When I was younger I was afraid of dogs. Diamond Dogs. Which by extension meant that I was afraid of David Bowie. What uncontrollable forces, ungovernable energies were running riot in the mind of a man who could produce characters, imagery and sound of such unsettling, beautiful strangeness?
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| Diamond Dogs Album Cover |
The last week has been a time for reminiscing sure, a celebration of his greatness and I can’t shake the sadness. With the passing of an idol we are, amongst other things, most likely lamenting the distance it puts between us and that formative time.
The nineteen eighties when I devoured Bowie is suddenly, and inexplicably, now no more real to me than the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. It has slipped into another dimension. The death refracts into our own lives and represents a line in the sand, the final sad commission of an era to the dust of history. We are sad for ourselves and the transience that the passing reflects onto us. A slice of ourselves goes too.
I never met David Bowie but I knew him well, we spent a lot of time together a long time ago. He wouldn’t remember but I’ll never forget.
His work in the nineteen seventies reinforces everything that has been said about that decade being the most fertile period of human creativity since the Renaissance. He single handedly gave birth to, and crowned himself king of, the new guard that propelled us out of the nineteen sixties.
Bowie was the watchword for that perennial adolescent struggle wherein young men and women strive to assert their being in stifling surroundings. He screamed from the rooftops that if you can conceive it you can be it. What could be more inspirational than that?
Never anything less than prolific, strange, innovative, magical and provocative he has left a hole in our culture that all the front men on earth combined can never fill.
He’s gone. David Bowie is dead, anything could happen now. It’s open season on the pillars of our civilisation. Suddenly it seems possible that we could wake up tomorrow to find that New York City has disappeared into the sea.
Bowie wasn’t a rock star. He was a colossus, a one man cultural movement every bit as important as the impressionists or the existentialists. He was ruler of a parallel realm. Narnia for the disenchanted, dislocated,dispossessed, the sexually ambiguous. He provided validation and empowerment for anyone scratching at the margins. The message was that he could do his outrageous thing with all that snarl and swagger, you could do yours too.
But the way that his appeal has been characterised as being exclusively to the marginalised and delicate is just plain wrong. He made some of the greatest music ever written, music for everyone. There was nothing saying the apprentice carpenter couldn’t latch on just as easily as the far-out Art student.
The implied influence of giants like Bowie is everywhere whether you’re composing a symphony, writing an essay, painting a picture or redecorating the spare room. There’s an achingly dull way to go about anything and there’s another way.
He was a work of art. The personality, appearance, dress, style and attitude were as fundamental to the impact of what he was doing as the sound he was producing. He rejected the chameleon tag seeing everything as being linked, being a progression, further instalments in the creative narrative. Bowie’s film roles seemed to be a segue from his stage self, he merely carried himself onto the screen. The body of work as musician, writer, producer, actor and painter can justifiably be viewed as a unified entity, a linear narrative rather than a series of so called reinventions.
It was all art and he was the consummate artist but the same gentle soft spoken man underlay every performance no matter how outlandish the presentation. The consummate artist right to the end; I listened to enough of Blackstar last week to know that it is a beautiful final act. Can we ever understand the irrepressible urge of the artist to create until it is physically impossible to continue?
When I think of my youth, there is Bowie. Always Bowie. The screensaver to my childhood. There will never be another David Bowie in the same way that there will never be another Pacific Ocean or Belle Époque. He should be given a State Funeral in every country on earth.
It’s a long time since Diamond Dogs, the only thing about the man that frightens me now is the thought of a world without him.
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