Ashes to Ashes

Detailed, thoughtful, and with a depth of knowledge, this book explores the work of David Bowie.

The writing is polished and insightful, and I learned much about this major musical figure as I enjoyed this well-organized text.

In 2009, Chris O’Leary began a blog entitled ‘Pushing Ahead of the Dame’ in which he ambitiously aimed to say something about every Bowie song. ‘Ashes to Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie, 1976-2016’ is the second book to grow out of that project; the first being ‘Rebel, Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie from ’64 to ‘76’, which was published to some acclaim in 2015.

This volume likewise aspires to be as comprehensive as can be (unless and until official releases or bootlegs reveal ‘new’ material), by analysing all the songs which Bowie wrote, co-wrote, produced or performed on in any capacity “in the rough order of their creation” from 1976 to 2016, from ‘Sister Midnight’ on Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’ to Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ swansong, or, if you wish to treat the subject matter alphabetically, from ‘Abdulmajid’ to ‘Zeroes’.

This means that, like its companion volume, this is a large book, topping 700 pages. Indeed, so sizeable is it that the footnotes and some additional information have been relegated to an online supplement.

On the plus side O’Leary not only has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bowie’s output but understands music and has a knack of writing about it accessibly. He is also not afraid to be opinionated, in the best possible sense of that word: expressing a personal opinion and being willing to back it up.

On the debit side, O’Leary misses some interesting anecdotes, such as the fact that it was Bowie who, having heard the demo, approached Badalamenti to provide the vocal for the latter’s arrangement of ‘A Foggy Day in London Town’, thereby beating Bono’s identical request by one day. There are also a few errors (the Sandy Hook shooting, having occurred after ‘Valentine’s Day’ was written and recorded could hardly have acted as a possible inspiration for the song) and an occasional tendency to display a wide vocabulary at the expense of intelligibility (‘China Girl’, we’re told, “was a slick anomie”). Moreover, some, like myself, may lament O’Leary’s decision “to devote a bit more space” than was the case in his original blog “to the music” at the expense of “lyrical analysis”.

Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, this book should be welcomed as a major addition to the growing literature on Bowie, which no fan will want to be, or should be, without.