News: Bowie Odyssey 72 Book By Simon Goddard.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of David Bowie's historic Ziggy Stardust LP on 16th June 1972, Omnibus Press will publish Bowie Odyssey 72 by Simon Goddard in paperback and strictly limited edition hardback on 16th June.
The third in Goddard’s 10 book Bowie Odyssey series – a year-by-year decalogy chronicling the life and times of the greatest pop star of his era against the cultural and social history of the 1970s – it continues the rock’n’roll soap opera of the first two critically acclaimed volumes: Bowie Odyssey 70 (a Sunday Times Book Of The Year 2020), and 2021’s Bowie Odyssey 71. Above and beyond an episodic biography of David Bowie, the Odyssey series amounts to an equally epic portrait of life in 70s Britain, its vast multi-layered narrative taking in not just pop but politics, sex, race, crime, media, fashion and a nation still retuning its post-war attitudes from black-and-white to colour.
The drama of Bowie Odyssey 72 begins in a country painfully devoid of glamour, freezing in a blacked-out winter of strikes, power cuts and the three-day-week: the optimum moment of impact for Bowie to unveil his cosmic alter ego Ziggy Stardust. By summer glam rock is christened and Bowie’s crowning success as the bisexual ‘Starman’ starts to rub off on his new friends Mott The Hoople and his hero Lou Reed. After Ziggy, music, clothes and the old codes of gender would never be the same again. But as his runaway fame quickly blurs all lines between fantasy and reality, neither would David.
The year of Ziggy Stardust is also the year of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the peak of T.Rextasy, the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the ‘weenybop’ explosion of David Cassidy and the Osmonds, the divine decadence of Cabaret, the New York Dolls, the ongoing horror of Vietnam, President Nixon, Idi Amin and Love Thy Neighbour. All play their part in Goddard’s exquisitely detailed and skilfully told real-time journey through 12 of the most creatively pivotal months in Bowie’s life. The boldest and most original book in the series so far, Bowie Odyssey 72 is now Goddard’s fourth on Bowie to date, including his earlier Ziggyology.