David Bowie Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: academic to spend year as David Bowie's many personas Professor Will Brooker will spend months at a time experiencing the star’s life at different points through his 40-year career – from Ziggy Stardust to Let’s Dance Professor Will Brooker, and David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Photograph: Twitter/Rex 
 
 From Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke, a professor in London is living his life as David Bowie for a year to gain a better understanding of the pop icon’s mind and work. 
 
 
 
 Will Brooker, who teaches film and cultural studies at Kingston University, is spending a few months at a time experiencing specific moments of the star’s five-decade career – from adopting Bowie’s eating habits and poring over the literature he read, to visiting the same places as the English singer-songwriter. 
 
 Brooker – who has transitioned away from Bowie’s 1974 Philadelphia soul period, and from wearing thick blue eye shadow with shock of orange hair – has already been to Brixton, Bromley and Beckenham, and plans to go to Berlin next month. 
 
 will brooker (@willbrooker) This has been one of the more unusual days in my academic life pic.twitter.com/e70n3ksRQm 
 
 “The idea is to inhabit Bowie’s head space at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time – a kind of split persona perhaps,” Brooker said. 
 
 The academic, who has been commissioned to write a monograph about the singer called Forever Stardust, said his starting point as Bowie was the late 1960s. 
 
 A bright yellow suit, marking Bowie’s 1983 comeback tour, black waistcoats and large collared white shirts have also been lined up in the academic’s wardrobe. “These things are quite hard to source and I had to go to a tailor,” he said, adding that most of his secondhand Bowie-like outfits were pulled together from online marketplaces. 
 
 Brooker is also preparing for the 80s bleached perm, which he said Bowie himself described as a scrambled egg sitting on his head. 
 
 will brooker (@willbrooker) I think my immersion has confirmed the reason for Bowie's supposedly boring "Heroes" album hair. He wanted to become more anonymous 
 
 He plans to watch the same films Bowie would have done, and claims he has submitted himself to sleep deprivation and, some weekends, eaten only red peppers and drunk only milk. The project also involves listening only to songs Bowie would have heard. 
 
 He has read works by William Burroughs, the postmodernist writer of the Beat generation; Aleister Crowley, the English occultist; Michael Moorcock, the science fiction author, and ideas about the death of God and existentialism by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 
 
 
 
 
 “If you’re reading some strange science fiction and books about magic you can kind of get into Bowie’s head and see it’s sometimes quite a strange place. A dangerous place, a place you wouldn’t want to live too long.” 
 
 
 
 “The levels of cocaine Bowie was consuming is not just illegal for a professor like myself, but it’s much too expensive – as well as unhealthy,” Brooker said. “So at the weekend I had a six-pack of energy drinks to try and simulate the experience of illegal substances,” he told the Guardian. “It made me very jumpy.” 
 
 Brooker added: “The thought that kept returning to me was: how did Bowie survive the 70s? He really made himself very ill. So it’s wonderful that we had him through the 70s.” 
 
 
 
 Although a few makeup artists have helped Brooker with some of Bowie’s more elaborate looks, the culture professor said he did most of it himself, with “quite a collection of makeup”, and that the pigment of the strong 70s makeup is still in place when he wakes up in the morning. 
 
 For replicating Bowie’s Thin White Duke era, Brooker lit black candles in his room and painted expressionist pictures while listening to German music. “I just wanted to have that immersion,” he said. 
 
 “No one could be Bowie again, and I’m thinking no one would want to go through everything he went through, not really. But I want to get some taste of it.” 
 
 will brooker (@willbrooker) Unbelievable - I just dreamed a whole new Bowie song in my sleep and now I can't remember how it went #bowiesymposium 
 
 He added: “It’s fortunate that I’m going through his career chronologically. Because I think by ’83 he was pretty clean. I think I’ll get a tan, get fit, get my hair changed again, get my teeth whitened.” 
 
 During his teenage years when Brooker first came across Bowie, he repeatedly listened to a cassette of the Let’s Dance album on his Walkman. 
 
 He said he felt an affinity with Bowie, who had achieved a “balance between success and strangeness, between a necessary commercial pragmatism and a core of personal authenticity”. 
 
 His undergraduate students have not seen Brooker teach since he began his project, and he said he could assure them he would not be lecturing while in fully Ziggy regalia. 
 
 Brooker said he was not sure how Bowie would feel about his latest project: “I hope he would be interested in and amused by my research. I do feel, though, that everything he says and does in public is performance, so if he did hear about it, we would be unlikely to know what he genuinely thought.” 
 
 
 
 On Tuesday – as a picture disk was released commemorating the 40th anniversary of Bowie’s first No 1, Space Oddity – a spokesman for the singer said he had no comment on the transformation of the professor into the pop icon. ||||| Published on Jul 16, 2015 
 
 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/p... So, you think you're a David Bowie fan. Meet Professor Will Brooker. He's researching Bowie via 'The Method'; a process of transformative immersion in his experiences. 
 
 
 
 He listens only to music Bowie listened to. His hair, outfits, even eyebrows, are modelled after Bowie. He watches movies that influenced Bowie and is taking singing lessons to learn and study key songs. He's even eating red peppers and drinking milk as Bowie did. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Will Brooker - Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University ||||| With the release of Blackstar on his 69th birthday, the enigmatic singer shows he has rediscovered his gift for strangeness 
 
 It was a horribly mundane way for such an otherworldly figure to vanish from public view. While performing at a festival in Scheeßel, Germany, on 25 June 2004, David Bowie began to experience pains in his arm and shoulder. What the singer thought was a trapped nerve turned out to be an acutely blocked artery requiring emergency angioplasty. What was dismaying was not so much that this beloved figure – the totem for generations of social, sexual and psychic outsiders – could fall so seriously ill but that Bowie could be human at all. 
 
 His subsequent disappearance from live performance has since evolved into one of the most fascinating vanishing acts in pop music. Bowie has not toured since his illness – his final performance to date was a three-song set at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom in 2006 – and, predictably, conjecture has filled the vacuum of absence. Depending on who you listened to Bowie was either dying of lung cancer or he was healthy and happily watching SpongeBob SquarePants at home with Alexandria, his young daughter, and wife, the model Iman. There was simply no way to know. 
 
 Unsurprisingly, Bowie managed to parlay this enforced sabbatical into a uniquely effective career move. His stock rose hugely while he was away, turning anything he did into an event in its own right. The unexpected release of Where Are We Now? – his first new song in a decade, on his 66th birthday on 8 January 2013 – was such a surprise that reportedly even Bowie’s own PRs had not heard it until they were called upon to write a press release in the small hours of that very morning. Bowie has created a world where, just as in his 1970s pomp, everything he does is a news story. The exhaustive retrospective exhibition that followed, David Bowie Is …, at the V&A burnished his reputation further. 
 
 Now on Friday, the day he turns 69 comes Blackstar, his 26th album, which is as startling as anything he has done,taking in hip hop, Brechtian theatre and abstract jazz. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Bowie on stage at the Bercy in Paris in October 2003. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 “The layoff was a necessity that he turned into a benefit; it became part of the Bowie mystique,” says Paul Trynka, author of the acclaimed Bowie biography Starman and a former editor of Mojo magazine. “I actually think he’d been privately longing to go away for some time. Julian Temple [who directed Bowie in the movie Absolute Beginners] told me that even in the 80s Bowie wanted to perform a magnificent disappearing act – a magician’s trick. The heart attack forced that upon him, but it completely changed his fortunes. By not being as needy as the average pop star, that puts you on a hell of a pedestal.” 
 
 Bowie has plenty of past to escape. Born in Brixton in 1947 and raised in suburban Bromley – the son of waitress Peggy and nightclub owner turned Dr Barnardo’s promotions officer Haywood Jones – young David Jones attempted to insert himself into every one of post-rock’n’roll Britain’s ever-changing scenes before succeeding on his own terms. In today’s parlance, he was a try-hard. He adopted and discarded styles, musicians, managers and lovers with regularity. 
 
 When he finally broke through in 1972, it was as the shock-haired, rail-thin, androgynous alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, who remade rock’n’roll for the era. Henceforth pop would become a rallying point for the weird and the marginalised, a permanent outrage and – especially – succour to young people whose sexuality did not conform. 
 
 As Bowie discarded Ziggy for a succession of personae – the cadaverous, cocaine-addled soul boy of Young Americans, the austere European man-machine of his trilogy of Berlin albums – it became a cliche to describe him as a chameleon of pop. But this was to miss the point. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Bowie performs as Ziggy Stardust in Los Angeles in 1973. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images 
 
 “The idea that he puts on a mask simply to market what he’s done is mistaken,” says Trynka. “Actually, he creates the mask in order to make the art. A chameleon changes to mimic its background. Bowie forces the background to change to mimic him. His great achievement is not to market himself with a persona, it’s to create a persona with which to make art.” 
 
 His most globally successful album, 1983’s Let’s Dance, appeared to expose the “real” David Bowie, but it left Bowie the artist with nowhere to go. He subsequently fell into a steep creative decline. Whether trying to court an audience with the gauche stadium noise of Never Let Me Down or provoke it with his garage band Tin Machine, nothing seemed to work. 
 
 “All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience,” Bowie admitted to Paul du Noyer of The Word magazine in 2003, in one of his last interviews before disappearing. “My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.” 
 
 The Bowie that Du Noyer met had largely repaired his reputation with a landmark performance at Glastonbury in 2000 and a series of well-received albums. He was also well into his life as health-conscious New York homebody, rising at 6.30am, boxing three times a week and warding off cigarette pangs with minty herbal toothpicks. He talked of writing a novel about female trade unionists in the 1890s and of his love for his young daughter. “It’s not that work doesn’t seem a priority, but it puts it in perspective,” Bowie told Du Noyer, adding with ironic foresight, “You realise that working in front of a crowd is not a life-threatening situation.” 
 
 “He was as charming and polite as the best stage Englishman you could ever hope to meet in New York,” Du Noyer recalls. “The tragedy of David Bowie is that he’s spent his life adopting personae with the result that nobody quite believes him when he tries to do normal. Nowadays he might be every bit as ordinary as he wants us to think he is.” 
 
 His collaborators observe an impenetrable omertà backed up by strict non-disclosure agreements. This can be painful. “I was on the cover of the Christmas issue of Guitar Player magazine,” the long-time Bowie guitarist Earl Slick told Alexis Petridis in January 2013. “I’m making a new Bowie album and I can’t tell them anything.” 
 
 Even Bowie’s finest producer, Tony Visconti, who returned for The Next Day and Blackstar, works on a need-to-know basis. “Whenever he calls me it’s always a surprise because there’s no leading up to it, there’s no hint,” he told Mojo magazine this month. “It’s just ‘I’m ready’.” 
 
 David Bowie: Blackstar review – 'As a taster for the forthcoming album, it works perfectly' Read more 
 
 Which leaves us with only the music to go on. “There’s usually an inexorable drift to the centre as time goes on,” says Du Noyer. “Bob Dylan makes Christmas albums nowadays. Not so David Bowie. He’s rediscovered his gift for strangeness.” 
 
 In an overmediated time where social media robs everything of its mystery, Bowie’s obstinate refusal to play along is almost a work of art in itself. Sphinx-like, he may infuriate. But at least he’s consistent. “When I’m really famous,” he told a colleague in the 1960s, when the notion of young Davey Jones as a star of any importance seemed absurd, “I’m not going to talk to anyone. Not even the band.” Today, he is as good as his word. 
 
 David Bowie: fact file 
 
 Born: David Robert Jones, 8 January 1947 in Brixton 
 
 Career: Studied art and design at Bromley Technical high school (“a complete exhibitionist,” said his fifth year report. “If he were capable of continuous effort his ability would have been put to better use.”) Trainee commercial artist at advertising agency Nevin D Hirst in New Bond Street. Subsequently full-time musician, actor, dancer and househusband. 
 
 High point: Creating the single Heroes with Brian Eno in 1977. Inspired by the sight of producer Tony Visconti kissing his German girlfriend Antonia Maass by the Berlin Wall, the song became an anthem of individual freedom. Bowie performed the song at the wall in 1987: “We heard that a few East Berliners might get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn’t realise in what numbers,” he recalled. “It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. I was in tears.” He would later play the song at Paul McCartney’s post-9/11 Concert for New York in 2001. 
 
 Low point: A toe-curling version of Martha & The Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street, recorded with Mick Jagger for Live Aid. “The band started playing it and it sounded fucking awful,” lamented the record producer Alan Winstanley to Bowie biographer David Buckley. “I had my head in my hands thinking what the fuck is this?” 
 
 What he says: “The source of all my frustrations is hammering away at the same questions I’ve had since I was 19, this daunting spiritual search,” he told The Word magazine in 2003. “They’re continual questions and they seem to be the essence of what I’ve written over time. And I’m not going to stop.” 
 
 What they say: “Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn’t exist.” – Moby.
– How does one truly understand David Bowie? Only by becoming him, of course. That's just what Will Brooker is in the midst of doing. The film and cultural studies professor from Kingston University in England says he'll dress like Bowie, eat like Bowie, watch the same movies and read the same books as Bowie, and act like Bowie's various personas over the course of a year, all in the name of research for a book he's writing on the pop icon, reports the Guardian. "The idea is to inhabit Bowie's headspace at points in his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time," Brooker says. He last month told Australia's ABC News in a video interview he started the project as "1965 Bowie"; he has lately emulated Bowie's 1974 Philadelphia soul period. He'll suffer from a lack of sleep but avoid cocaine. "The levels of cocaine Bowie was consuming is not just illegal for a professor like myself, but it's much too expensive—as well as unhealthy," Brooker says. "I had a six-pack of energy drinks to try and simulate the experience," he adds. "It made me very jumpy." He'll also likely avoid "a fling with Mick Jagger," he says, per Rolling Stone. But he consumed only red peppers and milk for a time and has visited cities linked to the singer. The project is likely to be anything but boring, but a year as the icon will be more than enough. Bowie's head can be a "strange" and "dangerous" place, "a place you wouldn't want to live too long," Brooker says. Next up: 1983. "I think I'll get a tan, get fit, get my hair changed again, get my teeth whitened," he says. There's a bright yellow suit waiting in his closet. (Perhaps he'll visit this dying Bowie-linked town.)