Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Bowie once praised Adolf Hitler… but he was always changing his tune

It wasn’t being a chameleon or sexual revolutionary that made him important, but his brilliant songs

issue 16 January 2016

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[/audioplayer]I was desperately worried that you hadn’t read or heard enough platitudinous drivel about David Bowie — and therefore felt compelled to weigh in with my own observations. In all honesty I haven’t heard so much repetitive, imbecilic guff since Mandela shuffled off this mortal coil. It was even worse than the confected sobfest that greeted the passing of the charming and likeable Lou Reed.

The eulogies for Lou were simply a case of the BBC telling everybody that they are dead hip and edgy, really enjoyed ‘Perfect Day’ and once knew someone, back in uni, who had an album by the Velvet Underground. With Bowie, it was partly the misguided wish to show off that same hipness, but also an attempt to shoehorn poor old Bowie, only hours cold, into their relentless political agenda. And so as soon as the ‘experts’ had told us, over and over again, that Bowie was a ‘chameleon’, they started in on his revolutionary approach to sexual intercourse —which was, in short, an atavistic and unceasing desire to shag anything and everything with a pulse, as often as was humanly possible. As far as the BBC was concerned, this made Bowie a sort of combination of Harvey Milk and Peter Tatchell rolled into one: a fearless fighter for LGBT rights, pushing back the barriers of conservative morality and heralding, almost single-handedly, a brave new world of equality for gays, transgendered persons, bisexuals, etc.

Missing entirely were Bowie’s stated political opinions. Arriving back in drab, grey, strike–ridden Britain from America in 1975, he said the country needed a good dose of fascism. Asked to elucidate, he said: ‘I believe very strongly in fascism… Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.’

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