Obituary: David Bowie - A Sad Sad Day
Talented beyond all our imagination's - He has simply reinvented himself in a different dimension
He Was Telling Us All Here
Goodbye
Go In Peace
David Bowie True Artistic Genius
"Lazarus"
Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now
Look up here, man, I’m in danger
I’ve got nothing left to lose
I’m so high it makes my brain whirl
Dropped my cell phone down below
I’ve got nothing left to lose
I’m so high it makes my brain whirl
Dropped my cell phone down below
Ain’t that just like me
By the time I got to New York
I was living like a king
Then I used up all my money
I was looking for your ass
I was living like a king
Then I used up all my money
I was looking for your ass
This way or no way
You know, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Now ain’t that just like me
You know, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Now ain’t that just like me
Oh I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Oh I’ll be free
Ain’t that just like me
Just like that bluebird
Oh I’ll be free
Ain’t that just like me
Obituary: David Bowie
Image copyright Getty Images
David Bowie was one of the most influential musicians of his time, constantly re-inventing his persona and sound, from the 1960s hippy of Space Oddity, through Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke to his later incarnation as a soulful rocker.
Where before, artists and groups either evolved their musical style and appearance or remained unchanging, David Bowie seemed to be in permanent revolution.He defied any label. Music, fashion, sexuality: all were Bowie's playthings. He was truly an artistic chameleon.
Bowie was born David Jones in January 1947 but reinvented himself as David Bowie, in 1966, in order to avoid confusion with the Monkees' Davy Jones.
Image copyright Getty Images But it was the title track of his second album, Space Oddity, which aroused more than passing interest.
The atmospheric tale of an abandoned astronaut, Major Tom, orbiting the Earth, Space Oddity became a hit in 1969, the year of the first Moon landing.
Initially a hit throughout Europe, it took four years to "break" the United States.
Ziggy Stardust
Bowie followed up this initial success with The Man Who Sold the World, a complex album, whose title track has been covered by artists as diverse as Lulu and Nirvana.His second album of 1971, Hunky Dory, was arguably Bowie's first great work. Its 11 songs, including the haunting Life on Mars? and Oh, You Pretty Things, redefined serious rock for the 1970s generation.
And a line from Hunky Dory's final track, The Bewlay Brothers, seemed to perfectly sum up David Bowie, "chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature".
Image copyright PA The album's huge popularity and the accompanying tour, featuring Bowie as the sexually ambiguous Ziggy, brought him worldwide stardom.
By now married to the former Angie Barnett (divorced in 1980) and with a young son, Zowie (now film director Duncan Jones), Bowie was a hedonist of breathtaking scale, living a rock and roll lifestyle fuelled by drink, drugs and vigorous bisexuality.
Having killed off Ziggy, 1973 brought Aladdin Sane, which cemented Bowie's reputation in the United States.
Songs like Cracked Actor explored the dark, seedy, side of fame, while Jean Genie was an old-fashioned rocker.
As well as writing and performing, Bowie now branched out, producing Lou Reed's Transformer album and writing and producing Mott the Hoople's hit single, All the Young Dudes.
Berlin sojourn
While he was touring with his next album, the apocalyptic Diamond Dogs, David Bowie recorded the Young Americans album in Philadelphia.This dalliance with "plastic soul" continued on the album Station to Station and brought Bowie hits including Golden Years, Knock on Wood and his first US number one single, Fame, co-written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.
Image copyright Getty Images Produced in collaboration with Brian Eno, these dense works were perhaps the most experimental of Bowie's career, mixing electronic sounds and avant-garde lyrics to produce a radical, and influential, song cycle.
The late 1970s saw Bowie concentrating on acting, starring in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and opposite Marlene Dietrich in the lamentable Just a Gigolo.
The critically acclaimed Lodger album was followed by Scary Monsters, notable for its groundbreaking video accompaniment and the single Ashes to Ashes, which updated the story of Major Tom.
Actor and web pioneer
But 1983 saw a new, driven, David Bowie return to form with the Let's Dance album.Hits like China Girl and Modern Love, coupled with the spectacular Serious Moonlight world tour, introduced Bowie to a whole new generation.
And his 1985 duet with Mick Jagger, a cover version of Martha and the Vandellas' Dancin' in the Street, was a major factor in the success of the Band Aid project and its accompanying Live Aid concert.
The late 1980s were dominated by Bowie's involvement with his new band, a postmodernist heavy metal outfit, Tin Machine.
This project, which was designed to allow Bowie to re-examine his rock 'n' roll roots, produced two albums of questionable quality and was panned by the listening public and critics alike.
As proof of his enduring popularity, in 2000 he was invited to headline the world-famous Glastonbury festival for the second time, nearly three decades after his debut there.
Bowie's 2002 album Heathen saw a long-awaited return to form for the indefinable master of rock style, and the man who, throughout his long and varied career, influenced everyone from Iggy Pop to Boy George.
In 2006, he made a surprise return to the big screen, playing a fictional version of real-life Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's illusionist drama The Prestige, for which he adopts a thick Eastern European accent.
After a decade without a studio album he released The Next Day in 2013, surprising fans who thought he had retired. It became his first UK number one for 20 years.
The same month, a retrospective of his career, "David Bowie Is..." opened at the V&A in 2013, becoming the museum's fastest-selling show, celebrating his legacy as a style icon as well as a musician and performer.
His latest album, the critically acclaimed Blackstar, was released on his 69th birthday, just days before his death.
He is survived by his second wife, Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid, and children Duncan Jones, the acclaimed sci-fi director, and Alexandria Zahra Jones.
Lovely piece by Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran
Published at 12:01AM, January 12 2016
What a lucky planet we were to have had David Bowie. So lucky. Imagine how vast all of space and time is — how endless and empty, how black and cold. Imagine a tracking shot across the universe, nothing happening nearly everywhere, nearly all the time.
And then, as it scrolls past our galaxy, you can hear, quiet at first, but getting louder as we close in, Rebel Rebel, coming from our planet, from our country, in our time, playing on tinny transistor radios, in a million bedrooms, as a whole generation, and the next, and the next, straighten their spines, and feel their pulses rise, and say: “This. This is how I feel. Or at least, this is how I feel now. Now I’ve heard this.”
Art shows us there are two ways to parent: to pass on your essence; to live for ever. The first is to have children. The second is to create a new kind of person, to embody a change so joyous, potent, liberating and kinetic that others, in their millions, follow suit, and become parented by you, by choice.
The hypnotist Paul McKenna was on Radio 4’s Saturday Live this weekend, talking about how to be confident. The secret was to think of someone who you thought of as self-possessed, and pretend to be them. Stand as they would. Act as they would. As the drag queens say: “Fake it til you make it.” McKenna’s example was Sean Connery, “Just raise your eyebrow”. But for millions, for me, it was Bowie that we pretended to be, whenever we were lonely, or scared, or full of that itchy, awful, brilliant desire to become something bigger than we were. That’s what heroes are, they show us a new way to stand that gives us confidence. They change our body language. They rewire our brains. They give us permission to become other. To become bigger. To become wilder and bolder when the only way forward in your life is to become wilder, and bolder, or else you will simply not exist.
Growing up in a world short of female role models, Bowie was a feminist one for me. He wasn’t aligned with any particular gender, or sexuality, or culture. He presented himself as a joyful alien, singing songs directly to, and for, anyone who felt weird, or lonely. As an odd, unfriended teenage girl in my bedroom, it was perfectly clear to me that David Bowie knew about me, and was trying to recruit me to be his friend. When he eulogised the hero of Rebel Rebel with their torn dress, and their face a mess, concluding “Hot tramp/I love you so”, that was me. Likewise, in Rock’n’Roll Suicide, when he told me I wasn’t alone and begged me to give him my hands “Because/You’re wonderful”, I was his muse. Whenever I am asked, “as a feminist”, if I “believe” in wearing make-up, I reply, simply: “If David Bowie can wear make-up, so can I.”
I’ve had 20 years to think about it, and I really don’t think I’m projecting. As an outsider himself — a ginger, bonk-eyed, snaggle-toothed bisexual in a dress, in Bromley — Bowie was singing to everyone like him.
He knew it would be easier to create something dazzlingly, grindingly, blastingly new — to take pop to the Kabuki theatres of Japan, the German avante garde, into space — than it would be to try to fit in. He intended to terraform a whole new world, and take pop — and us — with him. The Beatles, similarly, created a whole new world but they were part of a gang, a self-support system. And they were heterosexual. To paraphrase the oft-repeated homily about Ginger Rogers, Bowie did everything the Beatles did, but backwards, in heels, and alone.
Bowie’s velocity and daring were so astonishing and so outrageously successful that it’s impossible to pick the shrapnel of his Big Bang out of popular culture without tearing it to bits. Everywhere pop music is bold, ambitious, odd, dressed up — whenever it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before — when it’s Madonna, or Gaga, Pet Shop Boys, or Daft Punk, or Beyoncé — it is using the tools and framework largely built by one man from Bromley with tombstone teeth, and his name borrowed from a fixed-blade knife.
And alongside the big picture, Bowie specialised in moments; the most aching, perfect, precision, moments. Has a better love-lyric ever been written than the simple, “I absolutely love you?” in Absolute Beginners. Millions have written a million more words, he did it in four.
His command, “Let’s dance”, feels as if dancing is the most momentous, consequential thing you can do. And he is correct — sometimes, crossing a dancefloor and dancing with someone can change your life.
The vertical take-off in Life On Mars?, when suddenly everything changes because “The film is a saddening bore/for she’s lived it ten times or more” and then those “Sailors, fighting in the dancehall! Look at those cavemen go!” It is every terrifying, amazing Friday night out in a provincial town, in an era where boredom, and violence, and conformity, were everywhere, and the only way out was to find a song, and climb into it, and live in it, like Narnia. Like Wonderland. And then to spend the rest of your life finding others who also knew that Narnia, and Wonderland, who were intent on making this world more like that. David Bowie fans.
“In life, there’s only one rule,” the journalist Miranda Sawyer wrote on Facebook. “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like David Bowie.” It’s about as certain a law to live by as any other.
Why is it sad? Why is it sad that he’s gone? Why am I mourning the death of David Bowie more than any other I have known? Why does it feel as if the world is flatter, and colder, and less able to transcend than it did last week? It’s because an energy source has been turned off; a world-view has disappeared. We will never again see things through Bowie’s eyes: a man so effortlessly able to write the songs of the human heart, to explain ourselves back to ourselves that he spent his last 18 months writing an album to tell us he was dying. He released it just three days before he passed — the song Lazarus plainly stating it, yet no one knew.
As the music writer Graeme Thomson put it so beautifully on Twitter: “We were so thrilled to have him back, we failed to notice he was saying goodbye.”
But we were lucky. We were a lucky planet, and it was a lucky time. In all the cold, silent, black emptiness of space, we were the ones who had David Bowie. And he had us. He invented something just as astonishing as a currency, or a medicine, or a machine, or a circuit, or a city. He was an emotional statesman — a president of possible futures. Thank you, you beautiful man. Thank you for giving us us.
And then, as it scrolls past our galaxy, you can hear, quiet at first, but getting louder as we close in, Rebel Rebel, coming from our planet, from our country, in our time, playing on tinny transistor radios, in a million bedrooms, as a whole generation, and the next, and the next, straighten their spines, and feel their pulses rise, and say: “This. This is how I feel. Or at least, this is how I feel now. Now I’ve heard this.”
Art shows us there are two ways to parent: to pass on your essence; to live for ever. The first is to have children. The second is to create a new kind of person, to embody a change so joyous, potent, liberating and kinetic that others, in their millions, follow suit, and become parented by you, by choice.
The hypnotist Paul McKenna was on Radio 4’s Saturday Live this weekend, talking about how to be confident. The secret was to think of someone who you thought of as self-possessed, and pretend to be them. Stand as they would. Act as they would. As the drag queens say: “Fake it til you make it.” McKenna’s example was Sean Connery, “Just raise your eyebrow”. But for millions, for me, it was Bowie that we pretended to be, whenever we were lonely, or scared, or full of that itchy, awful, brilliant desire to become something bigger than we were. That’s what heroes are, they show us a new way to stand that gives us confidence. They change our body language. They rewire our brains. They give us permission to become other. To become bigger. To become wilder and bolder when the only way forward in your life is to become wilder, and bolder, or else you will simply not exist.
Growing up in a world short of female role models, Bowie was a feminist one for me. He wasn’t aligned with any particular gender, or sexuality, or culture. He presented himself as a joyful alien, singing songs directly to, and for, anyone who felt weird, or lonely. As an odd, unfriended teenage girl in my bedroom, it was perfectly clear to me that David Bowie knew about me, and was trying to recruit me to be his friend. When he eulogised the hero of Rebel Rebel with their torn dress, and their face a mess, concluding “Hot tramp/I love you so”, that was me. Likewise, in Rock’n’Roll Suicide, when he told me I wasn’t alone and begged me to give him my hands “Because/You’re wonderful”, I was his muse. Whenever I am asked, “as a feminist”, if I “believe” in wearing make-up, I reply, simply: “If David Bowie can wear make-up, so can I.”
I’ve had 20 years to think about it, and I really don’t think I’m projecting. As an outsider himself — a ginger, bonk-eyed, snaggle-toothed bisexual in a dress, in Bromley — Bowie was singing to everyone like him.
He knew it would be easier to create something dazzlingly, grindingly, blastingly new — to take pop to the Kabuki theatres of Japan, the German avante garde, into space — than it would be to try to fit in. He intended to terraform a whole new world, and take pop — and us — with him. The Beatles, similarly, created a whole new world but they were part of a gang, a self-support system. And they were heterosexual. To paraphrase the oft-repeated homily about Ginger Rogers, Bowie did everything the Beatles did, but backwards, in heels, and alone.
Bowie’s velocity and daring were so astonishing and so outrageously successful that it’s impossible to pick the shrapnel of his Big Bang out of popular culture without tearing it to bits. Everywhere pop music is bold, ambitious, odd, dressed up — whenever it looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before — when it’s Madonna, or Gaga, Pet Shop Boys, or Daft Punk, or Beyoncé — it is using the tools and framework largely built by one man from Bromley with tombstone teeth, and his name borrowed from a fixed-blade knife.
And alongside the big picture, Bowie specialised in moments; the most aching, perfect, precision, moments. Has a better love-lyric ever been written than the simple, “I absolutely love you?” in Absolute Beginners. Millions have written a million more words, he did it in four.
His command, “Let’s dance”, feels as if dancing is the most momentous, consequential thing you can do. And he is correct — sometimes, crossing a dancefloor and dancing with someone can change your life.
The vertical take-off in Life On Mars?, when suddenly everything changes because “The film is a saddening bore/for she’s lived it ten times or more” and then those “Sailors, fighting in the dancehall! Look at those cavemen go!” It is every terrifying, amazing Friday night out in a provincial town, in an era where boredom, and violence, and conformity, were everywhere, and the only way out was to find a song, and climb into it, and live in it, like Narnia. Like Wonderland. And then to spend the rest of your life finding others who also knew that Narnia, and Wonderland, who were intent on making this world more like that. David Bowie fans.
“In life, there’s only one rule,” the journalist Miranda Sawyer wrote on Facebook. “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like David Bowie.” It’s about as certain a law to live by as any other.
Why is it sad? Why is it sad that he’s gone? Why am I mourning the death of David Bowie more than any other I have known? Why does it feel as if the world is flatter, and colder, and less able to transcend than it did last week? It’s because an energy source has been turned off; a world-view has disappeared. We will never again see things through Bowie’s eyes: a man so effortlessly able to write the songs of the human heart, to explain ourselves back to ourselves that he spent his last 18 months writing an album to tell us he was dying. He released it just three days before he passed — the song Lazarus plainly stating it, yet no one knew.
As the music writer Graeme Thomson put it so beautifully on Twitter: “We were so thrilled to have him back, we failed to notice he was saying goodbye.”
But we were lucky. We were a lucky planet, and it was a lucky time. In all the cold, silent, black emptiness of space, we were the ones who had David Bowie. And he had us. He invented something just as astonishing as a currency, or a medicine, or a machine, or a circuit, or a city. He was an emotional statesman — a president of possible futures. Thank you, you beautiful man. Thank you for giving us us.
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