David Bowie: Finding Fame

This documentary is an easy look back into the life and artistic climb of David Bowie to the level of international fame.

It is informative without giving you too much information. Plus it is interesting in how it shows David Bowie and his focused artistic drive on is music dreams and how he made it all come true.

His personal life is left in the shadows and not dwelled upon.

Finding fame was not easy for David Bowie. It took a while for him to find his own voice.

Until then he borrowed Anthony Newley's with The Laughing Gnome. Bowie was more of a cheeky Cockney, even singing songs from Mary Poppins.

As a Londoner, Bowie also had time to try to imitate The Kinks or sing songs of the style of The Who.

The songs which Bowie released but they did not chart until The Space Oddity. Even then fame was far away.

Bowie was a man who was looking for an image as well as a voice and it seems he was getting there slowly.

The look came courtesy of Ziggy Stardust. Once fame was achieved, he put Ziggy away. It was now David Bowie from now on.

Although this documentary looked at his childhood, his parents seemed to be distant from him as well as each other. It did lack input from close family and childhood friends. I would liked to have heard more of Bowie before he became a singer.

Also Angie Bowie is missing from this documentary. She was instrumental in those early days and getting Bowie and his band to have a certain image and experiment with costumes.

David Jones, better known by his stage name David Bowie, is often considered the last word in cool, with his musical innovations, ambiguous sexuality, and varied constructed public personas. But an interesting feature of his early career was just how uncool it was. Bowie wanted to be a star, was interested in all forms of art, but as a performer, essentially made novelty records. Even his breakout hit, "Space Oddity", was really just one such novelty, albeit one he built upon (and even then not instantaneously) to provide the platform for his ultimate fame. This intriguing documentary gives us a glimpse of the young Bowie, ambitious but gauche, and scratching around as he tries to make a living on the outer fringes of the musical scene. It's interesting, even if you don't particularly appreciate his music: we often praise artists for being "authentic", and Bowie was authentic in the sense that he wanted to perform, but it's clear that we got from him were performances, and in the early cases, not very good ones. And in an age where stars are scouted, trained and marketed from earliest youth, it's intriguing to look back on a misfit's rather unlikely path to global fame.

This doco about a rock superstar is quite slavish in unearthing interesting footage, people and music from David Bowie's early years in the business. It's fascinating to learn that Bowie spent years releasing quite pedestrian songs and playing at minor clubs and with obscure bands, before he was famous. Some of the songs are not very good at all Most other people probably would have given up and got a straight job. But as one friend says, Bowie always had a lot of self confidence. He doesn't come across as arrogant, though, just quietly determined. His love of experimenting with things like make/up and genres later perhaps made him more resilient in finding more fans, adapting to trends and setting him apart from other music acts. He was a sensitive boy from an average London suburb who rose to the top. He inspired a lot of people and according to this film, was a nice bloke, too.

If you're looking for a comprehensive documentary about David Bowie's entire career than this is not it. This film does a great job documenting Bowie's early years of creativity and frustration within the music industry and his legendary metamorphosis into Ziggy Stardust, but that's where it ends unfortunately. All his great work from the 70's that follow Ziggy is left out, which annoyed me enough to write this review. What a shame.