Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Sean Egan - book review

Preposterous, a tad pretentious but oh so poignant

In 1974, Robert Hilburn reported in the Melody Maker that David Bowie wasn't keen on interviews. He felt they were “unnecessary links between him and his audience”. As they say, you could have fooled me. On the evidence of Bowie on Bowie: Interviews and Encounters, I'm not sure I've ever come across a more articulate pop star, or one more ready to share his thoughts. Or a nicer bloke, even if it may have been a case of putting on the charm. Mick Brown's observation in 1996 is typical: he was left feeling he'd known Bowie all his life.

Sean Egan has assembled a collection of telling pieces ranging in time from 1969 to 2003, encompassing the inky pop press – NME, Melody Maker – to the later, glossier end of the market, titles like The Word, Q and Mojo. Reading them in the days following Bowie's death, they provide more evidence, if any were still needed, of why he was so important.

A tad pretentious? Possibly. He's asked in 1985 about the trunk of 400 books he lugged around with him in the 1970s, and McLuhan, Wolfe, Ackroyd, Barthes, Barnes, Burroughs, Hardy, Huxley (Aldous), Johnson (Linton Kwesi), Kerouac and King (Stephen) are among those name-checked.

Looking back in 1983 to the days of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, he's happy to disown some of his more preposterous posturing – “I was completely fractured as a thinker” (though even in 1996 he's telling Mick Brown that Station to Station was a reconstruction of the Kabbala…). He was clear-eyed about the impact he had, enabling square pegs to live more comfortably in round holes – even if, as he observes in 1980, “I have never been anything other than Ziggy Stardust for the media en masse.”

The key to enjoying this book is to realise that he didn't necessarily mean everything he said – or, at least, he probably did the moment he opened his mouth, but perhaps not five minutes later. He brings to mind the Queen's line from the Through the Looking-Glass: “Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” For Bowie, interviews were an integral part of the pop-star process: he was putting on a show.

One last point, so poignant given that he died of cancer: almost every writer reports that he chain-smoked his way through the interview (in the last, when he appears to have finally given up, he describes cigarettes as “the bane of my life”). I'm not sure he was the kind of man to do regret, but you wonder if that might have been one. After all, 69 is too young to die.

Souvenir Press £14.99. Order for £12.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030