| David Bowie Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas |
Bowie was to the 70s what the Beatles were to the 60s
BIOGRAPHY
If the Beatles captured a 60s of optimism and love, Bowie was the signature artist of the 70s – distilling paranoia and confusion into pop both euphoric and terrifying
Dorian Lynskey
Wednesday 13 January 2016
D
avid Bowie had no feel for the 1960s. No wonder he floundered. Neither flower-power optimism nor insurrectionary bravado really turned him on: as he wrote in All the Young Dudes: “We never got it off on that revolution stuff.” Even Space Oddity fixated on the loneliness of space travel rather than the pioneer spirit.
The 1970s, though: there was a decade that spoke to his anxieties. A decade of cults, terrorists, scandals, recessions, defeats, environmental panic and a sense of constant crisis – what Francis Wheen described in his book Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia as “a pungent melange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fervour”. Bowie was to the 70s what the Beatles were to the 60s: a lightning rod, a tuning fork, a mirror. With his mastery of dread, and the excitements of dread, the man who described himself as “an awful pessimist” understood the decade’s strange energies like no other musician.