Dylan Jones - David Bowie

Chapter 1: Living in Lies by the Railway Line
19471969

Chapter 2: Commencing Countdown Engines On
19691970

Chapter 3: So I Turned Myself to Face Me
19701972

Chapter 4: Jamming Good with Weird and Gilly
19721973

Chapter 5: Battle Cries and Champagne
19731974

Chapter 6: Gee My Lifes a Funny Thing
19741976

Chapter 7: Sit in Back Rows of City Limits
19761979

Chapter 8: Put on Your Red Shoes and Dance the Blues
19801985

Chapter 9: Whos Gonna Tell You When?
1985

Chapter 10: Ive Nothing Much to Offer
19861989

Chapter 11: Its Confusing These Days
19901999

Chapter 12: As Long as Theres You
20002015

Chapter 13: For in Front of That Door Is You
2016

On October 31, 2016, as the rest of London was being swamped by hordes of drunken roisterers in nylon skeleton costumes and Donald Trump Halloween masks, many carrying neon pumpkins and covered in fake blood and blankets of spooky cobweb spray, Sothebys in Bond Street was an oasis of old-school gentility. All day the art handlers in the Mayfair auction house had been putting the finishing touches to the Bowie/Collector public preview, straightening up the Graham Sutherlands and the Damien Hirsts and struggling to reposition a gigantic Ettore Sottsass sideboard. Tonight there was going to be a private opening dinner for one hundred lucky people, and the exhibition needed to be inch perfect. By 7:45, the gallery was almost full as the likes of Tracey Emin, Keith Tyson, Elisabeth Murdoch, Robert Fox, Jasper Conran, Nick Grimshaw, Sam Smith, Saffron Aldridge, Alexander McQueens Sarah Burton, U2s Adam Clayton, Bowies art consultant Kate Chertavian, and dozens of other luminaries from the worlds of art, music, and publishing made their way slowly through the hallsmany taking selfies in front of a wall-sized blow-up of the Heroes album cover, some mimicking Bowies famous Erich Heckel hand gesture.

His greatest hits playing at entry-level volume, anecdotes were shared, conversations remembered, and even more imagined. Some of Bowies friends were there, as well as many people who had worked with him. There was even the odd journalist or two. There were people there who shouldnt have been there, and many who werent who ought to have been, but then such is the nature of the London society dinner.

The artworks themselves seemed to glisten like evidence, every one of them a pit stop in Bowies life, each purchase a punctuation mark, a story. Standing in these rooms, looking at David Bowies extraordinary art collection (most of which had been in storage for years, and included examples of outsider art, surrealism, and contemporary African art, as well as two hundred works by many of the most important British artists of the twentieth century, including Frank AuerbachI want to sound like that looks, Bowie once said about one of the artists swollen oil paintings), it was impossible not to feel his significance, as if any of us needed any more proof, because as a collector he suddenly seemed more important than any of the trinkets in the room. Here was a man who hadnt just inhabited the verge of greatness, he had stood in its very middle. An autodidact who tried to map his own cultural life, and who ended up creating one of the most important cultural lives of the last fifty years, David Bowie was his very own creation, his very own work of art.

As we sat down to eat, a carefully placed book about an alcoholic San Franciscan dentist stared up at me. In September 2013, to mark the Canadian opening of the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the curators, Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes, released a list of Bowies hundred favorite books. And at Sothebys I found one of them on my plate: McTeague, Frank Norriss graphic portrayal of the seamy side of survival in turn-of-the-century urban America, first published in 1899, and first read by David Bowie sometime toward the end of the 60s.

Each of the hundred dinner guests had been given one of Bowies favorite booksmy neighbors had been given The Outsider and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Seaan unexpectedly delightful touch to celebrate the opening of the show. As the guests worked their way through caviar salt and gin-cured salmon, followed by salt-marsh lamb rack and Wellington, you could tell some of them were trying to work out if there was a reason they had been given their particular book. Tracey Emin got A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (A funny, slapstick one, she said); film producer Paul McGuinness got Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess; and the chairman of HSBC got Madame Bovary.

There were many speeches that night, all of which mentioned Bowies profound curiosity and passionate espousal of the artists he collected. Simon Hucker, Sothebys senior specialist in modern and postwar British art, spoke, as did the auction houses Frances Christie and Oliver Barker. In the flurry of activity preceding the auction, Beth Greenacre, the curator of Bowies art collection since the turn of the century, said that many of the artists challenged the past and its established orthodoxies, artists who were intent on creating a new language. He allowed us to look at the world in a new way and the artists he collected are absolutely doing that, she said. A few weeks earlier she had told the Financial Times, There is something very English about [the work], and that is what David was: he retained his passport, no matter where he lived. And these pictures form a narrative about him, and his interests. He was an observer, and he was a historian. He really looked back at history to understand his current position, and that is what these artists were doing too.

Quoted in the Guardian around the same time, Simon Hucker said that Bowie had been attracted to artists with whom he saw a connectionoften outsiders or cultural refugees trying to break with their own history. This was the boy from postwar Brixton with his sights set on the world. It comes back to him being really interested in who he was, said Hucker, the culture he grew up in, the world of his parents, the world of his childhood.