Only the keenest of occult scholars would have recognised White Stains as the title of a slim volume of verse by Aleister Crowley (Bowie may have owned a copy as early as 1969, as there were apparent allusions to Crowley’s poem ‘Contra Conjugium TTB’ in ‘Cygnet Committee’).
This ranged from the vaguely ridiculous (compare Bowie’s drinking stanza to the chorus from The Student Prince made famous by Mario Lanza) to the deliberately hidden (or occult). Shakespeare, however, was only one source for a song rich in borrowed imagery. And he can also cast a spell – throwing darts,* perhaps – over lovers’ eyes, as he does with his daughter Miranda and her paramour, Ferdinand, during the course of the play. It is Prospero whom Bowie misquotes in the song, Shakespeare’s original line being: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’ (The same speech refers, as does Bowie, to ‘thin air’.) Prospero, like Bowie’s Duke, is a master of magic, who can command the elements while ‘lost in my circle’. But Bowie’s landscape was more oblique than that: not least because, in the tradition of ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, this was a song with lyrics that suggested more than they revealed, as if they had been written in a strictly personal code – an occult language, then, in every sense of the adjective.Įven if Bowie saw himself as the Thin White Duke, another duke was at the heart of the action: Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, exiled on an island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Instead the Thin White Duke returned in this song, which it would be easy to assume must therefore have been autobiographical. It may be a series of books.’ Or, as printed in Rolling Stone magazine at the time, it might be the briefest and most compressed of autobiographical fragments, which suggested he would have struggled to extend the entire narrative of his life beyond a thousand words. Simultaneously, he was telling journalist Cameron Crowe: ‘I’ve decided to write my autobiography as a way of life. It was, he explained, ‘partly autobiographical, mostly fiction, with a deal of magic in it’. And it was there that David Bowie, who was unmistakably thin, and white, began to write a book of short stories entitled The Return of the Thin White Duke. "Much of The Man Who Fell To Earth was filmed in Albuquerque – the so-called ‘Duke city’.
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