Happy Birthday David Bowie!

[Welsh Rich]

Who'd have thought it - 60 today and looking frightfully young

 

Happy Birthday Thin White Duke!

 

When I was four, I was convinced that David Bowie was from outer space. He was number one with his single 'Ashes to Ashes', the video for which featured his haunted, feline form in a number of settings: crouching in a padded room, hanging mid-air in a dungeony purgatory, sitting helpless and miniaturised in a Formica kitchen. I watched that clip on Top of the Pops and couldn't believe he was real. Since then, that's been pretty much my definition of a great pop star.

 

It took me years to register Bowie as someone fully human: so strange were his looks, mannerisms, songs and general way of being that even now I find myself wondering about him. For this man, who spent years of his life single-nosedly supporting the Bolivian economy and subsisting on small pieces of cheese, to reach 60 - which he does in eight days' time - makes you wonder whether some people really are immortal, or simply not of this world.

Bowie was the first star to make idolisation - the idea that his fans would place him on such a high pedestal that he could never again be 'one of us' - part of his act. It began in 1972 with Ziggy Stardust, a character whose rise, fall and rapid obsolescence was built by Bowie into the very songs his alter-ego sang. He had witnessed the hysterical fandom inspired by Elvis and the Beatles and saw that a single inspired creation could make people believe that he was like no one else on earth. Which is more than can be said for Ronan Keating.

 

Ziggy, channelled through Bowie, was the ultimate pop star: he was polymorphously perverse, had a messiah (or, more precisely, a Nietzschean superman) complex, and was convinced the world was about to implode. A more combustible mixture of teenage preoccupations is hard to imagine. He represented all the parallel universes you could step into just by listening to a record and turning your hair an unnatural shade of orange. Which I did, though not until I was 18.

 

The 14 years that had lapsed between my early sighting of him and my adolescent obsession were spent loving acts that were indebted to the flame-haired apparition: Duran Duran, Japan, the Pet Shop Boys, and later Suede, the Britpop-inventing band who started out brilliantly, but alas - unlike Bowie - got worse, not better, the more drugs they took. (Another reason to wonder whether he was made of actual human flesh.) What these bands shared with their hero was a love for making pop as elevated and dramatic as any opera, and the knowledge that style meant nothing without content.

 

The sheer speed with which he passed through his later incarnations - a pirate from space in 1974, a bequiffed soul boy in '75, a creepy Thin White Duke the following year, an adoptive Berliner the year after that - and musical styles suggest a man of superhuman imagination. One year he was an acoustic-strumming hippy, the next he would corral the Spiders From Mars as his band and create some of the most explosive rock'n'roll of the 1970s. I often wonder what it must have been like to have been a Bowie fan at the time that he was releasing an album every year and, seemingly, changing the course of music with every record. He was, in his own words, 'a fly in milk', absorbing influences and throwing them back out, which is why he made a soul album, the wonderful Young Americans, within months of moving to the US in 1975 and used the bleak sights of divided Berlin to create his introverted masterpiece Low. All the while looking and sounding not quite human, he managed to write hits that weren't only memorable but had mass pop appeal: 'Life on Mars', 'Jean Genie', 'Fame', 'Heroes' and 'Ashes to Ashes' - the strangest number one ever released.

 

He seemed to be able to change his very being just by changing his clothes and hairstyle, which suggests to anyone that they can do the same thing to the same effect. I can't say I developed immortal powers by having my hair styled in the same way as his character Thomas Jerome Newton in his one good film, The Man Who Fell To Earth, but it gave the experience of selling doughnuts in a Birmingham branch of Greggs in the early 1990s a subversive frisson. The customers would peer at the bright-red strands poking out of my hygienic hair-cap and wonder what sort of weirdy was serving them a steak bake. I felt as though I'd been touched by the hand of Bowie, which gave every second of my life a special significance.

 

Since the 1990s Bowie has been less of a trendsetter and more of a mentor and icon to the many who took his cue and decided to invent and reinvent themselves: not so much out of the loop as existing in a loop he created all of his own. It was Suede who sent me headlong into an obsession with their forebear that - at the risk of sounding like a prime candidate for psychological help - has made a large segment of my adult life feel like one endless, excitable daydream. My parting gift to my parents as I left home for London was a colourful mural of Bowie's various phases along one side of my bedroom wall. It's still there: every time I visit, a little more poster paint has cracked off the lightning flash across Aladdin Sane's face, which I trace with my finger for good luck. What makes this Pooterish story slightly more credible is that, unbeknown to me, the man who was to become my husband was painting exactly the same thing on his bedroom wall 200 miles away. How many pop stars are there, truly, who have inspired such feats of devotion?

 

We weren't so unusual. A litany of Bowie fans, their lives and careers transformed by his music, turn up on Mark Radcliffe's Radio 2 documentary, which airs next Saturday at 8pm, two days before Bowie's 60th. Its title, Inspirational Bowie, sums up everything about a man who, in his own words, was long troubled by 'a repulsive need to be something more than human'. Bowie's youthful belief that he felt 'puny as a human' ended up persuading not only himself but millions of others that they could be touched by a bit of space-dust and make anything seem possible.

 

You're not going to become a better person by listening to someone who, raddled by cocaine and sent to the edge of madness by his fans ('We're just the space cadets, and he's the commander,' said one wide-eyed LA girl in Cracked Actor, Alan Yentob's 1974 film about Bowie), started talking up Hitler as 'the first great rock star'. Neither would it be a good idea always to take Nietzsche literally. But what Bowie did, and continues to do, is to exert a hold over people who are open to the idea that you can go far beyond what is expected of you in life. It's not an exaggeration to say that I owe the life I have now to him and to the artists he inspired. It's a lot to ask of our pop stars, but in my experience it's what they've proved to be best at. Inspiring others to try and fulfil their potential isn't superhuman: it's mere, mortal humanity at its best.

 

 

[embiggen]

WOW 60!

[Attack With Love]

"Not a prophet or a stone age man, just a mortal with potential of a superman" HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY MAIN MAN

[kaysettes]

Here's to the Thin White Duke! (Clicky)

 

Whoops, can't hotlink that. If anyone is still interested, follow the links:

FoTC Music (left hand side)

and

either click Bowie on the player-thing

or

MP3 Sounds

Scroll down to Bowie

 

Flight of the Conchords! Woot woot.

[LouieB]

Yikes.....60....

 

LouieB

[Sir Stewart]

He looks it.

Finally.

[Analogman]

and

[mountain bed]

Happy birthday to one of the few people in Rock that successfully straddles the line between Art & Entertainment.

 

Of all the frontmen I've ever seen,hands down the very best.

[Wilco LP #7]

Happy birthday to one of the few people in Rock that successfully straddles the line between Art & Entertainment.

 

Of all the frontmen I've ever seen,hands down the very best.