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| © 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.
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| 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.
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| © 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.
