Yeah, when we announced a month of David Bowie movies, you weren’t expecting this one, were you? An adaptation of an obscure early Berthold Brecht play that Bowie recorded for the BBC in between Scary Monsters and Let’s Dance, Baal is quite probably the most challenging artefact in his screen career – and we’re including the Twin Peaks movie in that tally. But it’s also thematically linked to his music in a number of interesting ways, and it paired him with a great British director – the late Alan Clarke.
On this week’s episode, Graham is joined by We Are Cult‘s Mark Cunliffe once again to discuss the holy trinity of Brecht, Bowie and Clarke, as well as the way that Bowie’s screen career took off just as his musical career was hitting a troubled patch, the secret to success on Letterboxd and the vexed question of what Alan Clarke did in the Television Centre lifts. There may also be singing. We’re sorry.
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David Bowie in Baal
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