David Bowie: naissance d'une légende

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 Bowie Finding Fame" (2019 release from the UK; 95 min.) is a documentary about Bowie's early years. As the movie opens, we are given a quick glimpse at his 1973 Ziggy Stardust persona, at which time Bowie finally found the mega-success he pursued in vain for so many years. We then go back to "1965" when Bowie, then aged 18, admits he is "writing not very good songs". He ends up joining a band called The Third Level, one of many bands he joins in those years. Along the way we also get some insights on his upbringing in the Bromley neighborhood on the outskirts of London, with his cold and distant parents who don't care much for hugging or affection... At this point we are 15 min. into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this documentary is directed by Francis Whately, who in 2017 released an excellent documentary called "David Bowie: The Last 5 Years", providing great insight in Bowie's last years, most of which out of the public eye (and with shock releases of 2 great albums). This documentary can be seen as the flip side of that, giving us insights as to Bowie's first (slightly more than 5) years. As a pretty big Bowie fan myself, I knew he toiled in obscurity for years before breaking big, but I must admit I really didn't know much of the details. This documentary fills in all the blanks in one fell swoop. The film makers seem to go out of their way to track down band mates of Bowie's earliest bands (The Third Level, The Buzz, The Riot Squad, Feathers, etc.) and the verdict is pretty much unanimous: Bowie is determined and ambitious and loves himself more than anything or anyone else. "He wasn't lost, he just wasn't found yet", is how one of those band mates puts it. (Did you know that Bowie's very first album, "David Bowie", was released on June 1, 1967? Yes, the very day that the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" was released! "Bowie didn't stand a chance", comments a former band mate.) The documentary is chock-full with rare and never before seen archive footage.

"David Bowie Finding Fame" premiered earlier this year on the BBC to great acclaim, and finally received its US premiere on Showtime, where I saw it. I found it thoroughly enjoyable and revealing in ways I did not expect. Whether you are a casual (?) or die-hard Bowie fan, or simply interested in rock music history, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

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.

To me, Bowie has pretty much always been on the top of my Rock Music list. Like many others I discovered him in his Ziggy days...'72 I believe. I liked Starman but when I first heard Five Years I was blown away and there was no going back.

This Doc focuses on his early years. It was great seeing snippets of those early clips with songs I was unaware of. Some commented that they were disappointed it didn't go into Ziggy and what came after more. That wasn't the point of this Doc. Besides, everyone knows the early years are what's most interesting.

Alot of Bowie's early songs are actually very good..only to be let down by the arrangements at times.

Watching this Doc I got a sense of the personality that he was. The interviews with old band mates and friends were informative and didn't meander on. Slight disappointment was that there was very little visual interviews with Bowie.

All in all, very recommended to Bowie and Rock Music fans.

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.