David Bowie's Final Years: Inside the New HBO Doc

On January 11, 2016, Francis Whately overslept. An insomniac, Whately often struggles to fall asleep, though he’s noticed that when something very bad happens, he tends to sleep right through it.

Whately’s alarm didn’t go off that morning. He woke around 9:30, turned on his cell phone and was greeted by two dozen text messages and voicemails: David Bowie was dead. There was a request to appear on a radio program, too, but Whately had already slept through it, which was fine, because he needed time to process this news. Two days after the rock star’s 69th birthday, he had succumbed to a cancer he’d fought in secret for more than a year.

Whately, a documentary filmmaker and the director of the 2013 BBC film , which examines the star’s 1970s and ‘80s heyday, was stunned. He had. Still, there had been clues, like the persistent imagery of death and mortality on the new album. “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” Bowie sings at the start of one song. “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.”