Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free
A brand new biography has detailed the awkward friendship between David Bowie and Roger Moore in the late 70s which allegedly ended with the musician hiding under a table to avoid the James Bond star.
According to Hollywood screenwriter and novelist Hanif Kureishi, the 007 actor - who passed away in May - befriended the musician after he moved to Switzerland where he proceeded to drop in on the “Starman” singer unannounced.
Author Dylan Jones told The Telegraph at the press launch of his new biography David Bowie: A Life that "one of the weirdest people to be in Bowie’s orbit was Roger Moore.
Jones continued: “Kureishi told me this story, that when David Bowie moved to Switzerland at the end of the Seventies to escape tax and drug dealers, he didn’t know anybody there. He was in this huge house on the outskirts of Geneva - he knew nobody.
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculpturesShow all 19 1 /19Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Sunrise in the Mountains' by David Bomberg (1935) Oil on canvas estimated to sell for £150,000-250,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Forms on a Bow No.2' by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1960) Estimated to sell for £70,000-100,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Untitled' by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984) Acrylic, spray paint and paper collage on canvas, estimated to sell for £500,000-700,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Mendica' by Francis Picabia (1930) Oil on canvas, estimated to sell for £600,000-800,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Foyer' by Patrick Caulfield (1973) Acrylic on canvas, estimated to sell at £400,000-600,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Thorn Bush' by Graham Sutherland (1947-48) Crayon, charcoal, watercolour, ink and gouache, estimated to sell at £25,000-35,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Trevalgan' by Peter Lanyon (1951) Oil on board estimated to sell for £200,000-300,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'St Ives Harbour' by Winifred Nicholson (1928) Oil and coloured pencil on panel, estimated to sell for £50,000-70,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Fangalo' by Norman Catherine Store oil, wood and mixed media, estimated to sell for £10,000-15,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'What Happened in the Western Cape?' by Willie Bester Mixed media assemblage on board, estimated to sell for £2,000-3,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures 'Mannerbildnis (Portrait of a Man)' by Erich Heckel (1919) Woodcut printed in black, blue, green and ochre, estimated to sell for £30,000-50,000
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Frank Auerbach, Head of Gerda Boehm, 1965, oil on board, £300,000-500,000 “My God, yeah! I want to sound like that looks” – David Bowie on Frank Auerbach’s work, quoted in the New York Times, 1998. Bowie loved the rich, sculptural effects of Auerbach’s paintings (“I find his kind of bas- relief way of painting extraordinary. Sometimes I’m not really sure if I’m dealing with sculpture or painting”), and clearly felt a deep affinity with the artist, whose work could provoke in him a whole gamut of reactions: “It will give spiritual weight to my angst. Some mornings I’ll look at it and go, “Oh, God, yeah! I know!’’ But that same painting, on a different day, can produce in me an incredible feeling of the triumph of trying to express myself as an artist.” [Ibid] Head of Gerda Boehm, a portrait of the artist’s cousin, was last exhibited at the Royal Academy, when Bowie lent the work to Auerbach’s much- heralded retrospective in 2001.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Jean-Michel Basquiat, Air Power, 1984, acrylic and oilstick on canvas, £2.5-3.5m The Bowie-Basquiat connection is best known through the lens of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, in which David played the role of the young artist’s mentor and collaborator, Andy Warhol. Air Power was acquired by Bowie the following year.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Damien Hirst, Beautiful, Shattering, Slashing, Violent, Pinky, Hacking, Sphincter Painting, 1995, household gloss on canvas, £250,000-350,000 Bursting with a magnificently dynamic energy in its pulsating kaleidoscope of reds, greens, blues and yellows, this is a vibrant and powerful example of Damien Hirst’s trademark ‘spin’ paintings. Hirst was one of only a handful of high-profile contemporary artists for whom Bowie publicly expressed his admiration, interviewing the ‘Young British Artist’ for Modern Painters in 1995. “He’s different. I think his work is extremely emotional, subjective, very tied up with his own personal fears – his fear of death is very strong – and I find his pieces moving and not at all flippant”, said Bowie in an interview with the New York Times.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Ettore Sottsass, 'Casablanca' Sideboard, 1981, £4,000-6,000 Breaking with the minimalist aesthetic that characterised furniture design in the 1970s, Ettore Sottsass and the Milan-based Memphis group revolutionised cutting-edge design, introducing fun, humour and strikingly bold colour combinations. The ‘Casablanca’ Sideboard, from the first Memphis collection in 1981, is considered a defining work of Post- Modern design, with examples held in numerous major museum collections around the world including the V&A in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo dei Mobile e delle Sculture Lignee, Milan.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Harold Gilman ,Interior (Mrs Mounter), 1917, oil on canvas, £150,000-250,000 Harold Gilman’s painting, an essay in stillness, of the remains of the day, appears at first glance to be anything but revolutionary. But in the context of British art in the early 20th century, it is, in its own quiet and covert way, very radical. This was a new kind of subject, a suburban lodger and part-time charlady, lost in thought in a nondescript room in an ordinary London house. For art to be modern, artists like Gilman demanded that it should be concerned with the everyday life of the city, with the peripheral and unseen, with the working classes. All of this must not have been lost on Bowie, a boy born in Brixton just after the Second World War, when much of London’s housing stock was still as it was in the early part of the century – grand Georgian houses subdivided into flats and bedsits, with tall thin sash windows, linoleum floors and a stove for heat.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Romuald Hazoumé Alexandra, 1995, found objects £5,000-£7,000 Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumé is probably best known for his sculptural assemblages of commonplace found objects, such as Alexandra. Much like Marcel Duchamp and his ‘Readymades’, Hazoumé appropriates familiar objects and reconfigures them, creating a dialogue between art history and the history of colonialism in Africa, as well as contemporary African politics, especially those surrounding oil. Alexandra is indicative of Bowie’s far-reaching collecting interests, as well as his love of works with multiple layers of meaning and a sense of mischief and play. Bowie’s approach to contemporary African art – as with all other elements of the collection – was marked by a deep intellectual rigour, exemplified by his five- page review of the inaugural Johannesburg Biennale for Modern Painters in 1995.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Peter Lanyon, Witness, 1961, oil on canvas, £250,000-350,000 Witness is one of three works by Peter Lanyon that Bowie loaned to the artist’s retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2010. Lanyon painted Witness two years after he had first taken to the skies in a glider. This new activity allowed him to see the Cornish landscape from a radically different perspective and to bring bigger, more elemental forces into his painting, becoming “like the mountaineer who cannot see the clouds without feeling the lift inside them.” This is a painting of American scale and ambition, painted in a converted sail-loft in a small fishing town on the western-most tip of England.
Sotheby's
Bowie/Collector paintings and sculptures Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni, Brionvega Radiophonograph, model no RR 126, 1965, £800-1,200 It perhaps comes as no surprise to discover that the most innovative and daring musician of his generation listened to music on such an unconventional record player. Created by brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Brionvega, this playful stereo cabinet is a definitive piece of 1960s Italian design, with examples in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York and the V&A in London.
Sotheby's
“One day, about half-past five in the afternoon, there’s a knock on the door, and there he was: ‘Hello, David.’ Roger Moore comes in, and they had a cup of tea. He stays for drinks, and then dinner, and tells lots of stories about the James Bond films. They had a fantastic time - a brilliant night.”
“But then, the next day, at 5.30… Knock, knock, it’s Roger Moore. He invites himself in again, and sits down: ‘Yeah, I’ll have a gin and tonic, David.’ He tells the same stories - but they’re slightly less entertaining the second time around.
It was apparently here where the burgeoning friendship came to an end.
“After two weeks [of Moore turning up] at 5.25pm - literally every day - David Bowie could be found underneath the kitchen table pretending not to be in.”
Whether this was why Bowie - who passed away at the age of 69 in January 2016 - turned down a role in 1985 007 film A View to a Kill opposite Moore is unknown...
Jones' new biography saw the author interview over 150 people with some sharing such personal stories that they refused to be quoted on the record.
Follow Independent Culture on Facebook
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies