DAVID BOWIE




David Bowie

 

I am not moved

Easily to tears,

But the loss,

The sense of loss,

Created and curated,

Becomes the

Lightning conductor,

My eyes filming.

Ten years that’s all.

Played out

On stage but 

Disinterred daily.

Silver screened.

The man who never

Fell to earth.

But I, I can

Remember.

 

10th  January 2026


Bowie has always fascinated me, not in some all-pervasive or damascene way - I never met him and I never saw him play live - but as a presence, a significance, over the years which, at its natural end, generated a palpable awareness of loss. On a very basic level, I like his music - well, most of it - and play it a lot, but when you set it in the context of a restless creative intelligence, it is the mass of contradictions, comparisons and co-existences, and dare I say, changes, that set him apart as a man and a figure - embedded, like something glinting in the water - that are transformative. There is so much more with Bowie than usually meets the eye, or the ear. The humanity was all too evident in the drug-taking, alcoholism and blue-eyed ambition, but also in the disarming politeness, the genuine kindness and the devotion of a family man. There was though, a distance, something alien or unknowable, which, looking back, was there from the start, in Major Tom in 1969's 'Space Oddity', caught in conversations with Ground Control about 'which shirts' he wears and anxious to tell his wife he 'loves her very much', while 'floating in [his] tin can, far above the world'. So much of Bowie's life was crystallised into art, first by Bowie himself and then by his audience - through the music and its installation or appropriation as a cultural bellwether, the use of stage personas, album covers, videos and even, with Blackstar, the event of his death. High and low culture, personal and public, androgyny, art and life: it's the whole package. And like great music, or great art, it leaves the artist and becomes part of the audience, having a new impact and generating new, personal networks of associations in other's lives.

If I had to pick one song, it would, unsurprisingly, be 'Heroes', of which, by the way, Motorhead do a great cover version.


 

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