Free The Man Who Sold the World by Peter Doggett Page A

rationale, the relationship of Bowie and Terry gradually faded away, even if the memory of what Terry had been, and what he had become, continued to shape Bowie’s outlook for many years to come.
    â€œOne puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity,” he told the BBC in 1993. “You start to approach the very thing you’re scared of.” To alleviate this pressure, Bowie depended on his creativity: “I felt that I was the lucky one [in the family] because I was an artist, and it would never happen to me. As long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music and into my work, I could always be throwing it off.” During the remainder of the sixties, and for much of the seventies, he pursued a ferocious working schedule, as if constant exertion—the flood of songs, film treatments, scripts, and artworks that he produced, even when he was supposed to be resting between tours—would keep madness at bay. Creative output also blocked another avenue of negativity: “I was convinced I wasn’t worth very much. I had enormous self-image problems, and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. I was driven to get through life very quickly. I thought I didn’t need to exist. I really felt so utterly inadequate. I thought the work was the only thing of value.”
    His lack of self-esteem must have been reinforced when David Bowie —the album, and its attendant image—was launched, to a minimal response from the public. It had the misfortune of being released on the same day as the Beatles’ epochal Sgt. Pepper album, but Bowie and Pitt’s loyal supporters in the media ensured that it did at least receive a modicum of press coverage. “David Bowie has no great voice,” one review stated, but “he can project words with a cheeky ‘side’ that is endearing yet not precocious,” while his work was “full of abstract fascination.” In an apt summary of Bowie’s current situation, the journalist suggested that he could “make quite a noise on the scene if he gets the breaks and the right singles.” Prestigious though his album was, it effectively suffocated his career. Until a month before its release, he was still performing with the Riot Squad, incorporating a psychedelic lights show, surreal sound effects, and garish makeup into his act. The David Bowie LP bore no relation to this persona, and few of its songs—whimsical character studies, for the most part, defiantly removed from the psychedelic ambience of the era—could be performed without orchestral musicians. Bowie and the Riot Squad parted company in May, with the bizarre result that he celebrated the release of his album by not performing a conventional “pop” gig for the next fourteen months. Any momentum created by his years of performances at venues such as the Marquee was lost.
    Instead, Pitt encouraged Bowie to look beyond the vicissitudes of the pop charts for more enduring success—a farsighted view that would reward the singer, if not his new manager. His publisher, David Platz, urged him to pen English lyrics for songs from Israel and France, the most notable of which would provide the biggest hit of Frank Sinatra’s career—though not, sadly, utilizing Bowie’s translation [A50]. He also continued to write deliberately commercial pop songs (“top ten rubbish,” he called them, though none came remotely close to achieving that status) in the hope of attracting other artists.
    Meanwhile, Bowie won the starring role in a short silent film, The Image , made in September 1967. Written and directed by Michael Armstrong, it was ostensibly a tale of obsession in the vein of Henry James’s “The Story of a Masterpiece,” though it carried a subtext of homosexual self-loathing so obvious that perhaps its creator was blind to its