David Bowie’s Books: the 100 novels that inspired his best-known songs A new biography of the artist explores the 100 literary works that changed his life. Its author explores the books that inspired the music

Missed more than ever nearly four years after his death, David Bowie bestrode the narrow pop world like a Colossus. Only The Beatles match him in stature. Yet his creative method was, until his imitators caught up with him, unusual for a rock star. It involved opening himself wide to every influence – anything in any medium that served his vision.

Bowie would distil these influences in the alembic of his charisma before serving them up in the form of songs, videos, album sleeves, costumes and stage sets. He read a huge amount, so there was a natural role for books in this process.

In 2014, to coincide with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s opening of the V&A’s record-breaking David Bowie Is exhibition, the singer issued a list of the 100 books he considered the most important and influential out of the thousands he had read. This list quickly went viral, inspiring numerous blogs and book clubs.

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As a paid-up Bowie nerd – he had me at 12, around the time of “Let’s Dance” – I grew convinced that it was an ET-style trail of Reese’s Pieces laid down for fans. I wanted to tease out the links I believed existed between the listed books and Bowie’s life and work. So I read them all, then wrote my own book, published this week, called Bowie’s Books: The Hundred Literary Heroes Who Changed His Life.

People keep asking me how long it took. The answer is about nine months. Thankfully, I’m good at speed-reading, though I was helped by the fact that I’d already read around a third of them.

Sometimes it was obvious why Bowie had included a particular book. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange gives the “Ziggy Stardust” album its sheen of ultraviolence (“…should we crush his sweet hands?”), while Stanley Kubrick’s subsequent film informed the costumes Bowie and his Ziggy-era band wore on stage.

At the other end of Bowie’s career, the lyrics of “Girl Loves Me”, from his final album Blackstar, combine Burgess’s invented language of Nadsat with the secret gay language Polari.

‘William Burroughs asked Bowie if the lyrics of this Hunky Dory tune had been inspired by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. He replied: ‘Never read him.’ But he had really’

In the early 70s, Bowie tried to turn George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four into a musical, only to be thwarted by the writer’s widow, Sonia. (Some of the songs – including, um, “1984” – ended up on Diamond Dogs.) And he often spoke in interviews of his love for Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic On the Road, which his older half-brother Terry gave him to read when he was a teenager.

At other times, though, I had to work a bit harder. Where might Bowie have come across Vance Packard’s 50s exposé of the advertising industry’s evil ways, The Hidden Persuaders? Possibly on the shelves of the Nevin D Hirst advertising agency on New Bond Street where he worked briefly as a junior visualiser… Like most of us, Bowie had clearly defined areas of interest.

Several of the books touch on dandyism – the creation of a heightened, hyper-styled version of yourself. Others concern themselves with magical, speculative thinking – for example, Eliphas Lévi’s Transcendental Magic and the once best-selling Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s occult romance Zanoni.

Few of my fellow Bowie nerds were surprised by this when the list first appeared, but they were by the lack of science-fiction, considering what a big fan of the genre Bowie was known to be. (Arguably, he makes up for it by including a novel about a science-fiction obsessive, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.)

Bowie read compulsively, with the manic fervour he brought to most activities. In 1975, when he was filming The Man Who Fell to Earth in the New Mexico desert, he took with him a portable library containing 1,500 titles.

This might sound like an ostentatious way to declare one’s love of reading, but Bowie was justifiably proud of his habit: he hadn’t had much in the way of formal education and left school with a single O-level, in Art. This didn’t mean he was stupid or lazy – far from it; simply that, like many autodidacts, he preferred to teach himself rather than be taught. And he loved passing on what he had learnt to others.

Bowie’s post-war generation didn’t take books for granted in the way that we do. Penguin paperbacks had only been around since 1935 and reached a peak of coolness in the early 60s, when their blue and orange spines were crucial markers of bedsit sophistication.

The mission of Penguin’s founder, Allen Lane, had been to make the best writing available for the price of a packet of cigarettes. For working- and lower-middle-class children like Bowie, these books were capsules of democratised knowledge which promised access to a more interesting, more glamorous world. They understood well the printed word’s radical, transgressive potential: the number of once-banned books on Bowie’s list, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Last Exit to Brooklyn, speaks for itself.

All biography junkies know how unusual it is for successful artists also to be successful human beings. Since Bowie’s death, grieving fans have drawn comfort from the fact that hardly anyone (apart from Elton John, weirdly) seems to have had a bad word to say about him. What kept him grounded, kind, wise and funny? Family and friends, for sure. But I think his wide reading played a part too. Consumed responsibly, the best books take you out of yourself, only to put you back there infinitely enriched.

Which songs were inspired by the books?

‘Heroes’

The line “I wish you could swim like dolphins can swim” was inspired by a story in the memoir A Grave For a Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno, an Italian doctor posted to Italy’s colonies in North and East Africa between 1924 and 1943.

‘Breaking Glass’

When Bowie sings “Don’t look at the carpet/I drew something awful on it”, he is referring to the practice of drawing symbols on the floor to summon demons as cautioned against by French occult author and ceremonial magician Éliphas Lévi in his 1856 work Transcendental Magic.

‘Oh! You Pretty Things’

This jaunty warning to parents that they are about to be displaced by their super-intelligent alien children thematically reflects Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Victorian sci-fi novel The Coming Race.

‘Eight Line Poem’

When William Burroughs asked Bowie if the lyrics of this Hunky Dory tune had been inspired by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the singer replied: “Never read him.” But he had really.

‘We Are the Dead’

This song from Diamond Dogs is a relic of Bowie’s doomed plan to turn George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four into a musical.

‘Bowie’s Books: The Hundred Literary Heroes Who Changed His Life’ is published by Bloomsbury, priced £16.99