“Is it because it’s his 69th birthday or that he has released his 28th studio album today and it’s a corker?”
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Yet Bowie, intensely private when not performing, the ultimate showman when he was, had used his music to provide every possible clue that he was about to leave the stage. The aspiring artist was a teen popster, a hippy-ish folkie and a purveyor of novelty records (“The Laughing Gnome”, best forgotten), before emerging from his chrysalis to become one of the most unpredictable and influential figures in music.
Even his exit was an artistic statement.
David Bowie’s haunting final song and video to the track “Lazarus” was released last week, showing Bowie hospital-bound with his eyes bandaged and lying in a hospital on his death bed.
The opening line, “Look up here, I’m in heaven” takes on a poignant new meaning following the tragic news of Bowie’s passing yesterday. “Bowie also wrote the glam rock anthem “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople, worked with John Lennon on the James Brown-styled funk of “Fame” and brought in a young Luther Vandross as a backup singer on his hit “Young Americans”. Wong said the song’s chorus “You have my blessing, the world is merely a glimpse of time” gave room for imagination amid Hong Kong people’s fear of the handover back then.
Midge Ure, who helped organise the Live Aid concert in 1985 – at which Bowie performed – told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “He wasn’t just a brilliant songwriter and an fantastic creator, he excelled at everything”. “He had the heart operation and that’s it. He’s long since recovered from that”. He’d released no new music for a decade before 2013 and the subsequent “Blackstar”, released Friday.
David Bowie fan Rosie Lowery placed flowers at his mural in Brixton, London, after the singer’s death was announced on Monday. My teenage years were all about Bowie.
A string of albums followed, before 1972’s The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars made him an global star. He moved to Berlin to explore a minimal, industrial sound with collaborator Brian Eno. His speech was lovely, charming and really, really big-hearted. Bowie kept moving, even if not all his explorations were rewarding; his 1990s band Tin Machine produced some unlistenable noise.
“I haven’t seen him in so many years, I can’t make a big drama out of it”, she said. “For me, frankly, as an artist, that’s the most satisfying thing for the ego”.
“Zoolander”One of the most memorable moments from 2001’s “Zoolander” was a scene in which Bowie judged a walk-off between Ben Stiller’s Derek Zoolander and Owen Wilson’s character Hansel”. Kurt Cobain covered “Starman” with Nirvana.
Queen and Bowie joined forces on this instant-classic collaboration – and inadvertently supplied Vanilla Ice with his biggest single as a result.
Personally, two recordings from 1977 will always stick out.
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When the staff of the Roxy heard about Bowie’s death, they knew they had to pay tribute by screening one of his films. So he enlisted singer Luther Vandross, Family Stone drummer Andy Newmark and guitarist Carlos Alomar to accompany his Thin White Duke persona – a handle inspired both by Alomar’s description of his “translucent” boss, and Bowie’s other recent innamorata: Cocaine.
