Over the last months of his life, the singer was able to shake off late career doldrums and, despite his illness, find a final creative surge
For more than a decade before his death David Bowie seemed to disappear. Beset by ill health after an on-stage heart attack in 2004, he largely withdrew into a life at home in New York, becoming a ghost in the city where he had lived for a quarter of a century.
Yet as the world comes to terms with his death this week, admirers are digesting a remarkable late burst of creativity, a dramatic 18-month flourish capped by an apparently exquisitely well-crafted exit.
At 69, Bowie reasserted himself both as a musician Blackstar, the album released two days before his death, is topping charts around the world and as a questing creative figure whose vision is still playing out on the New York theatre stage.
How did Bowie pull this off from the penthouse duplex he shared with wife, Iman, and 15-year-old daughter, Lexi, in the Nolita section of downtown Manhattan?
The singers encroaching frailty meant he kept his life local. The theatre where his play Lazarus is running is no more than a few minutes walk away; Magic Shop, the studio where he recorded albums Blackstar and The Next Day, is even closer, on Crosby Street.
Each place would offer Bowie a last opportunity to work in the musical and theatrical worlds that he had specialised in amalgamating throughout his career. He wasnt any single thing, longtime collaborator Mick Rock told the Guardian. He was the great synthesizer.
The picture that has emerged over the past few days is of a man who was able to shake off late career doldrums and, in spite of declining health, find a final, focused burst of creativity.
First, in 2013, came The Next Day, an album that was a stylistic tour of his career; then the V&As David Bowie Is an exhibit of 300 objects of Bowie memorabilia revealing the consideration with which he had preserved the artefacts of his career; the play Lazarus, now set for Londons West End; and finally Blackstar, a jazz record that launched with a video that appears to anticipate his death.
According to Bowies longtime producer Tony Visconti, Bowie had known since at least November that his cancer was terminal. But even in his final weeks, Bowie had no idea how little time was left and was talking about a Blackstar follow-up.
Pictures from the opening night of Lazarus on 7 December last year showed Bowie still handsome and immaculate but possibly showing signs that he may have been unwell. Theatre producer Robert Fox, who worked with him on Lazarus, said Bowie never complained.
The work was great and working with him was wonderful but it wasnt great that he wasnt well. It was not good at all. Some days he just wasnt able to be around, but whenever he could be, it [his cancer] didnt interfere with his contribution. It was just horrible for him, rather than difficult for us.
Fox believed the work was not specifically coloured by Bowies sense of his own mortality. The struggle with mortality goes on whether or not youre unwell. People write about that stuff even when theyre in perfectly good health, he said. But Fox, who helped Bowie find a director and cast the actors, concedes it must have had some effect.
He would talk about his illness only to the extent that it affected his work. Not in any other way. He never grumbled. But I dont think he planned on not being around. He was optimistic that something (a treatment) would come along that meant that he could be.
Bowie had been battling cancer for six months when he entered Magic Shops expansive studio facilities in January 2015 to record his 25th album. The studio, which has also been used by Coldplay and Arcade Fire, was already known to him; he had recorded much of his previous album The Next Day there. But instead of rock musicians, he brought seven demos to progressive jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin.
The sessions were short and light-hearted, typically running from 11am to 4pm over three sessions of a week through to March. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem came in to add synths and percussion and the tracks were finished off in Viscontis own studio in April.
Visconti, who produced the album over the first few months of 2015, told Rolling Stone that Bowie showed up for some Blackstar sessions without eyebrows or hair after undergoing chemotherapy.
There was no way he could keep it a secret from the band, he told the magazine. But he told me privately and I really got choked up when we sat face to face talking about it.
Bowies affliction had not dulled his enthusiasm for work. His energy was that of a very young person diving into everything with fearless joy and abandon, said recent Bowie collaborator Maria Schneider, the orchestral-jazz composer. Not to say he wasnt serious. He was very clear about what he did and didnt like.
Annie-B Parson, of New Yorks Big Dance Theater company, was the choreographer on the Lazarus musical and worked in close proximity with Bowie from September until the opening night in December.
She said she did not know he was ill and did not think the actors knew either as they worked quickly to develop the show in a tiny studio at the New York Theater Workshop.
But the director of the musical, Ivo van Hove, told her something that she only now realises the significance of. At the beginning, he said this was the saddest piece he had ever worked on, she said. Its deeply connected to death and a person contemplating his own existence from the first moment we see him.
During rehearsals, Bowie sat quietly, elegantly dressed in grey sweater and white shirt, writing with a stub of pencil on a piece of paper. Physically, all criss-crossed, the choreographer noted, his slender arms and legs twisted about each other in concentration. Bowie would not intervene, but the creative team would get feedback.
He insisted on spectacle. What struck me was that Bowie was from some other place, he wasnt of this planet and he was cool with that, Parson said.
It only occurred to her with hindsight that a persons knowledge that they may have limited time left might fuel their creativity. Bowie was suddenly prolific, driven. There was almost an insistence that he had so much to say. He needed to get out these songs in time. And he did, she said.
Speaking on Friday from Warsaw, van Hove said: The first thing that struck me when I met in a room in New York with David and Enda [Walsh, Bowies co-writer on the piece] and they read it to me and played some of the music was the existential theme life and death and is there life after death or can you go on living just in your mind or your imagination?
When Bowie told van Hove, in strictest confidence, in November 2014, that he had cancer and might not survive the project, the songs he was writing became deeper, especially Lazarus, the song of the eponymous musical and single.
It is like his testament, said van Hove.
Bowies creative surge was stunning. When he was feeling ill after treatment, he would stay away from rehearsals, but was intimately involved when in attendance and a genuine collaborator who thrived off his cohorts ideas, van Hove said.
He was private about the details of his health situation. I didnt question him, but I knew he did not want to die. He was in a struggle for life during those 18 months, he said.
Some of the songs in the musical convey huge inner rage and a protest about violence in society, overlaid with poetry and layers of sound. But in person he was always the perfect gentleman, van Hove said. As Bowie became sicker, later in 2015, van Hove said he saw fear in his eyes. He was fragile, he said.
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