The Gentle Rebel Podcast David Bowie’s Search for Life, Death and God (with Peter Ormerod)
Peter Ormerod is a journalist and writer who has written extensively about culture and faith for The Guardian, and he is also an arts editor for NationalWorld. He’s a very close friend of mine, so it was a real pleasure to speak with him in this capacity for The Gentle Rebel Podcast.
Peter has just published a wonderful book, David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God. It resonates deeply with many of the themes we explore in The Haven and on the podcast, particularly the idea of what sits below an experimental approach to life.
Speaking of which, Peter also makes beautiful music. You can listen here.
Beneath the Changes, a Consistent Question
What really interested me was this path Bowie embodied so visibly through his art. The shifting characters, styles, and phases across his career can look like constant reinvention on the surface. But Peter invites us to see something else at play.
What if these changes weren’t signs of restlessness, but expressions of something deep and consistent underneath? A spiritual thread running through Bowie’s life and work.
That question sits at the heart of Peter’s book. What if the spiritual wasn’t incidental to Bowie’s creativity, but an essential driving force beneath it? Peter shows how this dimension was present from the very beginning, and he takes us on a compelling journey through Bowie’s searching.
Writing the Book He Wanted to Read
Peter says that after first hearing Hunky Dory at seventeen, his growing obsession with Bowie left him fascinated by the spiritual dimension of Bowie’s creative drive. Other writers had touched on this in passing, but no one had really followed it through in depth.
So Peter ended up writing the book he wanted to read.
Bowie as Mirror Ball, Not Chameleon
In our conversation, we talk about Bowie’s legacy as something like a mirror ball. Shine a light on him and you get countless reflections. Everyone seems to have their own version of who Bowie was, something that became especially visible after his death.
He’s often framed through the lens of “ch-ch-ch-changes”, the chameleon of rock. But Peter challenges this reading. The more he researched, read, and listened, the more those changes appeared to be a natural outpouring of a deeper spiritual quest.
For experimental people, this can feel familiar. The outer paths shift, but the underlying question remains.
Spirituality Without a Vocabulary
A “spiritual interest” is often dismissed as a celebrity hobby, something that pops up and disappears. Peter makes a strong case that this wasn’t the case for Bowie.
Part of the difficulty is that we don’t really have a shared vocabulary for this territory, which is why we fall back on words like spirituality. Bowie himself was fond of the saying, “Religion is for people who believe in Hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.”
He was sharply critical of religious institutions when he felt they corrupted the message of love at the heart of Christianity. For Bowie, spirituality wasn’t ornamental. It was essential to how he related to his life, his work, and his place in the universe.
Seeking Without Arrival
Through the seeking you will find. Not seeking to reach a destination, but seeking as a way of being.
Why didn’t Bowie give up? What was he seeking? What was he finding? There were clearly things he encountered that made atheism feel insufficient, even when he was tempted by it.
If Bowie arrives anywhere, Peter suggests it’s something like this: life is a gift, and love is the point. This can sound oblique, but Peter traces it clearly in Bowie’s later work.
What we’re left with is the result of that searching, a remarkable body of work that we can return to, live with, and explore.
Creativity, Humanness, and Collaboration
There’s a danger in how Bowie is remembered. He can be lifted out of humanness, made to seem like an exception rather than a person.
Bowie wrote bad songs. He made misfires. All of it belonged to the same quest.
He’s sometimes misread as an unrooted artist, endlessly reinventing himself, but he was deeply sensitive to place and time. He always worked with others. He needed bands, collaborators, and creative relationships. His best work emerged through collaboration, not isolation.
Smuggling Meaning Rather Than Preaching It
Bowie was political, but he didn’t see political expression as his strongest artistic voice. He admired bands like The Clash for carrying that role more directly. This raises an interesting question about what we expect from celebrated figures, and how easily we project our demands onto them.
Bowie was more of a smuggler. At Live Aid, he played a song and showed a video instead. Let’s Dance sounds like it’s about one thing, but it’s really about something else. Much of his music did a similar thing.
This was the mark of his artistry. He invited a conversation rather than delivering a message. He trusted listeners to discover depth for themselves, without it being spoon-fed.
And for experimental people especially, that kind of invitation matters. It honours the idea that the path keeps unfolding, even when the question underneath remains the same.
