Being David Bowie: More than a year after his death, the rock star has a few surprises left

This week, David Bowie's final album Blackstar picked up five Grammy awards, the first Grammys the rock star has ever won for his music.

But while the awards placed the elusive rock star in the spotlight once again, Bowie himself remains an enigma.

The artist has long been known for keeping his secrets close. A year after Blackstar's release, fans are still uncovering the secrets hidden in its album art and the public knows little more now about the man born David Jones than when he passed away in January 2016.

According to Dr. Will Brooker, it's likely to stay that way.

"I think David Jones put David Bowie out there in his artwork, and that was the side of him that he wanted us to know," Brooker says.

Brooker is a professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University in England. And when it comes to Bowie and David Jones, he has more insight than most.

Brooker recently spent a year immersing himself in David Bowie's life. He dressed like Bowie, read the books Bowie read and even took on the rock star's diet — minus the cocaine.

The experience informs his new book, "Forever Stardust: David Bowie Across the Universe."

You couldn't simply divide it up in terms of years and months, because some of Bowie's decades were just so, so busy and accelerated in terms of what he did.- Dr. Will Brooker

As he tells Day 6 host Brent Bambury, being Bowie helped him get a better sense of the man behind the rock star's many masks.

"Behind David Bowie, behind the front... you could feel what David Jones was doing, where David Jones was steering it," he says.

"If you see a ship moving, you get a sense of the currents."

Bowie through the decades

It wasn't easy to compress Bowie's five-decade career into a single year, Brooker says.

"You couldn't simply divide it up in terms of years and months, because some of Bowie's decades were just so, so busy and accelerated in terms of what he did."

Brooker spent three months on the 1970s alone, making his way through key Bowie personas like the Thin White Duke and Ziggy Stardust and travelling to Germany to better understand what the artist experienced during his Berlin period.

One of the more memorable costumes Brooker wore was made by a designer from the British TV show "Strictly Come Dancing." It was a replica of an iconic Bowie costume from the early seventies, featuring red dungarees and the artist's famous black eye patch.

Brooker believes the seventies, particularly the Berlin period, were easily Bowie's most important years.

"His rate of production was insane," he says. "The number of albums he produced; the number of personas he went through; the amount that he toured. It was dangerously fast and that kind of rate could not be kept up."

In an attempt to better understand Bowie's mindset at the time, Brooker immersed himself in the literature Bowie was reading just before the Berlin period, while Bowie was living in Los Angeles. Much of it was about Nazism, fascism and the Occult.

His rate of production was insane ... It was dangerously fast.- Dr. Will Brooker

"Nazis and magic; that's a strange avenue to go down," Brooker says. "You can see how someone could easily spiral downhill to a very dangerous place."

"It was fortunate for us, and fortunate for David Bowie, I think, that he left Los Angeles and went to Berlin, where he kind of chilled out, and cooled down and cleaned up his act a little bit."

That decision, which Brooker believes may have saved Bowie's life, also led to some of Bowie's greatest work: the famous Berlin Trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger.

The man behind the masks

While David Bowie never stopped making music and art, he became more private in the later decades of his career.

"I sometimes think the greatest trick that David Bowie ever pulled was the creation of David Bowie. Or rather, I should say, the greatest trick that David Robert Jones ever pulled," Brooker muses.

"We don't really know a great deal about the man behind the mask that we took to be the real person."

I sometimes think the greatest trick that David Bowie ever pulled was the creation of David Bowie.- Dr. Will Brooker

David Jones was remarkably private throughout his artistic career — perhaps most notably at the end of his life, when he hid his terminal cancer diagnosis from all but his closest confidantes.

The 'Bowie' rock persona served as a vehicle for fame, and a decoy, helping Jones separate his public art and career from his private life.

"When you put out something so flamboyant and fascinating as a decoy, people don't look at your real self," Brooker says.

Jones' desire for privacy even extended into the afterlife, Brooker says; it's reported his body never even left the hospital after he died.

But even in his later years, David Bowie never stopped creating art and pushing his own creative boundaries.

"He kept on going and never retired," Brooker says. "I really admire the fact that in the face of defeat and critical failures and commercial failures… he didn't say, 'I'm giving up.'"

Brooker came to deeply appreciate that longevity and persistence during his own year of being Bowie.

"He wasn't the best actor, but he acted. He wasn't the best dancer, but he danced," Brooker says. "He wasn't even the best singer … But he was just great at being David Bowie."

"He's the only person who's ever going to be that good at being David Bowie."