40 years of the CD - and it’s not dead yet

“Will Smith, Willennium?!”, scoffs Ricky Gervais’s misanthropic widower Tony Johnson in the latest series of After Life, as he’s trawling through his somewhat retentive brother-in-law’s in-car CD collection. “Yes,” Matt replies, “as in the Millennium.” “Yeah,” Tony retorts, “about the last time someone bought a CD.” 

Well, actually, not, according to new figures from the UK record labels’ association, the BPI, which revealed that after a 17-year decline, CD sales have picked up again. I should point out that this reverse was the result of blockbuster albums last year by Adele, Ed Sheeran and ABBA and, presumably, shifting in vast quantities from supermarket checkouts (take an educated guess as to who bought them). But as someone who still buys physical media, and has largely eschewed streaming, I do take a somewhat Luddite pleasure in knowing that CDs - in the format’s 40th year - are still selling. I like to think that it’s the result of the same sense of tactility that keeps me hanging on to physical music formats, more so than any considerations of sonic fidelity. It’s this thinking that CDs, like vinyl records and even cassettes, appeal to a combination of the newly middle-aged, the baby boomers and younger hipsters who’ve bought into the kitsch appeal of the older formats. 

The CD was an evolution of the clunky LaserDisc format that appeared at the end of the 1970s. Philips, one of the companies involved in its development then joined forces with Sony to develop an audio-only optical disc, which appeared in the summer of 1982. The first CD player went on the market that October, with the promise of a format offering “perfect sound forever”. For my part, I was a relatively late convert: I was still a teenager in 1982 with little awareness of this new hi-fi Eldorado. On top of that, the first player  was well outside my economic scope, given that my meagre paper round wages were mostly spent on vinyl and cassettes at Our Price. 

“The first player cost $1,000 – a lot of money in 1982,” Philips research scientist Jacques Heemskerk told The Guardian a few years ago. “We developed the discs and the players at the same time, then licensed the technology to other companies to make their own. Once we convinced Panasonic, all the others followed.” The price of players would soon start to come down. Philips and Sony invested heavily in marketing the CD. “We needed to do a lot of advertising and knew pop music would be the largest market, but we couldn't start with anything extreme, like punk,” explained Heemskerk. “So we made a deal with Dire Straits to promote it: their music was all put on CD, and they appeared in posters and advertisements. When Brothers In Arms became the first million-selling Compact Disc, we knew we’d underestimated how quickly it would become the dominant format. The vinyl album was so established, and in the US it seemed unthinkable that the cassette would disappear. But after that, things changed very, very quickly. Despite this, it would be a full 13 years before I took the plunge and bought my first CD, the result of taking a PR job at Philips, having access at last to a player. But even by 1995, when I came to work for the company, there were new challengers on the horizon, including Philips' own ill-fated Digital Compact Cassette format, and Sony’s MiniDisc.

27 years on, my CD collection continues to grow, as does my vinyl library, with the decision as to which format seemingly arbitrary. Before I moved in with my wife-to-be, I chose CDs to listen to in the car on the drive between South-East and South-West London, and vinyl for the at-home experience. Since moving in, a month before lockdown, I’ve worked almost exclusively from home, with a CD-only system in the living room where I work, and the turntable elsewhere, making the purchase decision even more random and based on choosing the format to match the ‘mood’ of how I want to consume the music - i.e. partially on in the background, or fully muso-style with no distraction. Yes, I’m a nerd. But even experts can’t make up their minds which is best. “When CDs first came in, I was decorating my house,” recalled Philips’ Heemskerk. “So I decided to get rid of all my vinyl albums, and get my old Rolling Stones and Beatles records on CD. It still hurts. Even though I worked on the CD, and it’s technically the best, I’m not sure people will have the same warm, emotional feeling towards them as I did with the vinyl album, with the beautiful 12in artwork.”

Of course the Compact Disc, being just that, does have its significant ergonomic advantage over vinyl, but the audiophile view is that vinyl is better. There’s a degree of fetishism to that, but as my teenage step-daughters will attest, having asked for and receiving only vinyl for Christmas, records will always be cooler than CDs, which are not and have never been cool to them. 

For a product born of the 1980s, the decade of somewhat sterile modernity, a music format that was as perfect as digital technology could enable seemed appropriate. It was also simple to use and totally portable, which led to the commoditisation of CD drives appearing in any electrical appliance that could fit one. It also contributed partly to the obesity crisis, because once inserted in the player, a CD would, unlike a record, not require getting up out of the chair to turn over, and could even be manipulated using a remote control.

I’ve actually lost count of the number of CDs I’ve accumulated since my first foray into the format, 27 years ago. Much of this is the result of rampant consumerism on my part, as the acquisition of a CD player coincided with my first visits to the United States when, in the days of two dollars to the pound (yeah, cheers Brexit…) I’d start any holiday or business trip to the US with a trolley dash around the nearest branch of Tower Records. I once took a 12-hour round trip from Mammoth Lakes in California to Fresno - via Yosemite National Park - just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD, before returning to Mammoth via a giant loop around the bottom of the Sierra Nevada mountains and then back up north on the near-mythical Highway 395. 

On another occasion, I went to visit a former executive of Sky TV at her new palatial office in The Helmsley Building in New York after another trolley dash around a nearby branch of Tower. Before we could properly catch up, her waste bin was full of cellophane wrappings, stripped from new purchases in the hope of not drawing attention at customs in London. That, in itself, highlighted one of the most annoying things about the CD - the so-called ‘jewel case’ (itself the subject of a lucrative and vigorously defended patent owned by Philips), which was a pain to open, with the spindle thingy in the middle often losing teeth. Buying in the US was even more trepidatious thanks to a near-impregnable wrap that required a surgical scalpel to get open, thanks to a pull tab that NEVER worked.

I can’t even remember what my first CD was: I know it wasn’t Brothers In Arms, which became most associated with the format’s acceptance in the mainstream thanks to Philips’ marketing tie-up with Dire Straits (the CD’s earliest appeal seemed to veer towards classical music enthusiasts). My collection grew to around 1200 CDs at one point, infused by hundreds of cover-mount discs from monthly music magazines. In 2010 I decided to downsize, taking a good half of that library to a specialist ripping service in Arnhem (I was living in the Netherlands at the time) to have it industrially transferred to a hard drive, covering the cost by selling the discs to a record shop in Amsterdam for a euro each. A decent deal. What was left were the albums I couldn’t bear to part with, albums like all true music obsessives I’ve probably owned on different format over the years, and have been sucked into the marketing hype of remastered special editions. This duality has been perpetuated most expensively by the purchase of the posthumous Bowie box sets as CD packages, in addition to the odd fetish vinyl acquisition.

The CD isn’t, however, perfect. It is just a little bit…uh…dull. Industry experts I worked with would refer to it as a “carrier”, which is about as anodyne a description as you could come up with. No wonder the CD always used to lose out in the NME’s regular ‘Vinyl, CD or MP3?’ questionnaire. But what it lacks in cool it makes up for in convenience. When I first started buying CDs, the game changer was the ability to take what seemed like hundreds of albums on holiday in one of those clear-sleeve cases. But then the iPod came along. And Napster, and with it the seismic shift from physical media ownership to digitisation. Some will say that this was a linear development: just as the digital CD was meant to kill off analogue formats, the ripping of CDs to playback on iPods and then phones opened the door to the removal of physical media altogether, in the process denuding the record industry and artists of the wheelbarrows of cash they’d earned for decades.

I accept that streaming is cheaper. It also allows an album to be auditioned before making a longer-term commitment. And what better convenience than storing all your music in the cloud, freeing up shelving for…whatever. I, however, will still maintain, delusional perhaps, that there is nothing quite like a physical music library. When we first bunkered at home for lockdown we became used to Zoom calls with colleagues and friends carefully framed in front of well-stuffed bookshelves to make them look erudite and well read. Interviewees for TV news bulletins appeared to compete with each other to see who had the most exotic book collection. But a record library - different matter. And when you think about it, you can cram more CDs into one than vinyl. At risk of sounding intrinsically shallow, I’ll take that. Long live the CD.

How many times must an angel fall?

As if things haven’t been gloomy enough this week, if you want a proper wallow, track down Francis Whateley’s David Bowie: The Last Five Years, shown on Friday as part of BBC Four’s Bowie Night, in honour of what would have been the Starman's 74th birthday. It’s not about how the documentary ends - because five years ago this morning, the world found out - but for one particular period in the penultimate act of his career. 

The time in question is, in the longer history, a relative blink of the eye, but it represents a glimpse of the real David Bowie, an individual who, for a large proportion of his musical career, was shrouded - mainly intentionally - in guises and crafted personas. In October 2003, Bowie commenced the Reality Tour, a 112-date campaign that would, over five legs, snake through Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand in support of Reality, generally thought to be his best album since 1980’s Scary Monsters And Super Creeps. It was a grueling tour with shows lasting two and a half hours each as the band merrily worked their way through almost 40 years of music. In fact, around 60 songs were rehearsed for the tour, drawn from almost every decade in the Bowie canon, from singalong hits to a lesser known cover of The Pixies’ Cactus and Sister Midnight, originally found on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. 

In Whateley’s film, band members, like bass player Gail Ann Dorsey, guitarists Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard, drummer Sterling Campbell, and longtime keyboard collaborator Mike Garson, speak with fondness of the David Bowie they were playing with. They enthusiastically embrace the exhaustive song catalogue, playfully finding new ways to perform it. But it’s clear that the Bowie they were touring with was comfortable in his own skin. The tour DVD shows him having fun, smiling and wisecracking his way through gigs that, night after night, appeared to be carefree celebrations. Moreover, it’s the off-stage footage that is the most revealing - hanging out with Slick in an amusement arcade, or larking about with a cutting impersonation of Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Brilliant!’ character from The Fast Show. It felt like you were watching David Jones of 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, as any ‘regular’ bloke in the pub.

While never an aloof figure, few probably knew the real David Bowie. Even himself, something apparent in Alan Yentob’s landmark Cracked Actor documentary in 1975, when an emaciated, cocaine-addicted Bowie - The Thin White Duke - swigging from a carton of milk in the back of a limo was, by his own admission, on the road to cliché rock star oblivion. What makes Whateley’s film so heartbreaking is that the David Bowie at the beginning of his final years on this planet was the very opposite of that casualty in the limo. Rather than reject his body of work - as so many performers of a certain vintage will do - he was celebratory of it. Things weren't always so.

While he’d disparagingly referred to his ‘80s commercial success (the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums, and even 1987’s Never Let Me Down and its subsequent Glass Spider Tour, with it’s overblown choreography and theatrical bombast) as his “Phil Collins years”, the 90s proved a different decade for Bowie. Musical fashion during the Britpop age turned its attention elsewhere, despite the likes of Blur and Oasis representing a reverence for the musical legacy of Bowie’s generation. Bowie, though, had also turned his attention elsewhere. His Sound + Vision tour in 1990 had been a conscious ‘retirement’ of the jukebox (“Knowing I won’t ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist,” he said). His sojourn with the punky faux-grunge Tin Machine then seemed to draw a line more fully. 

Like another Doctor Who-style regeneration, Bowie emerged with the spotlight somewhat off him with the largely electronic Black Tie White Noise album in 1993. Four years shy of turning 50, he embraced contemporary influences such as hip-hop, while also reuniting with Nile Rodgers. Some suggest this was a mild mid-life crisis, but in truth, it was simply the magpie tendency that had acquired genres throughout his career showing through once more. It also manifested itself in the understated soundtrack to BBC TV’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha Of Suburbia, which remains one of my favourite collections of Bowie music. Indeed, as the 90s progressed, Bowie explored further new avenues, with drum’n’bass and a more industrial sound, as can be found on 1. Outside, Earthling and the gentle Hours…, released in relatively quick succession between 1995 and 1999.

There is no doubt that the 90s saw a quietening of the mania that had followed Bowie since the beginning of the 1970s. And, yet, it’s something of a myth to suggest that the decade saw a complete rewrite of his character. This is attested to by Brilliant Live Adventures, a box set of previously unreleased live performances from the 1990s being progressively released like those encyclopaedia collections you used to see advertised after Christmas. 

The first, Ouvrez Le Chien (Live Dallas ’95) was released in October, with the second, No Trendy Réchauffé (Live Birmingham ’95) appearing in December, both with an eclectic line up of notably hit-light content. 

The third instalment, LiveAndWell.com appears next week, and will feature tracks recorded on the 1997 Earthling tour, and again skewing away from the traditional Bowie canon, with Hallo Spaceboy the only single and even the bleak V-2 Schneider instrumental from the Heroes album included. Brilliant Live Adventures’ six entries - the final three yet to be announced - may well prove to be collectibles for the most avid of fan. 

Previously, these 90s shows had only been available to users of Bowie’s pioneering web platform BowieNet, and it could be argued that they might well have stayed there (Bowie’s choice of songs in this period was never always met with the satisfaction of audiences who’d turned up to hear pop hits - “This is bollocks! We want Let’s Dance!”, a punter was heard saying at one gig). He had, in this period, been defiant: it had been a deliberate effort to shift away from the material that had driven the first couple of decades of his career. Bowie was also somewhat belligerent over how it would land, regarding the exercise of choosing relative obscurities as educational.

However, it wasn’t just the fanbase that grew indifferent. Even sections of the press turned, with “edgy” younger hacks making disparaging remarks, seemingly for reactionary kicks. Bowie’s former press officer, Alan Edwards, relayed to The Sunday Times late last year the story of how, in personal notes he wrote during the 1999 tour, Bob Dylan had just been made a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, but in the UK, Bowie was no longer being treated with anywhere near the reverence he once had. 

On 27 June, 2000, Bowie recorded a brilliant show for the BBC (later released as a third CD of a limited edition package of the Bowie At The Beeb compilation), during which he bound through classics like Wild Is The Wind, Ashes To Ashes, This Is Not America, The Man Who Sold The World and Let's Dance. It is still one of my treasured possessions, apart from anything else, for the vitality and freshness he brought to these songs. 

During the recording at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, Bowie enthralled the audience with hilarious stories about the set list he was performing. And, yet, Edwards couldn’t persuade a single journalist to come along. “The press wax lyrical about David now, but I had wads of tickets I couldn’t give away in the 1990s, because he was not deemed cool,” Edwards told The Sunday Times. 

Two days beforehand, Bowie had headlined the prestigious Sunday night slot at Glastonbury, delighting an enraptured 150,000-strong crowd with a 33-song romp through all the classics. Yes, the very songs Bowie had consciously rejected during his tours in the preceding decade. BBC2 aired the set in full last June, the first time it had been shown in its entirety, and almost 20 years to the day it had been staged. And it was mesmerising. The Glasto show has been rightly held up as the perfect Sunday night ‘legends’ performance, not just for the hands-aloft communal entertainment, but because we got the real David Bowie. From his baroque suit to his artfully tousled shoulder-length hair (a throwback to his late-60s folkie persona), this was a smiley, blokey Bowie. The man who fell down-to-earth, if you will. “Having a good time?” he threw out to the crowd at one point. This wasn’t the usual stage platitude. He was, genuinely, having a ball. “This is cool for us. I’ve not been here for 30 years, and it’s fucking great. I’m really hot and sweaty, I wore a stupid jacket, I’m too vain to take it off.” 

Glastonbury has been branded Bowie’s comeback, but in reality it was only a comeback from a relative wilderness. And if it was a comeback, it didn’t last all that long. For the following couple of years he withdrew into family life following the birth of his daughter Lexi. Now New York-based, he performed Heroes at The Concert For New York, the 9/11 benefit at Madison Square Garden in October 2001.  The following June came the Heathen album, another of my latter-career favourites, on which Bowie was joined by chums like Pete Townshend and Dave Grohl, as well as producer Tony Visconti, who had been a part of Bowie’s emergence at the end of the 1960s. It was a somewhat reflective record - not directly influenced by the events of the previous September, but certainly attuned to the anxious mood that emerged in America as a result. I was living in California at the time, and Heathen became a constant companion on the new contraption I was constantly plugged into. I believe it was called an iPod.

The following year Bowie released Reality which, when stood up next to Heathen, revealed a Bowie in his mid-50s and clearly contemplating the world around him. Moreover, it was an album of genuine warmth, full of ‘proper’ songs and a simpler, beginning-middle-end structure. The reception Reality met was as accepted as the comfort with which Bowie and his band went out on the road to tour it, which brings me back to the heartwarming - and heartbreaking - nature of the words at the start of this post. 

The Reality Tour, originally scheduled for ten months, came to an abrupt halt on 25 June, 2004, when Bowie experienced chest pain while on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Germany. It was a blocked coronary artery requiring an emergency bypass. And it ended his touring career. The public appearances that followed while he recuperated were few and far between, with the occasional awards show, and the odd performance, such as joining David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006 to do Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and Arnold Layne. It was David Bowie's final stage performance on British soil.  

Earlier that year he’d pledged to take a year off - “no touring, no albums”. It was a pledge he stuck to, mostly. One notable exception was his blisteringly funny appearance in a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras. He and Gervais had struck an unlikely friendship after Bowie had become a fan of The Office. 

“He loved comedy,” Gervais has said since. “He was amazing in Extras. I sent him the lyrics and I said: 'Do something quite retro, like Life On Mars, and he went: 'Oh yeah, I'll just knock off a quick Life On Mars then…’!”. The resulting appearance, in which Bowie, sat at a nightclub piano riffs a song about Gervais’s jobbing actor character Andy Millman (“Chubby little loser!”) is a piece of comedy gold. It was also a Bowie continuing to show his true self, though, still in character.

Extras wasn’t, of course, some kind of ironic finale. But it certainly marked an absence that would only be ended on 8 January, 2013, Bowie's 66th birthday, when we read via son Duncan Jones’ Twitter account that his dad had something new to say. And, thus, the mournful Where Are We Now? - the song which gave this blog its name - appeared without warning, with its nostalgic lookback at Bowie’s Berlin residency, itself an intentional withdrawal from the madness of 1970s fame. The following March, an entire album appeared, The Next Day. The world fell in love again with David Bowie. 

Suddenly, enigmatically, he was catapulted back into near-regal seniority, a member of rock's top team. A retrospective exhibition, David Bowie is..., went on tour after its run at London’s V&A (which I saw there and again, two years later in Paris). What we didn’t know, however, was that the show's subject was in the midst of a terrible, 18-month battle with liver cancer. This was to be the muse for two more surprises: the album Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, and his death two days later. “Look up here, I’m in heaven” he sang on Lazarus, “I got scars that can't be seen," and in the second verse, “Look up here, man, I'm in danger. I've got nothing left to lose”. Only Bowie could have seemingly stage-managed his own demise in that way. It obviously wasn’t so contrived, but to release his most personal album ever, one clearly alluding to his failing mortality, and then dying two days later seemed, well, perfectly Bowie.

Visconti maintains that Bowie had more music in him when he went, and was as shocked as everyone else by the news. But David Robert Jones had always had a vision. He even predicted the Internet. Perhaps the Major Tom of Space Oddity and Ashes To Ashes was, in reality, his alter-ego, and the Starman was simply projecting a future echo. The upshot is that it is too easy to get maudlin today on the fifth anniversary of his death. And I won’t. His career will always be the gift that keeps on giving (and the continuous output of posthumous releases seems to underpin that point). It’s just that when I look at those scenes of the real David Bowie on tour in 2003, you can't help wishing you could sit with him, one last time, in a South London pub. Having a laugh. Bowie bantz.

A duty of care

One Saturday night, early on in the lockdown, we binged our way through the second series of Ricky Gervais's brilliant After Life, his customary awkward moment-inducing dark comedy about a widower struggling with the loss of his wife. One of its many sub-plots is that of Gervais's character, Tony, and his bittersweet, will-they-won't-they relationship with his father’s care home nurse, Emma. This storyline is laid over the top of Tony's dad, Ray, gradually disappearing into the tangled mists of dementia. With apologies in advance for the spoiler, when Emma tells Tony that his father has died, I was instantly silenced - transported back to the identical call I received from my brother on a Sunday morning last August. The subsequent scene in Ray's care home, as he lay motionless in bed, took me back further, to the sight of my own father, finally at rest.

Dad's passing was my first up-close experience of death. Older relatives had died before in my lifetime but even in the case of my grandfather, who died when I was 15 (and had been my only living grandparent), I was somewhat distanced from his ultimate demise, due to him ending his days in a care facility my family felt it best that I avoided. I remember the day he died, though, looking out of my west-facing bedroom window and seeing a theatrically symbolic shaft of sunlight breaking through the cloud over where my grandfather had been living. 

With my dad's death, however, I'd seen it coming in real time. At 90, when he went, he'd had a 'good innings', as they say, but his later years had been blighted by prostate cancer and, ultimately, Alzheimer's, along with a suite of ailments associated with them both. Dad died in the care home he'd been a resident of for the year or so since a hospital stay the previous summer, after which it was concluded that it was no longer safe for him (or for my mum) to return to home. While tragic, he died 12 months later with some dignity and at apparent peace (although I later learned of the gorier, scatological detail of what his carers had to deal with as Alzheimer's gradually destroyed the wiring connecting his mind and his body. Their professionalism and their stoicism will remain with me forever). 

Ten months, almost to the day of my father's death, care homes could not be any more on the frontline of consciousness. Nearly one third of all COVID-19 deaths in the UK have occurred in care homes. The growing suspicion is that care patients and care staff have been the country's cannon fodder in the battle against the coronovirus, with a chronic lack of testing and widespread shortages of PPE, plus the knowing release from infected hospitals of patients back into care homes, almost guaranteeing asymptomatic transmission of the deadly bug. Damningly, the first independent report into the care sector's preparations for the pandemic has concluded that care home residents were, scandalously, "an afterthought". I can't speak for how my dad's facility in Kingston has fared, but if it's anything like thousands of others across the country, I shudder to think how he and his fellow residents would have survived. The National Audit Office report has revealed that 25,000 hospital patients were discharged into care homes as the pandemic reached its peak in the UK, with one in three homes suffering outbreaks of the virus. The report points to a lack of testing of hospital patients being discharged into or back into care homes as major cause of the infections that have wreaked tragedy amongst some of our oldest and most vulnerable citizens.

Meg Hillier, the former journalist who is now an MP and chairs the House Of Commons public accounts select committee, said of the report: "Care homes were at the back of the queue for both PPE and testing, so only got a small fraction of what they needed from central government. Residents and staff were an afterthought yet again: out of sight and out of mind, with devastating consequences." This, the report said, was nothing new, highlighting the "problematic" relationship between the NHS and the social care sector. "We have reported on successive efforts to integrate the two sectors," the report said, citing the numerous reports, consultations and independent reviews on this over the past 20 years. "Going into the pandemic, meaningful integration was still to occur, however, and the lack of it has made responding to the crisis more difficult in a number of ways," the report added, highlighting a lack of data and the most critical factor of PPE from government stockpiles not being released to care homes - including only 20% of gowns, 33% of eye protection and 50% of aprons that had been identified from scenario planning as being needed.

What leaves a bitter taste in my mouth is that while the government has been bragging about the record time it took to build the NHS Nightingale hospitals, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock boasting of his own achievements in reaching testing targets (which peaked, then fell back, and as at time of writing, his much vaunted test-and-trace app is still not fully operational...), care homes and carers have been making the ultimate sacrifice. It's almost as if this was planned that way. We've read  heartbreaking stories of carers succumbing to COVID-19 with their patients, bravely sacrificing their own lives to be with those they've devoted themselves to, rather than being at home with their families. 

My recollection of Dad's care team is one of a group of remarkable patient individuals, dealing with the weirdness and the grim hazards as car mechanics deal with engine grease and oil. And, yet, it's taken weeks of attrition before the government would even recognise the death rate in care homes as part of the official statistics of COVID-19 infections. Figures show that care home deaths tripled between the end of March and mid-May, passing the 7,000-per-week mark at a time when the national total was still only 21,000. Now it is above 40,000. Throughout this period the official advice has changed: on 19 March the NHS guidance was that: "unless required to be in hospital, patients must not remain in an NHS bed". On 2 April, the rules on discharging to care homes were clarified, saying "negative [coronavirus] tests are not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home". By 15 April, the government said all patients discharged from hospitals would be tested for coronavirus. Now, more than 14,000 care home residents with coronavirus have died in England and Wales alone.

As much as life in my dad's care home resembled the Cuckoo's Nest, I can't stop thinking about the team who looked after him for those 12 or so months or, indeed, those people who lived there. Those carers brought dignity to my dad in his final days, even when his own body was denying him of dignity.

Is it any wonder?

And so the anniversary of David Bowie's death comes around again. A properly balanced individual would simply get over it, as they would the deaths of any figure they'd held in high regard but never knew personally. Bowie is, though, one of only two artists I’ve properly mourned for, the other being John Martyn. And when I say “mourn”, I don’t mean the lowering of flags and wearing a black veil for a month, but a profound reflection on - as irrational as this sounds - the loss. In the case of Bowie, it was the loss of a creative soul who’s music, and all the different phases of that music - the winsome folk, the glam, the soul, the post-punk, the pop, the grunge...the endless reinvention, basically - captured my interest almost inadvertently. 

But in the wake of Bowie dying, on this day four years ago and just 48 hours after releasing his final album, Blackstar, I discovered another Bowie, one that I have also come to miss as much as a personal and now absent friend. In the flood of archive video clips that started surfacing on social media, documenting both live performances as well as the few on-camera interviews he did, I encountered a Bowie brimming with warmth and a distinct south London charm. Unencumbered by the addictions and foibles of the 1970s, the 1990s Bowie was funny and relaxed. Indeed, backstage footage of The Dame on what would be his final tour saw not a rock deity but a bloke you would willingly want to spent time with, down the pub, in a restaurant, out on the town. 

Somehow this not only completed my picture of Bowie, but also my appreciation of him, as if the incredible body of music and the bold artistic adventure hadn’t been enough. The cap of it all was a train journey back to Paris from the Montreux Jazz Festival when I watched the entire concert film of Bowie’s Reality Tour. Recorded in Dublin in 2003, and running to almost two-and-a-half hours, over 30 songs it not only captured Bowie at his best and captured Bowie’s best, but faithfully portrayed the relaxed, funny, easy-going Bowie that bandmates like Gail Ann Dorsey and Earl Slick would later tell a BBC documentary was what typified him on that tour. 

Sad, then, that health issues ended his live career in 2004, and until the bombshell of 2013, when the single Where Are We Now and, later, The Next Day album, appeared out of the blue, his public appearances were limited to a few guest slots, such as performing Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb with David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006, and his hilarious cameo in Ricky Gervais’s Extras (“Chubby little loser!”).

Since his death there has been no shortage of posthumous releases of archive material and rarities, all of which this fan has been more than willing to Hoover up. Yes, I’m the record company’s dream punter, buying super deluxe editions without question, but just as I will defend most live albums (if recorded well enough and capture a genuinely great performance), the Bowie box sets have provided new opportunity to appreciate the music, the charisma and the artist anew.

And, there seems, plenty more to come. On what would have been Bowie’s 73rd birthday two days ago, Parlophone announced the next set of baubles to prise open the fan’s wallet. Over the next six weeks an EP, David Bowie: Is It Any Wonder?, will be released online in six increments, starting with - and available now - a previously unreleased version of The Man Who Sold The World. The EP’s following five tracks will be released on a weekly basis from 17 January onwards. Then, on this year’s Record Store Day, 18 April, Parlophone will release ChangesNowBowie, effectively a recording of studio rehearsals for Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden on 8 January, 1997. Track listings have not yet been released, but the concert featured classics like Space Oddity, The Jean Genie, Queen Bitch, Scary Monsters (And Supercreeps) and other more obscure gems and a cover - with Lou Reed - of The Velvet Underground’s I'm Waiting for the Man. And, of course, I’ll be in the queue at 6am to buy it.

Goodbye Garry Shandling, half-man, half-desk

HBO

I sincerely hope the Grim Reaper is taking Easter off. Not wishing to be flippant, especially in this Holy Week - and one in which we've seen the very worst that humankind can do to itself - but since the beginning of 2016 the passing of entertainers who have meant so much more to people than merely authoring memorable songs or delivering superlative performances has been relentless.

Every time another falls, obiturists and commentators struggle, understandably, to say something new and original, a task made so much harder by the archly innovative nature of those we've lost this year. And yesterday we lost another one, Garry Shandling.

Perhaps you only know Shandling for just two of his achievements, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show: if so, you will have been blessed with having seen two of modern television's greatest game changers. That, I know, sounds like more of the same hyperbole, but for once it is valid.

The former of these two ground-breaking TV shows would probably have been the first most people outside of the Los Angeles stand-up comedy circuit would have known of Shandling. Pre-dating Seinfeld by three years, It's Garry Shandling's Show presented a similar concept, a sitcom about the stand-up comedy of its star, and focusing on male neuroses with more than a hint of Jewishness about it too.

What made Shandling's show so unique was that it was a sitcom where the borders between fiction and reality were never fully clear: set largely in an apartment which faithfully duplicated Shandling's own Sherman Oaks home, Shandling and his fellow cast members would frequently break the 'fourth wall' as they acted out scenes from the comedian's own hang-ups.

Addressing the audience in character wasn't particularly new: George Burns had done it many years before in his own sitcom, and Oliver Hardy had made the exasperated stare-to-camera a staple of his films with Stan Laurel, always to hilarious effect. But Shandling and co-writer Alan Zweibel found a new purpose in their show which ran from 1986 until 1990.

Two years after It's Garry Shandling's Show ended, Shandling hit comedy gold again with the unbelievably prescient Larry Sanders Show. Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show in May 1992 became far more than a major media event - it triggered the now-infamous battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno to succeed him (superbly chronicled, by the way, in Bill Carter's authoritative tome, The Late Shift).

To this Brit, until I visited America for the first time at the end of 1992 I had never really appreciated the cultural importance of US TV's late night talk shows. Chat shows in the UK were hardly zeitgeist-grabbing: Terry Wogan's show on BBC1 three nights a week often appeared to be nothing more than an outlet for publicists, rather than anything that would set the conversational agenda in workplaces the following morning. And while Michael Parkinson may have held the position of Britain's king of chat for his A-list interviews since the 1970s, there was little edge to them, even the more memorable encounters.

In the US, however, the late night talk shows held a commanding presence in the TV schedules, partly due to Carson's legacy. They were prized properties for the networks, maintaining affluent demographics up long after their recommended bedtimes with their formula of hosts' monologues, celebrity appearances, banter with sidekicks and wacky stunts. This was much to the delight of premium advertisers who paid healthily to associate themselves with the late night pack.

Carson had, in the words of Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson (who took on his own show - The Late, Late Show) been "your best pal and uncle and dad rolled into one", but with a cheek and a subversiveness. Letterman, more so than his rival Leno, took that cheek and subversiveness and added a proprietary brand of wiseass cynicsm. "The only person I ever watched was Dave," wrote Ferguson in his memoir American On Purpose. "He was funny and bitter and I got the feeling he secretly (or maybe not so secretly) despised showbiz." That was probably more than just at the core of Shandling's Larry Sanders.

The Larry Sanders Show was never meant to draw on the late night war of 1992, but its arrival on HBO in the midst of conflict in the August of that year was remarkable in its timing. The added spice was that Shandling had often filled in for Carson and was even considered at one point to be another potential replacement.

More than a quarter of a century on, the Sanders show is still - and should be - considered the standard by which any other satirical sitcom should be measured, and its legacy looms large in so many great shows that followed in its wake - The Office (in all its international incarnations), Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Thick Of It and its American cousin, Veep, Extras, Episodes, Alan Partridge - the list goes on.

Perhaps this is not surprising: spend any amount of time around the entertainment business and you will encounter its paranoias, its hang-ups, its narcissism and its insecurities, all of which Shandling captured so brilliantly with Sanders and his entourage on a fictional late night talk show.

Much like his mostly-self portrayal on It's Garry Shandling's Show, Larry Sanders took another angle on Shandling himself, now supplanted into Hollywood's morass of vanity and insecurity. The difference, though, was that The Larry Sanders Show wasn't focused entirely around Shandling's character - in one episode memorably and sycophantically described by producer Artie (the exceptional Rip Torn) as "like one of those goddamn creatures out of Greek mythology: half-man, half-desk."

Many of the wickedly funny plotlines spun from Sanders' on-screen sidekick, the relentlessly dim Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor). Supporting characters also took on prominent plot pivots, played by then-up and coming comic actors like Janeane Garofalo as acid-tongued talent booker Paula (succeeded by a pre-24 Mary Lynn Rajskub), Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham as smartarse head writer Phil, and Breaking Bad/Better Caul Saul's Bob Odenkirk as Sanders' reprehensible agent Stevie Grant.

Everybody on The Larry Sanders Show possessed egos that were easily inflated and dangerously fragile, starting with Shandling's own character and his self-popularity obsession and, on occasion, the size of his arse. The delicious irony of this, however, was that Shandling and his co-writers regularly used The Larry Sanders Show as an opportunity for celebrities to willingly send themselves up. David Duchovny - then in the throes of his original X-Files fame - often appeared as a guest on the fictional Sanders' show displaying a barely-concealed homoerotic attachment for the host, an attraction that hilariously made Shandling's character even more unnerved (Shandling would later appear in a semi-spoof episode of The X-Files, Hollywood AD, alongside Duchovny's then wife Téa Leoni).

From Jennifer Aniston to Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin to Henry Winkler, and Warren Beatty to Warren Zevon, very real stars lined up to appear on the show, as much a testament to Shandling's creation, given that these same stars would simultaneously be appearing on the promotional circuit of all the for-real late night talk shows of the day.

Garry Shandling may have started out as another Midwest shuckster plying the LA comedy clubs, but over the course of the 12 years that he made It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show, he carved himself out as one of Hollywood's sharpest observers. Credit, of course, shouldn't go entirely to him - there were co-writers on both projects - but when you look back on them now, they were both of their time and ahead of their time.

As the real late night talk shows can often be accused of, American TV is often formulaic. Neither of Shandling's most memorable creations could be accused of that. Even if his subsequent acting career didn't ever plough such rich furrows, these two shows will ensure a prominent place in TV's hall of fame, reminders that right before the 'golden age of television' came along, with heavyweight, earnest and deservedly-praised 'must-see' shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad, one slightly nerdy, stereotypically neurotic Jewish comedian from Chicago broke through barriers and accepted norms with two hysterical shows that will always be regarded as nothing but genius. No more flipping.