Where Are We Now?

You probably heard.

For a while, the news was everywhere. Of course it was - he's the first genuine legend to die in quite a while. Granted, Lou Reed went before Bowie but he was never really a paid-up member of the legends club, was he? Important and influential of course but not a front page death. No, Bowie was the first of rock's Live-Aid playing, stadium rocking, culture-shaping, life-altering, pension-reaching stars to leave us. How could he?

When I was 13 or 14 my sister had a K-Tel Bowie best-of that I spotted on the stereo one evening. That's how it starts, isn't it - listening to your siblings' records. And it's all so gloriously random - if there's ten records in the house they are, by default, your ten favourite records. Doesn't really matter what they are. And from that point on, every record you listen to has to be better to crack the top 10. That's why, to this day, I still love Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell, Glen Campbell's Live in London, Simon and Garfunkel's Live in Central Park and Dan Fogelberg's Age of Innocence. They may not all still be in my Top 10 but they'll occupy a place that in my heart that few records will ever reach. 

I can't remember how much I knew about Bowie at that time. Maybe I'd heard the 'Let's Dance' hits but that must've been about it. But something about that Best-of drew me in and never let me go. Soon after came Live Aid and, with it, that fantastic/terrible duet with Mick Jagger. I was hooked. The following year, Absolute Beginners put me over the top and, even though I was coming on-board just as Bowie began the rapid descent from his commercial peak, I spent much of the next three years investigating what I could of his back catalogue. In 1987 Bowie played Slane Castle and I was there with my two sisters - the first concert I ever went to. I can't really say if it was any good - at that age you don't really know what's good or bad, do you? I just loved being there in the same field as David Bowie somewhere in the middle of Meath. Who wouldn't love that?

Either way, the experience certainly didn't do anything to put me off him. Two years later, Tin Machine's first record came out and I was first in line. And just like the Glass Spider show, I loved it. I mean, I didn't understand it - all that stuff about 'goons with muddy hair' and 'mindless maggot glare' couldn't have made sense to 16-year-old me but the noise and the energy excited me beyond words and sustained me long after the music critics had revised their opinions and concluded that Tin Machine (both the record and the band) was actually a very bad thing indeed. 

I could go on and talk about songs and albums and shows but if you're interested you've heard it all before and if you're not you're not still reading. Never mind. From that point on, I kept buying his records (often baffling) and going to his shows (mostly challenging) and keeping up with what he was up to. Even when he stopped recording for a decade or so, little changed. He had given us more than enough to pick through in his absence and there was the occasional guess spot on records and gigs to keep me going. If he had retired, who could blame him? If he never sang another note he'd already given us more than enough. Then, when he reappeared in 2013 with Where Are We Now and The Next Day it was like he had never left. Everything was just as it always was. 

Then came January 11th. I woke up and started reading tweets about the previous evening's Golden Globes awards. This person won this, that person said that - the usual thing. And then in the middle of it all came a 'Starman RIP' tweet from a Dublin radio station. This made no sense at all. So I searched Bowie's name and found a few comments by people who believed the RIP thing was a hoax. Crisis averted! Until, seconds later, a tweet from Duncan Jones confirmed the news. Bowie is dead. Imagine that.

After that I just had to wait for everyone else to wake up and hear the news. it was all David Bowie all the time. Morning news, evening tributes, special editions of newspapers, playlists and podcasts. Then the inevitable backlash from newspaper columnist spotting an opportunity. You couldn't escape him. My mother, casting a withering glance at the newspaper, argued that the Pope wouldn't get as much coverage. "That's true", I replied, "but they'll always find another Pope - there's no more David Bowies". I'm not sure she was convinced at all.

As the days went on, I talked to friends. Some upset, others less so. A handful of us from the old Word blog recorded a Bowie podcast and talked at length about his life and work and what it all meant to us. In February, another group of us travelled to the Netherlands to see the David Bowie Is exhibition in Groningen. It's a fabulous show, covering his early life right up to (almost) his final years. As an document of a working artist, it's extraordinary. As an insight into the man himself, it reveals little. But maybe that's the point. It's the work that matters. The songs, the films, the artwork, the clothes, the ideas. These are what he's left behind - all that creativity. That's what's supposed to inspire us - that's what we're mourning. 

And maybe that's why I never cried - because of all the that he left behind. Didn't cry when the news broke. Or watching the tributes. Or reading about his last days and how he worked so hard to get Blackstar finished before his death. Watching endless videos on youtube didn't do it either. Walking around that exhibition in Groningen, there was awe and sadness and appreciation of what was left behind - but no tears. And speaking as someone who always cries at the end of Mr Holland's Opus, we're not exactly talking about a monument to stoicism here.

Until last week.

We were in a furniture store on a Sunday afternoon when I saw a girl walking around with headphones. But she wasn't listening to any music - she was talking to another woman. Then I realised that the other woman was her carer and the girl with the headphones had some kind of mental difficulty. As she walked around, I overheard her talking about music and her favourite singer. The carer was responding but not really listening. Lots of "yeahs?" and "reallys?". Turns out the girl's favourite singer was David Bowie and she was explaining that he died just after releasing an album on his birthday. And it made her sad that he was gone. Her carer was absent-mindedly picking things up and putting them down again while the girl talked about new songs like Lazarus and Blackstar and how there wouldn't be no more new songs. Then the carer asked her what her favourite song was. Without hesitation she began to talk about Width of a Circle and how it made her feel. That she listened to it all of the time and it used to make her so happy but now it made her sad. 

And there, among the cutlery and tableware in the kitchen section of a furniture store I started to cry. I never saw it coming. I think it was the uncomplicated, matter-of-fact way she said it. There was no attempt to intellectualise it. She didn't say "well he was the chameleon of rock who inspired a generation" or "he made it ok for people to be different" or any of that stuff that we heard over and over again. There was certainly none of what I've been writing for the last 20 minutes. Instead she was just sad because he had died and there'd be no more new music. I had to sit for a second and gather myself. In a furniture shop. Bowie's dead and there'll be no more new music.

Isn't it sad?

If that isn't quite enough Bowie wallowing for you, you might want to have a listen to Adam Buxton's two part Bowie podcast. Featuring a few good interviews with people who were close to Bowie at different times in his life, it gets to the heart of why he mattered so much to so many. You'll find it here.