Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie By Angela Bowie

Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie
 By Angela Bowie and Patrick Carr

I was looking forward to reading Backstage Passes but, oh my. Angela Bowie seems angry. The anger I felt coming through in this book overshadowed pretty much everything else. There was this whole undertone of anger.

Why is Ms. Bowie angry? She had some of the best things in life. She is rich, famous, beautiful, and had a famous husband but is still angry. 

Truth is I finally think I understand why she is angry. Understanding why Angela Bowie is angry is not the same as agreeing with why she is angry. It wouldn’t be so bad if she had tried to contain her anger to a chapter or two but well . . . the anger is everything. 

There were many, many things about David Bowie I could have hoped to have learned. There are many things I could have hoped to have learned about the relationship between the two.

 I could have learned more about how she has inspired a tune or two of his - like “Golden Years”. I could have learned so many things. 

But Backstage Passes is a handbook on Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll . . . 

SEX: Right out of the gate we learn about the largess of a certain portion of  Bowie’s anatomy. Angela Bowie, according to her own recollections, had sex and lots and lots of sex with pretty much anyone she wanted to.

Drugs: Angie was certainly progressive when it came to her own drug use and David’s drug issues. Mr. Bowie, it seems, was the one with the addiction in the family. Addiction to anything is never good. 

Rock and Roll: Angie by the Rolling Stones and, Golden Years were songs written for her or about her. Maybe there were others but we don’t read anything about them. Too bad.

Angela Bowie was beautiful and married a very successful guy. She participated in life to its fullest and often seems to have enjoyed herself but I still come back to anger.

The pictures in the book are fine. There are shots of her, Bowie, and the pair of them together looking oddly similar. The Wonder Woman picture and the story that went with it were funny. Who knew that Angela Bowie was in the running to play the iconic character on screen before Linda Carter got the role and made television history.

 Angela Bowie wrote an ok book but Backstage Passes is not a must-read and that’s a shame. And it just wasn’t a lot of fun. A book about the legend David Bowie by someone as intimate with the icon as Angela was should have been so much more. It should have been more than just anger. The anger hangs over the book like a harbinger of doom and takes all the fun out of things.

It’s a perfectly passable passel of papers but nothing more.