Beyond David Bowie’s Fame: A Unique Search For God
(REVIEW) As far as album covers go, David Bowie’s 1972 “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” remains one of rock and roll’s most iconic.
Bathed in ethereal light, as if beamed to Earth from some distant planet, Bowie (as Ziggy) stands in a gritty, rain-slicked London alleyway amid soggy cardboard boxes and bags of trash. A lone street lamp highlights the tinted blonde hair, electric blue jumpsuit and Gibson Les Paul slung over the shoulder of this “space invader” as Ziggy/Bowie identifies himself in one of the album’s tracks, “Moonage Daydream.”
Yet “polysexual stardust alien” was just one of Bowie’s many stage personas over the years, as journalist Peter Ormerod relates in this probing biography, “David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God.” Lurking beneath Bowie’s hallmark, androgynous ambiguity and layers of lightning bolt face paint was a deeply spiritual man whose musical career represented “a quest to discover a kind of God that made sense to him,” Ormerod asserts.
“I look to [God] a lot and he is the cornerstone of my existence – even more as I get older,” Bowie told an interviewer nearly a quarter century after the release of “Ziggy.”
It is this introspective Bowie, and not quite so much the flamboyant, other-worldly Ziggy, who inhabits the pages of this compelling, albeit occasionally fanciful, philosophical biography of one of rock and roll’s most talented, chameleonlike stars.
Bowie was born David Jones in South London in 1947 to middle-class parents. When he was five, the family moved to Bromley, a London suburb, where he sang in the choir of the local parish church. While the dusty hymns of the Anglican Church made an impression (a fellow chorister recalled years later that the classic hymn “Jerusalem” was one of young David’s favorites), neither Bowie nor his family were especially religious.
The “oppressive structures, unbending dogmas, [and] debauched hypocrisy” of organized religion, in fact, became recurring targets of Bowie’s music. Still, he was foundationally spiritual and intellectually curious, exploring a wide range of faith traditions throughout his life, from Buddhism to Gnosticism to Judaism to the occult.
But the vehicle for it all was always rock and roll. Like many British recording artists of his generation, Bowie looked to American R&B stars — Little Richard, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly — for inspiration. After playing in a local high school band, he released his first single under the name Davie Jones, which he changed two years later to David Bowie, after James Bowie, inventor of the eponymous knife. (He also sought to avoid confusion with Davy Jones, lead singer of the made-for-TV American rock band, the Monkees).
The predominant themes of his first, 1967 solo album — simply called “David Bowie” — included the innocence of childhood Christian worship and churchgoing. Yet the haunting, vaguely Tibetan chantlike lyrics and melodies of one track, “Silly Boy Blue” established the tune as Bowie’s “first important song,” Ormerod writes.
Ostensibly the story of a teenage runaway, the song is layered with references to Buddhist practices and Tibetan locations, the culmination of Bowie’s youthful flirtations with Mahāyāna Buddhism (the faith’s main East Asian branch) and transcendental meditation.
After a two-year dry spell, Bowie released one of his most famous hit singles, “Space Oddity,” about a lone astronaut (Major Tom), orbiting the Earth, cut off from “Ground Control” by a technical failure. While Bowie later confirmed that the song was about spirituality — the soul’s ultimate detachment from the body, in Ormerod’s estimation — the singer also cited Stanley Kubrick’s 1968, deeply philosophical film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” as an inspiration.
Further unpacking the song, Ormerod sees Major Tom’s story as “a leap of faith,” a philosophical concept associated with the 19th century Danish Christian theologian Soren Kierkegaard. By cutting ties with Earth and family, Major Tom “trusts in something that cannot be seen.”
Given that Bowie (by Ormerod’s own admission) never credited Kierkegaard as an influence, Ormerod’s assertion here is a bit of a stretch. He crawls out on similar limbs by likening the “Ziggy” cover to a “nativity scene” or detecting in another trademark Bowie song, “Heroes,” thematic echoes of theologian Paul Tillich’s “The Courage to Be”: a standoff with fate and death. Considering that “Heroes” is about a pair of lovers separated by the Berlin Wall, such a connection is plausible, though Bowie himself never explicitly said so.
Ormerod stands on firmer ground when he sticks to Bowie’s own confessional remarks on faith God, and religion, which he shared in numerous interviews over the course of his life (he died in 2016 from cancer). Then there are always the songs, some of which may be wide open to interpretation, while others are less so. Is the “starman waiting in the sky [who’d] like to come and meet us” Ziggy, or is he, as Ormerod has it, a Jesus-like, messianic figure?
Much less vague was Bowie’s controversial 2013 song “The Next Day”, a scathing condemnation of corrupt clergy. In the music video, he is dressed like a medieval ascetic and performing in a bar called The Decameron. Bowie belts out his accusatory lyrics to an audience of lecherous clerics, stigmata-perforated saints and half-naked prostitutes:
“First they give you everything that you want/
Then they take back everything that you have/
They live upon their feet and they die upon their knees/
They can work with Satan while they dress like the saints.”
What is clear is that there was much more to the music of David Bowie, and to Bowie himself, than the casual, tune-humming fan might have previously thought.
Though the man himself was never a saint, which he freely admitted, especially during his addiction-plagued years, Bowie was nonetheless a deep thinker who sought to define his relationship with God beyond the boundaries of organized religion. This engaging look at the man behind the music, and the music itself, offers perspectives that otherwise may have gone unnoticed.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist specializing in religion, culture, food, and history. His book, “Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers” was published by Interlink Books in 2025.