David Bowie and Blackstar: The reclusive rock god is still a star man

David Bowie is not like other men. There are those eyes, for starters: so like an alien, he was an obvious choice to play the lead in The Man Who Fell to Earth from the first moment he transfixed director Nicolas Roeg with that asymmetrical stare. Less flippantly, there's the way he's treated pop music as a platform for role-playing, in terms of both music and character. Traditionally, pop stars located the source of their appeal early on, and stuck rigidly to it. Only when a gifted few challenged this showbiz assumption did the notion of progress, of career development, shift from the purely commercial towards something more artistically intriguing.

And none was more intriguing than Bowie, the first star to wield androgyny with such shameless sexual provocation that he not only created a new genre, but helped overturn generations of antediluvian attitudes. He then darted off on different artistic and theatrical tangents at a dizzying pace that challenged his fanbase to keep up with him as he developed and discarded the series of personae through which he seemed to channel his creativity.

That they managed to keep up was testament to the baptism of fire faced by early glam-rock adherents, a trial that both inspired lasting devotion and sowed the seeds of autodidactic discovery. For hundreds of thousands of heretofore ordinary, dead-end kids, art and literature and music were suddenly illuminated as ways of seeing and being, as worlds of personal possibility, in a way that school had rarely managed to reveal.

Those fans became the first punks, effectively inspired by Bowie to overturn an entire music hegemony in a cultural revolution that only he, of those established stars, would survive with reputation intact.

So we shouldn't expect David Bowie to do things the usual way, like trumpeting his comeback from the hilltops, via a carefully organised series of high-profile interviews and media appearances. When, early in 2013, the single “Where Are We Now?” suddenly appeared for sale with no prior warning, breaking his self-imposed decade of silence, the wave of shock generated a curiosity that bore its parent album, The Next Day, to Bowie's highest chart placing for 20 years. Following his lead, the no-promo strategy soon became a showbiz commonplace, though its efficacy was inevitably linked to an artist's previous stature.

Likewise, we oughtn't to expect a David Bowie jukebox musical to follow the usual formula, in which an artist's biggest hits are shoehorned into a flimsy narrative depicting, if we're lucky, a biographical account of their struggle for success, or, if we're less lucky, a crass fantasy. When it became known that Bowie was working with writer Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove on a musical play extending the stranded-alien concept of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the first things that popped happily into most peoples' heads were “Starman” and “Space Oddity” – so, of course, neither of these feature in the stage production of Lazarus at all.

And while it is assuredly a fantasy, it could hardly be described as crass – indeed, most reviewers have struggled to fathom exactly what's going on in a production variously described as “hallucinatory”, “mind-numbing”, “a sensory stimulation chamber” and perhaps less attractively, “a work of blistering nihilism”.

Starring Dexter's Michael C Hall as the depressed, gin-sodden alien plutocrat Thomas Jerome Newton, the play presents his interactions with a series of characters, some of whom are mere figments of his imagination, and at least one of whom is actually dead. At various points, one character or another bursts into song, accompanied by a band sequestered behind a glass screen. However, the songs – five of which are new, including “Lazarus” itself from Bowie's forthcoming album, Blackstar – apparently have only the most tenuous connection, if that, with the onstage action, which sounds like a colourful riot of performance-art choreography, video projection, surrealism, general weirdness, and speculative philosophy. Exactly what any real Bowie aficionado would want, in other words.

Bowie's central involvement in Lazarus is also unusual in that it is the first time in his career that he has returned to previously trodden territory. While other “heritage acts” perform their most fondly remembered albums to nostalgic fans, Bowie has steadfastly rejected the notion, retreating from any personal performance at all. Hence, perhaps, the play's title, reflecting a persona brought back from the dead. Or, indeed, Bowie's own career, restored to potency after years of comatose inactivity. It's not hard to imagine the singer, holed up in his New York base, gazing at the world with a mix of stoicism, artistic fascination and melancholy nihilism. But that, of course, would be to impose the kind of analogous biographical parallel strenuously avoided in the play itself. Perhaps…

It's undeniable, however, that Bowie is currently in the midst of a creative surge, the next expression of which arrives on his 69th birthday, 8 January. Blackstar is unlike any album he has released, on several counts. For the first time, he's not present visually on the sleeve, which features simply a star and the word “bowie” created from fragments of the star-shape, resembling cuneiform writing. If The Next Day's cover image presented Bowie partly obscuring his past, here he's wiped it out completely.

That's certainly the impression given by the music, too: where The Next Day was comfortingly couched in a range of sounds and styles familiar from his earlier albums, Blackstar is a work of sonic extremity with only marginal relation to his past at all. Instead of finely turned songcraft, its seven long pieces rely for the most part on repetitive, open grooves predominantly inhabited by the writhing, abstract sax improvisations and furious jungle-esque drumming of Donny McCaslin's jazz combo, Bowie's accompanists throughout. Guitar is barely featured at all, present as just an intro vamp on one song and a single, balletic lead break towards the close of the final track. With Bowie crooning in alienated soul mode, the turbulent, overbearing, sometimes shrill power of the music recalls the uncompromising nature of Scott Walker's recent albums, and Tim Buckley's exploratory masterpiece, Starsailor, and is liable to divide fans in a similar manner.

Lyrically, it's little clearer, apart from the obvious references to the fallen alien Newton in “Lazarus”. The 10-minute title track, for instance, finds Bowie wondering “How many times does an angel fall?”, and sketching a tableau – villa, lone candle, execution – which, allied to the track's vaguely Middle-Eastern atmosphere and the repeated claim “I'm a black star”, has led to (flatly denied) suggestions that it's about the rise of Isis/Daesh. Long renowned for his interest in cut-up lyrics, Bowie delves into alternative lyrical strategies in “Girl Loves Me”, a mad polyglot babble: like some of Eliot's poetry, it should probably come with footnotes.

The song's only reliably distinct line is the repeated query “Where the fuck did Monday go?”, which adds to the overall sense of confusion conveyed by Blackstar. At times, Bowie sounds here like a man voluntarily adrift in a world he can neither control nor comprehend, a cork bobbing on a stormy sea, seeking to make land somewhere new.

The closest precedent in his earlier career is probably Station to Station, which found him stranded between America and Europe, en route from ersatz soul to krautrock motorik, searching for the new world that would come with Low. Something similar seems to be happening here, and with similarly thrilling energy, as Bowie effectively bids adieu to his past and bravely sets out to seek a new future in his 70th year, an age when most are winding down. But then, David Bowie is not like other men.