous 1975 BBC documentary, Cracked Actor. Bowie is gently grilled by Alan Yentob as a fly-on-the-wall, allowing Bowie to talk holds up a mirror to Bowie’s spiralling cocaine use as he embarks on the transitional phase of his 1974 Diamond Dogs US Tour as it becomes the Philly Dogs soul revue. Bowie would soon change gears from the malaise of the ‘fly in the milk’ indulgence of the Ziggy-mania, he races towards the new beginning of his ‘plastic soul’ recording session of 1975’s Young Americans.

The book covers many such pivotal phases in Bowie’s development as he follows his muse to rise above the consensus of pop culture flow while managing to alter its trajectory along the way. Tom Hagler’s insightful editorial notes that introduce each chapter provide welcome context of Bowie’s career at each given period. Notably, Bowie’s interviews would drop off after 1973, the death of Ziggy, and only pick up again in 1976. The book’s editor, Tom Hagler notes that in the early 1990s, Bowie found loyal support with the BBC, whose interviewers were willing to give Bowie serious time as he navigated his way through the commercially successful but artistically compromised period of the ‘difficult’ 1980s, and then the scorched earth fresh start of Tin Machine in the early 90s.

With the 2001 Heathen album and the globe-spanning Reality tour of 2004 Bowie became a mainstay of BBC talk shows like Michael Parkinson and Jonathan Ross which saw him placed on the more narrow role of a classic rock veteran. Here we see a shift from high artistic aloofness of the 1970s to a more open and genial Bowie. His sense of humour endures, but where it had once been his self-effacing shield, deflecting deeper, more probing questioning; Bowie would now talk about recent news and his favourite television programmes, as much as details of his latest album, slipping easily into the role of an easy-going raconteur, free from world-weary complaints and bitter nostalgia.

Bowie also speaks with BBC Radio mainstays such as Gideon Coe, and Marc Riley, people who grew up alongside Bowie’s music, had fantastic adventures in music and now completed the cycle of interview by speaking to him decades later as much fans as peers in the world of music. The book runs up to 2005 when Bowie gave what would be his last interview on Courtney Pine’s BBC jazz show, after which Bowie would more or less disappear from public life of the media, only to return to popular consciousness in 2013 with the release of The Next Day album. The careful and comprehensive order of this book made Bowie At The BBC an excellent companion for both the casual and obsessive Bowie fan.

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Words by Adam Steiner. his authour profile is here: You can find more about Adam at his website. and he tweets here