When Ziggy played...Tolworth

Picture: Tim Harrison

It is more than likely that you will never have heard of Tolworth. And why would you? It is, mostly, a roundabout on the Kingston Bypass as the A3 heads south-west out of London. It is not the adjacent Surbiton, best known for The Good Life and a million comfortable middle class memes. Nor is it Kingston-upon-Thames, anchor of the royal borough in which it is located. Down the road is Chessington, once best known for a zoo and now for its theme park. Further east is Epsom, north-east is Wimbledon.

Like much of this corner of London, where I was born, grew up and have returned to, Tolworth is part of a seamless conurbation, where towns once made distinct in the Domesday Book blur into each other, separated only by postcodes and school catchment areas. This is the suburbia of Betjeman, the aspirational outer boroughs where 1930s ribbon development brought rows of tree-lined avenues filled with semi-detached houses, bowler-hatted commuters and Austin Maxis getting washed on Sundays.

Tolworth’s primary landmark is a gargantuan concrete tower block built in 1963, with a glamorous-sounding ‘Broadway’ of shops attached to it. If you squint, the tower is visible from the air on the westerly approach as you come in to land at Heathrow. The tower’s exterior was once scaled by Terry Scott in an “amusing” Terry And June jape involving Scott and a window cleaning cradle. That was, pretty much, the extent of Tolworth’s glory, for me at least, coming from two miles up the A3 in New Malden. Until, a few years ago, when a caller to Danny Baker’s then-Saturday morning show on BBC Radio London revealed that he’d seen David Bowie perform in a Tolworth pub one Thursday night in 1972. 

The story, which blew everyone listening away (not least, Baker himself) was that the caller, then a teenager, had actually seen Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars make their live debut at The Toby Jug, a pub that, until the spring of 2002 , sat next to the A3 at the Tolworth roundabout. Pubs like the Toby Jug were staples of the suburbs, a neighbourhood boozer, with engraved pewter tankards hanging above the bar and regulars like my grandad (who frequented the Toby Jug’s closest rival, the Red Lion), nursing halves of Charrington's Toby Ale. 

But that Saturday morning, when I heard the story of Ziggy’s arrival on Earth in a pub almost walking distance from the house I was born in, my fascination with the area’s musical heritage took on a new and unexpected twist. As I’ve chronicled on these pages before, I’d long known about the Kingston area’s connections with rock’s formative years (see myriad posts-passim on the likes of John Martyn, Eric Clapton and my childhood friend Steven Wilson), but Bowie… 

He was, of course, an adopted son of suburbia himself. Brixton-born, at the age of 6 Bowie and his family migrated out to another leafy borough, Bromley. On 10 February, 1972 he was living in nearby Beckenham, at Haddon Hall, the glorified commune he’d come to occupy with then-wife Angie (a marketing graduate of what used to be Kingston Polytechnic) and their infant son Duncan. Guitarist Mick Ronson, bass player Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey were there too. That afternoon they piled into a Transit van and drove west, through the outskirts of Croydon, Banstead and Sutton, to the pub that, as Surbiton-based writer Tim Harrison describes would play an integral and unlikely part of musical history. 

Not that it was meant to be: having run through most of the songs at a rehearsal gig on 29 January at the legendary Friars of Aylesbury, a planned launch on 3 February at the Lanchester Arts Festival in Coventry had been cancelled by Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, making Tolworth the first port of call on a string of dates that the band would play throughout the spring and early summer of 1972. The tour would present material from the album that would be released that June - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. But it wouldn’t just be a showcase for new work - it was the commencement of a new guise for Bowie, one which combined conventional rock music with a somewhat avant garde costumed glam rock theatricality, within the notional concept of a sentient alien arriving on Earth. 

Tim Harrison

Tim Harrison chronicles that evening, 50 years ago, in his remarkable book, Hello Tolworth, I’m Ziggy. In many respects it is the tome I’ve always wanted to write myself, charting the phenomenal galaxy of musical talent that came from and through south-west London in the ’60s and ’70s. In particular, it focuses on the acts who played the function room of one suburban pub in its heyday, on their circuitous, industrial routes to greater glories. It’s the result of five years - yes, Five Years! - of extensive research by Harrison, revealing a rich list of bands who performed at the Toby Jug until its demolition - a catalogue of classic rock, with Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Howlin’ Wolf and even Muddy Waters during the ’60s blues boom, King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull and Genesis in the prog era, and the likes of Squeeze, The Damned, Ultravox and The Stranglers in the punk and New Wave years. It is, though, the copiously researched chapter at the book’s outset of the night when David Bowie reinvented himself again (and not for the last time), that provides Harrison’s premise. 

Without wishing to recount in full Bowie’s story up until that Thursday night in February 1972, his arrival on stage at the Toby Jug, wearing bright red wrestling boots and supported by three “unreconstructed white English blokes” from Hull dressed in “stretch silver satinette”, to quote one witness, lit the touch paper on the cultural phenomenon that Bowie would become throughout the 1970s. 

Fame - to use a word - had hitherto been fleeting: his pop debut with his self-titled, debut album led to the career reset of his second, self-titled solo album, known mostly as “the one with Space Oddity on it”. That may have been a hit single, but over the course of 1970 and 1971, and the albums The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory, Bowie was still searching for his place. It’s almost a cliche now to refer back to him as a shape-shifting magpie, collecting whatever styles and genres took his fancy, but over the course of these four records he’d embraced Anthony Newley-style vaudeville, pastoral folk and blues rock. Hunky Dory was barely in the can when Bowie and the three Yorkshiremen entered London’s Trident studios to record the Ziggy Stardust album.

Two nights before Tolworth became Ziggy Ground Zero, the band - with no mention of the moniker they would adopt for much of 1972 and 1973 - appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the BBC’s venerable music show which was, then, a late night refuge for the progressive and the eclectic. The set included Five Years, Queen Bitch and Oh! You Pretty Things and was, technically, the debut of Ziggy and the Spiders. But that wouldn’t happen, officially, until 9pm 48 hours later, when the quartet took to the stage at the Toby Jug.

Actually, Ziggy appeared about an hour before the band went on. Harrison tells the story of 19-year-old Alan Stevens, the landlord’s grandson, who brought a brown ale to Bowie in the makeshift dressing room before showtime. Offering it to “Mr. Bowie”, he was quickly corrected: it was for “Ziggy”. An hour later, in front of 60 punters scattered around the pub function room’s wooden flooring, Bowie made his introduction: “These are the Spiders From Mars”, he said, matter-of-factly, and then promptly introduced each Spider by name. Harrison’s extensive research tracked down the predominantly then-teenage punters there that night - 16 and 17-year-olds from surrounding areas like Worcester Park, Thames Ditton and Ewell, from the flats across the road and the housing estate around the corner. Their recollections are fascinating snapshots in time: “No one was really sure if it was brilliant, or if it was madness,” said one, adding: “They [the band] were all up there; tarted up in make-up. It wasn’t androgynous…it was just weird.”

This was the outset of glam, something you wouldn’t find much subscription - yet - to in the suburbs of the early 1970s. “I’m not sure 1972 was ready for it”, the punter told Harrison. Another admitted: “My first thought, when the band came on, was ‘What a bunch of weirdos!’”. He’d gone to the gig somewhat sight unseen of Bowie’s work. “I thought the band were weird and camp,” he said. “I’m not homophobic…but it was men in shiny gear - it was a homoerotic display, and I’d no experience of that, no terms of reference.” 

Like most of Bowie’s guises, Ziggy was part pantomime, part theatre, and even though such comments seem archaic now, it’s just possible, with the squinted eye of half a century’s elapse, to understand what a culture shock the quartet must have caused that night in Tolworth (later that year, in a now infamous appearance on Top Of The Pops, Bowie/Ziggy would drape his arm around Ronson’s shoulder while performing Starman, prompting much conservative frothing, coinciding as it did with Bowie claiming to Melody Maker that he was gay).

Over the course of two hours, and performances of most of the Ziggy Stardust album, along with tracks like Life On Mars?, Changes, Space Oddity, Rock’n’ Roll Suicide and Suffragette City, those 60 gig-goers at the Toby Jug witnessed yet another Bowie rebirth. It was a pattern that would repeat itself with almost every new album, every new persona, every new haircut, right up to and including the release of his final album, Blackstar and his subsequent death in January 2016. Even the death mask he carried at the end, with the visual nods to Major Tom, Ziggy and outer space in the video for the title song’s single release, appeared to be a very considered theatrical exit.

Picture: DavidBowie.com

The 50th anniversary of the live debut of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars may, in the grand scheme of things, be a relatively minor moment in pop’s greater panoply. Perhaps not as significant as, say, the young Elvis Presley calling in to a recording studio on Union Avenue in Memphis to cut a disc for his mother’s birthday, or John Lennon bumping into Paul McCartney at the St.Peter’s Church village fete in Woolton. But round these parts, it’s a moment for celebration still today, hence the string of events taking place to commemorate the events of 10 February, 1972 - including a Bowie-themed ‘silent disco’ at Waterloo Station and an open-air music festival 30 minutes down the branch line from the London terminus at Tolworth’s own station, a short walk from the site of the Toby Jug. It’s all the idea of local community figure Robin Hutchinson: “We’re celebrating Tolworth as a place of firsts and discovery,” he says, adding that Bowie's launch of the Ziggy tour was an important moment for the history of pop. “And it happened in Tolworth!”. Hutchinson makes the point that the suburbs have long been the font of musical history: “Yet, fifty years on from the Ziggy gig, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a venue in the town for live music. It’s something the local community has been after for a while. Where would an artist like Bowie play today?”.

That night, fifty years ago, sits prominently on a professional timeline that, itself, spans half a century’s worth of recording, half a century’s worth of music without much comparison for its variety, experimentation and, at times, daring. It’s a career that had been in play for several years when Ziggy and The Spiders rocked up in Tolworth. As a coda to this, the Toby Jug gig provided the opening night of what would be a run of 191 performances before Bowie artfully ‘retired’ Ziggy at the Hammersmith Odeon the following year. You used to be able to get to Hammersmith from Tolworth on the 72 bus - the “phantom 72”, as my late father used to call it when he had to take it to work.

Tim Harrison’s book, Hello Tolworth, I’m Ziggy - including copies signed by the author - can be ordered via this link.

A Bowie biopic? Start cringing now

No sooner have I stopped reflecting on the beatific glow created by Francis Whately's wonderful David Bowie documentary, Finding Fame, on Saturday evening that I discover - belatedly, it seems - that there are ghouls abound planning a biopic about The Dame.

I have form on such things: rock star biopics, in particular, make me cringe. Even the supposedly good ones, like What’s Love Got To Do With It, La Bamba, The Doors or Control. The trouble with them, usually, is that they attempt to animate characters who are or were, by nature, animated already. Even Bowie himself once said "They never seem to get them right." So, did we really need a biopic about Queen, a band whose lead singer took flamboyance and excess to new extremes and which were pretty much widely known already? Frankly, I could have just watched a compilation of clips of Queen playing live, as that is what counted. However salacious an existence Freddy Mercury led, the biopic that got made turned it into something of a cartoon, albeit with a strong central performance by Rami Malik. We didn’t, however, need to see Mercury's life re-enacted when a documentary of the depth and quality of Whately's Bowie trilogy would have served the purpose far better.

Later this year we will get Rocketman, described as "an epic musical fantasy about the uncensored human story of Sir Elton John’s breakthrough years." Made by the same team responsible for the entertaining Eddie The Eagle, and starring Taron Egerton (who played Eddie Edwards) as Elton John, it too smacks of the superfluous. Any serious biographer or documentary maker could do a better job of recording John's life than any live cartoon about him. Which is what fills me with absolute dread about Stardust, the film announced last month that would focus on Bowie's first trip to America in 1971. It certainly won’t be about Bowie's music: Salon Pictures, who are making the film, said in a somewhat terse statement that: "The film was written as an ‘origins story’ about the beginning of David’s journey as he invented his Ziggy Stardust character, and focuses on the character study of the artist, as opposed to a hits driven ‘music’ biopic.” The statement added: "We would like to clarify that this film is not a biopic, it is a moment-in-time film at a turning point in David’s life, and is not reliant on Bowie’s music”. Salon also make the clarification that Stardust will use "...period music and songs that Bowie covered, but not his original tracks." In other words, 'we don’t have the rights to use Bowie's music'.

Duncan Jones, Bowie's film director son, poured ice cold water on the project last month, tweeting: "Pretty certain nobody has been granted music rights for ANY biopic... I would know." followed by "I'm not saying this movie is not happening. I honestly wouldn't know. I'm saying that as it stands, this movie won't have any of dads music in it, & I can't imagine that changing." "If you want to see a biopic without his music," he added in another tweet, "or the families [sic] blessing, that's up to the audience." Bowie's lifelong friend George Underwood (who, as a schoolboy, was the cause of the singer's permanently dilated pupil, leading to the myth that he had different coloured eyes) has also waded in, telling the NME that he was dreading the film: "They never seem to get those right. Although I did like the Freddie Mercury one [Bohemian Rhapsody], but they’re never accurate. All of the books about David are copies of things that just aren’t quite right then it gets worse and worse.” Francis Whately himself has called it correctly, telling the NME that biopics like Stardust will only emphasise the "wrong aspects" of Bowie's life and career. “What I’m glad to have been able to do is make three 90-minute films on David Bowie as a musician, the artist, not anything else. That’s what’s important."

Johnny Flynn, best known for TV's Vanity Fair and Les Miserables is slated to play Bowie in Stardust. As Malek demonstrated in Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, with the right voice coaching and prosthetics, Hollywood can turn you into anyone. But Bowie - just like Mercury - was distinctive throughout his career. It’s what made his career. He went from character to character, constantly reinventing himself, adopting new masks and costumes in the process. Ziggy Stardust was, after all, one of those characters, a vessel for Bowie to play out his imagination through, musically and theatrically, and one of the most powerful memes ever devised in popular art. Frankly, we don’t need an actor impersonating that, even if with the editorial intent of informing the audience. Safe to say I, for one, will be avoiding Stardust like the plague.

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.