Bowie and Me. A sort of love story.

In the late seventies my older sister bought the Bowie compilation album ChangesOne and played it until the grooves on the record ran shallow. My musical influences had not extended much beyond Ken Dodd and Pinky and Perky at this point, but I was immediately smitten. His voice seemed to come from a different planet and the picture of him radiated a sort of warm, handsome cool that had echoes of the Hollywood greats - while at the same time being slightly unsettling - a kind of menacing handsome. Those mismatched eyes, the too thin cheekbones, the faraway look. When my sister got tired of the record, as teenage girls are wont to do, I lifted it off her and have played it ever since. If you listen to those songs now, from the warm buzz of the title track to the crazyweird John I'm Only Dancing and the sublime rock and roll number Suffragette City, you get a seminar, not just in the otherworldliness of early Bowie but of his incredible eclectic range and famed unwillingness to get pegged down. The distance between Hunky Dory and Golden Years is just five years, but in musical terms it outstrips anything most pop artists achieve in a lifetime of writing.

As I grew up and the eighties broke, Bowie went mainstream. I didn't mind. I was fourteen when Let's Dance came out and suddenly David was cool and other boys views matter when you're fourteen. Alongside the contemporary releases I began to build up a collection of his back catalogue and sheltered in my boarding school bedsit received an education, courtesy of my record player, that I was most certainly not getting in the classroom. Those bizarre and brilliant Berlin records. Low. Heroes. Hard work at first - especially if everyone else is listening to Wham - but ultimately so much more rewarding. Then Lodger with its yaaaassssaaaasssin world music influences. The soul cool of Young Americans. And with Bowie you didn't just get the music. You got film, poetry, art - the man was a polymath. I learned about Andy Warhol from him. And Laurens Van der Post. And Nicolas Roeg. And Egon Schiele. And Eno. And Philip Glass. And that men could wear dresses. And that Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd were better than what came after. And that you didn't have to give the public what they wanted. And that working class popstars from Bromley could produce lines of poetry every bit as good as Byron or Edgar Allen Poe:

"We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when

Although I wasn't there, he said I was his friend

Which came as some surprise

I spoke into his eyes

I thought you died, a long, long time ago."

Fashions came and fashions went and his stock grew with time and not everything he did was brilliant but you could never accuse Bowie of being dull or standing still. He was always interesting. Challenging. Changing. Other heroes faded, David never did. He was never irrelevant.

There's a great line in Kooks where Bowie, addressing his young son Zowie, now Duncan, sings:

"And if the homework brings you down, then we'll throw it on the fire and take the car downtown."

I remember my friend Andy Chappell and I listening to that in our cold Northamptonshire boarding school and him saying to me "If I ever have a son and everything gets too much, I'm going to sing that to him." I don't know if Andy ever did, but last week when my 11 year old found his homework too much I did - and we did - and as we did we listened to Blackstar on the CD player and my son said: "The thing with Bowie is - that the more you listen - the better he gets." 

So thank you David. Thank you for entertaining me and my family. Thank you for holding my hand through broken hearts and teenage angst and failed projects and new horizons. Thank you for educating me, for thrilling me, for teaching me about art and film and music and what it is to be young and what it is to grow old. Thank you for the wayward turns and the fashion tips.Thank you for Blackstar and Rock and Roll Suicide and Win and China Girl and Julie and V2 Schneider and yes - even the Laughing Gnome. You have been much more than the soundtrack to my life and - you have been an inspiration.