I woke up to them talking about David Bowie on BBC Radio 4 at about 7:10 on Monday morning. At first, I thought they were just doing a review of the new album…but as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes I realised that they were talking about him in the past tense 🙁 #MadeMeCry Yes, it is awful. I was very, very upset, couldn’t believe it… o_O The news of his death. And, how upset I was, I mean. We’ve been rehearsing Life on Mars with the band, I sang Space Oddity with my finger-crippling 12-string and tried to sing Wild is the Wind on Monday. I couldn’t manage the latter, it’s too strong a song, it’s making me well up thinking of the melody, right now, days later.
I do feel like my generation of fans knew him as more than just some celeb art rockstar, he’s been ubiquitous for the whole of my life since first hearing Space Oddity on the telly and radio when I would’ve been 3 years old…so not quite the whole of my life, but almost…there was Laughing Gnome and for a pre-schooler that was a quite amusing delight. But, it was the rockers, Ziggy, Gene etc that got me going at the time of first hearing the likes of Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan and T-Rex and the like when I was still just a bairn.
Several friends and not a few conspiracy theorists have mused on the possibility that it’s a massive bad taste hoax, a PR stunt or an artistic statement itself. After all, did nobody know he was ill? We all knew Lemmy had cancelled shows and was on the ropes long before they announced his cancer and subsequent death. How did Bowie keep it so quiet? More to the point how did he manage to create Blackstar with all its accoutrements while presumably so ill with the liver cancer that would kill him?
There was an announcement from his Berlin trilogy collaborator Brian Eno that suggests even he hadn’t known, although the last email from Bowie (signed Dawn) made him realise in retrospect that it was a “goodbye”. (Again, welling up). It’s not a conspiracy, he’s not Lazarus, he isn’t coming back; the video was very disturbing even before his death was announced. But, he engineered his last days to be the ultimate multimedia art installation, the most personal kind. Perhaps not quite on a par with the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, nor the Albert Memorial, but, you know, something that should leave the likes of Emin, Hirst and their ilk gasping in its thrall.
Bowie took the piss, he set whole packs of cats, not among pigeons, but among prized showbirds. He told tales, he read Viz, and Spike Milligan and Anthony Burgess and Bruce Chatwin. He was presumably rather amused by scientists naming a Malaysian spider with spiky orange hair Heteropoda davidbowie, how could he not have been? The last account his twitter followed was @TheTweetofGod.
I’ve laid claim to some kind of vague connection with Bowie in the last couple of years having met guitarist John “Hutch” Hutchinson who was Bowie’s early collaborator and the original “Ground Control” to Bowie’s “Major Tom” in the demo of the song and played the original 12-string; it’s a duet, see? Hutch was later an “auxiliary” Spider from Mars too and tells quite the tale of their times together in his book Bowie and Hutch. But, that’s not a real connection, I never met, him, wasn’t even that fussed about the attitude and the stance, although I respect and understand them (I think). It was never the costumes nor characters, nor the acting.
For me, it was always the music, not all of it, just the good stuff. So, it’s strange that I am grieving, like so many others, someone I never met, never knew except in the context of his artistic output and have no real reason to mourn above and beyond the death of any of the millions of others who died on the same day. I suspect that the feeling exist as a proxy for the loss of our own dreams, the passing years and the inevitable end. But, in his death, this ultimate artistic statement there remains wonder, but, sadly, even if we can sparkle, he won’t land tonight. (Welling again).”I mean look even the initials are the same”
Goodbye Starman.