Lazarus flies again

Today, on what would have been David Bowie’s 74th birthday - and two days before the fifth anniversary of his death - marks the start of a flurry of new Bowie activities that will continue well into the year. 

At some point today, the quick-fingered will be able to order a very limited edition single featuring previously unreleased cover versions of John Lennon’s Mother and Bob Dylan’s Tryin’ To Get To Heaven. The 7” single will be limited to just 8147 numbered copies - 1000 of which  on cream coloured vinyl - and will only be available to buy from this afternoon from the official Bowie store and Warner Music’s Dig! Experience of trying to buy the series of 1990s live albums being released progressively on these sites has proven frustrating as limited numbers have sold out almost as soon as they’ve been made available.

However, there is more this weekend to both celebrate The Dame’s birthday and commiserate his death. Starting today, a recording of the musical Lazarus will commence a short streaming run via Dice for three  nightly performances. The show was co-developed with Bowie just as he was fighting the cancer that eventually killed him. It ran in New York before transferring to London, where I was privileged to see it for myself, poignantly on the first anniversary of his death. 

Despite receiving mixed reviews from theatre critics, it provided a fascinating, if unusual, finale to Bowie’s life and career. The idea behind it was his, and saw the production revive the character he'd played in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. In that, Bowie was the alien Newton (essentially, the persona Bowie had cultivated in the first half of the 70s), stranded on Earth and coming to terms with modern day America. Lazarus updates the story, with Newton (played by Michael C. Hall) now living in a shabby New York apartment and longing to return to his home planet. It wasn’t lost on any in the audience - after Bowie had died - how personal the theme was, the result of the singer, playwright Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, developing the storyline and selecting songs from the extensive song canon to propel the narrative. 

Much of Bowie’s death was surrounded in clearly intentional mystique, and as Lazarus's genesis made clear, he was clearly approaching the final curtain with typically considered reflection. Even his actual demise seemed choreographed, coming exactly two days after the release of the unexpected final album Blackstar. The final act of stage direction from an artist who, throughout his career, had cultivated a series of guises as vessels for his art. 

Bowie knew he was dying as Lazarus was being developed. At one point, he told van Hove that he would be stepping back from rehearsals due to illness requiring treatment. Still, though, only a tiny circle of people were aware, which meant that when Blackstar arrived, as enigmatically as 2013's The Next Day - his previous surprise album - there was hope of a renaissance in the 69-year-old’s output. 

The clues, however, were there in Blackstar: the bleak lyrics, with references to morbidity; the surreal video, featuring a beatific Bowie singing in heavenly glory; another scene, in which the corpse of an astronaut rests on a planetary surface, pointing to the final resting place of Major Tom. They all pointed to the outcome that was announced on 10 January, 2016. Perhaps, now, not so subtly, though at the time the Blackstar single was released in November 2015, no one knew what was truly to come.

Lazarus was an unusual memorial, but on the other hand, exactly what you would have expected. While it could be accused of resembling a trendy secondary school drama teacher’s personal hobby horse, it provided people like me with a chance to grieve and celebrate Bowie’s music at the same time. I’ll happily admit to having “something in my eye” at the end of it. It was, of course, no substitute for seeing Bowie perform one last time (I only got to see him live once, to my eternal regret), but Lazarus and its adoring audience felt like a fitting commune for the Starman. Long may we wallow.

On Sunday, Where Are We Now will look more extensively at Bowie's last years, and the apparent contentment he'd found during his final tour.