Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

ecall. “And there were pieces of me all over the
floor.”
Hughes increasingly had no idea what Bowie was
talking about. “Do the dead concern themselves with
the affairs of the living? Can I change the channels
without using the clicker?” Bowie jokes during his
episode of VH1’s Storytellers, taped in 1999 and
released to retail a decade later. Other obsessions
included an obscure form of photography called
Kirlian, which is supposed to capture the aura as
well as the flesh.
“He felt inclined to go on very bizarre tangents
about Aleister Crowley or the Nazis or numerals a
lot,” Hughes says. “It’d leave me scratching my head.
He was completely wired. Maniacally wired. I could
not keep up with him. He was on the edge all the
time of paranoia, and also going on about things I
had no friggin’ idea of what he was talking about.
He’d go into a rap on it and I wouldn’t know what he
was talking about; remember, I was pretty loaded. I
was thinking about sex and he was thinking about …
whatever.”
“My other fascination was with the Nazis and their
search for the Holy Grail,” Bowie later clarified.
“There was this theory that they had come to
England at some point before the war to Glastonbury
to try to find the Holy Grail. It was this Arthurian need,
this search for a mythological link with God. But
somewhere along the line it was perverted by what I
was reading and what I was drawn to. And it was
nobody’s fault but my own.”