What did David Bowie mean by ‘No confessions/ No religion’ in his lyrics to ‘Modern Love’? Peter Ormerod proposes what at first seems an unlikely theory – that Bowie was talking about Gnosticism, the complex spiritual, though not religious, belief that God lies beyond the material world and that all humans carry a divine spark within.

Ormerod admits that perceiving intellectual depths in a hit single sounds far-fetched – ‘an attempt to find weight in a scrap of fluff’. But he points out that Gnosticism, with its rejection of organised religion and its trust in God and man, was one of Bowie’s lifelong obsessions: a sincere enthusiasm he shared with Leo Tolstoy and Carl Jung.

A journalist who grew up in the clergy, Ormerod has written one of the best and most original books of those published to mark a decade since Bowie’s death from cancer in January 2016. Bowie, defined in his lifetime by his relentless capacity for reinvention, has transmogrified again – from pop star to wellspring of ideas. Ormerod examines his subject through the prism of religion and spirituality, suggesting God underpinned Bowie’s life and entire musical career, from suburban 1950s choirboy to Blackstar, his existential, death-defying final album of 2016. The outer reaches of religious thought caught Bowie’s imagination, including occultism. But Ormerod’s evidence for a broader, lifelong spiritual quest is compelling. The Bowie you thought you knew is recast completely.

One surprise is how much Bowie talked about God. He told an interviewer in 1996:

There’s a term that the Gnostics use, which is called the God beyond God. There’s a sense that one is trying to find some merit in the chaos that we perceive as our existence… I think that’s one of the major searches that I’ve probably made in my life.

Equally interesting is how intensely spiritual Bowie’s lyrics were, even when he was not talking directly about religion. Those of ‘Modern Love’ are among countless examples. As are these, from ‘A Better Future’ on 2002’s Heathen album: ‘Please don’t tear this world asunder/ Please take back this fear we’re under.’ Ormerod interprets them as a plea to a deity. Bowie maintained that his 1971 song ‘Life on Mars?’ arrived fully formed, as if sent by a higher force. And he often claimed that the title of Station to Station, the 1976 album recorded at the height of his drug-induced paranoia, referred to the Stations of the Cross.

The outer reaches of religious thought caught Bowie’s imagination, including occultism

Ormerod is at pains to point out where his observations are interpretations, and he acknowledges when evidence is thin, which it sometimes is. Whether Bowie ever found his God is unknown; but his search led to a body of work that changed lives and the wider culture forever.

Ormerod’s gift to readers is his wide-ranging citations. That is not the case with Paul Morley’s Far Above the World, a seductively packaged, entertaining but at times perplexing book. It is billed as an exploration of Bowie as a cultural force through biography and is full of admiration, enthusiasm and intensely vivid scenes, laden with extravagant metaphors. (For example, on Bowie producing Iggy Pop’s 1973 album Raw Power: ‘Bowie shrivelled the Stooges’s traditional place-shattering distortion to singed skin and bone.’)

This is Morley’s second book about Bowie. His first, 2016’s The Age of Bowie, was intentionally offbeat but hindered by the writer’s self-imposed ten-week deadline following his subject’s death. This new one feels like an attempt to rectify the rushed nature of the first, and often reads as if Morley would have preferred to write a memoir of his own fandom. He doesn’t give his sources and there are no citations, so we have to take him at his word, which means that those hoping for a conventional biography should look elsewhere. But Morley’s books are enjoyable as collections of thoughts and impressions, a little like sifting through the contents of his brain.

Alexander Larman’s Lazarus is the first book to deal solely with the second half of his subject’s career, from the Tin Machine experiments in hard rock of the late 1980s onwards – less examined than Bowie’s origin story, but equally rich in drama. Larman is another Bowie fan, but his curiosity about the origins of the music, studio dynamics and motivations draws him to established facts rather than romantic visions. His sources also include original interviews, particularly those with Gail Ann Dorsey and Reeves Gabrels of Bowie’s dazzling touring band. (Gabrels, also of Tin Machine, tells Larman that by 2016 he had long lost contact with his former collaborator but dreamt about him vividly the night he died.)

Today, Bowie is treated as something close to a cultural god. But the second half of his career was often a bitter struggle for attention. Larman reminds us that Tin Machine was a creative success but a catastrophic critical failure from which Bowie took decades to recover. ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, his 1995 anthemic disco hit with the Pet Shop Boys, peaked at No. 12 in the UK; it would be nearly 20 years before Bowie had a bigger hit. Much of his later years were spent thrashing about, dabbling in arts journalism, acting, the internet, financial instruments, even wallpaper design, until the creative reset and acclaim that arrived with 2013’s album The Next Day and the V&A’s multimedia career retrospective exhibition David Bowie Is…

The latter was a smash with museum- goers, who found its mix of music, art, serious scholarship and the zeitgeist irresistible. It went on a five-year world tour and changed the fortunes of the V&A. The accompanying catalogue (V&A, £32) has just been extended and updated with two new chapters: an essay about the making of the exhibition by the curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, and a chapter on the David Bowie Archive.

David Bowie Is… may have helped restore Bowie’s status by reminding audiences of his prolific output and quicksilver talent, but the essay reveals that its success was never certain and its production was fraught. In a rare surrender of creative control, Bowie had nothing to do with it other than granting the curators access to his archives. The project was nearly cancelled several times, seemingly over high stress levels and the risk of financial disaster. Now, anyone has the same access to Bowie’s 90,000 archived items at the V&A’s East Storehouse facility, which opened last year.

After Bowie’s death, the semi-serious observation that he was somehow ‘holding the universe together’ was often heard every time a destabilising shift – Brexit, the rise of the far right, the pandemic – occurred (most of these books mention this, too). Bowie was not cosmic glue; there were geopolitical disruptions and natural disasters in his lifetime. But it seems that way to the generations that made pop music central to their lives. As Hanif Kureishi, Bowie’s friend and collaborator, told the Guardian: ‘Bowie was this ruling god… he was a figurehead for us… he liberated all suburban teenagers.’

Whether Bowie’s supremacy and cultural relevance will outlast the living memory of those generations is unknown. For now, he’s very much alive in books, archives and the collective imagination. Perhaps future generations will reinvent him again.