There’s another BBC Bowie documentary on the way – but it won’t be on our screens for another year.
It’s called Bowie In Berlin and is due out in autumn 2026, when it will be 50 years since the Thin White Duke, seeking a new career in a new town, relocated from Los Angeles in a bid to kick cocaine and re-route his career.
We all know what happened next – the so-called Berlin trilogy, Iggy Pop, Eno, “Heroes”, entire sides of albums devoted to moody instrumentals. But in doing so, Bowie, as so often, was forging a new path that many other (lesser) artists would later take. So much so that ‘moving to Berlin and going a bit arty’ is now a rather hackneyed rock cliché in itself.
The BBC doc does sound as if it has dug a bit deeper than previous attempts to cover this ground. Significantly, they’ve spoken to four women who all knew Bowie during these years but have rarely been interviewed: Romy Haag, Claire Shenstone, Sarah-Rena Hine and Sydne Rome.
“These women saw a Bowie that nobody else saw,” says the BBC statement announcing the documentary. “(They) all gave him something different, helping his regeneration into an artist who no longer needed to hide behind characters, but was happy to perform as himself – David Robert Jones.”
The director is Francis Whately, who was also behind the camera for the BBC’s other Bowie docs, David Bowie: Finding Fame, David Bowie: Five Years and David Bowie: The Last Five Years, and the executive producer is Louis Theroux, who needs no introduction.
“This is a dream project,” said Theroux in a statement. “Francis’s three previous Bowie films are the gold standard for Bowie film-making and indeed for docs about music in general. To have his artistry focused on the Berlin years - using the lens of the women in Bowie's life - is a perfect match of director and material.
"There’s a wonderful unity of time and place to Bowie’s period in Berlin. He hit bottom, but he also found himself making some of his most personal music, then relaunched himself for the first time without a mask, as himself. So, Berlin is the crucible for his incredible regeneration and everything that came afterwards.”
Next January will mark ten years since the great man’s death, and there will, in all likelihood, be all sorts of Bowie-related malarkey coming our way in 2026. But for aficionados, Whately and Theroux’s project will be among the most anticipated.
