What follows is a brief account of fifty-plus years in the life of a Bowie fan. In recognition of the tenth anniversary of his death, here is My Life With Bowie.
NB. this post includes my own personal subjective opinions. They might not be the same as yours - if they're not, I don't need to hear about it.
Some breaking news in just now this morning... it's been confirmed that David Bowie, singer and musician, has died at the age of sixty-nine.
- BILL TURNBULL, BBC Breakfast News, 11th January 2016
What David Bowie gave to our world can't be overestimated. His death at the top of 2016 shocked the world: we'd all just assumed he was immortal. You have to take a step back to really appreciate what a gargantuan this man was. It's a gross understatement to say that he changed the world; of course he changed it.
Our planet without him is a much bigger, much blander and much less colourful place.
When I first saw the Lazarus video I thought it was amazing and brilliant and all the other superlatives you'd normally associate with Bowie. Here was the Thin White Duke as an old man, craggy and grey-haired but still bursting with the genius and originality and depth he was well-known for. A new character to add to the line-up: a blinded prophet in a hospital bed, dragging the last shreds of creativity from his soul and frantically putting them down on paper while he still had the chance. Retreating into a closet and closing the door on himself. Of course he was saying goodbye.
By now Bowie was indelibly entrenched in my DNA. I'd been vaguely aware of him in the early Seventies via Space Oddity and Changes and Starman but what really made me sit up and take notice was his appearance on Top Of The Pops on 4th January 1973. I was eleven, not quite into music yet, but for some reason The Jean Genie hit the spot.
I bought Aladdin Sane and was delighted to hear the word "wanking" in one of the songs.
Someone at school (I can't remember who) thought the last track on Side 2 was called "lyrics within".
I lost a 10p bet to a boy at school because my mum insisted that The Laughing Gnome was by Anthony Newley and I believed her.
As the Seventies progressed I became what you'd call a serious Bowie fan. I set about acquiring his back catalogue and Hunky Dory quickly became my favourite.
He was on tour in 1978 so I snapped up some tickets. Three, at £4 each: one for me and one each for my friends Mark and Andy. Except, for some unfathomable reason, Mark didn't want to go. As it happened my cousin's boyfriend was after a ticket, and offered me £15 for my spare. I didn't need much persuading.
So on Saturday 1st July I was there at Earls Court, high up on the balcony. Bowie strode onstage with the rest of the band, no fanfare and no pyrotechnics and no lightshow. The house lights didn't even go down. He just started playing. Warszawa (which for decades I'd pronounced "Warsaw" but found out the correct pronunciation years later ("Var-sha-va")). The first half of the show was mostly new stuff from Low and "Heroes".
Then after the intermission he performed a lot of stuff from the early Seventies as well as obscure stuff like Alabama Song (me, and thousands of others: "what the fuck is this?").
So I eagerly awaited the next album. I'd booked tickets to see The Tubes in 1979 but the shows were cancelled after Fee Waybill broke his leg. I was due a refund from the record shop in Hammersmith where I'd bought the tickets, but instead I opted for a copy of Lodger when it was released a couple of weeks after my eighteenth birthday.
In the meantime Bowie was on Capital Radio, introducing the album with a few fans joining him on air (they were told beforehand that they could ask him about anything except his marriage and his son Zowie).
So I was familiar with this brilliant record before I got my copy; frustratingly, I didn't get my hands on it until over a week after everyone else. I bought my girlfriend Andrea a copy on the day of release and played a bit of Fantastic Voyage on a little record player at Hamleys (we both worked there at the time). "Do you want to take it home?" she asked.
On my way home from work one day, I was on the escalator at Oxford Circus tube station and one of the metre-high laminated Lodger posters had come loose. So I grabbed that and brought it home and proudly displayed it in my bedroom.
By the time Scary Monsters came out the following year I was a dyed-in-the-wool Bowie disciple. Ashes To Ashes was on the radio six or seven times a day and I never got fed up with hearing it. I was working at Debenhams at the time, and asked the guy in the record department if he could keep the display material for me once they'd finished with it. So I soon found myself on the tube with two huge cardboard posters with Bowie's face on them. I kept one for myself and gave the other to my mate Kev.
Kev had previously given me a (nearly) life-size Lodger cardboard cut-out which I tacked to my bedroom ceiling for a while. He also introduced me to a lot of rare and unreleased material like You Didn't Hear It From Me, Who Can I Be Now? and the US remix of Rebel Rebel. He travelled to New York to see The Elephant Man, and after waiting backstage leapt into the back of Bowie's limo and kissed his hand.
Bowie's triumphant return to the scene in 1983 was a huge comfort to me at a difficult time. He seemed to be everywhere at once: Let's Dance, the Serious Moonlight tour, The Hunger, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. '83 was Bowie's year.
My ticket stub from the Serious Moonlight tour.
His so-called "Phil Collins years" were of little interest. Tonight was disappointing, Never Let Me Down even more so. Following his rise to ubiquitous mega-stardom with Let's Dance it all seemed to have fallen a bit flat. I went to buy Day-In, Day-Out from one of my two local record shops on its day of release in 1987.
Me: "Is the new Bowie twelve-inch in yet?"
Gormless spotty teenager behind the counter: "Oo?"
Me: "Bowie."
Gormless spotty teenager: "David Baaaawie?"
That was the moment I realised the world had moved on from David Bowie.
I missed the Glass Spider tour, and seemed to have slept through the Tin Machine period (1989-91). My third and final live Bowie moment, at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert in April 1992, was pretty unremarkable.
But when he returned with a new "solo album" in 1993 I was all ears. Black Tie White Noise had more gems on it than his entire post-1983 output to date. You've Been Around. Black Tie White Noise. Nite Flights. There were a lot of jazz-inspired moments on it, like the amazing Looking For Lester, and I was hoping for more of the same. So I was disappointed when I read that his next album was going to be an experimental project in collaboration with Eno.
Until I heard it. 1. Outside (1995) (the first part of a trilogy that never materialised) was crammed full of weird, uncompromising, dark, gothic industrial masterpieces. We'd got our Bowie back! I'm Deranged, We Prick You, Wishful Beginnings, No Control, The Motel were all brilliant. The new version of Strangers When We Meet was about the greatest thing I'd ever heard. And the video for The Heart's Filthy Lesson was a dream come true.
Sadly, it wasn't to last. The follow-up, Earthling, was a load of shit. Virtually unlistenable jungle tripe. The absolute nadir of his recording career. A couple of years later hours... followed, an acoustic-based attempt to revisit the spirit of Hunky Dory. That wasn't much cop either (the songs themselves are pretty boring and made worse by the atrocious guitarist Reeves Gabrels, formerly of Tin Machine).
Heathen followed in 2002 and that was much better. The three stand-out tracks, Sunday, Slip Away and Heathen (The Rays) were, again, head and shoulders above anything he'd recorded since Outside.
After the disappointingly ordinary Reality the following year there was nothing. By all accounts Bowie had been "close to death" after suffering a cardiac arrest onstage during the Reality tour. There were no live dates, no record releases, nothing. Reports came in sporadically, suggesting he had suffered a stroke, that he was terminally ill, that he'd retired. We all resigned ourselves to the likelihood that he'd stepped back for good and there'd be no more Bowie music.
And then suddenly, after ten years of silence, he came back. On his sixty-sixth birthday in 2013 a new single and album were announced. Where Are We Now? was available immediately, with the album The Next Day to follow in March. The Where Are We Now? video premiered the same day, full of references to Bowie's Berlin years, with the Duke looking (and sounding) old and frail. But it was Bowie. That was enough to put a big grin on the faces of Bowie fans everywhere. I was smiling all day.
The album had been recorded in secret with dire consequences promised for anyone involved who let the cat out of the bag. And it worked: it was a delightful surprise. The Duke was back.
It wasn't long before another album was announced. Blackstar was preceded by a couple of singles: the ten-minute Blackstar and the aforementioned Lazarus. The album was released on Bowie's sixty-ninth birthday, 8th January 2016 and as promised it was weird and dark and doomy and laden with ethereal freeform jazz sax.
Then three days later, at four minutes past seven in the morning, I was pottering about on my computer with the BBC news on in the background when Bowie's death was announced by the late Bill Turnbull. It was a horrible surprise which wiped out all the happiness I'd felt at his long-awaited return three years before.
I was in a daze for the rest of the day. Cycling to work was surreal. It was hard to concentrate on anything else or talk to anyone. At lunchtime I got a text message from my sister, which she'd written five hours before and hadn't sent. "Have you heard the news?" She's a fan too, and she was as freaked out as me.
I didn't stop shaking all day.
When I picked my nine-year-old daughter up from the child-minder she told me they'd played Starman in assembly at school that morning. That was kind of the last straw, which brought me close to tears. The tributes on the evening news programmes brought me closer. The "rest in peace" ticker at the BT Tower. The tweets from the likes of Paul McCartney, Iggy Pop, Eno, Mick Jagger and the Stones, Madonna, Marc Almond, Yoko Ono, Tim Peake, Simon Pegg, even Kanye West. The whole world was freaked out. A world without Bowie. Wow.
Of course, it was only the mortal David Jones who had died. Bowie, the concept, the character, will live forever. How could he not?
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