David Bowie A Decadent Desolation, 1976-1979

By the mid-1970s David Bowie was the biggest pop star in the UK, but his personal life was in turmoil. In a bid to escape the chaos of his drug problems and to flee from the media spotlight, the performer and musician eventually found his way to West Berlin, where he started to work on what would become some of the most memorable and critically lauded recordings of his career. Bowie stopped moving from persona to persona, as he had previously done, settling instead on being simply himself, and began to blend the music he was hearing in his adopted homeland with the avant-garde methodologies used by his friend and colleague Brian Eno. Bowie shared an apartment with Iggy Pop while in Germany and this led to numerous escapades including David's production and assistance with songwriting on Iggy's Lust for Life and The Idiot albums, and his performing keyboard duties on the Ig's 1977 tour. This film reviews and documents the music that Bowie recorded and the life that he led between the years 1976 and 1979, when his most adventurous, challenging and thought provoking work was unleashed and when his lifestyle was as different to what had gone before as could barely be imagined.