ABOOK FOR EVERY BOWIE SONG

Bowie’s Books John O’Connell Bloomsbury €23.99 ★★★★★

In the late Seventies Sounds magazine published a letter from a reader moaning about David Bowie’s ‘pretentious’ reminiscences of his Berlin years on radio. The real Bowie, reckoned the reader, was probably ‘feet up, jam on toast, reading The Beano’. Judging by John O’Connell’s absorbing study, that verdict wasn’t wide of the mark.

Bowie was an avid reader and took a library of books with him on tour. A list he compiled of 100 that had influenced him was published by the V&A when it launched a Bowie exhibition in 2013. O’Connell has set himself the task of reading it and matching each book to a track Bowie either wrote or sang.

Some of the connections speak for themselves – for instance, Dante’s Inferno is paired with Scary

Monsters (And Super Creeps),

1984 with Bowie’s Big Brother and Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial Of Henry Kissinger with This Is Not America.

Elsewhere the pairings can be ingenious, as when Madame Bovary is linked to Life On Mars? via the ‘girl with the mousy hair’ who longs to escape her suburban life.

Some feel more tenuous – was Bowie’s friendship with Lou Reed comparable to that of Achilles and his armour-swapping friend Patroclus in The Iliad?

But then picking out resonances and echoes is meant to be fun, not a po-faced academic exercise.

So what from the Bowie oeuvre goes with The Beano? Why, it’s The Laughing Gnome, of course!