.
In 2015, I was invited to give two keynote lectures in Melbourne on my ideas around on the creative synthesis between the work of David Bowie and the ideas of Carl Jung.
I had published three book chapters that year with Routledge Press, Bloomsbury Press and the Melbourne Jung Society, drawing from ideas I first presented in 2012 as Artist in Residence, (thanks to a grant from Arts Queensland) at the University of Limerick’s Strange Fascination Symposium on David Bowie as a creative figure in contemporary culture.
The first lecture was to the Melbourne Jung Society on the occasion of the 140th anniversary of Jung’s birthday at Wattle Park Chalet, with Swiss Consul Mrs Erika Esther Kimpton.
Then, later that same day I presented a second lecture at the Australian Centre for Moving Images, [ACMI] as part of the blockbuster Victoria and Albert Museum “David Bowie is” exhibition in Melbourne. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jun/30/david-bowie-is-strange-fascinations-with-tanja-stark
What few could foresee when I published these papers on Bowie and Jung with Routledge, and another on the archetypes of death in the work of Bowie with Bloomsbury, and, as I gave these lectures on Bowie and Jung in 2015, was the cultural tsunami that was about to crash around both these men that saw their archetypal significance explode in pop culture in 2016.
As Annette Lowe writes: ” Jung’s mind reached deep into the human psyche. The life-giving energies of his ideas have transformed individual lives and shaped the work of artists, writers, filmmakers and performers. Jungian ideas are reflected in modern spirituality, modern pastoral care and aged care. Jungian ideas are reaching out to new generations, who recognise their perennial appeal. This book outlines the extraordinary effect of Jungian ideas in the wider world“.
Bowie, as we now know, would die in January of 2016. Then, late in 2016 another controversial Jungian influenced professor, Jordan Peterson, would burst into public imagination, who I had been following thanks to Ann Magnusen mentioning both my work and his, in her editorials around dreams and synchronicity for Magnet Magazine earlier that year.
Thanks to this Jungian connection, I would later have lunch with Jordan Peterson in Brisbane, but that is curious story for another time.
Those who have followed my work will be aware that, despite invitation, I have not formally published anything on Bowie since 2015. That is not an unconscious decision.
I said what I needed to say prior to his final release, and I left others to take it further. There is much more I could say, and maybe one day I will. But I am very aware both Bowie and Jung have strong creative forces that constellate around them, and perhaps, as I wrote in my paper, to quote Jung ” I needed to eschew the chameleon that takes on the colours of those around him, and instead exist in my own colour and light”.
As an artist who has explored ideas filled with strong archetypal energies, charge and spiritual transformation for decades, for me that meant leaving the worlds of Jung and Bowie, to return to concentrate on carving out my own spiritual and creative journey. In this I find myself increasingly drawn to explore the awe inspiring realm of the mystically Christian realm of the Sublime and the Divine.
My Bloombury and Routledge papers are available online here for sometime.
My Chapter for the Melbourne Jung Societies book Jung in Effect is below:
Stark, Tanja., “Bowie and Jung”, in Jung in Effect: Jung’s ideas in the wider world, Annette Lowe (Editor), Melbourne Jung Society, 2015
“David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes,
reading and speaking of hte psychoanalst with a passion” Ourser 2013″
When David Bowie was Fifty, he was asked if he was no longer frightened of “madness”. It was a pivotal question of an artist whose creative body of work across five decades has been pierced with themes of alienation, fear, abandonment, possession and insanity, and with a close family history of institutionalization, psychosis and suicide.
Sitting upright, Bowie paused before poignantly reflecting “Well I think maybe that’s not entirely true…I have maybe only a wariness of it these days…it’s been fairly well recorded my family is pretty rampantly, ah, I think I’m not sure how much of it is madness…there’s an, an awful lot of emotional and spiritual mutilation goes on in my family, and ah, I think to a certain extent it’s touched me in various ways over the years” (Yetob, 1997).
Bowie’s cautious admission of his wariness was all the more poignant as the interviewer, Alan Yentob, had been there two decades before filming the emotionally and physically fragile star on the cusp of his implosion into paranoia and delusion for the documentary Cracked Actor in 1975. It was around this period Bowie infamously ‘saw’ a body falling from the sky during an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, jumping up to close the curtains, remarking that he had been “getting a little trouble from the neighbours” (Crowe, 1976).
Bowie’s encapsulation of ‘madness’ as ‘emotional and spiritual mutilation’ strikes me as quite profound and shows depth in his understanding of the dimensions of suffering experienced by people that are vulnerable to emotional imbalance in the face of trauma. It also suggests why Bowie would be attracted to the ideas of Carl Jung, who believed mental distress was much more than a phenomenon of biological reductionism.
Contrasting the ideas in Jung’s writings with Bowie’s own creative expression uncovers significant parallels in thought and theme that illuminate core aspects of Bowie’s often cryptic, multi-layered work. This compellingly suggests Jung has been a central influence upon – and compass for – Bowie as both men navigated the mysterious, sometimes perilous, depths of the psyche.
In recent years 68-year-old Bowie has remained fiercely silent, despite his public currency at an all-time high – the release of a critically acclaimed album, a record-breaking international exhibition by the V&A museum of his personal archive, and effusive praise from younger artists extolling his influence upon their creativity. Pressed to describe Bowie’s influences in 2013, his long-term friend and collaborator Tony Oursler revealed “…David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes, reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with a passion”. Oursler also mentioned he had accompanied Bowie to the New York exhibition of Jung’s Red Book in 2009 (Duponchelle 2013).
It was confirmation, and indeed the key to unlocking the essential thematic concerns that repeatedly permeate Bowie’s creativity – the proliferation of archetypal images, a profound engagement with the unconscious, a complex relationship with the numinous, tension between opposing polarities and the ongoing specter of a shadow that threatens to overwhelm and displace surface realities. Bowie synthesizes enduring mythopoeic themes with the zeitgeist of pop culture. Mixed with his own struggle for meaning, catharsis and knowledge he has become a contemporary representation of Jung’s ‘visionary artist’ who manifests the underlying, repressed energies of the times. This, I suggest underlies his ongoing resonance in popular cultural consciousness in an age of anxiety.
Bowie has often spoken of Jung across the decades, overtly identifying with Jung’s view of the creative process:
“Being imbued with a vividly active imagination, still, I have brilliantly Technicolor dreams. They’re very, very strong. The ‘what if?’ approach to life has always been such a part of my personal mythology, and it’s always been easy for me to fantasize a parallel existence... I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them, really. I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives…the fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes” (Bowie in Roberts 1999).
Bowie famously sang of Jung by name on his Aladdin Sane album in 1973, with its wordplay on sanity, and cover adorned with the iconic ‘lightning flash’ across his face. He described his Glass Spiders of ‘Never Let Me Down’ as “…Jungian figures, mother figures” around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour but also created an enormous onstage effigy (Swayne 1987). He acted in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a story based on Jung’s friend and proponent Laurens van der Post. He was in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, both films with archetypally Jungian shadow struggles, and he even expressed interest in a proposed film based on Jung’s book Aion. His career overflows with intrinsic narratives around individuation, and engagement with the energies of thepersonal and collective unconscious. Classic archetypal images abound with theatrical splendour, together with the Messiah, the Trickster, the Prophet, the Madman, the Alien, Death and the Apocalypse.
Jung knew highly sensitive visionary artists created deeply powerful art, but they were also intrinsically vulnerable:
“Every creative person… is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument… The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him …There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
Jung observed that inflation and over-identification with archetypal images could result in imbalance, psychological disintegration, and even psychosis. Bowie had sung of his onstage persona “making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind, like a leper messiah”. Yet for a time his identification with Ziggy’s archetypal persona went beyond the stage. and he ‘paid dearly” for this immersion in the realms of the unconscious, something reflected over and again in his art. The lyrics of ‘Time’ for instance, intimate how attachment to the ‘strong, active, potent force of dreams could be alienating; his ‘breakthroughs’ conceivably both light and dark intrusions from the unconscious.
Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful, I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs, But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you Dreamless, The door to dreams was closed… But all I had to give was the guilt for dreaming (Time 1973).
Curiously, a strange sense of being ‘outside time’ struck both Bowie and Jung who shared a pervading, nebulous sense of memories and ‘nostalgia’ beyond the present. Contrast Jung recalling“[as a boy] I could not understand this identity I felt with the eighteenth century…I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia” with Bowie’s “It’s odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about ‘old and other times’ as though I had a lot of years behind me” (Jung MDR; Bowie, Concert LiveWire 2002). Both Jung and Bowie were also intrigued by a strange familiarity around the future, Jung in his prophetic visions about a coming epoch, while Bowie described:
“…the sensibility that comes over is some feeling of nostalgia for a future. I’ve always been hung up on that; it creeps into everything I do… that’s obviously part of what I’m all about as an artist…The idea of having seen the future, of somewhere we’ve already been keeps coming back to me…I’ve often had that feeling very strongly with myself that …well, it’s like what Dylan said about the tunes are just in the air.” (McKinnon 1980: 37).
It suggests certain intriguing characteristics apparent in the psyche of both men. who also experienced frequent synchronicities, vivid dreams, and a sense of being outsiders. While it is impossible to discern the extent to which Bowie’s expressions are intentionally or subconsciously derivative of Jungian themes, or spontaneously and analogously synchronous, the answer must be a little of both. This gives weight to Jung’s idea that the unconscious manifests in primal archetypal patterns and that certain people such as artists and seers are more sensitive to these energies (or the perception of such). Whatever the case, experiences such as these tend to raise complex existential questions from an early age typical of creative minds with an intellectual bent (or vice versa), These explorations almost inevitably coalesce around areas of psychology, spirituality, science and mythology. Thrown in with an iconoclastic bent, it was inevitable both Jung and Bowie were destined to wander roads less travelled.
i
Sitting upright, Bowie paused before poignantly reflecting “Well I think maybe that’s not entirely true…I have maybe only a wariness of it these days…it’s been fairly well recorded my family is pretty rampantly, ah, I think I’m not sure how much of it is madness…there’s an, an awful lot of emotional and spiritual mutilation goes on in my family, and ah, I think to a certain extent it’s touched me in various ways over the years” (Yetob, 1997).
Bowie’s cautious admission of his wariness was all the more poignant as the interviewer, Alan Yentob, had been there two decades before filming the emotionally and physically fragile star on the cusp of his implosion into paranoia and delusion for the documentary Cracked Actor in 1975. It was around this period Bowie infamously ‘saw’ a body falling from the sky during an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, jumping up to close the curtains, remarking that he had been “getting a little trouble from the neighbours” (Crowe, 1976).
Bowie’s encapsulation of ‘madness’ as ‘emotional and spiritual mutilation’ strikes me as quite profound and shows depth in his understanding of the dimensions of suffering experienced by people that are vulnerable to emotional imbalance in the face of trauma. It also suggests why Bowie would be attracted to the ideas of Carl Jung, who believed mental distress was much more than a phenomenon of biological reductionism.
Contrasting the ideas in Jung’s writings with Bowie’s own creative expression uncovers significant parallels in thought and theme that illuminate core aspects of Bowie’s often cryptic, multi-layered work. This compellingly suggests Jung has been a central influence upon – and compass for – Bowie as both men navigated the mysterious, sometimes perilous, depths of the psyche.
In recent years 68-year-old Bowie has remained fiercely silent, despite his public currency at an all-time high – the release of a critically acclaimed album, a record-breaking international exhibition by the V&A museum of his personal archive, and effusive praise from younger artists extolling his influence upon their creativity. Pressed to describe Bowie’s influences in 2013, his long-term friend and collaborator Tony Oursler revealed “…David Bowie inhabits Carl Jung’s world of archetypes, reading and speaking of the psychoanalyst with a passion”. Oursler also mentioned he had accompanied Bowie to the New York exhibition of Jung’s Red Book in 2009 (Duponchelle 2013).
It was confirmation, and indeed the key to unlocking the essential thematic concerns that repeatedly permeate Bowie’s creativity – the proliferation of archetypal images, a profound engagement with the unconscious, a complex relationship with the numinous, tension between opposing polarities and the ongoing specter of a shadow that threatens to overwhelm and displace surface realities. Bowie synthesizes enduring mythopoeic themes with the zeitgeist of pop culture. Mixed with his own struggle for meaning, catharsis and knowledge he has become a contemporary representation of Jung’s ‘visionary artist’ who manifests the underlying, repressed energies of the times. This, I suggest underlies his ongoing resonance in popular cultural consciousness in an age of anxiety.
Bowie has often spoken of Jung across the decades, overtly identifying with Jung’s view of the creative process:
“Being imbued with a vividly active imagination, still, I have brilliantly Technicolor dreams. They’re very, very strong. The ‘what if?’ approach to life has always been such a part of my personal mythology, and it’s always been easy for me to fantasize a parallel existence... I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them, really. I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives…the fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes” (Bowie in Roberts 1999).
Bowie famously sang of Jung by name on his Aladdin Sane album in 1973, with its wordplay on sanity, and cover adorned with the iconic ‘lightning flash’ across his face. He described his Glass Spiders of ‘Never Let Me Down’ as “…Jungian figures, mother figures” around which he not only anchored a worldwide tour but also created an enormous onstage effigy (Swayne 1987). He acted in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a story based on Jung’s friend and proponent Laurens van der Post. He was in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, both films with archetypally Jungian shadow struggles, and he even expressed interest in a proposed film based on Jung’s book Aion. His career overflows with intrinsic narratives around individuation, and engagement with the energies of thepersonal and collective unconscious. Classic archetypal images abound with theatrical splendour, together with the Messiah, the Trickster, the Prophet, the Madman, the Alien, Death and the Apocalypse.
Jung knew highly sensitive visionary artists created deeply powerful art, but they were also intrinsically vulnerable:
“Every creative person… is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes… Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument… The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him …There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
Jung observed that inflation and over-identification with archetypal images could result in imbalance, psychological disintegration, and even psychosis. Bowie had sung of his onstage persona “making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind, like a leper messiah”. Yet for a time his identification with Ziggy’s archetypal persona went beyond the stage. and he ‘paid dearly” for this immersion in the realms of the unconscious, something reflected over and again in his art. The lyrics of ‘Time’ for instance, intimate how attachment to the ‘strong, active, potent force of dreams could be alienating; his ‘breakthroughs’ conceivably both light and dark intrusions from the unconscious.
Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful, I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs, But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you Dreamless, The door to dreams was closed… But all I had to give was the guilt for dreaming (Time 1973).
Curiously, a strange sense of being ‘outside time’ struck both Bowie and Jung who shared a pervading, nebulous sense of memories and ‘nostalgia’ beyond the present. Contrast Jung recalling“[as a boy] I could not understand this identity I felt with the eighteenth century…I was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia” with Bowie’s “It’s odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about ‘old and other times’ as though I had a lot of years behind me” (Jung MDR; Bowie, Concert LiveWire 2002). Both Jung and Bowie were also intrigued by a strange familiarity around the future, Jung in his prophetic visions about a coming epoch, while Bowie described:
“…the sensibility that comes over is some feeling of nostalgia for a future. I’ve always been hung up on that; it creeps into everything I do… that’s obviously part of what I’m all about as an artist…The idea of having seen the future, of somewhere we’ve already been keeps coming back to me…I’ve often had that feeling very strongly with myself that …well, it’s like what Dylan said about the tunes are just in the air.” (McKinnon 1980: 37)
It suggests certain intriguing characteristics apparent in the psyche of both men. who also experienced frequent synchronicities, vivid dreams, and a sense of being outsiders. While it is impossible to discern the extent to which Bowie’s expressions are intentionally or subconsciously derivative of Jungian themes, or spontaneously and analogously synchronous, the answer must be a little of both. This gives weight to Jung’s idea that the unconscious manifests in primal archetypal patterns and that certain people such as artists and seers are more sensitive to these energies (or the perception of such). Whatever the case, experiences such as these tend to raise complex existential questions from an early age typical of creative minds with an intellectual bent (or vice versa), These explorations almost inevitably coalesce around areas of psychology, spirituality, science and mythology. Thrown in with an iconoclastic bent, it was inevitable both Jung and Bowie were destined to wander roads less travelled.
The Red Book: Dream Dystopia and Mystic Myth
Certainly, Jung’s belief that confronting and engaging with the unconscious could uncover wisdom and psychological integration resonated for the young Bowie in 1971 (as we will see in a moment). Significantly, his friend Tony Oursler tellingly claimed that Jung’s Red Book provides perspective on Bowie’s recent work in 2013.
So, it seems that through this artistic openness to the unconscious, Bowie has cryptically carved his own iconography, infusing primal archetypal concepts that permeate philosophy, esoteric spirituality and literature – the timeless undercurrents and anxieties of existence – into the metaphorically futuristic tongue of sexuality, psychology and spiritualized science fiction evident in his music. How spontaneously this occurred, who can tell?
When Bowie sings of Jung in 1973’s Drive-In Saturday, the verse seems to contain a compellingly cryptic allusion to Jung’s Red Book experiences, Jung facing a raging sea of visions finding it hard to keep formation, and often forced to “cling to a table so as not to fall apart”, as he confessed, in their saturating fallout.
“Jung the foreman prayed at work /Neither hands nor limbs would burst / It’s hard enough to keep formation with this fallout saturation … stands in steel by his cabinet / He’s crashing out with Sylvian / …With snorting head he gazes to the shore / Once had raged a sea that raged no more” Bowie Drive-In Saturday’ (1973).
Jung’s recollection of the period, “My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me” is certainly consistent with Bowie’s lyrics. This concept of Jung forced to ‘cling to a table’ in the face of a hallucinatory stream of images is also reflected decades later in Bowie’s film clip for ‘Survive’ (1999). The singer clings to a table as his grounded domestic reality merges with a space-like dream world and he begins to float strangely around his kitchen.
Curiously, in a sublimely clever or incredibly synchronistic allusion in the context of Jung’s bizarre visions, the inclusion of “crashing out with Sylvian” could plausibly refer to the Sylvian Fissure in the brain, a region discovered to produce hallucinogenic visions and ‘paranormal’ perceptions when electrically stimulated. Presciently, this generates what neurologists called an ‘illusory shadow person’ or doppelganger phenomenon; a highly charged and recurring Bowie archetype (Penfield 1955; Arzy et al., 2006).
Bowie also invoked Jung when discussing the strange visionary intrusion in ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ (1971) – “…look out my window what do I see / a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me / all the nightmares came today / and it looks as if they’re here to stay”. Jung had advised patients with disturbing dreams and visions to creatively express them in “beautifully bound journals”, to help explore and process the experiences. These ideas underpin much of today’s art therapy processes.
“It is of great help …to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their ‘mythology.” (Jung Red Book 2009: 216)
Bowie seemed to internalize this advice, reflecting, “…according to Jung, to see cracks in the sky is not really quite on…I thought I’d write my problems out” (Doggett 2012). But where Jung used paper and kept his strange visions relatively private, Bowie, as an artist, intuitively recorded his own ‘Red Book’ in spiral grooves of vinyl, adorned the sounds and visions of his dreams and fears with glitter and dye, and shared them with a youth hungering for new manifestations of old myths.
Fascinatingly, the nightmare-inducing hallucinatory hand reaching down from the cracked sky in Bowie’s lyrics darkly mirrors Michelangelo’s archetypal painting of The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. With its crack in the sky and the hand of God reaching down to spark life into Adam, like Bowie’s song, it is a metaphorical fusion of spirit and flesh and the conscious and unconscious dimensions. Intriguingly, Michelangelo’s portrait of God appears to conform deliberately to the neuro-anatomical shape of the brain, its Sylvian Fissure clearly evident, suggesting Michelangelo may have intentionally conflated theology and anatomy with the spark of consciousness (Meshberger 1990: 1837; Blech & Doliner 2008).
Changing Personas: Chameleons and Caricatures
Jung’s ‘persona’ archetype has been conceptually defining throughout Bowie’s career, often taking exaggerated theatrical forms. While David Bowie himself is a creative persona of David Jones, the multiple (sub) personae, from Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke to the more recent Reclusive Artist, are a fusion of caricatured masks and an underlying psyche. This appears to be a mix of deliberate and unconscious creation, enabling a plethora of public and private projections, transference and countertransference to abound. Bowie’s frequent metamorphoses, both musically and visually, became part of the Bowie myth, and gained him a popular reputation as rock’s Chameleon, an archetypal image of camouflage and perpetual change.
While Jung believed inner plurality was normal, indeed virtually integral to the visionary artist, extreme imbalance was psychologically problematic. When a young Bowie intimated that his personas involved a dissociative psychic splitting of his underlying identity, it suggested powerful personal complexes behind the creative masks. “…Offstage I’m a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It’s probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David”, he tellingly remarked (Saal 1972). Jung believed all people have complexes and in becoming conscious of these “…provided the ego can establish a viable relationship with a complex, a richer and more variegated personality emerges” (Samuels, Shorter and Plaut 1986). Yet Jung also warned:
“…what is not so well known, but far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us. … The unity of consciousness is disrupted and the intentions of the will are impeded or made impossible…”.
“[A complex has]“...a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness.” (Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche 1960)
So, while Bowie’s chameleon-like procession of personas functioned as potent archetypal images within society, (the subversive artist, mysterious outsider, androgynous alien, the illuminated prophet), as they took on a psychic life of their own, amplified by hubris, fans and media, he was perpetually forced to manage, integrate or crucify these characters. Bowie would later affirm Jung’s caution around these potentially self-fracturing and possessing energies that threatened to entangle, split off or dominate his psyche.
“…that fucker [Ziggy] would not leave me alone for years…my whole personality was affected…It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity… I think I put myself very dangerously near the line. Not in a physical sense but definitively in a mental sense” (Bowie in Jones 1977)
Interestingly in one Red Book vision Jung also wrestles with multiplicity and integration through the archetype of the chameleon:
“All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick…a chameleon, a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard… I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light…” (Jung Red Book, 2009)
Although the Red Book wasn’t published until 2009, Bowie synchronously reflected Jung’s visionary archetypes of himself as “chameleon” and “caricature” amongst the layers of 1971’s enigmatic Bewlay Brothers “…he’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature”, a song he acknowledged had “… layers of ghosts within it. “It’s a palimpsest…I distinctly remember a sense of emotional invasion”, affirming its genesis in the mysterious realms of the unconscious (Bowie in Daily Mail 2008). A palimpsest is an old manuscript that has been erased to make way for new writing – an interesting observation in the context of these recurrent archetypal images.
Shadow Man
But perhaps Bowie’s creative expression can only be fully understood by grasping his intense artistic wrestling with the shadow as it has manifested both in him and society. This struggle with repression and projection, inflation, possession, awareness and integration, has Bowie locked in a tumultuously hypnotic dance of Faustian conflation, catharsis and Jacobean control, creating an energetic tension that permeates his creative work.
“I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a tree, and I looked and frowned and the monster was me” (‘The Width of a Circle’ 1970)
There is an undeniable energy associated with art born from seeking truth within the depths of human experience. Writing of Jung, Kaufman asserts “…in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity” (Kaufman 2007). Yet artists could find themselves in deeply vulnerable, precarious positions when immersed in energy so often imbued with psyche-twisting permeations. Bowie recognized its dual capacity:
“You can call him foe, you can call him friend / You should call and see who answers / For he knows your eyes are drawn to the road ahead / And the shadow man is waiting round the bend / Oh, the shadow man … It’s really you.” (‘Shadow Man’ 1971)
Yet the specter of shadow possession remained a potent undercurrent, manifesting for instance, in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with its polarized duality – “Someone else inside me / Someone could get skinned… / Someone fetch a priest” – or insanity-inducing spirits on ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ – “She asked me to stay and I stole her room, She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind. Now she’s stupid in the streets and she can’t socialize.”
Bowie’s surprise re-emergence in 2013 was pierced with a dark adult retelling of the original Bowie mythopoeic narrative that had begun so naively with the laughing gnome in 1967: possession by the repressed unconscious shadow that inspires creative passion yet ominously threatens to overwhelm and displace the ordered surface reality. When, in ‘The Stars Are Out Tonight’ (2013) film clip, a dull married couple’s life is invaded by daimonic celebrity doppelgangers (autonomous archetypes) dwelling as neighbours in the house next door, possessing the wife and replacing domestic reality with eccentric orgiastic passions, it was a poetic retelling of Jung’s warning on the repressed energy of an unconscious shadow:
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They may dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.” (Jung 1967)
Like the infamous body he ‘saw’ falling from the sky four decades earlier, Bowie was creatively embodying what in a more chaotic period he had described as ‘ a little trouble from the neighbours’ – problematic intrusions from the unconscious.
Archetypal Anima and Alchemy
Jung called the balanced union of anima and animus ‘Syzygy’, a Greek word also describing the alignment of celestial bodies and male-female pairing of spiritual emanations in Gnosticism. This is an interesting concept within the context of Bowie’s androgynous expressions and gnostic spiritual interests, hinting, perhaps, at Syzygy Stardust as futuristic alchemical theatre. The hermaphroditic construction also presciently foreshadows the double-headed mannequin that appeared in 2013.
Bowie’s love songs often manifest a longing for a conjunction transcending earthly constraints. Within the pulsating surges of ‘Heroes’, Bowie imagines lovers momentarily conjoined as King and Queen, echoing the archetypal union of the Sun King and Moon Queen in the Rosarium Philosophorum, an alchemical treatise that fascinated Jung. Yet early on, Bowie described a Jungian awareness of conflating anima or Eros with the numinous:
“I have a vast capacity to love, but the one time I found I was falling in love it became obsessive to a point where the object of that affection was becoming overblown. It was no longer a real thing, it was becoming my search for some kind of mythological feeling that man is supposed to have, and probably the feeling that man eventually develops for, an awareness, of God …[Obsessional love satisfies] something that needs to be fulfilled in oneself” (Bowie on Dinah! 1976).
It was a wise observation on the difference between external anima projection and internal integration. Jung wrote that his concept of the anima was a renaming of what poet Carl Spitteler had called ‘My Lady Soul’. Consciously or not, Bowie’s ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ (1973) laid bare the pull of her archetypal seductions.
The Man Who Souled the World
“It’s the process that matters, isn’t it? Rather than getting your information – or redemption – easily and directly you must go through this long stubborn painful trek. As with alchemy, the end result isn’t as important as the long process whereby all the inessential aspects of “you” have been stripped away…” (Bowie in Penman 1995).
Bowie’s 1970s track ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ could be interpreted as an early search for integration. It’s a haunting song, partially due to the ambiguity that hints at both light and dark, and also due to its cultural association with Kurt Cobain, whose own performance of this song was released several months after he shot himself in the head.
In the song the protagonist encounters a powerful force of the unconscious he assumed was long dead, but the figure identifies himself as “the Man who Sold the world” who ‘never lost control.” Not grasping its significance, he laughs, shakes his hand and makes his way back home, remaining partially repressed, and split off from himself.
“I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed/I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here/We must have died alone, a long long time ago/Who knows? Not me/We never lost control/You’re face to face/With the Man who Sold the World”
After years of searching (ego differentiation of the first half of life) the enigma unfolds, the personal merges with the collective unconscious and its enormous mysterious influence is revealed, the pilgrim now faced with integrating this into consciousness or remaining blind to its power.
Imagery from the ‘Where Are We Now?’ 2013 film clip contrasted with the Noble Empress from the Rosarium Philosophorum, a medieval alchemic work that intrigued Jung (1963).
Four decades later the melancholic reverie of ‘Where are we Now?’ functions as a poignant bookend to ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Brimming with archetypal images, the Oursler directed film clip includes a diamond symbol of the Self and a double-headed mannequin reflecting anima/animus Syzygy and the Noble Empress. Amidst Bowie’s own Memories, Dreams and Reflections of Berlin, the song culminates in archetypal (and alchemically symbolic) elements: Sun Rain, Fire, You, Me suggesting a poetic wholeness in the process of individuation. But life (and art) is rarely so clean-cut, as the rest of the album would attest.
Approaching the Numinous
“…The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous” (Jung, Letters Vol 1, in Stein).
“…. The one continuum [on Outside] that is throughout my writing is a real simple, spiritual search…and everything I’ve written is about “Who is my God? How does he show himself? What is my higher stage, my higher being?” (Bowie, Ill, 1997).
Encounters with the Numinous are mysteriously personal, subjective experiences often described in spiritual, mystical terms as a transcendent sense of oneness with the universe or divine presence that evokes awe, wonder or peace often operating outside usual perceptions. Unbounded by religious paradigms (though historically integral to them), they offer hints of a greatness or unity outside (or within) the self, and range from delightful serendipities to Damascus Road conversions, meditative trance and sense of knowing or a rapture evoked by music. Concentrated doses of the Divine in the context of a broader spiritual journey, encounters with the numinous can be profoundly intense and defining experiences that resonate deeply across a life. Acute manifestations, such as seem to have occurred with Bowie’s “Word on a Wing” experience (as we will see in a moment), can be contextually transformational. Yet they can be difficult to ground and integrate in the modern rationalist psyche. They raise questions about meaning and consciousness that have intrigued humanity for aeons, from philosophers, theologians and shamans to neurologists, psychiatrists and theoretical physicists.
Bowie’s complex multi-layered and conflicted relationship with spirituality, meaning and existence has been a pervasive theme in his creativity and a life-long work in progress.
“…There’s no doubting for me [spirituality has] been a recurrent qualification of my work from the day I started writing. A very early example, I suppose, is Space Oddity. A more obvious example would be Word On A Wing…” (Bowie, Hollywood On Line, 1996).
Eight years later he would affirm:
“…my initial questions haven’t changed at all. There are far fewer of them these days but they are really important. Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on…” (DeCurtis, 2005).
Cast in this light, Bowie’s iconic and recurring space imagery can legitimately be understood as new spiritual metaphors for age-old themes of alienation and enlightenment, archetypes of pilgrimage, tension and search; as above, so below; outer space as inner space; his cosmology of stars, suns and serious moonlight infused with rich layers of symbolism and contemporary re-imaginings of old mythologies. Yet Bowie’s work has always had both overt and cryptic markers of a spiritual seeker, his grappling with the numinous manifesting in riddle-some twists across half a century. Song after song speaks of faith and despair referencing a pantheon of theologies from Kabbalah, Buddhism and Theosophy to Pentecostalism and paganism, woven together in an intensely consuming and tangled mix of spirit and flesh. Bowie was indeed ‘writing out his problems’ with the numinous, processing his psycho-spiritual questions through music. Speaking around Earthling, Bowie expressed the centrality of his drive to integrate opposites and find spiritual balance:
“…[there is] this abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism. I keep going backwards and forwards between the two things, because they mean a lot in my life…. What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. And that period of time – from today until my demise – is the only thing that fascinates me” (Cavanagh 1997: 52).
Bowie knew from experience how dangerous imbalance can be. His highly sensitive antennae perpetually tuned to the zeitgeist could leave him perilously vulnerable to the destabilizing energies. When an emaciated, fragile Bowie empathized with a fly drowning in milk, “… That’s kind of how I felt – a foreign body and I couldn’t help but soak it up, you know” to Alan Yentob in 1975, it was a vivid analogy of the visionary artist’s bittersweet gift that would bring him precariously close to the edge. Subsumed by cocaine abuse and unbounded esoteric and occult obsessions, his Station to Station period is marked by an apparent psychotic implosion. Bowie would reflect, “I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology”(Sandford 1997). This unrestrained acquiescence to the unconscious allowed the Shadow to overwhelm in the persona of the Thin White Duke with all his mytho-aryan hubris and was a toxic mix to his disintegrated and vulnerable psyche. So while the creative expression of this period is imbued with powerful archetypal energies exploring polarities of the eternal and the ephemeral, the shadow merger destructively subverted this into psychologically dark and dangerous territory of ‘emotional and spiritual mutilation’ a risk, as discussed earlier, that Jung knew faced all visionary artists.
Yet within those depths, a numinous light also emerged. “A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps…” wrote Jung, an admonishment Bowie appeared to manifest in ‘Word on a Wing’ (1976) “…and I don’t stand in my own light, Lord, Lord, my prayer flies like a word on a wing/ And I’m trying hard to fit among your scheme of things…”. The song spoke of a glowing vision flowing from the unconscious into his conscious life. That this was a profoundly numinous experience for Bowie, a spiritually enantiodromic counterpoint to the darkness can be seen four years later:
“…There were days of such psychological terror when making [The Man who fell to Earth] that I nearly started to approach my reborn, born again thing. It was the first time I’d really seriously thought about Christ and God in any depth and ‘Word On A Wing’ was a protection. It did come as a complete revolt… The passion in the song was genuine. It was also around that time that I started thinking about wearing this [silver cross] again… now almost a leftover from that period… But at the time I really needed this. Hmmm (laughs), we’re getting into heavy waters… but yes, the song was something I needed to produce from within myself to safeguard myself against some of the situations that I felt were happening…” (MacKinnon 1980).
Jung was aware that while profound numinous experiences can be genuinely transformational, the intensity of the process runs the risk of sending the psyche spinning wildly between polarities of dark and light and the important work of balanced integration and individuation must continue (Stein 2006). That Jung conceived of the cross as an important symbol of conjunction and individuation may also be significant here.
Strung out in Heavens High
“I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the Earth bathed in a gloriously blue light…and I myself was floating in space,” Jung wrote of a numinous vision during a near-death experience (Jung MDR 1967: 289) Paralleling Major Tom “…here am I sitting in my tin can, far above the world, planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do” the synchronistic imagery of Bowie’s 1969 classic ‘Space Oddity’ again suggests archetypal convergence. But if Bowie’s psychonaut seems blissful, perhaps it is because he is oblivious that he has lost touch with ‘ground control’, drifting into ‘space’, severed from sustaining realities, at the mercy of the unconscious, vulnerable to the chaos that will emerge in 1980’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’.
‘Space Oddity’ is a deeply symbolic song that elicits primal recognition of personal and collective anxieties around fracture and disintegration. Major Tom personifies the split between the celestial and terrestrial, spirit and flesh, sanity and psychosis, and society’s increasing disconnection both from the sacred and the grounding of the Earth.
This psychic tension becomes extreme in Ashes to Ashes recalling Jung’s counsel on suffering: “You yourself are a conflict that rages in and against itself in order to melt its incompatible substances…. in the fire of suffering…. crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the reconciling third takes shape.” (Jung Letters:375). Evoking the Christian funeral rite and echoes of the alchemical process of calcination Major Tom has now awoken to the mental torture of psycho-spiritual alienation. ‘Strung out in heavens high hitting an all-time low’, the film clip shows Bowie in several guises: a whiteface clown wading in the sea of the unconscious; an alien(ated) man entangled in a mass of twisted organic tubes resembling a brain; a Madman in a padded room, the beloved anima/wife of ‘Space Oddity’ replaced by a scolding Mother archetype. Amidst the tumult, Bowie’s mention of ‘one flash of light but no smoking pistol’ recalls Jung’s own fear that he was ‘experiencing a schizophrenia’ as his visions flashed about him, keeping a pistol close to his bed if he should ‘go mad’.
26 years after Major Tom first appeared, Bowie seemingly alludes to the struggle around this complex again in ‘Hallo Spaceboy’. “The chaos is killing me…. your silhouette is so stationary, You’re released but your custody calls, And I want to be free, Don’t you want to be free?” seeking reconciliation in this deeply mythic trinity of repression, torturous awareness of opposites and despair. While this makes for great art and fascinating analysis, the palpable struggle is much to bear.
Lacerating Entangled Brains
As should be apparent, allusions to tortured, entangled psyches consistently permeate Bowie’s albums from his foreboding (alter) Janine “…your strange demand to co-locate my mind scares me into gloom” (1969) to ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’ “…all the knives seem to lacerate your brain I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain” (1972), and Days “… my crazy brain in tangles pleading for your gentle voice, those storms keep pounding through my head and heart, I pray you’ll soothe my sorry soul” (2002). Over two dozen songs contain a specific reference to the brain, often fragmented, sometimes associated with images of females and destruction, suggesting a very strong complex.*
Jung’s own cerebral anxiety emerges in a Red Book vision of a strange, tangled mass of organic roots and fibres, which he recognizes as his own brain. Met by gnome-like subterranean Cabiri, Jung describes being presented with a ‘Flashing Sword’ to lacerate his brain and sever himself from the entrapment. Despite railing against their suicidal instruction to destroy his brain, the Cabiri, who are part of this entanglement, insist on this action that will kill them also. Eventually, he accepts their instruction, and in slicing through his brain, gains balance and self-mastery by submitting his analytical mind to the creative wisdom of the depths.
The mythological spirits of the underworld held great symbolism for Jung, embodying the fertile juices of the unconscious. Significantly Bowie creatively manifested his own subterranean creatures across the years. Yet even his early whimsical work reveals a foreboding aspect around the unbounded unconscious, ironically illustrated in 1967’s ‘Laughing Gnome’. Like Faust followed home by Mephistopheles in the form of a poodle, Bowie’s protagonist is followed home by a gnome. He feeds and sends him off at the station, only for the gnome to weirdly reappear with a doppelganger. Co-opting these twins’ fertile creativity for financial gain, the young man seems oblivious to the potentially subversive energies of unrestrained unconscious invasion. Can he sanely co-exist with these uninvited entities infesting his chimneystack (a now blocked interior vent) who taunt him “… ha ha ha hee hee hee, I’m the laughing gnome, you can’t catch me” about their slippery nature? Bowie had illustrated Jung’s description of a complex:
“…when one analyses [sic] the psychology of a neurosis one discovers a complex, a content of the unconscious, that does not behave as other contents do, coming or going at our command but obeys its own laws, in other words, it is independent or as we say, autonomous. It behaves exactly like a goblin that is eluding our grasp.” (Jung in Diamond, 1999: 100).
Decades later when Bowie portrayed the beguiling Goblin King (an adult incarnation of the infantile Laughing Gnome) in the movie Labyrinth – an archetypal quest into the shadowy depths of a metaphorical Underground- its risks were seductively clear. Significantly, the way out of this movie labyrinth lay in consciously confronting and assimilating the shadow, rather than being hypnotically subsumed by its dark goblin energy. Jung prefigured this narrative writing of his Red Book visions:
“…in order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me “underground” I knew I had to let myself plummet down into them…only by extreme effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth” (Jung 1967: 178).
If the Cabiri who forged Jung’s sword symbolise the unconscious forces that arise in the imagination and provide creative sustenance and intuitive direction, perhaps then, this same unconscious creative energy metaphorically imbued David Jones with his creative gifts, and his entanglements. His ‘flashing sword’ then, was a ‘bowie knife’ – the identity that allowed both creative expression and excess but also a means to destroy the entanglement. Ziggy’s rock-n-roll suicide would seem to fit.
Curiously a strange visceral image of his brain emerges in the spiritually themed song ‘Seven years in Tibet’: “Are you OK?, You’ve been shot in the head/ And I’m holding your brains/ The old woman said…I praise to you, nothing ever goes away” Like Jung’s vision, the song points to the destruction of an entangled brain, by a gun-as-sword, but this time the anima/mother female figures that were often associated around traumatic brain imagery in Bowie’s lyrics, seems to have changed. Appearing here is an old woman who calmly holds his restless brain, allowing contemplation and serenity that speaks of the numinous. This emergence of the Senex/Crone is a powerful archetypal image, speaking of late-stage individuation, after the integration of the Shadow.
1999’s “hours…” album similarly stands out in Bowie’s oeuvre as reflecting Jungian ideas of balance, portraying a tangible equanimity that speaks so often of the unconscious dream world: ‘Something in the Air’, ‘If I’m Dreaming My Life’, ‘New Angels of Promise’, ‘The Dreamers’. Even the album’s interior artwork contains a ‘mandala’ of unified duality between the iconography of an ethereal Bowie cradling his Earthling self, and a dark Shadow trinity.
Would that it were always so poetically balanced. In contrast, the final song on The Next Day (2013) album is the spiritually tormented and ‘disintegrated’ Mobius strip of ‘Heat’ seemingly wrestling again with the gnostic prison of matter, perception, prescience, (self) deception and identity: “…And I tell myself, I don’t know who I am …But I am a seer, I am a liar”. Entangled in another psyche-twisting ‘hellish’ knot, imprisoned between polarities, the song once more echoes a complex relationship with the Numinous, the Shadow, Persona, and the Self. And, as if to underline his enduring dance with the mysterious force of the unconscious, Bowie opens the song by drawing from Yukio Mishima’s novel Spring Snow (1969). The protagonist in this story wrestles with prophetic dreams, omens and the spectre of unconscious invasion. One passage his lyrics reference – “… he saw a flock of peacocks settle suddenly on the snow…‘I’m too involved in my dream-world…They’ve spilled over into reality, they’re a flood that’s sweeping me away’” – has deep echoes of Jung’s description of his overwhelming flood of Red Book visions “…that burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me”. And so it goes.
A Million Dreams
Jung’s ideas have resonated strongly with Bowie as he creatively processed the complex world of the psyche, exploring numinous dimensions and wrestling with tension, conflict and paradox through archetype and caricature, metaphor and myth. Bowie’s creative expression appears to have drawn intensely from the unconscious in creating his own metaphorical ‘space’ cosmology, – his myth – in music that infuses modern anxieties with ancient and contemporary symbolism. In manifesting these archetypal themes, Bowie’s art reflects a struggle for meaning in the process of individuation. While this has often come at great cost to his own psyche, throughout the process his creative work has evoked primal motifs that resonate deeply with his audience, consciously and instinctually.
“Tell them I’m a dreaming kind of guy, And I’m going to make my dream, Tell them I will live my dream, Tell them they can laugh at me, But don’t forget your date with me, When I live my dream.” (When I live my Dream, 1967).
Tanja Stark
*In 1897, TV interviewer Jools Holland co-opted Bowie into an impromptu word association test. “Cor, bloody hell, who you bringing on this, Jung? Haha Jung! C.G. Jung!” Bowie laughingly replied. Deliberately or not, in this lighthearted exchange Bowie smoothly responded to all words offered, with two exceptions: ‘USA’…to which he paused and said “chasm”, and “David Bowie” followed by a long pause to which he responded “…lost”.
References
Arzy Shahar, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, Laurent Spinelli L and Olaf Blanke. “Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person.” Nature, 443 (2006): 287
Blech, Benjamin and Roy Doliner. The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009.
Bowie, David. “Rock’s Heathen Speaks”, Interview by ConcertLiveWire, 16 June 2002,
Cavanagh, David. “ChangesFiftyBowie”. Q Magazine, February 1997, 52-59
Crowe, Cameron, “Ground Control to Davy Jones”, Rolling Stone Magazine, Feb 1976
DeCurtis, Anthony. “I’m not quite an Atheist and it Worries Me”, Beliefnet.com, July 2005
Diamond, Stephen. “Reading the Red Book – How C.G. Jung Salvaged his Soul”, Psychology Today, 25 February 2011
Diamond, Stephen. Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis ofViolence, Evil, and Creativity. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Doggett, Peter. The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. London: Random House, 2011.
Duponchelle, Valerie. “David Bowie: les secrets du clip surprise de Tony Oursler”, Le Figaro, 10 January 2013
Hollywood Online. “David Bowie Live!”, Hollywood Online, 1996
Ill, Paul. “The search starts with a simple abundance of enthusiasm”, Music Paper March 1997
Jones, Allan. “Goodbye to Ziggy and All That.” Melody Maker, 29 October 1977,
Kaufman, Carolyn. “Three Dimensional Villains” Archetype Writing: The Writer’s Guide to Psychology. 2007
MacKinon, Angus. “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be”, New Music Express, 13 September 1980,
Meshberger, Frank. Lynn. “An Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy”, Journal of the American Medical Association 264 (October 1990): 1837–41.
Mishima, Yukio, Spring Snow, Shinchosha, Japan, 1969; Alfred A. Knopf (Eng. trans.) 1972
Penfield, Wilder and Marshall Faulk Jr., “The insula. Further observations on its function’, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery”, Brain, 78 (1955): 445-471.
Penman, I. “The Resurrection of Saint Dave.” Esquire Magazine, October, 1995.
Roberts, Chris. “I’m Hungry for Reality.” Uncut Magazine, October 1999
Saal, Hubert. “The Stardust Kid”, Newsweek, 9 October 1972,
Samuels, A, B Shorter, and F Plaut. A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. New York: Routledge, 1986.
Sandford, C., Bowie: Loving the Alien. London: Little Brown, 1996.
Stark, Tanja “Crashing Out with Sylvian: David Bowie, Carl Jung and the Unconscious” in Eoin Devereux, Martin Power and Aileen Dillane (Eds.) David Bowie: Critical Perspectives. Routledge. 2015
Stein, Murray. “On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation.” MurrayStein.com
Swayne, Karen. “Hello I’m David Bowie and You’re Not.” No.1 Magazine, April 1987,
Yentob, Alan, “Changes: Bowie At Fifty – A documentary” BBC, 1997.
Yentob, Alan, “Cracked Actor- Documentary”, Omnibus Productions, BBC, London, 1975
Routledge’s new paperback edition of David Bowie : Critical Perspectives, with my chapter on Jung has a brand new cover featuring my Bowie Russian Nesting Dolls.
Sweet.
Grab it here:
Published on
Comments