That's Entertainment : David Bowie
So, here we are…2016.
I promised myself I’d make sure I kept to my one article each Friday this year (last year was a bit haphazard with so much on) and I wanted to go BIG. Really dive in to the record collection.
In essence, I wanted to make some ch-ch-changes.
Little did I know, that by the end of the first week of the year, I’d have a new album to sink my teeth in to and be mourning the death of a musical, artistic and cultural icon.
On Friday 8th January, (on his 69th birthday) David Bowie released his 25th studio album titled Blackstar. Early reviews suggested it was Bowie at his best, with bleak soundscapes, pop flourishes, saxophones and nuanced musings about the human condition and life & death. He’d explored these with 2013’s unexpected The Next Day, which set out to deconstruct the Bowie myth.
Little did we know, but Blackstar is/was Bowie’s swan song, a farewell letter, a gift to his fans, a legacy and a fitting epitaph to a career that was over fifty years long. A beautiful ta-ra to a life less ordinary, it was filled with references, hints and illusions of his pending demise. The film clip (and song) Lazarus plays as a wave goodbye. Its unnerving and beautiful. Much like the film clip of Queen’s These Are The Days of Our Lives where a dying Freddie Mercury said I still love you as his last words on film with a wry, cheeky kiss goodbye, Lazarus does the same.
Musically, I came in to Bowie with the Let’s Dance era of arena shows, world tours, MTV saturation. I didn’t know that for about 15 years, he’d already had a dozen albums, the same amount of fashion changes and had ridden the wave of cultural and critical acclaim to be re-launching himself for the period that was his commercial zenith. He did Dancing In The Streets with Mick Jagger in 1985, when I didn’t know Mick Jagger was a Rolling Stone.
I first met Bowie, as Jareth the Goblin King, in Labyrinth of all things, a Jim Henson film. We had the soundtrack on cassette, procured from Woolworths in Bloxwich and I was cool. Little did I know, in the Bowie canon, it truly is the uncoolest album but to me, I love it and forever will. My favourite Bowie song - As The World Falls Down - is contained within. It sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the rest of the soundtrack but it is a lush, gothic wonder.
Of course, after that, it was constant album releases that pushed the envelope of soundscapes, technology, style, fashion and art. Then I learnt about his past - by the late 1990’s, Bowie’s best of’s were always double-disc and critics lamented a track left off here, a quality single left off there. By the time of his 2014 retrospective, it was 3-discs and I was lamenting a tack left off here and a quality single left off there.
He was an actor too. Amongst his filmography were interesting choices - The Man Who Fell To Earth (cult sci fi), Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (the fated WWII prisoner of war), The Hunger (cult vampire), Labyrinth (cult fantasy) and The Prestige (cultish magic, as Nikola Tesla).
And Bowie roamed the earth, straddling music, film and art, like a giant. He was quirky and queer, but he was also quintessentially rock n roll and a supreme talent. He was a pioneer and a progenitor of technology, sounds and styles that were much appreciated, much lauded, much derided, much aped but never matched.
A chameleon. A master of reinvention.
Forever evolving, never boring.
An icon.
And he was just a man. A man who was loved by his family and friends. From all the anecdotes I’ve read, he was genuinely witty and warm. A caring soul. He had his foibles and his peccadilloes.
It’s easy to put rock stars on pedestals. Too many rock stars’ posters adorn bedroom walls.
However, in this instance, I think the outpouring of love and flowing tributes are fair. I’ve watched a slew of videos, some I’d never seen or barely remembered, and watched re-broadcast docos.
David Bowie, a bit like the Queen, has always been there (in my lifetime anyway). You kinda take for granted they will always be around. The hear David Bowie had died just didn’t seem real. It’s facetious, but I was in shock. You never really know what you’ve got until it’s gone and listening to all his albums this past week really hammered home what he meant to me and millions of other fans through the years.
So I suppose it’s fitting, that the final line sung, on the final album recorded should be : I can’t give everything away. Cryptic to the end, interpret it as you will. It’s filled with sax; I love it. Sax will be cool again in a year what with Blackstar topping the world’s charts.
For now, you’ll hear me screeching to Life On Mars and shredding frets, whilst shedding the odd tear.
Farewell spaceman.
RIP David Bowie 1947-2016
A selection of my favourite Bowie songs.
Ziggy Stardust (1972)
As The World Falls Down (1986)
Life On Mars (1973)
Lazarus (2016)
I’m Afraid of Americans (1997)
Let’s Dance (1983)
The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell (1999)
Ashes to Ashes (1980)
I Can’t Give Everything Away (2016)
Hallo Spaceboy (1996)
