His trick is you and me, boy
Every post-Soviet
party in the early 90s reminded me of the scene in a Moscow restaurant from Master and Margarita. There is not a lot
I can remember as I had to be very small at the time, but sweaty waiters with
heavy alcohol-filled trays do spring to mind. What else? Dancing women – so
remorselessly unattractive and overweight you wanted to scream. Awful sweaters,
awful haircuts. And, of course, the music. Scratchy, low-quality mixtapes full
of Patricia Kaas, Boney M, Smokie, Paul McCartney and, once upon a time, a tune
that sounded vaguely different to a skinny boy of 5 or 6 whose perception of
art was so embryonic you could squash it with a tennis racquet.
It’s hard to resist
the temptation to overstate the importance of what happened more than twenty
years ago. But there it was. One tune. One song on a chewy, murky cassette from
the early 90s. I think I recognised it some ten years later, from a strangely
seductive music video. The song was called “Ashes To Ashes”. Again, it sounded
like a different world. Different planet, something from outer space. And I had
no idea who Thomas Jerome Newton was. Christ, I had never heard of Major Tom.
I don’t mind seeing
people overreact. If anything, overreaction shows that a person can react in
the first place. Something of a trick in these listless, emotionally vapid
times. And on the white morning when I found out about David Bowie’s death, I
freaked out. One SMS message left me speechless on the snow-covered street in
the centre of the city. It happened the day Heath Ledger died, but that’s
because death was so fucking absurd that day. It happened the day Amy Winehouse
died, but that’s because of the strange circumstances in which I learned about
her death. It certainly happened the day Christopher Hitchens died, but then
everyone had seen it coming.
With David Bowie, you
could never see it coming. Liver
cancer? Fuck off. Bowie changed. That
was the point of Bowie. Ziggy, Tom, Duke. Bowie changed all the time. Change equals
life: Bowie could not die. Bowie had
to go on forever. And so I overreacted. More than that, I wanted the whole
world to overreact. Get off their fucking social network. Their Twitter
accounts, their Facebook posts with cute pictures and dramatic YouTube videos.
Like they cared. Like they needed this public display to show that they cared.
(I was oddly pleased to check Luke Haines’s Twitter a day later to find out
that he wasn’t there with any tributes, he was with his favourite Bowie
records; my love for the man has grown some more.) The idea just sounded so
pettily narcissistic and so cheap. It still does.
Favourite Bowie
records… They changed as rapidly as Bowie changed. And yet sinking whiskies,
playing “Time” for the hundredth time, I realised it must have been that album
he did in 1973, in the post Ziggy Stardust craze. Aladdin Sane. The pun in the title was so obvious, so fitting, and
the music was quintessential Bowie. Glam-rock Bowie (“Cracked Actor”), theatre
Bowie (“Time”), classical avant-garde Bowie (“Aladdin Sane”), generic rock’n’roll
Bowie (“The Jean Genie”), unnecessary cover Bowie (“Let’s Spend The Night
Together”), even doo-wop Bowie (Drive-in Saturday”). Truly it had everything
(well, almost everything). It even had
“Lady Grinning Soul”, one of my favourite songs of all time. It wasn’t all right, but then Bowie never had to
be. He was the perfect pop outsider, the quintessence of postmodernist expression.
His genius was deranged.
Which is the
undertone I must have felt at one of those post-Soviet parties that looked more
like a Satanic ball than the actual
Satanic ball in Bulgakov’s novel. My perception of music and art must have
expanded that day. It did so many more times later on, for there were stories
and there were albums to look forward to. Good, bad – that was almost
secondary. They were new. Then there
was his fear of flying. Those misguided 90s. Him playing Tesla. The overlong
hiatus… Death. Only this time, it doesn’t add up. Because however insane and imperfect
that world was, I now realise – as the cruel and otherworldly Blackstar spins again and again in the
background – that it will no longer give me a new Bowie. Good or bad. There won’t be a single new David Bowie
record. I don’t understand this. It is preposterous. It is fucking insane.
