Thin White Duke Review: He Disowned This One Completely

The third Bowie character in this file, and the only one he refused to defend afterwards

The Thin White Duke holds a 4.6 from four hundred and forty-one people, charges ten to thirty pounds, and it is the third Bowie venue in this district.

And it is named after the one he spent the rest of his life apologising for.

1975 and 1976

The Thin White Duke is the character on Station to Station – immaculate, in a white shirt and black waistcoat, ice-cold, aristocratic, and emotionally absent.

And Bowie, at that point, was living in Los Angeles on a diet that he has described, without exaggeration, as red peppers, milk and cocaine.

He has said, repeatedly, that he has almost no memory of making Station to Station. He knows it happened in the studio. He does not remember being there.

It is one of the best records he ever made and he cannot recall making it.

What he said

Things he should not have said, in interviews, about politics and about strongmen – and there was an incident at Victoria Station in 1976 involving a gesture from an open car which was almost certainly a wave and was photographed at the worst possible instant.

He spent decades addressing it. He described himself, in later interviews, as having been out of his mind, completely crazed, and said that the things he had said were appalling and that he was ashamed of them.

He did not blame the drugs and he did not blame the character. He said, flatly, that he had said it and that it was indefensible.

The Prat is recording this because a bar has named itself after the persona and because the persona is not a neutral object, and we have been careful about exactly this at the Otherist and at BLOODSPORTS and at the Chilled Eskimo.

What he did next

He left.

He went to Berlin, in 1976, specifically to stop – and he lived in a flat in Schoneberg, above a car parts shop, and he rode a bicycle to the studio, and he made three of the strangest and best records of the century.

Low, Heroes and Lodger. Half of Low has no lyrics at all.

He shared the flat with Iggy Pop, and the two of them were, in effect, keeping each other alive – and they both got out, and a very large number of people in their position did not.

The three

Starman, who pointed at the camera and changed fifteen million lives.

Ziggy, who was executed on stage without warning.

And the Thin White Duke, who was abandoned in a flat in Berlin and never spoken well of again.

Three bars, three characters, one man – and the discipline of destroying each of them before it destroyed him is the entire career.

Verdict

Good bar. Go, and put on Low.

Why Berlin worked

Because nobody cared.

West Berlin in 1976 was a walled island inside East Germany, subsidised, strange, and full of people who had moved there specifically to avoid West German military service – which meant it had an enormous population of young men with nothing to do and no institution watching them.

Rents were almost nothing. The bars did not close. And a very famous person could walk into one and be entirely ignored, because the city had decided, collectively, that being impressed by anybody was beneath it.

Bowie rode a bicycle to the studio. He shopped in the supermarket. Nobody stopped him.

He has said it was the happiest he ever was, and that it was the only place he was ever able to be nobody.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]