Recommendations of the Editorial team
David Bowies Berliner years are the focus of a new one BBC-Documentation. Under the working title “Bowie in Berlin”, the 90-minute film is scheduled to appear on BBC Two and BBC IPlayer in autumn 2026. An exact date is still pending. But it is already clear: it will be a look at one of the most formative phases in the life of the musician.
Bowie retired to Berlin between 1976 and 1978 to escape his cocaine addiction and to realign his artistic career. The decision turned out to be a turning point. During this time, the three celebrated albums “Low”, “Heroes” and “Lodger”, which later entered music history as “Berlin Trilogy”.
The documentary uses archive material and also illuminates Bowie’s environment in Berlin. The focus is on four women who became central reference points for the musician: Clare Shenstone, Romy Haag, Sarah-Rena Hine and Sydne Rome. Each of them shaped Bowie in different ways. As a muse, source of inspiration and reflection of his artistic and personal search.
Berlin as a turning point
“These women saw a Bowie that nobody else saw,” says the BBC announcement. They would have helped him to loosen from his stage figures and to return to the stage as David Robert Jones – his bourgeois name. Directed by Francis Whatly, who already realized Bowie document like “Finding Fame”, “Five Years” and “The Last Five Years”.
He is supported by Louis Theroux, who is on board as an executive producer. Theroux described the project as a “dream project” and emphasized that Bowie’s Berlin time looked like a melting pot of his artistic rebirth. Here he “reached the low point, but at the same time created some of his most personal works”.
In addition to the Berlin trilogy, Bowie also played a crucial role in the restart of his close friend Iggy Pop. Its albums “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life” also emerged in Berlin, with Bowie as a musical co -designer. The friendship of the two artists and the collaboration with Brian Eno made Berlin the creative center of an entire era.
The legacy lives on
An anecdote illustrates the creative energy of those years. Bowie developed a chord sequence on the ukulele from simple television signals and asked Iggy Pop to make a song out of it. The result became “Lust for Life”, a classic in rock history.
You can already pre-order the Rolling Stone edition 11/2025. This includes: not only our cover story for the past few years, but also the global explanation of a “Blackstar” song, which Bowie oriented to a Berlin song from 1977: “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, which quotes the harmonica melody of “A New Career in A New Town”.