Look up here, I’m in Heaven: Bowie A Supreme Artist To The End
Look up here, I’m in Heaven: a supreme artist to the end
Just before the end of his life, millions of fans saw David Bowie lying pale and grey in a hospital bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. It was not his final hour, but a staged version for his new album, Blackstar.
“Look up here, I’m in Heaven,” he sang. “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.”
“His death was no different from his life — a work of art,” said Tony Visconti, Bowie’s friend and longtime producer who was one of the few people, outside of the musician’s family, who had been aware that the musician was close to death.
Bowie’s widow, Iman, who had occasionally offered glimpses of the domestic life of the Starman in his final phase, as a low-key fixture of downtown Manhattan, had written a series of sorrowful messages on Twitter over the weekend.
“Sometimes you never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory,” she wrote on Saturday. “The struggle is real, but so is God,” she tweeted the next day.
Yet the gossipy metropolis of New York was thoroughly unprepared. Crowds were packing into Lazarus, his sold-out theatre show in the East Village, and Bowie himself had appeared on stage recently at the premiere. Its director, Ivo van Hove, said the cast was busy yesterday, recording the soundtrack — another project that Bowie had wanted to see completed.
A birthday portrait released last week may have been the last official photo
Reviews of Blackstar, the album that he released last Friday on his 69th birthday, declared that the Starman was still shining brightly. The artist might have disappeared for a few years, the New York Post said, but “he has never sounded more alive”. Yesterday’s New York Times, which had gone to press before the announcement of his death, declared: “It’s a good time to be David Bowie.”
This carefully stage-managed exit was in its way another extraordinary achievement for a man who could provoke headlines around the world merely by being photographed near a SoHo recording studio. Having undergone so many radical transformations, he had lately turned into a doting, stay-at-home dad who read voraciously, painted and sometimes walked his daughter, Lexi, to school.
“Imagine David Bowie turning up to your school,” a fan wrote on Twitter, when Iman described going to see a school production of Willy Wonka. “He turns [up] as David Jones,” she replied.
The musician had faded into the hip, moneyed crowds of SoHo, where he lived with his family in the penthouse of a luxurious tower crammed with media and music executives.
Flowers from fans and neighbours piled up on the street outside yesterday morning. “Our hearts are broken,” wrote one. “I miss you, I miss you, I miss you,” wrote another.
Some bought their bouquets at the same florist that Bowie frequented, for although he had disappeared from the public eye, he was hiding in plain sight.
“He ordered some bouquets about a month ago, I guess, when the play opened,” Ray Ledu, 61, the proprietor, said. The musician was a regular customer as he bought his wife flowers on the 14th of each month, the day they were introduced by their hairdresser at a dinner in Los Angeles.
Mr Ledu was a huge Bowie fan. “It seems like he’s gone out in a flash of activity and creativity,” he said.
Bowie had also been a regular in the local bookstore, McNally’s — though staff there said they had not seen him recently — and in a vintage children’s clothes shop called Lilliput’s. Shortly after the release of his penultimate album, the proprietor, Carline Gouin, recalled Bowie coming in to introduce his son, the film director Duncan Jones. “He’s always on his bicycle, he’s always in his jeans, very simply dressed. You don’t recognise him.”
The neighbourhood through which Bowie moved was full of celebrities. At the bike shop across the road from the singer’s house, a mechanic who had once changed a tyre on his daughter’s pushchair, said he had also worked on the bicycles of Lady Gaga and David Byrne,of Talking Heads. “I think Bowie was surprised we didn’t recognise him, but he’s just a guy, you know?” said Hal Ruzal, 62, staring across the road at the flowers mounting up.
Bowie himself had said he lived in New York “as a citizen pure and simple. I don’t go for the disguise thing,” he told New York magazine a few years after he arrived in SoHo. “I’ve never found it necessary, at least not since my real hair colour grew in years ago.”
There were occasional flashes of stardust. At a founding party for the New York branch of the private members club SoHo House, in 2004, a fellow member recalled Bowie approaching the owner, Nick Jones, offering to buy the place. “I’m not sure whether he was joking,” Euan Rellie, a fellow member, said. “Nick said, ‘Well, I have put a lot of time and money into this’.”
He also recalls Mr Jones’s wife, the broadcaster Kirsty Young, saying that she had never been star-struck until her encounter with Bowie that evening.
Yet Mr Rellie also recalls meeting him another time, at a petrol station outside the city, and failing to recognise him until the pop star said: “All right Lucy,” to his wife, the author and socialite Lucy Sykes. “He was very old school — had this great cockney accent,” she said. “And very friendly, not what I expected.”
Neighbours and longtime collaborators seemed equally shocked at his death. The producer Brian Eno said that he had received an email from him a week ago. “It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence, ‘Thank you for our good times, Brian. they will never rot’ . . . I realise now he was saying goodbye.”
Visconti, Bowie’s producer, who acknowledged a few years ago that he had effectively become Bowie’s “voice on Earth” after the musician stopped doing interviews, had been occasionally forced to deny rumours of illness after the musician suffered a heart attack in 2004.
“He always did what he wanted to do,” he said in a statement yesterday. “I knew for a year this was the way it would be.”
Yet even he felt unprepared for Bowie’s departure. “He was an extraordinary man, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it is appropriate to cry.”
Life and times (for absolute beginners)
Born David Robert Jones in Brixton, South London, on January 8, 1947.
27 studio albums
27 films
100 singles
140 million estimated album sales
Five UK No 1 singles (Space Oddity, Ashes to Ashes, Under Pressure, Let’s Dance, Dancing in the Street)
Nine UK No 1 albums so far (Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, Scary Monsters [and Super Creeps], Let’s Dance, Tonight, Changesbowie, Black Tie White Noise, The Next Day)
Six countries of residence (Britain, America, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, West Indies)
5,000 concerts
£135m estimated fortune
One O level, in art
Did you know?
His first broadcast interview was at 17, when the BBC introduced him as founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men. “It’s not nice when people call you darling and that,” he said.
He trained as a mime artist under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp and founded a troupe called Turquoise, later known as Feathers.
He claimed to have a phobia of tea after “a horrible incident” when he was five.
He was injured by a lollipop thrown from the crowd into his eye at a concert in Oslo in 2004. It was removed and he continued the show.
Bowie declined a CBE in 2000 and a knighthood in 2003.
He lent his name to a spider species discovered in Malaysia in 2009, called Heteropoda davidbowie
He said . . .
“Fame itself . . . doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.”
“I’m an instant star. Just add water and stir.”
“You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.”
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