The interweb was awash yesterday with grief and astonishment, after the news broke of Bowie’s passing. As is the way of these things, I was looking at his son’s Twitter feed when the death was confirmed, elliptically. Better voices than mine have aired the pain, but for what it’s worth he was indeed the ultimate showman, at once visceral and cerebral. He understood the concepts of social media before they were invented, and the archness behind the Blackstar project is , literally and ironically, breathtaking.
The emancipation of the teenager was a double edged sword, the glorious and hellish confusion of hormones on full tilt was given credence, yes, but in the 70s no-one seemed to have any idea how to handle it, barring Cathy & Claire. So, as neatly summarised by Alexis Petridis in the Guardian, “no matter how weird and alien you felt, you couldn’t be as weird and alien as Bowie and his bandmates.”
Yesterday, from Twitter.
From the DC Thomson journos
and from Sherry, pace Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry
Goodbye to the man known in this house as Bromley Dave, and not for the first time on this site, the below seems appropriate. Let it be recorded that I did see people of my age crying at the train station yesterday morning, in the cold and dark. If nothing else had happened, at least he gave us that modulation to E flat in Life on Mars? (I know it’s that because of an interview with his long time collaborator Rick Wakeman on the inestimable Janice Forysth show in 2013).
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene v.
Starman, Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, The Stars (Are Out Tonight), Blackstar.