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.

Watch that man

When he died, enigmatically two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his prophetic final album Blackstar, the world re-examined David Bowie, as is the way when legends pass away. The process was both cathartic and informing, and it perhaps woke a consciousness that Bowie was more than just another dead rock star. Because he had been more than just a rock star to begin with.

The somewhat inevitable, but none the less enjoyable reissuing of his albums in a series of chronological box sets, starting with Five Years (1969–1973) in 2015 and most recently Loving The Alien (1983–1988), has enabled the ardent Bowie fan to reassess in depth the chapters of reinvention that made Bowie, over the course of the better part of 50 years as a recording artist, one of the most fascinating acts of the pop and rock age. I probably don’t need to declare my interest here: this and my previous blog plundered their titles from The Dame. But the stream of biography that has continued to flow since his death in 2016, along with the myriad re-releases, has been nothing but a celebration, though most has focused on the Bowie everyone knows, the Bowie from Hunky Dory, through Ziggy and the Thin White Duke personas, to the Berlin trilogy, the '80s pop, the '90s experimentations with “urban” music, to his settling in late middle age with some of his most pleasing work and, from what we can gather, the most personable David Bowie, comfortable in his skin, comfortable with his legacy of hits, funny, self-depreciating and quintessentially South London, a bloke you’d love to hang out with.

This latter Bowie was closer to David Robert Jones from Brixton than at any time since 1969 when his strumming 12-string guitar heralded the intro to Space Oddity, and the real David Bowie (even if he'd gone by that moniker since 1966) - the progressive Bowie - emerged. The period before that point tends to get less attention, but tonight at 9pm on BBC2, a film-length documentary addresses the period of the Jones-Bowie metamorphosis, and the path of theatrical character finding that followed. David Bowie: Finding Fame is the third and final film in Frances Whately's trilogy of superbly researched and edited retrospectives, following 2013's David Bowie: Five Years and 2017's David Bowie: The Last Five Years. Finding Fame focuses on his career at the outset of the name, David Bowie.

As David Jones, Bowie formed his first band, the Konrads, as a teenager, pretty much echoing how The Beatles and the Stones had built their reputations, playing live rock and roll at youth clubs and weddings. Shortly after leaving technical college, the young Jones joined the King Bees, building a repertoire of R'nB covers of Howlin Wolf and Willie Dixon numbers. After a stint in another blues outfit, the Mannish Boys, Jones joined a succession of beat bands, like The Lower Third, the Buzz and Riot Squad. By this time David Jones - or 'Davy' Jones, as he'd become - was growing somewhat dilettante, flirting with quitting pop music altogether and studying dance at Sadler's Wells, as well as falling under the twin influences of dance and mime artist Lindsay Kemp and the theatrical music of Anthony Newley.

Here is where Finding Fame comes in. Renaming himself David Bowie (conscious of not being confused with The Monkees' Davy Jones, drawing on American pioneer James Bowie for a name that would remain for the rest of his life), 1966 saw Bowie embark on a career that would, until Space Oddity three years later, struggle to find a form, even if the novelty single The Laughing Gnome would provide a minor hit (and a bi-product of Bowie’s affinity with Newley’s material). What emerges, however, is that Bowie was - and remained - restlessly in search of his style, and as his albums right up until, and including Blackstar, will attest, that relentless exploration was what produced such an amazing canon of work. Almost all of it was inspired by or, in some cases, pilfered from, the diverse musical and artistic influences Bowie devoured. Paul McCartney may have strayed little from the charming melodicism he brought to The Beatles, but even by the time he reached Blackstar, his 25th album, Bowie was still experimenting, that time with experimental jazz, on Let’s Dance with funk (working with Nile Rogers) or Young Americans with Philly soul. At essence, Bowie was a magpie street mod, collecting shiny trinkets as he went and feathering his nest with them, and forever changing his hair, his look, his style.

What informed and influenced this perpetual reinvention is explored by Whately in the documentary, calling on witnesses who were there at the creation of David Bowie, such as his first cousin and lifelong confidante Kristina Amadeus, and his highly influential ex-girlfriend Hermione Farthingale (yep, American friends, that’s a real name). There are also contributions from the late Lindsay Kemp, in his last on-camera interview, as well as longstanding friends like Geoff MacCormak and George Underwood, and the producers Mike Vernon, Tony Hatch and the producer who’d be most associated with him, Tony Visconti. Drummer Woody Woodmansey, the last surviving member of the Spiders From Mars also makes an appearance. Into the mix Whately adds previously unheard recordings and unpublished documents, such as the BBC’s report from a November 1965 audition by The Lower Third, in which they attempt Chim-Chim-Cheree from Mary Poppins. “Routine beat group,” sniffs one verdict, “strange choice of material. Amateur-sounding vocalist who sing wrong notes and out of tune. Group has nothing to recommend it.” That singer - then going by the name Davie Bowie, gets a bluff dismissal from another: “The singer is a cockney type but not outstanding enough.” However, another wrote: “The lead singer could interpret a beat number and a number like Chim-Chim-Cheree with equal facility.” Yep, that’ll be Bowie.

Equally anticipated in Whately's film is previously lost footage of an early '70s TV appearance. Though seemingly a bolt-on to the pre-fame (or pre-Fame?) context of the documentary, Whately has unearthed what could be considered the birth of Ziggy Stardust, a June 1972 spot on a long-forgotten ITV children's show, Lift Off With Ayshea. Most of the show's 144-edition run are believed to have been wiped, but with audio of Ziggy and the Spiders performing Starman emerging, a fragile tape was tracked down, which will hopefully make it into the final edit of Finding Fame (if it has been restored in time). Though Finding Fame concerns itself mostly with Bowie's emergence in the mid-60s, the Starman clip will be fascinating to see where that tousle-haired Brixton boy ended up, and in a TV performance that pre-dates the famous - or infamous - performance Top Of The Pops performance of the song, with Bowie outraging the nation with his arm draped around Mick Ronson's shoulder

There here will be more unearthed material to come in April when Parlophone releases Spying Through A Keyhole, a box set of seven-inch vinyl singles marking the 50th anniversary of Space Oddity, and containing nine previously unreleased recordings including early recordings of Bowie’s first meeting with Major Tom.

Drawing its title from a lyric in another early song, Love All Around, Spying Through A Keyhole includes recordings and acoustic home demos of songs like Mother Grey, In The Heat Of The Morning (an early Bowie song that some may already be familiar with), Goodbye Threepenny Joe, Love All Around, London Bye, Ta-Ta and two work-in-progress versions of Angel, Angel, Grubby Face. There are also a couple of versions of Space Oddity, including one which may be the first ever demo of the song that put Bowie firmly on the map.

As with the release of any archival material from any artist, this collection may well be one for the fans, but as a companion to the final Whately documentary, it will help sequence the DNA of the David Bowie that was to come, the Bowie that even know, three years after his death, continues to fascinate like few - if any - of his contemporaries in the rock era.

Look up here, I'm in heaven - Bowie one year on

© Simon Poulter 2017

It probably took me the best part of that Monday morning to take it all in. Because it just didn't seem true, let alone expected. Or even logical. Three mornings previously I'd eagerly started to consume Blackstar, like everyone else blissfully unaware of - or subconsciously ignoring - the clues that, now, seem far less than cryptic. As I had done as a teenager with a new purchase, I listened to the album non-stop throughout the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, first as the overnight iTunes download and then - as soon as I'd been able to get out of the house and down to the FNAC on the Champs-Élysées (then my nearest record shop) -  the CD. Yes, we music heads are somewhat obsessive-compulsive like that: I needed a physical confirmation that Bowie's new album was real. To acquire it required taking Line 9 of the Métro to Franklin D. Roosevelt station, where poster ads for Blackstar adorned the entire length of the platform walls, further proof that, by any dimension, this was a major album launch, from a major artist. The fact that this would only be the second album from that artist in 13 years only added to the sense of occasion.

And it was strange and confounding and oh-so definitely Bowie. Blackstar won nothing but rave reviews. I myself wrote, in what would significantly be the final post of my What Would David Bowie Do? blog: "★is simply stunning. You might have expected me to say that but, trust me, I don't out of slavish sycophanticism. Because, creatively, conceptually and, most of all, musically, it has exceeded expectations. It is the Bowie album I wanted, and we needed."

I wasn't alone. "The overall effect is ambiguous and spellbinding, adjectives that apply virtually throughout Blackstar," wrote Alex Petridis in The Guardian. "It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music." That appeared on the 7th. How were we - anyone - to know what lay behind Bowie's restlessness.

He was, though, and in the words of Blackstar producer and long-term collaborator Tony Visconti, "at the top of his game". As we now know from David Bowie: The Last Five Years, Francis Whately's wonderful BBC2 documentary screened last Saturday, Bowie was already undergoing treatment for cancer when he brought together a relatively unknown group of jazz-minded musicians at The Magic Shop studio in New York's SoHo, not far from his home. The assumption was that cancer was simply something Bowie was dealing with, but once his death became known, the resultant record's themes of reflection and even acceptance of mortality made perfect sense. "Look up here, I'm in heaven," opened Lazarus, the third track. "I've got scars that can't be seen. I've got drama, can't be stolen, Everybody knows me now".

Whether, though, he knew his condition was terminal as he wrote the album is not fully clear. The lyrical prescience is chillingly uncanny. But by the time Bowie came to make the promo videos for Blackstar's lead single and title track, as well as for Lazarus, he was ready to tell the Swedish video director Johan Renck over Skype that he was "very unwell and I'm probably going to die". The treatment had been stopped. Time - the untameable beast that smoked a cigarette in Rock'n'Roll Suicide - was running out on one of the most unique figures of the 20th century, even if he'd spent much of the 21st century at that point out of sight.

Dying so soon after releasing Blackstar could have been the most Bowie thing he could have done. A theatrical exit, enigmatic to the last. We may never know whether it was his desire to get the album out, or whether some other force kept alive long enough. Or, simply, the emotional release of bringing out his final record exhausting his failing body. But whether, in hindsight, Bowie's death can be explained, it was still unreal. The release of an album for any living artist - let alone such a storied figure as David Bowie, with close to 50 years of recording behind him and all those flirtations with myriad musical styles and changes of image - is always an event of excitement and trepidation.

For the fan, I've always maintained that nothing beats the first play of a new record. It's like disrupting virgin snowfall or unboxing a new iPhone. There is fevered expectation, nervousness even. Will it improve upon its predecessor? Will it be worse? Will it chart new creative territory? Will it move me? For Blackstar these emotions were accentuated by the fact that we had only just come to terms with Bowie being 'back' after extended absence. You could be forgiven for getting giddy at the sight of all those billboards and magazine back cover adverts trailing the arrival of a new album.

Rolling Stone/Jimmy King

We'd been treated to some wonderful, wicked Bowie teasery in the previous three years: waking up on the morning of his 66th birthday to see a tweet from Duncan Jones, his filmmaker son, revealing new music, the beautifully reflective single Where Are We Now?, followed by an entire album - The Next Day. Nothing for close to ten years, not even a hint, and then - BOOM - Bowie was back, back, BACK. The release of the bonkers, brilliant Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) in 2014 to herald the Nothing Has Changed compilation augured that Bowie was in a rich vein of creative form. News of Blackstar merely consolidated this.

Which is why the text I got that Monday morning from a colleague in Finland - already one hour ahead - saying "Sorry man" was so baffling. Sorry about what? After three consecutive days of playing the album non-stop, and even then not being able to catch up with all the reviews that appeared before Christmas, the very last thing I would have expected was for Bowie to be dead. "He can't be," I thought to myself. "He's just brought his new album out." My inner narrative was defiant: you don't write, record and release an album, and then die two days after it comes out.

Monday morning wore on. It was now headline news. Television, radio, online. People were already gathering to enshrine the Bowie mural on the side of Morleys department store on Tunstall Road in Brixton, a ten-minute walk from the house in Stansfield Road where the singer had been born, 69 years before. Mid-morning I received a text from my friend, the musician Steven Wilson, himself another huge fan. We discovered that we'd both received copies of The Laughing Gnome reissue in November 1973 for our birthdays, a week apart. Even more delightful was that they'd been bought as a job lot by my parents from Woolies in New Malden. Within a few days Steven paid his own tribute, adding a stunning, faithful cover of Space Odyssey to the set of his forthcoming Hamburg show. It would become a fitting tour staple.

However, as Steven and I exchanged messages, the enormity of Bowie's death still didn't sink in. I guess that's classic denial. I later blogged about it, of course, not so much in grief as trying to process it all. There was some backlash to such melodrama, the "snowflake" accusations of the cold-hearted who felt it necessary to shower discorn on the mass outpouring of what would be the first of so many celebrity deaths in 2016. Obviously, none of us were friends with Bowie, or related to him. But that glib dismissal of the "Diana-isation" of Bowie's death cruelly and ignorantly glossed over the power of art, of music, and indeed of Bowie's art and music.

He wasn't some mythic, messianic man of the people. That was why we was considered so cool. He wasn't one of us. For much of his career, he wasn't one of anything discernible. He was David Bowie. He may have been born in Brixton, growing up in the suburbia of Bromley, but as soon as David Robert Jones became David Bowie, and all permutations thereafter, he became a pop star unlike any of his peers. And that was the point. That was his point.

© Simon Poulter 2017

I am too young - well, I was too young - to have experienced Bowie the first time around, whether the tousle-haired, Newley/Brel-obsessed folkie, the supreme songsmith opening his 'classic' 1970s account with the remarkable Hunky Dory or commencing the first of his characterisations with Ziggy Stardust.

Even if I score some points for The Laughing Gnome being the first single I ever owned, I formally entered Bowiedom with Ashes To Ashes and its album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). And then, as so often was the case with Bowie, no sooner had he embraced, briefly, New Wave and the New Romantic eras, than he was shape-changing again with Let's Dance. Only later did I dive into his 1970s canon, discovering the most extraordinary body of work, and an incredible eight-year run of nine albums of original songs, plus the live albums (and the Pin Ups collection of covers).

There were - are - many ages of Bowie. The folkie, the progressive rock pioneer, the glam rocker, the soul boy, the Berlin lab experiment, the lost years of the late '80s and misguided attempts to embrace youth with drum'n'bass in the '90s, and then the second golden era, as a relaxed, contented Bowie emerged with Hours, Heathen and Reality. Indeed the latter spawned Bowie's final concert tour, and it was interesting to hear bassist Gail Ann Dorsey say in the BBC documentary how relaxed Bowie was on the Reality Tour. "He was funny - that was the real David Bowie".

It was not something I'd ever thought of about Bowie. Not that I thought him a po-faced automaton, but his characters and guises masked the Brixton boy beneath. After his death I poured over interviews with him on YouTube, and only then did I become mournful. Because throughout was the very antithesis of measured, PR-controlled rock legend, but the chuckling, jovial soul with a recognisable, self-depreciating south London sense of humour. He was, in interviews with Michael Parkinson, Jools Holland and Chris Evans, a Bowie I'd never previously considered, a Bowie you'd want to hang out with in the pub. All fans at some point yearn for personal contact with their heroes, but this sensation was different. It was final realisation that the Thin White Duke, the whey-faced Pierrot clown, Ziggy and all the others were simply costumes. That was when I realised that we'd lost someone unique and peerless. And that was also when I realised that it was OK to mourn. Because Bowie was more than just a pop star, more than a poster on the teenage bedroom wall. He'd been a part of my upbringing. And in that sense, he would be irreplaceable.

The next day continues

So this is weird. Downright odd, actually. Five days ago I was listening to a brand new David Bowie album for the first time and four days ago writing a review of it. And, then, two days ago I was coming to terms with his death.

Hard to take it all in, and not just from the perspective of grief. How incredible - if that's the right word - these last few days have been. The euphoria of a record reconfirming the continuation of an incredible canon of work and a career that had seemed lost, then news that its author was gone.

Cute as it may be to suggest that Bowie's death was as cleverly stage managed as any of his artistic endeavours in life, the reality is that we won't ever know whether nature just took its course, or that, somehow, reaction to Blackstar being released, along with almost exclusively glowing reviews generated in advance, would prove to be the final inhalation.

"He always did what he wanted to do," wrote producer Tony Visconti, who first worked with Bowie on his 1969 David Bowie album. In a Facebook post he said: "He wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was no different from his life - a work of Art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift."

In the same post, Visconti revealed that Bowie had taken him into his confidence early about his life expectancy: "I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn't, however, prepared for it."

No one was. No one is. Even taking the cod philosophy of Gerry O'Driscoll, the Abbey Road handyman quoted on Pink Floyd's The Great Gig In The Sky: "I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it – you've got to go sometime", you don't lose the sting of it.

On Monday night I went out for a walk down to the Flamme de la Liberté, the unofficial memorial to Princess Diana above the Pont D'Alma tunnel where she died, not out of any morbid fixation, but that I hadn't actually been out of my apartment since the news about Bowie had broken, needed to stretch my legs, and Pont D'Alma is only a ten minute walk away.

But when I got there it dawned on me how Bowie's abrupt death was, almost, sort of, kind of like that of Diana. A bit. In a way. Not to get too Daily Express about it, Diana had been enjoying a new lease of life when she died in that tunnel, indulging the good life of Paris and doing so with her new(ish) love. So when the news, that Sunday morning, hit the world so unexpectedly, it was like a punch to the solar plexus and the "outpouring of grief" (© all news organisations) that followed was accentuated by the unexpected shock. Because we think celebrities are immortal, right? I remember when Jim Henson died, people were grief stricken: "What will happen to The Muppets now?". OK, bad example.

With Bowie it was the same or similar or not far off it. As enigmatically as he'd lived his life, his expiration came without warning. We were all on a high because a) he was back and b) he'd produced something so satisfying and nourishing that he couldn't possibly just exit stage left like that. But he did.

So this post marks the start of a new blog. The old one, What Would David Bowie Do? was, as I've oft pointed out, never actually about Bowie. It just seems ludicrous to maintain a blog with his name in it - regardless of the reason why his name is in it - when he's no longer around. It just doesn't.

Thus, What Would David Bowie Do? ends - after, appropriately, five years - as it should: like Miss Havisham at Satis House collecting dust in her wedding dress or a watch stopped at the exact moment of an alien encounter, with the final post being that review of Blackstar.

New adventures abound (and no apologies for the new title - it was indeed the best I could come up with and, yes, it does cover pretty much anything I might post on it, and, yes, it is a nod.