First published in a special issue of the New Statesman on 15 January, 2016, marking the death of David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016).
Philip Hoare: Lighting up a blacked-out Britain
In the hot summer of 1976, in white school shirt, black evening waistcoat and trousers, my hair slicked back and sprayed gold, I took the train to London where Kraftwerk’s crackling nuclear “Radioactivity” and the surreal brutality of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou gave way to the man himself, sunken-cheeked, too thin to be caged by the fluorescent array of strip lights behind him. In the oceanic darkness of the arena, I felt I was utterly alone with him, like everyone else. He was in his new incarnation, as dark as the times: Jean Genet out of Man Ray, burned black and white into our monochrome dreams, singing of “the return of the Thin White Duke/throwing darts in lovers’ eyes”. He arrived at Victoria in a slam-door train and was driven away standing in an open-top car like our great dictator.
John Gray: The shifting shaman of the modern age
If your aim is to be original, you will most likely end up looking and sounding highly derivative. Striving for self-expression, you turn yourself into a mouthpiece for the ruling clichés. David Bowie did the opposite. Knowing himself to be – as a matter of fact or fate – utterly singular, he chose to become a clairvoyant who served as a channel for the shifting spirit of the age. Along the way a succession of selves emerged, each of them novel and original. A commonplace view has it that Bowie was a chameleon who kept reinventing himself in order to exploit the turns of fashion. But his changes served a deeper end. By becoming Nobody, he became many people and at the same time himself. . .
Kate Mossman: Reading the runes
A week ago, critics were reviewing his new album, Blackstar, and trying to locate the surprise. It had to lie in the music this time, when last time it was all about the delivery. He’d gone and got himself a jazz band, the Donny McCaslin Quartet, whom he first saw playing the 55 Bar in Manhattan early in 2013 (with a power only Bowie could wield, he sent the sax player out to do some of the promotional interviews for the album). Many of the songs are semi-improvised, with a ponderous, ambulatory structure that adds to a sense of mystery unfolding.
The centrepiece title track is a strange, ten-minute movie-of-the-mind that starts in the unsettling soundworld of eastern deserts and then breaks, unexpectedly, into a light Motown-tinged ballad with a tune that wouldn’t be a million miles from Adele’s “Make You Feel My Love”, if you laid one on top of the other. This epic track actually came out last year, along with the album’s two other substantial offerings, “Lazarus” and “Sue”. I wondered if the joke, this time round, was that when you finally got your hands on Bowie’s new album you realised you’d already heard the best stuff for free.
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Yo Zushi: In defence of “bad” Bowie
Tonight remains the Bowie album I return to most often. Its critical panning seems, now that Bowie is gone, an aberration: no album that begins with the seven-minute masterpiece “Loving the Alien” and contains the rocking “Blue Jean” should have received the drubbing it got. The TV-special-style cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” is as stirring, in its cold, almost Brechtian way, as Station to Station’s “Wild Is the Wind” (1976) – it’s like watching Elvis in Vegas through a sheet of ice.
Kate Mosse: King of the outcast girls and boys
Where were you when you heard the news? My ma had always said she could remember precisely what she was doing, how the day felt, when she heard Elvis Presley had died. I’d never understood what she meant, not really, until today. I thought I would never forget the white of the tablecloth at the Santa Catalina Hotel, the swirl of Spanish and German, a little Russian and English being spoken around me. A half-eaten piece of bread and a third cup of coffee, growing cold. A little cheese and an apple cut in four.
Will Self: A vaudeville star who spun new worlds
Unlike “Sir Mick” and “Sir Elton”, Bowie had refused state honours from the British government. And he’d done it not once, but twice. The message was clear: he didn’t seek status or preferment in this world, at least not the sort politicians dole out. I never met him myself. Indeed, my only direct connection with him was fairly bizarre: a copy of Alethea Hayter’s classic work of literary-critical history Opium and the Romantic Imagination, with “David Bowie” inscribed on the flyleaf, together with his Swiss address, in charmingly juvenile, cursive handwriting. I’d acquired the book from a friend, Kevin Armstrong, who at the time (mid-1980s) was playing guitar in Bowie’s Tin Machine band. It kicked around the house for some years until, suffering from my conscience, I mailed it back to him.
He never thanked me, even though I’d put a return address, but I bore no ill-will; I reasoned he must be busy. Or, if not busy, like some deity who’d created not just one world but many, he was resting from his labours. I wouldn’t claim to have an exhaustive familiarity with Bowie’s oeuvre but then I don’t need to – his music, in common with that of the Beatles, constitutes the backdrop on to which the transitory experiences of my own life have been projected; a romantic imagination indeed.
A Martian up a ladder throwing paint at a canvas
Bowie turned up at the Factory wearing white Oxford bags and yellow Mary Janes, a slouchy bibbety-bobbity hat pulled low over his long blond hair. He sang his homage “Andy Warhol” to the master (“Tie him up when he’s fast asleep/Send him on a pleasant cruise”), who was reportedly not wholly flattered. Then he performed an earnest mime for the nonplussed Warhol in which he opened up his heart and let his guts spill on the floor.
It spoke, perhaps, of what was to come: the annihilating effects of serious, cult-level fame; the sense of being haunted by his own creations, of careering with them into places inimical to physical and mental health. Bowie was always willing to take a risk, to expose himself, to go further out than anyone else might have thought possible. Album after album wore its influences on its sleeve: the avant-garde German expressionism of Heroes and Low, the Chatterton-meets-Beau Brummell lushness of The Man Who Sold the World.
Like many other rock stars, he started collecting art, including a pair of Tintorettos, a Rubens and a Frank Auerbach. But at some point in the 1980s he began making it, too. He’d got himself stuck creatively, and as a way of edging out of the doldrums he switched media, using painting as a way of swimming back to himself. At first it was a private business, a respite and release from music, and then a fertile way of solving problems and nudging around blocks.
Paul Du Noyer: Close encounters with the Bromley boy
Where the former Beatles turned their speech into Scouse-American sing-song and Mick Jagger trademarked a high-camp mockney drawl, Bowie’s pronunciation remained as neatly clipped as a Beckenham privet hedge. He chose his words with studious precision and delivered them with the quiet stoicism of an Ealing Studios RAF pilot. He knew that journalists are easily seduced by famous people who remember their names, and could flatter you with earnest inquiries about life back in England.
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