Bowie Book Club Podcast – interview – 11/11/2025

I have long been a fan of the Bowie Book Club Podcast, a show which delivers deep insights and wild speculation on David Bowie’s reading habits. The podcast started with reading Bowie’s 100 books list (in no particular order) a series of titles which Bowie selected that he had enjoyed or had an impact on his creative life.

Now into its second season, Bowie Book Club is exploring a more speculative, but no less considered, list of books that they feel had a significant connection to the David Bowie universe. In this interview, I speak with the hosts Greg and Kristianne about music, books and Bowie!

Adam Steiner: So as you state in your intro at the beginning of each podcast episode, you know each other from book clubs / reading groups and… “following the sad death of David Bowie in 2016”, you finally got your act together, and started meeting up on a regular basis to and worked your way through the 100 book list? 

Greg: Yeah, we live just a couple of miles from each other, as the bus goes. We usually meet up in my basement to record.

Kristianne: We only did it online during the pandemic.

AS: I’d like to know how each of you first encountered David Bowie?

K: Do you want to go first, Greg, because you’re older?

G: I think the first song that registered with me was ‘Fashion’ from Scary Monsters. I was maybe about 10 or so, and I called the local radio station, and asked them to play it. And the DJ said “How old are you” and I answered “ten” and he replied “Well that figures” and he hung up on me. And he didn’t play it.

Then we had a department store near us that would sell cassette tapes for like $1.50, so that’s where I found Ziggy Stardust and Scary Monsters.

K: I was a little less precocious, I was older. I think I was a freshman in high school, so it was a fortuitous second-hand store find; back when you could find things that hadn’t been all picked over. I found two vinyl albums, one was Pin-Ups and the other was Scary Monsters. Radically different, of course, but I picked them up, totally for the covers. And I had heard Bowie, but I hadn’t connected with him at that point. I was a big Laurie Anderson fan, but this was a big departure from that year

AS: It’s interesting you would both latch on to that same Bowie album, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). I guess it was something to do with growing up in that same era of the Eighties; and with big singles like ‘Ashes To Ashes’ and ‘Fashion’ making such an impression on the radio.

Clearly, you are both big readers, tell me about yourselves, are you both book industry professionals?

K: I’m not such a big music fan as Greg. When Bowie released his book list, it was such a fascinating and wild collection of books. 

I’ve worked in and around book stores for a couple of decades. I was a bookseller here in Seattle, and then I worked for a book industry newsletter called Shelf Awareness with a focus on indie bookstores. Who is getting a big deal, or movie adaptations. In and around the book world. So when I was in the UK last year, I just went round visiting indie bookstores.

G: My only connection to the bookworld is to one day open my own bookstore! There’s a tiny bookstore in the town I grew up, near my house, that I could walk to, called “The Three Rs” 

AS: Bowie said the list was quite spontaneous – not necessarily his favorite 100 books – just ones he really liked. What do you think it reveals about Bowie, now? Did you learn anything new about him?

“There was a tendency for the books to include what we would call the ‘Boring Bowie Boy”

K: I think it was quite early on when we read our most disliked book on the list Maldoror [Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont] that we realized that this isn’t about our favourite books. This is about the books in our lives that were really influential at a point in time, and they continue to be influential in our memories. So I like there’s this variety on the list. We broke it down into several categories — what was on our ‘murder wall’, Greg?

G: It seems like there are certain themes, Teenage [Jon Savage]  was at the centre of it and then there are a lot of the obvious music biographies, and there was a tendency for the books to include what we would call the ‘Boring Bowie Boy’, a kind of narrator who’s not quite as interesting as other characters in the book. And this is a tendency perhaps of the time; they were mostly male authors. The one surprising thing is how few science-fiction books there were. So there are some interesting threads, and we tried to carry this through into the second season of Bowie Book Club.

K: There were some obscure books on the list, but certainly ones that were relevant to the time. I love how in your book, Silhouettes And Shadows [Adam Steiner, 2023] you manage to bring in a lot of the books on the list, even just to the influence on that one album Scary Monsters. That shift from A Clockwork Orange [Antony Burgess 1962] and the Bicameral Mind [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian  Jaynes, 1976 – and breath] from the 1970s through to the early 1980s.

AS: Could you make your own ‘100 book’ lists? 

K: We tried to make our own lists and it’s a fascinating exercise. We sometimes chose books, not that we love, or would necessarily recommend, but are still influential.

“I learned a lot about periods in history where I felt I had big gaps.”

AS: I know what you mean about ‘books-for-the-young’ that stay with you. I used to work as a cleaner in a hospital, specifically for elderly patients. And there was a small collection of donated books and from there I found several things that just blew my mind, Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There, Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – it was a very surreal form of sentimental education.

I admire Bowie’s love of the high / low culture of reading, particularly in his 100 books list – placing the Beano, Viz and Raw alongside Before the Deluge [Otto Friedrich, 1972] and Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae – I think he really hit a nerve between pop culture and intellectual heavyweight – did you get the sense of cognitive dissonance, for a guy who pretends to like everything spreading himself thin?

G: I think that these were just parts of his childhood, progressing from The Beano, to becoming a teenager and finding Viz, with all of this scatalogical stuff and then onto the more arty Raw.

K: I mean, across the breadth of it, I learned a lot about periods in history where I felt I had big gaps. Like, Before The Deluge, which you mentioned from the list, I really enjoyed. And that period of the Weimar era Berlin, wasn’t something I had spent a lot of time reading about.

G: And the books on Russia, running from Nights At The Circus [Angela Carter], which was an incredible model and Into The Whirlwind [Yevgenia Ginzburg, 1967] super harrowing, this crazy story of the gulags. There was a huge range in the stories that they tell.

“There is this push and pull between his domestic childhood, but even when he is living this esoteric life in Berlin or New York he is still carrying around some of those things and the history of his childhood.”

AS: Bowie’s list is very Anglophile, old world English; was this enlightening, engaging, challenging for you guys?

G: Just looking at my shelf, the two books that jumped out are J. B. Priestley’s English Journey, it’s more that sort of narrow focus history of the period between the wars, and in the same way that A People’s Tragedy (Orlando Figes), taking such a specific look was really fascinating. Another that really stood out for me is Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, that old English ancient history almost like a Hammer film. I think we have something of a shallow understanding of English culture, through things like punk and Bowie, but those books touched on it in a slightly deeper way.

K: Those are two good examples that I perhaps wouldn’t have found otherwise. I think there are a few books that are part of the English literature canon in American literature. Flicking through the list, things like Puckoon [Spike Milligan, 1963] was familiar, because my dad loved The Goons show.

G: There is this push and pull between his domestic childhood, but even when he is living this esoteric life in Berlin or New York he is still carrying around some of those things and the history of his childhood.

K: There is an interesting balance between the things he is trying to be and the very nostalgic pieces.

AS: Which Bowie album, or era, is most important to you?

K: I came to the Low era later and that’s my touchstone period, now. I later found a vinyl copy of Station To Station in Vancouver, Canada, and that was on constant replay for me. And as I’m flipping through the list of songs and the associations we find with a book for each episode.

“I was going to say the podcast really introduced me to 1. Outside for some reason it had just slid by me.”

G: Honestly, I think I would say the same thing. The ‘Berlin Trilogy’ still amazes me. But I would also have to say that Blackstar, coming when it did, still amazes me. Not how different it is, but how striking it is.

K: I was going to say the podcast really introduced me to 1. Outside for some reason it had just slid by me. So we attached several books to that album, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood [1967] and The Insult [Rupert Thomson, 1996]. It was also very close to Hawksmoor and Madame Bovary.

AS: I often feel Bowie is a uniquely bookish musician –a bit like Nick Cave, but in a different way– I always wondered why he never wrote a book; his songs are like glimpses of a speculative novel…

K: On our bookshop page we started doing other lists. When someone would list their favourite books. Brian Eno had a very interesting list, but not a lot of other musicians. 

G: Patti Smith had a great list, she talked about poetry all the time.

“There is a real value in learning about someone through their reading list; whether it’s good or bad qualities.”

AS: For the second series you selected 100 titles close to Bowie – I noticed you picked some real intellectual and thematic bangers, like Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – of course it’s a speculative list – but I think you chose really strong books well aligned to Bowie’s original 100?

K: There is a real value in learning about someone through their reading list; whether it’s good or bad qualities. As we were doing the first list we started to find new books to make a second list, and there were some real surprises: why wasn’t there more sci-fi, why hasn’t he read this or that, and we imagined we could be his best booksellers.

AS: Did you have your own list criteria for the second season of Bowie Book Club? 

K: In the end, we only picked fifty-six books, because one hundred is a lot. We got some really interesting suggestions, someone suggested Grendell/Beowulf, due to Apollonian-Dionysian connections and Nietzsche. And someone suggested Alisadair Gray’s Lanark. I know him as the author of the recent movie, Poor Things.

G: Eventually, we might have to fill in the other 44 books, but we’re putting that off until later.

AS: Do you have a favourite Bowie book about Bowie?

G: In terms of the podcast, Chris O’Leary’s blog, Pushing Ahead Of The Dame, which was released into two books; these have been a huge help in picking the songs.

https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com

K: I did really enjoy your book, Silhouettes And Shadows, just because it went back to that Scary Monsters era and also the Dylan Jones book because the oral biography format connected back to the primary source focus of those interviews, of people in their own words. And along with that were Bowie’s own reflection on his relationships with people. There is also a book by Spanish artist, Maria Hesse, called Bowie: An Illustrated Life. I don’t believe that her book is true, but she did enter into that realm of his creative life, and it’s very much about her artwork.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51077918

AS: The new David Bowie archive at V&A East has opened this year – what books or Bowie-related-tat should be in there?!

G: First thought: there’s a dog in my office named ‘Bowie’, with one blue eye and one grey eye – I’m not saying the dog should go into the museum…

K: The unofficial Bowie flip book, illustrated by Amy Pearson, and it shows the transition of Bowie from all his looks. It’s a mix and match of all these characters.

Thank you to Greg and Kristianne

Find the Bowie Book Club website here, along with links to their best-of 2025 reading list.

https://www.bowiebookclub.com

https://bookshop.org/shop/bowiebookclubpodcast

SILHOUETTES AND SHADOWS: The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

An avant-garde pop album rich with tension and fear, 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) marked a pivotal point in David Bowie’s career. Standing at the bleeding edge of the new decade it was here Bowie sought to bury the ghosts of his past and the golden decade of the 1970s to become a global superstar reaching millions of new fans. In this rare moment, David Bowie, the costumed clown of romance, suffering, and song, let his mask slip to reveal David Jones, the man within.

“Written with a poet’s love for the jumble of words, the critic’s fierce interrogating eye, and the fan’s love of music, Silhouettes and Shadows is an essential read for anyone who takes Bowie seriously. Steiner brings out this unique stage in Bowie’s life and art in full colour and with a rich and intriguing weave of testimony and fresh insights .”
-David Buckley, author of David Bowie: Strange Fascination

“Steiner’s rich text brilliantly recreates the claustrophobic paranoia and relentless self-analysis of an album that seems more unsettling every time you hear it.”
-Peter Doggett, author of The Man Who Sold The World

“An insightful, expansive, and informed searchlight into the inner workings of one of the most essential recordings of Bowie’s oeuvre. Beautifully conceived and written with penetrating insight.”
-Chuck Hammer, guitarist

Reading Silhouettes and Shadows is like living with the album in real-time. In some chapters we are next to Bowie as he is creating the album; sometimes we are next to the photographers and artists putting together its dazzling cover; sometimes we are with the videographer shooting the groundbreaking video for “Ashes to Ashes;” sometimes we are with Steiner himself as a responsive, insightful listener to each song – it’s a pleasure to relive Scary Monsters in Steiner’s hands!”
–Glenn Hendler, author David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (33 ⅓)

“Both foreshadowed destination and a point of departure, Scary Monsters is a significant staging post in Bowie’s career. Adam Steiner’s erudite book communicates the thrill of an artist meeting the times, and his past, head on.”
-Graeme Thomson, author of Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds

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The Secret History of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

An avant-garde pop album rich with tension and fear, 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) marked a pivotal point in David Bowie’s career. Standing at the bleeding edge of the new decade it was here Bowie sought to bury the ghosts of his past and the golden decade of the 1970s to become a global superstar reaching millions of new fans. In this rare moment, David Bowie, the costumed clown of romance, suffering, and song, let his mask slip to reveal David Jones, the man within.

Learn more

“Written with a poet’s love for the jumble of words, the critic’s fierce interrogating eye, and the fan’s love of music, Silhouettes and Shadows is an essential read for anyone who takes Bowie seriously. Steiner brings out this unique stage in Bowie’s life and art in full colour and with a rich and intriguing weave of testimony and fresh insights .”
-David Buckley, author of David Bowie: Strange Fascination

“Steiner’s rich text brilliantly recreates the claustrophobic paranoia and relentless self-analysis of an album that seems more unsettling every time you hear it.”
-Peter Doggett, author of The Man Who Sold The World

“An insightful, expansive, and informed searchlight into the inner workings of one of the most essential recordings of Bowie’s oeuvre. Beautifully conceived and written with penetrating insight.”
-Chuck Hammer, guitarist

Reading Silhouettes and Shadows is like living with the album in real-time. In some chapters we are next to Bowie as he is creating the album; sometimes we are next to the photographers and artists putting together its dazzling cover; sometimes we are with the videographer shooting the groundbreaking video for “Ashes to Ashes;” sometimes we are with Steiner himself as a responsive, insightful listener to each song – it’s a pleasure to relive Scary Monsters in Steiner’s hands!”
–Glenn Hendler, author David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (33 ⅓)

“Both foreshadowed destination and a point of departure, Scary Monsters is a significant staging post in Bowie’s career. Adam Steiner’s erudite book communicates the thrill of an artist meeting the times, and his past, head on.”
-Graeme Thomson, author of Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds

PAGES OF HACKNEY | BOOKSHOP.ORG
WATERSTONES | RESIDENT | TARGET | FOYLES | WOB | BARNES & NOBLE |
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD