Reading the Starman
On the anniversary of David Bowie's death, we explore the influence of Anthony Burgess on his words and music.
In 2013, the curators of the exhibition David Bowie Is published a list of the singer’s 100 favourite books. Among the titles that Bowie valued were novels, political books, biographies of musicians, and comic books. The list reveals a good deal about his preoccupations as a reader and the influences on his creative output. Two of Anthony Burgess’s novels feature on the list — A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers — and it’s easy to see other ways in which Burgess influenced Bowie’s music throughout his career.
The Nadsat slang of A Clockwork Orange appears in several Bowie songs, from the 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to his final album, Blackstar (2016). ‘Suffragette City’ on the earlier album contains the line ‘droogie don’t crash here’, while the song ‘Girl Loves Me’ on the latter album is written in a blend of Nadsat and Polari (originally a theatrical slang, based on Italian).
‘Girl Loves Me’, embedded below, appears to be a portrait of the criminal underworld, including illicit deals (‘Popo blind to the polly in the hole’ meaning ‘the police are blind to the money in the hole’); prostitution (the girl of the title seems to be a trans sex-worker who will ‘split a ded from his deng deng’ or ‘separate an old man from his money’); and drug-taking (‘vellocet’ being a fictional drug created by Burgess). This song seems to be Bowie’s most direct creative interaction with the language and world described in A Clockwork Orange.
Burgess’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation were influences on Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona and the aesthetic surrounding the music. While in character, Bowie would begin concerts by playing a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an important musical motif in Burgess’s novel.
In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, Bowie looked back on the creation of the character: ‘The idea was to hit a look somewhere between the Malcolm McDowell thing with the one mascaraed eyelash and insects. It was the era of Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs. [It] was a cross between that and Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become.’
Apart from Burgess’s direct influence on Bowie’s music and lyrics, there are connections between Bowie’s reading list and Burgess’s list of his own favourite books, Ninety-Nine Novels (1984). One item which appears on both lists is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Burgess’s novel 1985 is a direct response to Nineteen Eighty-Four, engaging with Orwell’s text in inventive ways, including a non-fiction commentary on utopia and dystopia, and a novella in which Burgess sets out his alternative vision of the year 1985. Bowie also intended to write a stage musical based on Orwell’s novel. This never came to fruition, because the estate of George Orwell refused to grant permission, but a few songs — including ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ — appeared on his 1974 album, Diamond Dogs.
There are other points of convergence between Burgess’s and Bowie’s reading lists, including A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and Room at the Top by John Braine. The Toole novel is, in Burgess’s words, a ‘comic extravaganza’ in which the protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, rages against modernity while enjoying its comforts. Braine’s novel, on the other hand, is a realistic study of a young man’s attempts to improve his social standing, which Burgess notes for ‘its lack of humour and irony’.
Burgess’s choice of 99 novels also includes Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe and Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. These novels were retrospectively classified as ‘angry young men’ novels — stories in which the protagonists grow disillusioned with the post-war establishment. Bowie’s list reveals that he was fond of similar work, and he also selects The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956) and Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse (1959). These choices may reflect the status of Burgess and Bowie as outsider artists whose creative work stands at odds with that of their contemporaries.
In 1986 Bowie appeared in the film adaptation of Absolute Beginners, in which he played the role of Vendice Partners, a sleazy advertising mogul. He also wrote the title song for the soundtrack.
There seems to be some overlap in the favourite authors identified by Burgess and Bowie. Both lists feature work by William Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Spark, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, J.B. Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and James Baldwin.
Burgess’s list deals exclusively with novels written in English, but Bowie’s list includes translations, non-fiction works and poetry, which Burgess writes about elsewhere. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, selected by Bowie, is one of Burgess’s favourite poems, and he composed a complete musical setting for performance at Sarah Lawrence College in 1977. The Waste Land can also be seen to influence Bowie’s lyrics in songs such as ‘Eight Line Poem’.
A comparison of these reading lists shows Burgess and Bowie to be very similar artists, despite the wild differences in their creative work. They both valued serious and comedic work, shared an interest in dystopian fiction, and enjoyed experimental works such as those by Nabokov and Spark.
It should come as no surprise that Bowie ranked two of Burgess’s novels in his top 100. Both reading lists show us that, despite their different backgrounds, Burgess and Bowie can be seen as kindred spirits.
Find out more
Read David Bowie’s favourite novels by Anthony Burgess:
A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Earthly Powers (1980)
Listen to Ninety-Nine Novels, our podcast series exploring Anthony Burgess’s reading list. Start with the episode on Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, one of Bowie’s favourite novels.