RICKY GERVAIS: After his heart problem—“I was in a very dark place,” he told me—I went to his flat downtown. The little concierge there said, “Oh, are you here to see Mr. Jones?” And I went, “Oh yeah, of course I’m here to see Mr. Jones. David Bowie doesn’t actually exist, does he?” And we went in, and his apartment was beautiful, just beautiful. He asked if I wanted a coffee, and then when he reappeared from the kitchen he was shaking and fumbling as though he was really ill. He wasn’t taking it at all seriously. There was this pewter, or steel, statue right in the middle of the floor. And he went, “Yeah, the artist was trying to do in 3-D what Picasso tried to do with 3-D in 2-D, but anyway my daughter likes to hit that with a hammer.” So that’s why we got on.
GAIL ANN DORSEY: I was never his best friend or anything. Artists have their own world, and I always remembered that I was hired and there to do a job. Jobs come and go. I’ve been in the business long enough to know that nothing lasts forever. I felt very close to him in terms of our working relationship, and there were times when I’d gone to his house, or gone to Christmas dinner, or gone to his apartment to listen to records, then I wouldn’t see him for a while and we would email just to say hi. And then in the last year he sent me a few emails just to tell me that he loved me, quite out of the blue and I didn’t know then that he was sick but I would respond and I would say, “Hey, I love you too.” I’m so glad I took the time to tell him I was so grateful for his presence in my life, because he changed my life forever. He gave great gifts. One Christmas, he did a portrait of all the band members as Christmas gifts. He’d gone around with a Polaroid camera on the last day of the Outside tour, and snapped every band member and he did the paintings from those photos. They look like the cover of the Outside album, which is his own painting of himself. Very cool, very modern. I would guess everyone kept theirs. I’m never gonna sell mine, I can tell you that.
My fondest moment could have been any night, after any concert, just when the night is done, him coming over to me and just giving me a hug or giving me a kiss on the cheek or rubbing my head. It was just that thing of him being proud of me. He was very protective. The last time I saw him was October 2014, while I was making the Daphne Guinness record in New York, and David came to the studio to hang out, as he knew her, it was right around the corner from his house. It must have been right before his diagnosis, as he was fine, he looked fine, there was no sign of anything. I didn’t see him for the next year or so, so it was all emails. I knew he was doing a new album and that it was secret. I always knew he wanted to do a jazz album, but I didn’t think it was going to be what it turned out to be.
GEOFF MACCORMACK: My last significant communication was when I’d sent him some music by an American experimental band I was really excited about, and he sent me this message and I thought, That was a bit…slushy. But then I suppose he must have known he was ill. He said, “Geoff, your choice in music has always been on the money. Thank you for being my friend all these years and I miss you lots, now fuck off.” So I wrote back, “Likewise pal, off and fuck,” and he came back with “Mission accomplished.”
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: “Toothbrush” was the last thing I actually said to David. When we were together, we had a real surreal sense of humor, and I think a lot of people felt excluded. They didn’t know what was going on. People used to fuss and pamper him, but he was very down-to-earth. He was funny. Weirdly, when we only had landlines, I’d be just about to call him and I’d get through immediately as he was calling me. This happened a number of times. He used to call me Michael and I used to call him Robert, which are our middle names. We were on the top deck of a bus once when we were kids, and we both said at the same time, “Don’t forget your toothbrush.” And so for the next fifty years, whenever we wanted to remind ourselves of that, we said, “one-two-three toothbrush!” The last time I saw him we finished by saying, “Toothbrush.” It was silly. Towards the end we always kept in contact by email. “Hello, Michael.” If I emailed him, he’d always answer immediately.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: I spoke to Iman at the Met Ball, when Stella was co-hosting a few years ago. I saw Iman but I didn’t see David, and she said, “Oh you should give him a ring, because he sort of sits in the house and doesn’t do much.” So I didn’t think much more of it, but then probably about a year later I did give him a ring and I figured now that it would have been around the time he got his diagnosis. So we couldn’t hook up, we were just going to have a cup of tea in New York, so it was very sad. We didn’t work together, and the only thing we ever did was a concert in New York. We had dinner together—we were on a skiing holiday together, and he was there with Iggy Pop. So we had a great evening. I have a picture now of the two of us that I have on my computer.
GEOFF MACCORMACK: It was early in the morning and I was in my house in Southend and the phone rang. I missed it, but there was a message from Co [Coco] saying, “Hi, darling, I really need to speak to you.” And I thought, That’s bad. David must be really, really ill. I should come over. And then I saw the news. It was only when I spoke to George [Underwood] that I lost it.
While David was in London, showing his family the places he used to live, he called the theatrical producer Robert Fox, whom Bowie had known for forty years, asking him to tea. He went to meet him at his hotel and within minutes he told Fox he was going to write a musical based on the character Thomas Newton, from The Man Who Fell to Earth. They discussed writers for him to work with, and Fox suggested the playwright Enda Walsh, whom he felt had all the right qualities to convey the story of a man from another planet stuck in New York, desperately trying to get home. In November 2014, Fox flew to New York for a preliminary workshop, where he expected to meet Bowie. Instead he was told to go to Bill Zysblat’s office, where he spoke to Bowie via Skype, and where David told him that he was ill and undergoing a treatment that meant he wouldn’t be able to attend in person. “It was shocking,” says Fox. “He was feeling unwell but he wasn’t making a fuss about it. He was about to start a new treatment that was quite experimental and that had had some success in other people. He felt optimistic about it being able to prolong his life, hopefully in the belief there would be better and newer treatments that would come along.”
TOMMY HILFIGER: He smoked so much. One time we were flying down to Mustique and the minute he stepped off the plane he lit up a cigarette. My son had come to meet us and I introduced them and he said, “You shouldn’t smoke!” David started cackling and said, “You’re so right!” and stubbed it out on the tarmac. But he never had a cigarette out of his hand. Liver cancer is usually the result of medication or drinking, but maybe his body had taken such a beating early on. I would have thought he would have died of lung cancer, as he was a terrible chain smoker.
TONY PARSONS: I always felt that if you smoked that much you usually died at sixty-two, and if you smoke as many cigarettes as David Bowie did then he should have died at sixty-two. That’s the age that my father was, that’s the age that Christopher Hitchens was when he died. Your body just packs up after that. So it’s not a bad innings, and yet I was just devastated by it, I was choked by it, really choked by it. Strangely, I only met Mick Ronson once, and he was dying. He still looked like Jean Harlow, the blond guitar hero, but he had cancer. And he was dying.
MICK ROCK: I knew about the strokes, and I knew there had been a complication and he had had to go back in, but I didn’t know he was as ill as he was. I know what he officially died of, but he died from smoking. When I look through my old photographs of David, he’s got a cigarette in his hand in every other photograph. David had to give up smoking when he had the strokes, but the damage had already been done. Cigarettes had more to do with his death than you think.
In the summer of 2014, Bowie was having boxing lessons even though he was still on medication because of his heart problems. But then he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and a concentrated bout of chemotherapy ensued. It was a fight he would eventually lose. About a week before his death, and a few days before the release of Blackstar, Bowie called Tony Visconti—via FaceTime—to say that he wanted to make “one more album.” Bowie had been writing a fresh set of songs, and had demoed five of them, even though he was still undergoing chemotherapy. Apparently he had known since November that his cancer was terminal, but according to Visconti, he thought he had a lot more time left. “He thought that he’d have a few months, at least,” says Visconti. “I don’t know exactly, but he must’ve taken ill very quickly after that phone call.” The producer says he first learned of Bowie’s illness in early 2015, when he turned up for a Blackstar session “fresh from a chemo session, and he had no eyebrows, and he had no hair on his head. There was no way he could keep it a secret from the band.” Again, according to Visconti, by November, the cancer had spread all over his body. Visconti says that when he first saw the Blackstar lyrics, he said to Bowie: “You canny bastard. You’re writing a farewell album.”
AVA CHERRY: I was here in Chicago when I heard he’d passed. I was asleep. I let my phone tell me when different things are going on. It gives me alerts. It was four in the morning and I just kept hearing ching ching ching. And I was thinking, Who’s calling me at four in the morning? And I look and I see all these Facebook people say I’m so sorry I’m crying I feel so depressed I don’t think I can live and I was like, What? And they were like, David’s dead. And I just started to cry. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t realize that it was going on but here it was. When I first heard Blackstar I kept saying to myself, Why is this so dark? Why is it apocalyptic-sounding? Why is he grimacing and making faces and stuff? Now I understand. He didn’t tell anyone except his immediate family that he was going through chemo for two years and that he was dying of cancer. And Blackstar is all about that and expressing his feelings about death. And I didn’t know that.
CHRIS STEIN: It really is extraordinary that he made this last record in the full knowledge that it would be his last, his swansong. I guess some of the classical poets did things like that. It’s a bit like Mishima, who committed public suicide, but that was a little sloppier, and didn’t come out the way he intended it to.
TONY VISCONTI: The last album was hard to produce because I didn’t know he was going to die. I only realized it was a parting gift when he passed away. Then I reviewed the lyrics and it hit me hard. I think he did have plans for another album, but the subject of death had always been strong with him, and he wrote a lot of songs about it. In a way he was obsessed with death. I know he loved Jacques Brel’s “My Death,” and he used to sing that live with his acoustic guitar all the time. And there are a few beautiful renditions of it. I think it is a theme for a lot of writers, like Woody Allen, who writes about death all the time but he’s a comedian. David was just realistic about it.
All writers work their fears out in their writing. They have this privilege that most of us don’t have, as writing and performing is a cathartic experience for them. I honestly think Blackstar is his best album, his magnum opus. He just got better and better. Some fans might disagree, as they might ask why he recorded “Sue” again, but I know he did it because he wanted to make a different version of it, with a completely different flavor to it. I was watching a master in action, a grandmaster. He really was amazing on this album—the songs were extremely well written and his vocals…I just couldn’t believe how rich his voice sounded and how loud he was singing and how passionately he was singing. So I saw firsthand how this album was shaped over about nine months, and it just sounded so beautiful every time I heard it. It’s melancholy rather than sad. Some bits are quite cheeky. It’s kind of humorous.
Every time Bowie put out a new album, there were a lot people who hated it and then they ended up loving it. This happened because he broke his own rules, he broke his own mold. He just threw the old David Bowie away and created a new one for each album. People say why didn’t he record “Rebel Rebel” again or why couldn’t he write another “Space Oddity”? Because he’d done it, he didn’t write the formula. So now if he hadn’t passed away I think people would still be loving the album. You have to discard your beliefs of what you think David Bowie is going to write and just be open to the new things he puts out. But I’ve seen this with every album. With Young Americans you heard people saying that white people weren’t meant to make soul, and with Low the record company almost rejected it because there weren’t enough vocals on it. But everybody loves Low—that album gave birth to Gary Numan and a lot of other styles of British electronic music. He was a trailblazer but you didn’t see it at first.
MIKE GARSON: What I couldn’t tell anyone until he died was something he told me in the mid-’90s, and something that sat very heavily with me for twenty-one years. We were on the tour bus in 1995, somewhere in mid-America, one o’clock in the morning, and he told me that ten years earlier he had seen a psychic, and the psychic told him he would die at the age of sixty-nine or seventy, so it’s almost as though he designed the end of his life that way. So the last eighteen months he had liver cancer, so he knew for a fact. But this was something he had known for over thirty years. I couldn’t tell anyone. Who could I tell? So I just lived with this knowledge. Then, when I got the call, like everyone else I went into shock. Then I swear, ten seconds later, I think, Oh, that’s what he told me.
TONY VISCONTI: I’d always be there from day one. I’d be on the thing right from the beginning. We always started every album with about two weeks of discussion—kicking ideas around, formulating what we were going to do. It was a procedure. Because it’s very much like making a film—you have to plan it. So, before we even recorded one note of music, I was already totally prepared for what I was about to do and hear. Then you just dived in. From day to day the role changed. Some days I would do nothing. Other days I would do everything. It depended on what the song needed. It’s not so much what I gave to David. It’s what I gave to each song. Each song was like a baby. It had a life of its own. It needed special food. It couldn’t drink milk. This baby loved pineapple, this baby didn’t. It was really more about addressing the music and the songs. Sometimes it was giving him the confidence to go on and reassuring him that I was there for him and I would make sure everything went smoothly. Producers do everything nowadays and I’m one of the earlier producers who started that. David was much more proactive as a producer as well. He used to be a little more passive, just gave you the songs, the melodies. He often picked the band members. But then he started doing demos at home and being very specific about what he wanted. On Blackstar, he was playing a lot of instruments. But he played them at home and then was able to take them off of his home recorder. By the time he died he was just so much more intelligent and more experienced. And I wasn’t going to hold him back at all.
ELTON JOHN (MUSICIAN, SINGER-SONGWRITER): David and I were not the best of friends towards the end. We started out being really good friends. We used to hang out together with Marc Bolan, going to gay clubs, but I think we just drifted apart. He once called me “rock and roll’s token queen” in an interview with Rolling Stone, which I thought was a bit snooty. He wasn’t my cup of tea. No, I wasn’t his cup of tea. But the dignified way he handled his death, I mean, thank God. I knew he’d had a heart attack onstage in Berlin years ago, but not about the cancer. Everyone else, take note of this: Bowie couldn’t have staged a better death. It was classy.
PAUL GORMAN: I guess my point is that he’s too interesting to be turned into a sacred cow. It does him and his achievements a grave disservice. He could be terribly corny; part of that generational thing among Englishmen doing Goons voices with Brian Eno at the Château—shudder…he was great but not as great as everyone says he was. I mean, [Guardian columnist] Suzanne Moore said she’s convinced that his death inaugurated a new phase for the world where Terrible Things happen because he was such a Good Person. Seriously. This is a grown person with, I assume, a mortgage, driving license, and adult responsibilities yet is peddling forced and otherwise unacceptable juvenilia dressed up as worthwhile comment. I followed him since 1973, had a brother who saw him at UFO, went to all the gigs, met and interviewed him, worked on the same War Child projects as him, so I am a fan…and yet…he was a shit to his mother, he was a shit to his manager who supported him through thick and thin, and he was a shit to numerous partners, including his first wife, whose contribution he meanly refused to acknowledge even unto death. He didn’t pay UK taxes for forty years, he made execrable records during 1984–1995, often wore terrible clothes, stupid makeup and had rotten haircuts, definitely flirted with right-wing politics, and made silly statements on the subject…in other words, a normal, flawed human being. This absurd elevation—particularly by people I know wouldn’t have known Lodger from Tonight before he died—needs puncturing.
ERIN KEANE (JOURNALIST): After David Bowie’s death took us all by surprise, the tributes overwhelmed. Social-media feeds were filled, almost unanimously, with videos and links and memes praising the influential artist who seems to possess near-universal appeal—he made enough hits to feel populist, and yet remained sufficiently influential to exist on a forever-cool plane with his scant handful of equals. But in between the Labyrinth GIFs, the retrospectives, and moving tributes to his style and gender performance, a quiet pushback began online too. Don’t forget this part of the story, the messages suggested, with links to this earlier interview shared: “I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie: Confessions of a ’70s Groupie,” in which Lori Mattix recounts her teenage days in the Los Angeles rock scene. Mattix had, in her own words, consensual sex with not only Bowie—at age fifteen—but with Jimmy Page as well….
Mattix’s narrative is troubling to read in the sober light of 2016. A girl loses her virginity to a man in a hotel room, and that same night has her first threesome with him and another teenage friend as well. There are drugs and alcohol everywhere. There is David Bowie’s wife, Angie, banging on the door the next morning. There is the girl’s mother, indifferent when she’s not overtly approving of the conquests; her father, deceased. There is David Bowie’s face Monday all over the Internet, fans moved to tears over his death. There is scant, if any, mention of that girl in those moving tributes. There is, even in 2016, the question of how appropriate it is to talk about her at all.
I believe Mattix when she says that she felt special in the company of these glamorous, powerful men, happy to let them decide how and when she’d have sex and with whom. At fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen. Not because I agree—most people grow out of the idea that sex with a rock star is a goal to pursue—but because when you’re young it’s easy to believe that experience is the one currency you’re allowed to hoard and never pay out. Because it’s alluring to believe a woman is made from her chosen experiences, and aren’t you already a woman at fourteen, at fifteen? Doesn’t the world, goddamn it, let you know that every day? Our culture, too, makes it easy to simply accept Mattix was a girl who decided she knew what she wanted, and to let it go at that.
And wasn’t it, as she says, “a different world”? Oh, the ’70s. Things were different then. But they were not, really, no matter how many times we all collectively wish that to be true. If you can say with a straight face “Men don’t have sex with young girls anymore”—well, good luck to you with that. What changes is this, only—which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed. What is more appropriate than making sure we don’t forget this, ever, even at inconvenient times?
I believe Mattix when she says the sex with her rock-star partners was consensual on her behalf, and I also believe, for good reason, David Bowie and the others committed acts that are exploitative, and illegal. Age fifteen is young, no matter what, and they were the adults with all the power in this dynamic, and that is not what healthy, normal sexual relationships for teenagers look like. I also believe it’s important to say this is different from the horrific decades’ worth of rape allegations brought forth against Bill Cosby, and different from Roman Polanski’s rape of a drugged girl. It is not the same as the lawsuits against R. Kelly over his alleged sexual abuse of young girls, though the conditions that made all of these stories possible stem from the same terrible old root: powerful men, young women, and a whole lot of people who looked the other way—or in the case of these teen groupies, even romanticized the tales. Say, wasn’t Almost Famous great?
Does even talking about the story, now that he has died, taint Bowie’s legacy, as some fear? What is any true legacy but complicated? If we feel guilty for talking about it, maybe we should explore where that guilt really comes from. I can believe that David Bowie might not have believed he violated anyone by having sex with Lori Mattix and whoever else, though of course I don’t know his (or, for that matter, Jimmy Page’s) heart, or even whether these events transpired at all the way Mattix says they did, although the tales have been out there long enough to be read as a generally accepted narrative of the times. It is not hard to believe Bowie likely understood at the time—without even having to acknowledge it—that he was simply availing himself of the sensory perks of his station. How was a girl any different from good dope, the best table, a forgiven room-service bill? They were an indulgence to finally grow out of, perhaps, like cocaine and cheeseburgers.
And it would seem as though she believes the same—she was availing herself of the pleasures available to her at the time, and she made her own decisions willingly and enjoyed herself with no major regrets. Should we demand she represent her experience any other way? If what we do is believe women, should we believe her? It is possible to believe her and to know objectively that it was wrong anyway, and to say so. Not for her or for Bowie, necessarily, but for other girls now who are absorbing how we talk about these stories, and all the girls yet to come.
EARL SLICK: In a lot of ways people thought they knew David, but they didn’t. I did. We had a problem in common, a situation, our whole lives, and I understood him because of that. I don’t even want to go there. It’s something that we had in common, that we had talked about privately. And that’s why I’m telling you this, because I’ve never told anybody. So in my own way I could understand what seemed to be the callous shit that he would do. The not calling you, or all of a sudden deciding you were going to be replaced by this guy or that guy. But that was David. You know, he never discussed his brother. With me it came up maybe a couple of times over the whole time I knew him, during certain conversations we had about a certain thing. And when it came up, it came up not at length at all. As far as his personal life was concerned, how he grew up, his mother, his brother, his family, it really wasn’t anything he talked about at all. David was very, very, very private about that. Anything to do with his private life. The only thing I knew was that he did his own washing up and stuff. If there was a coffee cup that needed washing, instead of calling the maid in, he’d do it himself. On the bus he’d get all bitchy: “Slicky, this has got to be your cup! So clean it.” He had no problems making coffee, washing up, but that’s about as far as it went. I’ve felt very negative about David at times, but I loved the man to death. He wasn’t a saint, but I miss him a lot.
NILE RODGERS: The last time I saw him was on film. I was being honored with an award and I wanted him to give it to me, but Iman was getting honored that exact same night, so of course he wasn’t going to choose me over his wife, plus she was getting her award in San Francisco. So he made a film for me, which was really sweet. When I heard that he’d died I wasn’t as shocked as some people were, even though I hadn’t seen him for a long time. Because when he did the film for me I could see in his face that it wasn’t the same. I would always call his office and ask him to come and perform “Let’s Dance” with me if I was playing in the New York area, so I was in contact with him a lot. But the people who worked with him on the last record were very loyal. Sterling Campbell, who I introduced him to, didn’t say a word to me.
STERLING CAMPBELL: I sent him a message when [the musical] Lazarus came out, congratulating him, and he just sent a message back: “Thanks Ster.” That’s what he called me, “Ster.”
CANDY CLARK: I really regret not going to see Lazarus. I was going to go to the opening night, as I was really intrigued to see what he had done to the movie, and what he had done to Mary-Lou, my character in The Man Who Fell to Earth. I just put it off, and now I’ll never be able to see it. I thought, he’d probably be happy to see me, I’d probably get a good seat. It’s a valuable lesson: don’t take anything for granted. When I saw pictures of him on opening night, standing there holding hands with the other actors, I thought he didn’t look good. Either he’s really, really tired or he’s sick. He looked like he was in pain, and kinda yellow. Jaundiced. Dry. That should have been a clue.
ANGIE BOWIE: In the ’70s he had a terrible fear of death, but then that goes hand in hand with the excessive paranoia that comes with excessive drug taking. He confided all about that with me. However, it wasn’t a fear of death he spoke about. It was a fear of getting killed. It’s a bit different. Getting cut down in your prime is different from dying. I don’t think that was an issue. And he managed his departure—because he had some notice of what it was going to be—I think, with great grace and style. Because you can’t just throw your hands up in the air and become morbid. He stayed busy and focused and left us with a huge inventory of art and activity in that final eighteen months, once he knew.
WENDY LEIGH: I do think it’s fascinating that David died when Angie was sequestered in the Big Brother house. She obviously had this dilemma: Do I stay in and try and win the prize money, or do I go out and try and capitalize on David’s death. I mean, she has dined out on him forever and ever and ever. That was delicious.
BONO: David called Jordan, my daughter, who was feeding when he stayed with us in Dublin, Pixie. He called her that because she was a tiny little bald head when he met her. She’s an exceedingly clever girl, and she’s had a very, very deep connection to David Bowie. Not related to the fact that he was going to be walking in any minute when her mother was feeding her. She was very evolved with her taste in music, and she’s a bit of a music Nazi. I’m terrified of playing her stuff. But she’s a big Bowie fan. And when Blackstar came out, we were walking over Killiney Hill, and we shared an earphone. I put it in one side and she did the other. And we listened to Blackstar together on this walk. And it was a very special moment between father and daughter, her hearing Blackstar for the first time, us hearing it for the first time together. And we loved it. And we were together a few weeks later, and I sent him a photograph of the two of us and told him the story I just told you. And it was his birthday. And I sent him a long, long email. And then a few days later [when] we got the news and with the devastation of losing somebody who all of us in the family loved, came the tiniest little morsel of comfort, which is that we actually did communicate with him on his birthday. I’m told he read it, but he did not reply.
MICK ROCK: My wife had gone to bed, and I had watched some TV, hung out with the cats, and crashed out on the sofa. The next day I turned on the TV, which is something I never do, so it must have been intuitive, and I saw my “Space Oddity” video, and I wondered why. I assumed it was some kind of follow-up to the release of Blackstar. And then I saw the tickertape along the bottom saying “David Bowie dead at 69.” Tony Visconti said this, and I feel the same, that David wasn’t thinking he was going when he went. The picture taken of him a few days before he died, he looked fine. I find it very difficult to look at the Blackstar video even now. To be so creative right up to the end, that’s brave, that’s special.
WILLIAM ORBIT (MUSICIAN, COMPOSER, RECORD PRODUCER): I had been eager to watch The Last Panthers after reading an online synopsis, impatient to get into the story, and had not known about the Bowie song (“Lazarus”). Subsequently I learned that it came from an album that was a final testimony, and I let it slip by, as my current mood and new projects weren’t allowing room for the full acceptance of Bowie’s departure from the world, nor was I in the right frame of mind for listening to his final message.
I suppose I thought it was a maudlin record, but it is anything but. The full song as it appears on the album had the signature sobbing, moaning Bowie moments that were amongst his huge range of vocal expressions—which went from Broadway musical to rock and roll ball-busting to intimate confession to primal scream—and it colored my first impression. This, and the brittle close harmony, unsettled me. In my experience, musicians generally have an optimistic view of life, and never more so than when actually creating music, preferring to hedge the reality of oblivion with the thought that people will say nice things about their work when they’ve gone, and thereby existentially remaining in play. All of the tracks on Blackstar twist and turn musically, especially the key. Most of the great David Bowie songs, as with most great pop songs generally, stick to one key, containing a basic set of related chords. This album does not have that consistency, to the point that there is even a multitude of spacial effects on his voice. I could also hear a deep commitment in the performances of all the musicians, especially Donny McCaslin’s sax and Mark Guiliana, the drummer. They sound like a band who could play absolutely anything to its fullest. But the album feels like an open-ended gift to all of us who were gutted to learn of his death.
But it is not maudlin. I’ve always taken the word for granted, and so I looked it up, and it is the wrong word entirely. Just as it would be for Henry Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament.” Blackstar is not “self-pitying” or “tearfully sentimental.” This album has actually had a profound emotional effect on some people closest to me in my life. I take longer to respond to matters of the heart, but I get there. I’m getting there now as I journey back from that word. Let’s put that word far away in the rearview mirror.
TONY VISCONTI: I think the music industry would get in David’s way if he had been starting out now. I think David was ahead of his time and he had a very difficult time being signed back in the day. He started out writing songs for the West End, he tried folk music, he tried a lot of things. “Space Oddity” is what finally got him a singles deal rather than an album deal, and then he didn’t really come out with a new hit single until Ziggy Stardust, so my point is the labels believed in him. Once he had shown that he managed to get one thing as a hit on the radio they didn’t drop him, whereas nowadays anyone will do that. They just don’t allow any experimental style artist to be signed, but we would have gone underground, we would have used the Internet and used all those tools. He would be true to himself. I would still be working with him. I only support geniuses, I’m afraid, people who are courageous and very intelligent. Those are the only people I work with.
KEN SCOTT: David would never get signed by a label today, as he wouldn’t be given the chance to develop. He would have floundered, as he wouldn’t have been supported. There is no way a record company could afford to nurture someone in the way that Bowie was nurtured all those years ago.
DAVE STEWART: Like a lot of people in the rock and roll bubble, he used to go on tour and take cocaine and go crazy, and was surrounded by lots of women who would throw themselves at him, and he was quite happy to take the opportunities…but when he met Iman he knew this was it. He changed immediately. You could see that something had happened in his brain, a lightbulb moment: Oh, I can be loved by someone. I think it was hard for many people to get their heads round the fact that he had domestic bliss. People liked him as a decadent rock god, not a man who was happy at home. But he desperately needed it. Personally I was enchanted by the dignified way in which he decided to go, and I’m fully expecting to see a video at some point where he is somewhere in heaven singing, “Here am I sitting in a tin can…” Nothing would surprise me….
LINDSAY KEMP: He was splendid, a genius. I still love him. I never fall out of love. Once in love, always in love.
JOHAN RENCK (DIRECTOR): It became a project that had a lot of tears. It started very innocently. I was directing a television series called The Last Panthers, and when we started approaching the end of the shoot I decided that I wanted someone from my childhood to write the music for the opening credits. So we started looking around and someone suggested David Bowie, but it didn’t even cross my mind because it was so unreachable and so unthinkable. So I just told her: “You don’t even ask somebody like that.” But she insisted, and a day after we approached him we got an answer saying that David was interested in the project. So I sent him a rough cut of the first episode, the script, and a mood board, and very shortly thereafter, he sent me a rough outline for the song that later became “Blackstar,” but in a very different arrangement, in a very different shape and form. When I heard the piece I knew it was absolutely right, immediately. A couple of days later, he and Tony Visconti Skyped me from their studio—they’re playing it to me and the two of them are sitting there like kids, looking eagerly at me and wondering what my response is going to be. Then I hear myself saying, “Well, I love it, but I do not like the guitar you have on top of it.” And I’m thinking, “What the fuck am I doing?” Then I see David and Tony just look at each other and they stop nodding and they say, “OK, OK. We’ll call you back in one hour with a different idea. Hang on.” Then they just hung up. So I hung up and said to my wife, “What the fuck did I just do? I’m, like, producing David Bowie and Tony Visconti while they’re in the studio. I’m an idiot.” But at the same time, it was what I wanted. So, they called me back an hour later, and they’re playing me a new version in which they’d replaced the guitar with a more string-like effect, or something slightly more droning. And I thought it was perfect.
A few weeks later I find myself in New York and I get an email from David: “Look, I’ve completed this song; do you want to come over and have a listen to it?” So I walked over to his office, which is just a couple of blocks away from my mine, and he puts on this CD and he puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Mind you, it’s ten minutes long.” Then he plays me “Blackstar” and asks if I’d be interested in making a video for it.
Obviously from the get-go he was an extraordinarily nice man, charming, curious; he would listen as much as he would talk, he would be very gentlemanlike on all levels, and I took an immediate liking to him; I liked the human being that was David Bowie very much. So we started collaborating. He would send me random drawings, and I’d send drawings back to him. Then he’d send me some Luis Buñuel fake documentary about some strange Spanish village up in the mountains, and I would send him some old, obscure Russian film that I felt was interesting. The collaboration was amazing because it was a collaboration in its absolute truest form, like nothing I’ve ever had before. There’s always egos, there’s always people who need to prove a point, or people who need to prove their salary by commenting on stuff, rather than just saying, “This is good, let’s just move on.” This one had none of that; this one was just the way it should be. Then in the summer of 2015 I was in my country house in Sweden, moping around in my shorts, and he sends me a message saying that he needs to Skype me. So he comes up on Skype and says, “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you that I’m very ill and that I’m probably going to die.” And it’s one of the most absurd, bizarre moments I’ve ever experienced. I’m trying to put words to it now, but it’s almost impossible to do that. And some stupid thing comes out of my mouth like, “What do you mean?” or “Are you joking?” because I couldn’t even grasp it. And then he said, “I’m telling you this. I’ve been contemplating and I feel that I have to tell you this because I’m not sure I will be around to be in the video.” And we’re like two months from shooting the video. I’m saying, “What the fuck are you even saying? I’ve known you for my entire life pretty much and now I met you for a moment and now all of a sudden you’re saying you’re going to die?” It’s like the most insane thing ever. So this is what he tells me and we speak about it a little bit and for a minute the conversation is pretty serious, but then he sort of says, “I’ve known this for a while and I’m in treatment.” He explains everything to me, but from that moment, since I’m a very optimistic type of guy, my reasoning was always that he’s going to be in treatment, he’s going to fight this shit, it’s going to be a battle, and then he’s going to be fine and then it’s all good. So, from the moment of him telling me I went onto the trajectory of pro-life on his behalf. But, to be honest, I don’t think he told me only so I could figure out what to do on the practical level for the video, to find a replacement for him, I really think he told me because he wanted death to be a third collaborator in this video; he wanted death to be there as a presence in terms of formulating all the ideas and lying as a middle instigator for his thoughts as we went onwards. Because what I found out later, he knew he was ill enough to not make it, because of the nature of his cancer, but he never told me that.
When I went into the process of making the videos, I immediately sensed the reflective aspect of them. He had been around for so long, with such an enormously prolific career and I said to him early on, “The interesting thing here is we don’t have to look outside your myth to look for references. Also, it’s almost impossible to make a video with you without mirroring elements of your various iterations over the years.” But I never thought they would be the last videos he ever made. Never did it cross my mind. I was even hoping we were going to do videos for other songs on the album. So, for me, there was nothing morbid about making them. Nothing suggested that he was ill over these seven months that we were working together, and the “Lazarus” video we shot in November, which was only pretty much a month and a half away from his passing, and he was as perky as ever. I later found out that during that week he had understood: It’s over; we’re going to end all treatment and you have a short time left to live. But there was nothing that ever came up between us.
He had told very, very few people about his illness; even people in his closest sphere around him didn’t know. He told because he had to. Obviously his family knew, and obviously his close collaborators knew, and Coco, and [photographer] Jimmy King, and [business manager] Bill Zysblat. Our conversations would touch upon stuff that to some extent related to mortality and death. He would randomly text me or chat—and this is not me trying to say I was becoming besties with David Bowie; that’s not at all what I’m saying. All I’m saying is that because of the information I sat on, there were conversations that he had with me that perhaps he didn’t have with other people. I was sure that he was going to make it. He was so young physically and mentally and spiritually. He literally felt ten or fifteen years younger than his age—he was sixty-nine and he didn’t look a day over fifty and some change, to be honest. And a big, warm smile that he always had and his honest, cheeriest eyes never revealed anything like a battle with death on the inside. Obviously in “Blackstar,” death is present with this sort of wraith that is summoned within the video, and even in “Lazarus,” obviously, death is present. But to me, the wraith was not death; it is more the illness that needs to be fought and dealt with to some extent, but it was not necessarily death.
“Blackstar” was an extraordinary piece of music—it’s like an anthem. It’s really my cup of tea: it’s kind of dark, it’s ominous, but it’s also dreamy. It changes, it starts to be different colorings in the mid-part and all that. So I really loved it. I can tell you one thing though, within these songs, within the harmonies and within the lyrics, there are references to death on a lot of levels. And to me I didn’t find that peculiar. “Lazarus” was not intended to be a requiem. When he came to me, he said, “I want to make a video for this song, but I just want to stick to a performance video.” And I said, “Great. I already have an idea.” And I drew a picture of him in bed with this weird sort of…To me, Lazarus means a man in bed—from the Bible—and that’s what I wanted to say. It had nothing to do with Bowie being on his deathbed; I’m sure it did on his behalf, but for me it didn’t. For me, it was about the man who rises from his bed and takes his bed and walks. So, when he died and I look at this video of this old man—he managed to look very old at the beginning of the video there—lying sort of struggling with his demons in the bed, it was like, Holy, fucking shit, what have I done? He had sent me these images from Station to Station with the black-and-white striped outfit and said, “What about if we reawaken this guy?” It was all his own myth. When we were shooting “Lazarus,” he knew that he only had a month or two left of his life; we were sitting there, me and David and Jimmy King, who’s his longtime collaborator, stylist, archivist, and all that kind of stuff. We’re sitting watching the playback of the take we just did and one of us said—I don’t remember who it was, to be honest, but I think it was Jimmy: “Hey David, wouldn’t it be funny if you ended the video by going back into the closet.” And David started giggling like mad: “Yeah, look, David Bowie has come back into the closet! Fuck yeah, we’ve got to do that. Let’s do that right away.” So we did this thing where he, sort of, reverses into the closet and closes the door and disappears. And it was just for fun; that’s how that idea came up. And little did I know how extraordinarily powerful this was, to end the last video he ever did by him going into his own fucking coffin and closing the door and disappearing, for all eternity. Even at the very end of things, he would have a laugh and he would be audacious. He had an enormous loyalty to his fans. He would do things to please his fans, or to tease his fans: “They’re going to question this. They won’t know what this is about. They’re going to have a lot of fun thinking about this,” and so on and so forth. He was extraordinarily loving towards everybody who liked his music.
BRIAN ENO: David’s death came as a complete surprise, as did nearly everything else about him. I feel a huge gap now. We knew each other for over forty years, in a friendship that was always tinged by echoes of [comic characters] Pete and Dud. Over the last few years—with him living in New York and me in London—our connection was by email. We signed off with invented names: some of his were Mr. Showbiz, Milton Keynes, Rhoda Borrocks, and the Duke of Ear. About a year ago we started talking about Outside—the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that. I received an email from him [recently]. It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence: “Thank you for our good times, Brian. They will never rot.” And it was signed “Dawn.” I realize now he was saying goodbye.
I was shown a copy of that last email, and while it would be intrusive to mention precisely what it said, it was a celebration of the pair’s collaborations over the years, a litany of achievement; “We did all, that, Brian.” The email quite quickly veered off into Pythonesque banter, with Bowie repeatedly writing “Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum…” (which is also German for Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…)
FRANCIS WHATELY: In November 2015 he sent me an email. My daughter and his daughter were exactly the same age and I’d sometimes mentioned my errant daughter and the difficulties of bringing up a teenager. And he asked me how my family was, and I said, “Things aren’t great.” He said, and I’m paraphrasing: “I’m very happy with my lot. I’m very pleased with the new album. What more could any man ask for.” Which I thought was a very strange thing to say, and I didn’t really think more of it. He then said: “How are you and yours?” And I wrote back—and I know you’re not meant to write back to David Bowie and actually tell him how you feel, but I did because the BBC were going through a round of redundancies again, in their infinite wisdom—and I said, “Well, the BBC are cutting 50 percent of the staff in my area, but perhaps it’s time to move on.” He wrote back about two days later and said, “If the BBC have any wisdom at all, they will give you a job for life.” And that’s the last I heard from him. I’ve worked at the BBC for over twenty years and interviewed Hillary Clinton, academics, journalists, actors, and all sorts of very clever people. And I never met anyone as clever as him. I never met anyone with his star power; I never met anyone with his ability to put someone at their ease; I never met anyone who was as un-starry, actually.
How much he played on his own family’s madness, I don’t know. He might have played on it because it made him more romantic. People have told me that he had this great fear of going mad. I find that unlikely. I think he was a man very much in control of his own destiny and his own ability. Do I think he wrestled with the black dog? Yes, his music says it all. But do I think he ever thought he was going to go mad? No.
What I’m surprised about is the amount of people who worked with him for a short period who never heard from him again and who found it impossible then to get through the machine to get to him again. So I remember Jack Hofsiss, who directed The Elephant Man, who told me that he’d been trying to get through to David but couldn’t get through the office. Did the messages get through to David? I don’t know. Did his people not pass on the message? Did he feel that was a time in his life that was now over? I don’t know. What I am surprised by though is the amount of people who appear to have been “rejected,” in inverted commas, by him, who still remained incredibly fond of him and reluctant to say anything bad about him at all. He seemed to exert his charm well beyond their own personal sell-by dates.
KIM JONES: He was here for a real reason you know. I’m not at all religious, but some people are here for a reason, aren’t they? It was awful when we heard that he’d died. On the Friday beforehand I had been with Kate Moss and we had done a happy birthday message for him and sent it to him, and then on the Monday I saw that he was dead. It was a shock because Kate and I had just that weekend been planning to ask him to do a special project together…it didn’t seem real when I heard.
KATE MOSS: I cried a lot when he died. I was at home. I had just sent him a birthday message, because he would always send me an email on my birthday. So I put together a piece of paper that said Happy Birthday DB, and I did a film to “Mr. Bojangles” whilst holding the poster, and sent it. The next morning, it was really early morning, as I’d had a really late night and I was just going to bed. It was six o’clock. And my boyfriend told me what had happened. Because everything about the few days before had been about him. I’d even come home and watched the Hammersmith Odeon film on the projector. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched that concert. What made him so special was that he was just so not scared. He was so out there, and so free, and so himself and also not himself. That’s a true artist, making himself into a walking piece of art. He took it to another level. It wasn’t just about music, it was everything. It was his whole culture. I think a lot of people have a female side, but he just managed to not be frightened by it. He used it to his advantage in his music, his stage presence and in his looks. He had such good legs! And when you see him going across the stage in those boots, it’s just heaven!
DORIAN LYNSKEY (JOURNALIST): News of David Bowie’s death arrived like news of his surprise comeback, in the early hours of a bleak January morning. This time, however, a bulletin from Bowieworld made the morning even bleaker and the disbelief was horrific rather than magical. In our house, like so many others, it wrenched the day out of joint. My wife burst into tears, my oldest daughter sang “Life on Mars?,” and I had the same reaction as if I had lost a friend or family member rather than a pop star: a stubborn, instinctive “No.” In pop terms, Bowie’s death was a hole in the sky; a disturbance in the Force. It’s customary when a great musician dies to play some of their songs in tribute but we are always listening to Bowie, and to people inspired by Bowie; he’s one of the elements that constitute the air that pop music breathes. The radio played “Space Oddity” but it could have played any of a couple of dozen peerless songs and they would have been no less representative.
Looking back, you can hardly believe how fast he moved. “I can look back on a song that I’ve just written and it means something entirely different now because of my new circumstances, new this or that,” he said in 1972. Just look at him go. On Radio 4’s Today program John Wilson said it was a fallacy to call Bowie a chameleon because chameleons blend in with their environment whereas Bowie reconfigured his environment. He had a voracious appetite for exciting developments in music, cinema, fashion, media, and visual art and the strength of vision to mold these whirling influences into records that were unmistakably David Bowie. You could argue that a genius is someone whose extraordinary world hunger is equaled only by their capacity to harness it.
Bowie knew he had cancer all the time he was making Blackstar but he withheld the news. His final gift, to himself as well as us, was to allow this brilliant album to be received on its own merits, undistorted by a sense of finality and the sentimentality that comes with it. For just three days after its release, it sounded like someone racing forward rather than looking back and you could imagine that yet another new phase had begun. Now it transpires that he knew this would be his last record, which makes its fearless strangeness even more impressive.
Blackstar was actually meant to be released in the last week of October, to escape the mass of “Best-Ofs” released at Christmas, although its release was held up because the video for “Lazarus” wasn’t quite ready. This whole idea of releasing the album to coincide with his death was just morbid speculation. There was also a whole lot of disinformation concerning the secrecy of Bowie’s illness, as the fundamental reason he didn’t tell anyone was because he didn’t want anyone to be upset. This was the reason he kept the seriousness of his situation secret from Sony, his record company; the whole team working on the record were so resolutely positive about its release—and genuinely giddy with excitement because of his new jazz direction (“a genuine sonic departure”)—he didn’t want to burst their bubble. This was typical. Bowie knew exactly what effect he had on people, and behaved accordingly. Which meant that he always tried to act normally, even though it was inevitably a heightened sense of normal. He knew that Blackstar would be an important album for him—at Sony they internally compared it favorably to Low—and he was as concerned about its marketing as he was about its predecessor, The Next Day. With that album he couldn’t quite believe how Sony had managed to keep it such a secret, and was equally appalled when he found out certain people involved in the making of the record had started blabbing to the press. He didn’t want there to be an excessive amount of noise, he just wanted it to be taken seriously. Remarkably, he read every review of The Next Day, every broadsheet thesis, every hastily scribbled blog. Everything. He was engaged but separate, obsessive about the world around him, and his role within it, but loath to engage. He really enjoyed being the Englishman in New York, being able to disappear at a moment’s notice. He had no interest in being the custodian of his back catalogue, no interest at all in his past—one of the reasons why there were no boxed sets during his “retirement”—but was driven by contemporary culture. He always wanted to know what was going on. He would delve into medieval history, but you wouldn’t catch him boning up on anything that had happened in his own past. Let the fans do that. One Sony executive remembers asking him why he spent so much time in the studio in the ’70s, to which Bowie was disarmingly blunt: “It was the only way I could make any money. Every time I delivered an album I got paid. You didn’t make any money from touring in those days.” He was extremely proud of Blackstar. In a final missive to one of the somebodies at Sony he wrote, “Not bad for an old rocker.”
THOMAS DOLBY: I was in the States and saw the news on the BBC website. I wasn’t very surprised, as I knew he had been sick. Michael Jackson once said to me, “When I die I want to go like Elvis, because the bigger the star the more disgusting the death.” Bowie turned his death into a statement, which is just extraordinary.
DORIAN LYNSKEY: Enigma is not usually a renewable resource. Once you lose it, it’s gone forever. In that respect, as in so many others, David Bowie is the exception. While it’s foolish to assume any lyric from this master of masks and bluffs is autobiographical, Bowie liked to leave the possibility open, and if there’s anything on ★ (aka Blackstar) that feels like a direct address to the listener, it’s these lines from its final song: “This is all I ever meant/That’s the message that I sent/I can’t give everything away.” Bowie’s unusual comeback, which began one night in 2013 with the bolt-from-the-blue announcement of his album The Next Day, was predicated on giving away as little as possible. Bowie could do whatever he liked and his choices were never predictable. He gave no interviews and played no live shows. He snubbed Danny Boyle’s efforts to use his songs in a musical biopic while saying yes to a low-key musical stage show, Lazarus, the Sky Atlantic drama The Last Panthers, and, most improbably, a show based on SpongeBob SquarePants. We thought we had him figured out. We were wrong, and hooray for that.
Like The Next Day, Blackstar was recorded in secret and delivered to a record company expecting nothing. But while the previous album was a dance with his past, especially Lodger and Scary Monsters, Blackstar is what happens next. The retro allusions are fleeting: “Girl Loves Me” binges on Nadsat, the Clockwork Orange argot Bowie deployed on “Suffragette City”; a fiercer version of 2014’s “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” recalls Earthling’s drum ’n’ bass; that’s about it. It is not half as daunting as reports originally suggested. These are strong songs, powerfully rendered. Each one creates its own distinct space. The title track, a new angle on Bowie’s favorite word “star,” is an art-rock tour de force with hints of Scott Walker and later Radiohead. “Lazarus,” from the New York musical, is an opaque fable, by turns elegiac and throat-grabbingly intense. “ ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” and “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” are urgent experiments in rhythm and violence. “Dollar Days” and “I Can’t Give Everything Away” hail from a parallel-universe version of Bowie’s ’80s, with thick synth chords and rampaging sax. Bowie’s voice constantly changes, too, from a jaded croon to a spooked warble to a strangled squawk to a muttered threat. If there’s a criticism, it’s simply that seven songs are too few but they contain more new ideas than most artists, of any age, could manage in seventeen.
JONATHAN BARNBROOK: I didn’t know David was ill when we were designing the cover for Blackstar. I didn’t guess when I met him. And we talked about the theme of mortality but not in a personal sense, in a more universal sense. You can hear it on the record of course. So I was as surprised as anyone else when he died. I would have probably designed it differently had I known. But then I think I picked up on [it]—it’s a black album, with a black life and a black label. I picked up on the emotion in the album and I think it’s better that I didn’t know. I think he didn’t tell me because it was just more convenient and it made the working process easier.
For Blackstar I actually went to New York to meet him and to listen to the album with him; for the other ones it was generally emails of the music and just a quick discussion. We’d never directly talk about the actual meaning of the songs or often even the meaning of the album, and I think it was better that I just interpreted the emotional meaning of the album than think about what [the] actual songs were about. I’d tried to keep it abstract and I think he was quite happy to keep it abstract. There’s so much visual noise on album covers these days so it’s better to keep it really simple and make it stand out.
Actually it doesn’t have any type on it, which made the record company very nervous, because normally you’d have “David Bowie” on it and a picture of him, and both elements had gone. We spoke about having a picture of him on the cover. And I said that this is not the kind of album where you should have a picture of you smiling on the front. He said I completely agree. So, I mean, he was coming at it from a different place. He didn’t specifically ask for his name not to be on it, but the first thing I wanted to do for the album was to shorten it to “Bowie,” because “David Bowie” jarred with the minimal nature of using the star instead of writing Blackstar. And we deliberately didn’t tell people directly it was his name. So it’s playing with things coming into focus, which is the same as music as an abstract thing. Music suggests things to people and they may not be right. David would often say, “What people see in my songs is far more interesting than what I actually put into them.” The way people construct the story around the meaning of the lyrics, that was the thought for the Blackstar/Bowie name. Still people come up to me at lectures or tweet me and say, “What do these stars mean?” Or “I’ve just discovered that the stars mean Bowie.” I think it’s nice. Not everything needs to be explained. When I look at the stars I think of the first discussion we had, about black holes. They give you life and they will finally drag you back to your death. He talked about mortality and the universe and the star. There was also a discussion about the current political state of the world, and the way gender is moving around these days, and how that is related to the Blackstar. Not sure why, but he showed me quite a lot of drawings that he had done. And a lot of these provided the basis of the Blackstar video. Women with tails. That was a comment about gender. Strange non-female or non-male-specific characters.
Even right until the end he was not a negative person. His last few emails were very definite and strong about what we were going to do with the designs, how the album would be promoted, and that kind of thing. And the people from the “Lazarus” shoot which was shot not long before he died commented on what a positive presence he was that day. I don’t think he was feeling sorry for himself.
PAUL SMITH: At the beginning of January I was curating our installation for London Collections Men at the Royal Academy, when I heard the news. I was re-creating my original Nottingham shop—which measured about ten by ten feet—and filling it with a variety of artifacts. There was a pile of vintage speedometers that inspired some of my watch designs; some examples of Frank Auerbach’s work, which I made into scarves; an old-fashioned squeezebox, which was the inspiration for one of my leather concertina bags. Lots of stuff like that. So when we heard the news we also made the shop an homage to David. It felt like the right thing to do. We had just done the official T-shirts for Blackstar. He asked me to design them, and they came out at one minute past midnight on the eighth, the same day as the album. It was quite dark, and it had a hint of jazz as well, but it was superb.
There came a point, not long after his death, when it appeared that anyone and everyone felt they needed to express an opinion about Bowie. The memorializing and reminiscing became something of a rite of passage, almost as though you hadn’t somehow fully engaged with the modern media maelstrom unless you had made public your thoughts about DB. Many recollections were based around the lightning-bolt moment when he had fallen into their lives, or around a particular interaction, which obviously was now encumbered with huge significance. Others still were Twitter-esque exclamations of grief, love, and respect. Martyn Ware, who was in both the Human League and Heaven 17, described a typical vignette: “I met Bowie in 1978 when he came to see the Human League [in a pub in Fulham]. I have a photo of it, amazingly—I couldn’t believe someone took a photo of it. It was completely unannounced; we had no inkling he was coming, he and his entourage. The dressing room, to give you an idea, was like a cubbyhole, really; the ceiling and the floor were covered in graffiti. It had no door and, like all those places, it just smelled of beer and pee. For me, it was like Jesus stepping out of a medieval painting and walking into your front room. It was just bizarre, I couldn’t comprehend it; I still can’t quite comprehend it to this day, really. He was such a hero. And then, of course, no pressure at all, that was ten minutes before we were due to go onstage.” Some, like Cyndi Lauper, simply applauded the fact that he managed to successfully and repeatedly fuse sound and vision: “Corporate people who don’t understand performance art”—the suits—would say, “Your image is so big, I can’t hear you sing.” That’s why we all looked to Bowie, because he was one of the first performance artists and he didn’t give a rat’s ass; he didn’t say, “Oh, I think I won’t dress up this time.” You know, he just fucking looked at the image and the sound, and put them together. And some got him completely: “There was David, and there was Bowie,” wrote the illustrator Edward Bell in a poem. “Schizophrenia was in the genes. He could be cold and ruthless; He could be charming, erudite, witty and extremely good company.” Or, as Robyn Hitchcock said, “There was always something about Bowie in his day that was very triumphalist. He was always about powering through and getting there and making your way—as he himself once said: ‘Very Capricorn.’ ” So many people had stumbled upon him in their early teens. “David Bowie was somebody who I loved when I was fourteen, when his career was just starting,” said the novelist Nick Hornby. “We followed him every step of the way, and I think you can feel a lot of our own mortality in the shock of his death. We thought this generation was somehow immortal. But it shouldn’t be shocking. Let’s face it: It was a guy who was nearly seventy, and he died too soon, but he died roughly at an appropriate age—threescore years and ten, and all that. So in that way, it’s even more stark than somebody who was shot or who died of a drug overdose.”
The one voice that was absent from the chorus of approval belonged to Tony Defries, who as far as the media was concerned was absent without leave. Some said he was living in South Africa, others that he was living and working on the West Coast. His LinkedIn profile was fascinating: “A successful British entrepreneur and inventor. Currently working on commercializing a flexible electronic quantum battery powered entirely by human biophotons and light. This patent pending wearable clean technology will provide a constant supply of electricity for smartphones and other mobile devices. Quantum entangled renewable energy is a game changing technology that can help to make a zero emission sustainable future possible.” The summary of his career cast him as assisting in the creation of independent record and publishing companies acquired by major conglomerates, as well as being the architect of deals enabling “photographers, illustrators, designers, songwriters, producers, performers and other creators to secure and retain valuable creative rights and benefit from ongoing revenue streams.” His profile then goes on to reference his time with MainMan, which had once created “a unique management structure that combined movie studio dynamics with those of independent producers, record labels and music publishers. He made Bowie a superstar and launched the careers of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Mick Ronson, Mott the Hoople, Luther Vandross and John Mellencamp.” It obviously made no reference to the business troubles (offshore tax issues, copyright infringement) that blighted the latter part of his career.
I spent several months trying to track him down, and then, having eventually made contact, suddenly got an email from him. “Before considering any request I need details of your previous published work,” he wrote, “and the length, scope, topic, specs, status, deal, terms, delivery and publication dates, territory, format medium and all other rights being sought for the proposed (oral as in written and spoken/audio or audiovisual) RH biography + list of people interviewed and their comments good or bad. Also need a copy of the bio so far that shows your overall approach and tone.”
So we started corresponding, with me outlining exactly what I was attempting to do with the book, and encouraging him to speak to me; and with him parrying in kind, wary of what I was trying to do. Then, one day in November, he suggested we talk, and so planned a call for later that week. When we spoke—for an hour, off the record, on the phone between Johannesburg and London—we covered a lot of ground. Defries was passionate in his espousal of Bowie, and was at pains to describe the affection he continued to feel for him. He appeared to be completely at ease with the ramifications of their business dealings, and was adamant that none of David’s success would have happened without him. We talked about how Defries had started tidying up Bowie’s past, extricating him from various contracts that he felt were going to complicate matters going forward. He also talked at great length about his decision to sign with RCA, and the plan to turn Bowie into an Elvis-like figure, removed from public life, and—crucially—isolated from the media. He said he wanted Bowie to act like Hollywood royalty, which is why he hired two bodyguards to accompany him wherever he went, why he booked him into the biggest, grandest hotels, and why he kept him away from the press. Simply by encouraging him to think like a star, Bowie started acting like one—for instance when he went to see Elvis perform at Madison Square Garden in 1972, he came back to London demanding that Defries buy him hundreds of scarves, as he liked the way Elvis had something to throw at the crowd as a keepsake. After a while I began to feel as though I were listening to the proud parent of an occasionally wayward child, someone who had explained the rules during adolescence, and who was now both admonishing his boy for being so distrustful and also wallowing in his subsequent success. Because even Defries appeared to acknowledge that Bowie developed an uncanny, barometric ability to stay several steps ahead of those around him, a man who walked through the ’70s looking like a perpetually changing magazine cover, rarely leaving his house or his dressing room without imagining a huge logo hovering somewhere above his head, like a birthday balloon or an alphabet blimp.
After our initial conversation, Defries and I stayed in touch, with me trying to cajole him into cooperating, and him suggesting various revenue-sharing possibilities—was I open to him contributing to the book as an assistant author, co-author, collaborator, or “in some other mutually determined designation or capacity”? Would I be interested in him promoting the book through him appearing on network TV and/or streaming programs, and would I be interested in interviewing him for GQ? He wanted to know if I might be interested in using unpublished pictures of David from his archives, and generally wanted to see how we might be able to work together. This correspondence went on for over a month until it fizzled out due to our inability to agree terms. (His final salvo contained a request for $360,000 for his contribution, which I replied proved that he had a keen sense of humor.)
MADONNA (SINGER): I never felt like I fit in growing up in Michigan. Like an oddball or a freak. I went to see him in concert at Cobo Arena in Detroit. It was the first concert I’d ever been to. I snuck out of the house with my girlfriend, wearing a cape. We got caught after and I was grounded for the summer. I didn’t care. I already had many of his records and was so inspired by the way he played with gender confusion. He was both masculine and feminine, funny and serious, clever and wise. His lyrics were witty, ironic, and mysterious. At the time he was the Thin White Duke and he had mime artists onstage with him and very specific choreography, and I saw how he created a persona and used different art forms within the arena of rock and roll to create entertainment. His music was always inspiring, but seeing him live set me off on a journey that for me I hope will never end.
Bowie’s last will and testament, which detailed how his estimated $230 million fortune was to be distributed, was officially filed in Manhattan Surrogate Court on Friday, January 29. He left the bulk to Iman, Lexi, and Duncan, but gave $2 million to Coco, along with all of his shares in a company called Opossum Inc. As the company was officially dissolved in 2008, after only five years trading, it was thought to be either some sort of tax-efficient wheeze, or a cypher. Conspiracy theorists had a field day, alighting on the fact that the Wikipedia entry for “opossum” says, “When threatened or harmed, they will ‘play possum,’ mimicking the appearance and smell of a sick or dead animal.”
PAUL SMITH: He was the punctuation marks in so many people’s lives, including mine. One night in the ’90s, my wife and I had supper with him and Iman at Christie’s in St. James. When we left to get the cabs, there was a big staircase and as David walked down it, he started singing, “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day,” to [my wife] Pauline and I. She reminded me of that moment the morning he died, and we were both in tears.
AVA CHERRY: He did so much for black music. He campaigned to have Michael Jackson’s videos on MTV; he was always fighting for those kind of rights. When he wanted to do Young Americans I took him to the Apollo, which is where he met Carlos. Richard Pryor was there, the Spinners…and of course when we did Young Americans he opened up a whole new market for himself, which was black people.
He showed everybody that it’s not about whether you’re gay or straight or you wear your hair green or blue or black or white. Be yourself. Project yourself as an artist, be yourself, be who you are. Don’t let other people influence your muse and what you really need to be. He looked like a girl but he was still a man. When you’re an artist you have to have a person who says it’s OK to be yourself. Don’t try to be someone else.
CHERRY VANILLA: I am in so much awe of him orchestrating his own death. Who does that? What an artist. The album, the theatre production, the photographs, I just thought, Bravo, David.
“I knew David at the very beginning and then bumped into him along the way,” said the Kinks’ Ray Davies. Thirty years after covering the band’s “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” on Pin Ups, Bowie invited Davies onstage for a 2003 Tibet benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. “We played ‘Waterloo Sunset.’ We took a verse each, and a bridge, but we said, ‘How shall we do this?’ After a long discussion, we decided we’d impersonate one another.” Davies also had a “mad” idea of producing a musical based on the life and career of Dirk Bogarde, which would have starred Bowie. “But we never got round to it. I think he’d have been great.” They became “quite good email friends,” and two years before his death, Bowie wrote the sleeve notes to the compilation The Essential Kinks. “I always feel David could have collaborated more. You listen to ‘Heroes,’ he had such a great feel for music. And a mischievous chap.”
LADY GAGA (SINGER): Well, the moment that I saw the Aladdin Sane cover for the first time, I was nineteen years old, and it just changed my perspective on everything. I remember I took the vinyl record out of the casing and I put it on my vinyl player—which was on my stovetop in my kitchen, because I was living in this really tiny apartment and I had my turntable on my stove. I started to dress more expressively. I started to go to the library and look through more art books. I took an art history class. I was playing with a band. I guess what I’m trying to tell you is, my friends and I in New York, we’ve lived a lifestyle of total immersion in music, fashion, art, and technology since we were kids—and this is because of him. I just would never be here, or have the philosophy that I have, if I didn’t have someone to look up to that blew my mind so intensely. You know the way that Nile Rodgers talks about Coltrane, and the way that Coltrane makes him think about jazz? That’s how David Bowie is for me. You meet or see a musician that has something that is of another planet, of another time, and it changes you forever. I believe everyone has that, don’t you? That one thing you saw as a kid that made you go, “Oh, OK. Now I know who I am.”
IVO VAN HOVE (DIRECTOR): He didn’t call me. It was Robert Fox, the producer of Lazarus, who was a longtime good friend of David. He knew me, and said they didn’t want a conventional Broadway musical director, but somebody a little bit more innovative, experimental, whatever, out of the box. Robert wrote me an email and I thought it was really like a joke, like, this is not real. So I left it there for a day or two. And when I replied, Robert called me immediately. He said, yes, Ivo, this is for real and then indeed I sat with David Bowie within three weeks after that, at a table in New York, in his office. Which was scary, but he was so nice, such a gentleman, so open, very well informed. He had seen a lot of productions of mine on the Internet. He even went to Lincoln Center because there are a few productions there in the library. He had seen it all. He was [so] well prepared for that meeting. [In the abstract], meeting David Bowie, I wouldn’t know what to say, I would have been like a groupie, a stupid groupie. But knowing that I was going to work with him, the meeting was immediately at another level. [As for Lazarus], people want to see what they cannot see at home on the television, so I think that theatre is not only there for entertainment. People that buy tickets, that pay a lot of money, in the West End or on Broadway, they want to see something special, something they cannot see somewhere else.
BEN BRANTLEY (NEW YORK TIMES THEATRE CRITIC): There was a certain expectation surrounding Lazarus. Bowie himself was involved, Ivo van Hove had become the director of the moment, and Michael C. Hall was involved. I mean, it did seem a strange mirage of individual talent, but I think there was a certain amount of anticipation, even if I don’t think anyone knew quite what to expect. Bowie was channeled beautifully in the play. It was interesting, because the singers did have that great heft that musical comedy or American musical voices have, but they also got his inflections. I didn’t like it when they talked so much, but it was quite beautiful when they sang. The plot was a little bit thick, but it was gorgeous to look at and to listen to. It was very much in the science-fiction vocabulary—vampires, reincarnation—and for me it seemed almost collegiate. I mean, all you have to do is follow a few seasons of Star Trek and you’d follow most of the plot. But gosh it was so beautiful. When you look back and see it as a sort of valedictory piece, it does acquire another kind of gravity and eloquence.
Bowie was always sort of throwing around these autobiographical clues throughout his career. It was a sort of hide-and-seek thing. Throughout his career he had put out these various avatars of himself, more than any other famous person I can think of. They were populating the world on their own, long before Bowie died, and Lazarus sort of brought them all together because the different performers incarnate different aspects of the different Bowie characters. It’s a little literal in parts, and I think like a lot of great art, Bowie’s best when you don’t dissect him too literally. But when you listen to the music, when it actually all comes together in some of those moments of performance, I think that it’s a very worthy reflection of his work, and his preoccupation with fame, and it’s an interesting comment on the legacy of fame and how it alienates. Because that was his most abiding persona, wasn’t it? And this was the alien in the twilight of its life.
You could say that the first part of his career was devoted to work that acknowledged his fear of madness, and the second part reflected his mistrust of fame. But he did manage fame rather well by the end though, didn’t he? I mean, obviously if you started the day with the cocaine breakfast, well, he really needed to get past that. But the way he walked among us in New York to the extent that he did was kind of extraordinary. He had a profound ambivalence about fame, which I think most famous people have, unless they’re just absolute morons. The only way to be really famous in that way is to have no nervous system. Which means you can’t be an artist. So it’s a really double-edged gift. As much as anyone I can think of, he was able to have it both ways in the end, which is a certain privacy but also the sense that there was this creative horse still giving out signals, that he was this man from another planet. I mean, David Jones walked this Earth and the streets of New York and Soho but David Bowie was still whispering to us from another dimension and in other forms. I have such respect for people who have that degree of celebrity who can die privately. The only other person I can think of in recent years who pulled that off to the same extent was Nora Ephron, as no one knew she was sick. It means she got to leave in her own way, on her own terms, which is rare when you’re that well known.
Bowie had an incredibly astute self-educated mind, and even though he had a lot of different artistic personas, they were all being fed by one very, very original sensibility. I think he does hold up to close scrutiny. Mystery is a great part of the artist’s mystique, but I think if you look at the man you realize he was incredibly intelligent. Through all the years of muddle and excess, he was still seeing things, and there was a crystal unconsciousness always at work. He’s a little like Warhol in that I think he’s the other artist who predicted for our culture, what would come. I think they both identified the culture of celebrity and alienation of the twenty-first century. This makes them sound more trivial than they are, and I don’t mean that, but I think they realized how the world would be hungry for those superficial images. An endless population or personas. I mean, obviously Kim Kardashian is not a great artist but David Bowie made her possible. I think he was as smart about fame as anyone I can think of. Who knew that the strange man with the strange eyes and the bad teeth would become a sex symbol? In the ’60s he kept experimenting until he got it right, but he wasn’t an obvious candidate for superstardom from day one. But then he became famous and did this Houdini act, and managed to escape it. He stage-managed the latter part of his public career as well as anyone I can think of.
JOEY SANTIAGO (MUSICIAN): We had the privilege and pleasure to meet him: He was humorous, humble, effortlessly genuine. He invited us to have dinner with him. [We] had Indian food. I sat next to him! He admired the way I played simple lines for the sake of the song. He paid for dinner and I had to peek at his credit card. Seemed like he wanted all to see that he is Davy Jones. He was Davy Jones that night. Glad we met one of the nicest human beings on the planet. He’ll be the first man on Mars. RIP.
MICHELLE JASPERSON (BLOGGER): Speaking to people about how I’ve dealt with his passing, the first thing they say is “He’s gone, but his music lives on.” That might be considered adequate if you were making reference to one of the current pop-tartlets rising up through the ranks, but it doesn’t even come close to someone of David Bowie’s status and legacy. To those who were only paying attention in passing, he was a singer. From my perspective, though, he wasn’t just a musician. He wasn’t just a singer. He wasn’t just someone who wrote and sang songs.
My love and admiration of David Bowie recognized and encompassed so much more than that, and this fact alone clearly demonstrates the monumental generational gap in entertainers of his vintage, in contrast to the artists who’re currently clinging to their coveted spot on the iTunes chart. The reasons why I’ve always been attracted to David Bowie involves so much more than just “the music.” It included what he valued and the integrity that he demonstrated. I admired his intellect and constant quest for knowledge. He had immense business savvy, which was demonstrated particularly well in the promotion of his final two studio albums—even, incredibly, while he was being treated for cancer. The promotion and release of Blackstar were carried out with incredible depth and forethought, despite the pain that he must’ve been experiencing. I dread to think of the energy that the planning of Blackstar must have consumed from a body that was gradually falling apart. In his personal life, he and his wife were smart enough to understand the difference between their personal and professional lives—Iman has often been quoted as saying that she was married to David Jones, not David Bowie. They weren’t media whores constantly seeking attention and cameras—instead choosing to let the quality of their work speak for itself. David Robert Jones was honest, genuine, and real. Like all of us, he had his faults and his younger lifestyle choices were questionable, to say the least. But over the last twenty-five years of his life, after cleaning up his act, he became a role model unlike any other—full credit to Iman and his daughter, Alexandria, for forcing him make the necessary changes.
We’ve learned since we lost him that he refused collaborations with bands like Coldplay and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His reasons for this will go to his metaphorical grave, but one can only assume that he simply didn’t think they stacked up, or that they didn’t present him with material worthy of his collaborative input. I love that about him. He had a standard that he was not willing to compromise, regardless of how it would reflect back on him. David Bowie wasn’t motivated by commercial success or media attention, unlike the manufactured bullshit that currently dominates the radio waves. Throughout his career he maintained a certain benchmark of integrity and made sure he called the shots—and he was respected for it industry-wide. This was demonstrated in his ability to keep his cancer a complete secret from the world outside of his inner circle—the few people he confided in respected his request for privacy and confidence and kept the secret—something almost unachievable and unheard-of in our current age of instant digital worldwide communication and twenty-four-hour news cycles. Most artists are used and abused by their “hangers-on,” the people that I unaffectionately refer to as “leeches.” God knows you attract plenty of them when you have a high profile, and they all want something out of you. David Bowie shed as many of these people as possible in the final decade of his life. He valued education, privacy, health, and family. In the media interviews that he did prior to 2004, his intellect always shone through. After his heart attack in 2004, as is well publicized, he completely avoided all media and redirected his priorities. I’m a married thirtysomething living in the greater Wollongong region of NSW, Australia. I work full-time in customer service. Sometimes I enjoy writing. David Bowie was my biggest single influence in life—may he Rest in Peace.
Iggy Pop spent much of 2016 holding back a tide of grief, uncharacteristically staying away from the media, almost berating himself for being so upset. When he did occasionally surface, he was at pains to emphasize the difference between Iggy Pop and James Osterberg: “The art of survival is knowing just when to switch off the Iggy.” He treasures his memories of his friend, eternally grateful to Bowie for (a) taking care of him when he was in a drug spiral, (b) teaching him how to behave around celebrities (“He explained to me how these guys ticked and how to deal with them”), and (c) introducing him to Europe. He was also sad that his friend never got to see him become a character in a LEGO video game: “I checked out some pictures of the LEGO version of myself and found them hilarious: LEGO jeans! LEGO hair! Bowie would have loved it.”
DR. MARK TAUBERT (PALLIATIVE CARE CONSULTANT AT VELINDRE NHS TRUST, CARDIFF): A thank-you letter to David Bowie, January 15, 2016…
Dear David,
Oh no, don’t say it’s true—whilst realisation of your death was sinking in during those grey, cold January days of 2016, many of us went on with our day jobs. At the beginning of that week I had a discussion with a hospital patient, facing the end of her life. We discussed your death and your music, and it got us talking about numerous weighty subjects, that are not always straightforward to discuss with someone facing their own demise. In fact, your story became a way for us to communicate very openly about death, something many doctors and nurses struggle to introduce as a topic of conversation. But before I delve further into the aforementioned exchange, I’d like to get a few other things off my chest, and I hope you don’t find them a saddening bore.
Thank you for the ’80s, when your ChangesOneBowie album provided us with hours of joyful listening, in particular on a trip from Darmstadt to Cologne and back. My friends and I will probably always associate “Diamond Dogs,” “Rebel Rebel,” “China Girl,” and “Golden Years” with that particular time in our lives. Needless to say, we had a great time in Köln.
Thank you for Berlin, especially early on, when your songs provided some of the musical backdrop to what was happening in East and West Germany. I still have “Helden” on vinyl and played it again when I heard you had died (you’ll be pleased to hear that “Helden” will also feature in our next Analogue Music Club in the Pilot pub in Penarth later this month). Some may associate David Hasselhoff with the fall of the wall and reunification; but many Germans probably wish that time had taken a cigarette and put it in Mr. Hasselhoff’s mouth around that time, rather than hear “I’ve been looking for freedom” endlessly on the radio. For me that time in our history is soundtracked by “Heroes.”
Thanks also on behalf of my friend Ifan, who went to one of your gigs in Cardiff. His sister Haf was on the doors that night and I heard a rumor that Ifan managed to sneak in for free (he says sorry!). You gave him and his mate a wave from the stage which will remain in his memory forever.
Thank you for “Lazarus” and Blackstar. I am a palliative care doctor, and what you have done in the time surrounding your death has had a profound effect on me and many people I work with. Your album is strewn with references, hints, and allusions. As always, you don’t make interpretation all that easy, but perhaps that isn’t the point. I have often heard how meticulous you were in your life. For me, the fact that your gentle death at home coincided so closely with the release of your album, with its goodbye message, in my mind is unlikely to be coincidence. All of this was carefully planned, to become a work of death art. The video of “Lazarus” is very deep and many of the scenes will mean different things to us all; for me it is about dealing with the past when you are faced with inevitable death.
Your death at home. Many people I talk to as part of my job think that death predominantly happens in hospitals, in very clinical settings, but I presume you chose home and planned this in some detail. This is one of our aims in palliative care, and your ability to achieve this may mean that others will see it as an option they would like fulfilled. The photos that emerged of you some days after your death were said to be from the last weeks of your life. I do not know whether this is correct, but I am certain that many of us would like to carry off a sharp suit in the same way that you did in those photos. You looked great, as always, and it seemed in direct defiance of all the scary monsters that the last weeks of life can be associated with.
For your symptom-control needs, you will presumably have had palliative care professionals advise on pain, nausea, vomiting, breathlessness, and I can imagine they did this well. I envisage that they also discussed any emotional anguish you may have had.
For your advance-care planning (i.e., planning health and care decisions prior to things getting worse and before becoming unable to express them), I am certain you will have had a lot of ideas, expectations, prior decisions, and stipulations. These may have been set out clearly in writing, near your bed at home, so that everyone who met you was clear on what you wanted, regardless of your ability to communicate. It is an area not just palliative care professionals, but in fact all healthcare workers, want to provide and improve, so that it is less likely that any sudden health incidents will automatically result in a blue-light ambulance emergency-room admission. Especially when people become unable to speak for themselves.
And I doubt that anyone will have given you cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the last hours/days of your life, or even considered it. Regrettably, some patients who have not actively opted out of this treatment still receive it, by default. It involves physical, sometimes bone-breaking chest compressions, electric shocks, injections, and insertion of airways and is only successful in 1–2 percent of patients whose cancer has spread to other organs in their body. It is very likely that you asked your medical team to issue you with a Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation order. I can only imagine what it must have been like to discuss this, but you were once again a hero, or a “Held,” even at this most challenging time of your life. And the professionals who saw you will have had good knowledge and skill in the provision of palliative and end-of-life care. Sadly, this essential part of training is not always available for junior healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses, and is sometimes overlooked or under-prioritized by those who plan their education. I think if you were ever to return (as “Lazarus” did), you would be a firm advocate for good palliative care training being available everywhere.
So back to the conversation I had with the lady who had recently received the news that she had advanced cancer that had spread, and that she would probably not live much longer than a year or so. She talked about you and loved your music, but for some reason was not impressed by your Ziggy Stardust outfit (she was not sure whether you were a boy or a girl). She too, had memories of places and events for which you provided an idiosyncratic soundtrack. And then we talked about a good death, the dying moments and what these typically look like. And we talked about palliative care and how it can help. She told me about her mother’s and her father’s death, and that she wanted to be at home when things progressed, not in a hospital or emergency room, but that she’d happily transfer to the local hospice should her symptoms be too challenging to treat at home.
We both wondered who may have been around you when you took your last breath and whether anyone was holding your hand. I believe this was an aspect of the vision she had of her own dying moments that was of utmost importance to her, and you gave her a way of expressing this most personal longing to me, a relative stranger.
Thank you.
DAN FOX (AUTHOR): I had never before felt any sense of grief for a public figure, someone I’ve never met before, or a famous person. It’s sad when you hear the news but I didn’t feel a wellspring of grief or anything like that, but I felt oddly out of sorts that morning when I heard. I walked up to his apartment on Lafayette Street, just to see the crowds there, and on the way I bought some flowers from a local deli. I left them and I walked away. When I was walking back to work part of me, the sort of rational part of my brain, just thought, That was a bit corny, that was a mawkish thing to do. Another part of my brain realized that those flowers weren’t necessarily for this famous musician—they were actually for what he represented. [His] songs, which are songs about loneliness and feeling different, of course appealed to me as an arty adolescent—which doesn’t make me special, that’s what he did for millions of people. But it was a sense of cultural literacy that I also got through Bowie. He provided a model of autodidacticism where you could become culturally literate outside the academy. You could find out a lot about the world and other creative lives and projects through the prism of this particular musician. There are lots of bands and musicians that have done that, he’s not necessarily unique in that regard, but he was certainly a significant one for me. I also think that a lot of the ways in which he comported himself as a creative person are really relevant to artists and the way they work. There’s a sense of collaboration and community; he was someone who always celebrated working with other people. There’s a sense of restlessness, of wanting to do lots of different things—for better or for worse—whether it’s acting, writing, or painting as well as making music. There’s a sense of knowing when to stop and take a break from things, to step back from the work you’re making, and of changing things up to keep them interesting for yourself. There’s having a sense of humor about yourself and self-deprecation, and just maintaining a sense of possibility, that there are other places in the world to go and explore.
PAUL MORLEY: We have all collaborated with the idea of David Bowie, according to when we had our first contact, when we first started to like him. We’ve all collaborated with creating the idea of David Bowie and I think having worked at that, on and off, for a period of time, it seems crazy to lose that impetus. What we need to do is keep reinforcing the idea of David Bowie as an important historical figure, more than just being a pop musician, or a rock musician, all of these kind of things, which tend to be reduced, but transfer him into history in a more significant manner. Bowie spent his life exploring what it meant to be not just an artist, but what it was to be a human being.
On the day that it happened, I got a lot of calls from broadcasters asking me to comment, and I realized that part of being the future of journalism is being a kind of professional mourner. It’s a strange reduction in a way—that sentimentality, talking about a loss and missing something. I was getting the calls all day from an astounding amount of news organizations and I was determined not to do it; not least because I always found when I used to do that kind of thing and go on these live television programs and try and communicate what I felt, that you’d get forty seconds before being shunted on the way to weather. So, even though they acknowledged that they had to acknowledge the death of David Bowie, there was still a slight condescension, there was still a slight sense of: it’s just a pop star. I ended up going on Front Row on Radio 4, but I was only given a minute, and was so frustrated by this that I went home and sobbed—not necessarily for the death of David Bowie, but more for my inability to really encapsulate as I wanted to what he really meant to me, what I felt about him. There might have been hundreds of books about David Bowie, but I had my own David Bowie and I like that history of David Bowie. And I figured that everything had changed because he’d died; the architecture, the geography of David Bowie had died; there was a new David Bowie in town and I wanted to write about that David Bowie.
He spanned the entire history of pop, from making music in a skiffle band as a teenager to ending it as this kind of abstract Internet internationalist who’s using the Internet to transmit electronic signals around the world. No one else has managed to go from that to that. And within it, he’s there and thereabouts as everything happens: as mod happens, as the British blues happens, as rock and roll happens, as albums happen, as singles happen, into the early ’70s as glam happens. He’s always there or thereabouts. Sometimes he’s embedded in it; sometimes he’s sort of on the outside but not being completely exiled by it. Punk doesn’t exile him, because his sensibility somehow, unlike a Mick or a Rod or an Elton, doesn’t get exploded and turned into something deeply uncool by punk. Artistically his sensibility is not really embedded in the genre. He’s playing with genre, he’s using genre, he’s brilliant at using influences and then taking what’s happening around him at the same time and updating it. Even when he was out of favor, he was aware of his out-of-favor-ness and he was exploiting that because to try not to be out of favor would have been deeply uncool.
He lived his life as someone who was working out what it is to be alive. From the very early stages of his life he was working out what it means to be a human being, and a lot of the information about how to decide what it is to be a human being came from his interest in music and art and poetry and books. That idea that you never really knew who he was is part of the great illusion, it’s the wonderful conjuring trick, it’s the great piece of show business; we’re all looking at David Bowie and meanwhile he’s over here being someone completely different. I always think that’s why he loved Iman—because when he met her, she didn’t know much about his music, didn’t know much about him. He could be David Jones there; he didn’t necessarily have to be David Bowie. He’d been David Bowie….He’d been making up David Bowie from early doors. What’s fascinating about his archive is he’s the very first student of David Bowie. He’s collecting stuff before he ever knows that he will be that famous, or that iconic. He’s the first student of David Bowie and the last student of David Bowie and we’re all just students that join in along the way and help him create the idea of David Bowie. It’s this David Bowie that’s fascinating, but it’s definitely not David Jones.
I love this wonderful way that he pinned together, like no one else, an avant-garde sensibility with a middle-of-the-road showbiz sensibility: so over here, he’s Marcel Duchamp, he’s Roland Kirk, and he’s John Coltrane; and over here, he’s Judy Garland, and he’s Elvis Presley, and he’s Anthony Newley, and he’s Shirley Bassey. He also made intellectual discovery seem glamorous, and that’s incredibly important because ultimately that transcends it just being about fashion, or just being about music, or popular culture. It’s about the greater reasons of being alive and trying to create something that is fairer, and better, and stranger, and more wonderful. He didn’t make political statements—he was never a messenger—but embedded in these great sexy pop songs and this incredibly glamorous image, were incredibly important points about how to make life better, more wonderful, and less brutal. I think it’s inevitable that we will feel really grateful in that sense because there’s not many people who can do it in the way that he did it.
A few days into February, news spread that Blackstar wasn’t the sum total of his final recordings, and that there were a few songs that were finished—maybe even a whole album’s worth—that might be released in the future. Conspiracy theorists, tired of creating ever more bizarre accounts of Bowie’s own micromanagement of his own death, started suggesting that the artist had recorded not one, but maybe several albums’ worth of songs, records that were scheduled to appear at regular intervals after his death—singing from beyond the grave. Well, in October 2016, three unreleased tracks finally saw the light of day on the Lazarus cast album, three songs written, recorded, and produced by Bowie at the same time as Blackstar. The record contained the cast and band of the original New York production performing their versions of the eighteen songs from the show (from “Life on Mars?,” “All the Young Dudes,” and “Heroes,” through to “Valentine’s Day,” “Love Is Lost,” and “Dirty Boys”), Blackstar’s “Lazarus” (which increasingly sounded like something The XX could have had a hand in), as well as the three new Bowie tracks. Coproduced by Bowie and Tony Visconti and recorded with Donny McCaslin and his quartet, the same band that played on Blackstar, these last three songs—“No Plan,” “Killing a Little Time,” and “When I Met You”—were predictably intriguing.
“No Plan” was the standout, a genuine greatest hit that sounded like it came direct from the Scott Walker songbook, with vaporous traces of Dusty Springfield (although it was faintly reminiscent of the opening theme of Prometheus). A ballad both mournful and uplifting, the version sung by cast member Sophia Anne Caruso actually sounded like a classic show tune, while Bowie’s version is one of the most haunting things he’s ever done. It’s a beautiful song, and sounds almost as though it’s covered in a buttery light. The words, too, while seeming to slip easily from Newton’s lips, could quite easily have applied to Bowie’s present and perennial disposition: “There’s no music here/I’m lost in streams of sound/Here am I nowhere now? No plan?…All the things that are my life/my moods, my beliefs, my designs/Me alone, Nothing to regret/This is no place, but here I am/This is not quite yet.” It almost sounded apostolic.
The rest of the Lazarus cast album was produced by the show’s musical director Henry Hey, who had previously worked with Bowie on The Next Day and featured vocals from Michael C. Hall, Caruso, Cristin Milioti, Michael Esper, and other cast members backed by the seven-piece house band Hey assembled for the New York run. Extraordinarily, the album was recorded on January 11; when the musicians turned up at the studio, they were quietly told that Bowie had died the night before.
MICHAEL C. HALL (ACTOR): The recording gave us a chance to actively do something productive that we knew was in sync with his wishes. It was very emotional and surreal. Doing the show was more challenging, realizing just how much David’s enthusiasm for it had to do with its capacity to be a meditation on mortality and death.
Meeting him and singing his songs felt like more than a formality. David didn’t come to see [me in] Hedwig—he was aware of my acting, but that was the first time he heard me sing. I did puddle on the floor when he left, for a second. The music doesn’t operate the way it does in traditional musical theatre, in as much as it isn’t always there to move the story forward. It can be atmospheric, but also provide a counterpoint. I know David didn’t want to do a jukebox musical, and this is the furthest thing from it. He maintained a fascination with the [Newton] character. That theme of isolation and the interest in that embroidered interior world we all create runs through all his work.
DANNY FIELDS: When I visited Britain the month after David died, it was like a grief-stricken civilization. He was very great, and wonderful, but he was not God. He wasn’t an Iggy or a Lou. All of those people who went to Brixton on the day he died and danced all night and fucked all night, they were torn apart because he liberated them. But they are all as good as David, all brilliant. People were saying that he set them free, and showed something to them about themselves. I thought that this was maybe his greatest achievement. It’s not something he did; it’s something people felt he had demonstrated. Each person said he made them acknowledge themself, their talents, their emotions, or maybe their sexuality. Each had a different example.
BAZ LUHRMANN: I would hazard a guess that someone who so constantly reinvents themselves, and is so restless and relentless in the search for story and culture and other worlds and other people and other ideas, someone who was so moving forward, that that movement has to come from something in one’s childhood. He had a natural body intelligence. Mind intelligence yes, but also a body intelligence. A sensitivity to how he feels, and also how others feel. That you can’t learn. Some giant intellectuals have tremendous computing energy, but no body intelligence at all. For those that have both, they have a sensitivity to the world around them. And that turned into this tremendous cultural engine.
Also, he created the world around him. It wasn’t enough that he would create a character, he would have to change the world to suit that character. He would change the world around him to contextualize his character. So with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, wherever that went so too would the show go with him. He lived it. Then he would go on and do the Thin White Duke, and he lived it. He did a mash-up of all the English royalty or grand landed gentry and a sort of gothic figure. It was Byron-esque. That ability to make a cultural collage, to tear sheets from disparate culture and make something new out of it. I think it’s interesting that the period that we’ve passed through and are living in now is one where cultural eclecticism is de rigueur; it defines the world around us, but it’s also a world where we’re comfortable exposing the mash-up, the montage, the eclecticism. We don’t want to have to go over all the cracks in all the joining lines of the collage. That’s why he was at the forefront and so important and so thought about in the modern era. It’s a bit like hip-hop, which is at the end of the spectrum and also changed the world. I think those are two really great reference points. One was coming out of England and all the art schools, and one was coming out of the Bronx. They sort of cross over. I remember a period in which this whole hip-hop thing was happening and then David Bowie was shocking America with his whole theatrical collage. He’s collaging theatrics, pop culture, and music, and in the Bronx young kids are collaging with records and images on the sides of trains, comic books, and superheroes, and everything around them. Even their dance moves are an assemblage of influences collaged together in something new. Just like Bowie, they were able to make something new out of a whole lot of references without trying to hide the joins.
I think genius is of course the rustiest word. It’s like “cool,” the easiest overused word and flung around. Genius to me, it’s not like you’re brilliant at everything, it’s when you’ve got some crossed wires within you, that makes you relentlessly move towards something at such a high level that it stands above the rest of the regular playing field. David’s internal energy, the intelligence in the eyes, you could tell that the mind was still looking and the heart still searching. Even towards the end, he was writing his own narrative. After he had a heart problem, which was very downplayed, I remember when he came to my house midway going to the studio at the top, I suddenly became conscious of this, but he refused to let it be seen. Always energetic, he would walk right up to the top of the stairs. So he refused to even consider that there might be an end to the journey. He dealt with that, I think, in the same way that he dealt with everything else. He was writing his own narrative. I mean obviously not the conclusive part of it. There are a lot of performers and artists who left immense visual, literal, or sonic thumbprints, but few of them affected the culture across the board. Just that kind of boundary smashing. He led a lot of young people from his generation to believe that there are just no boundaries, it’s just expressing yourself. You can be music, cinema, performance, art, writing, it does not matter, it’s how you mix it together to get something really expressive. It’s either true and effective or it’s not. He didn’t just lead the charge, he lived the charge.
JOHAN RENCK: He didn’t really [say goodbye], to be honest. And I spent some time being disappointed by that, because I didn’t speak to him during the last week. I texted him on the Monday of that week—the following Friday was his birthday, was the release of his album and the “Lazarus” video—so I texted him on Monday and said, “We’re all good for Friday,” without any question or anything like that. And he didn’t respond. Then on Thursday I sent him a birthday gift to his office—I found this really cool old book that I knew he would like. He didn’t respond to that either. And then on the weekend I was like, Why the hell didn’t he answer it? Then he passed away, which…I can’t even go there. And a few days later I was like, Why wouldn’t he have said goodbye? I felt, I mean, not hurt, to be honest; it took me not a long time at all to realize like, Stop being a fucking idiot. He said goodbye to the entire world through these videos and that was the goodbye to everybody out there who had a relationship to him. I was not in any position to ask for more [of a] goodbye than anybody else, of course not. So I realized that I got a fucking great goodbye from him because not only did I witness it, I was part of him, I was next to him, whilst he was constructing this goodbye. So to me it was like I got the same goodbye that everybody else got and I’m super fucking happy about it.
CARLOS ALOMAR: I was in a state of mourning for months. David was everything. Think ten years ago: who were you listening to? Well, they’re gone. That fucking sucks. You were my star. I cried over the song. You said just what I wanted to say when I broke up. You were my all. And now you’re gone. I love the fact that David’s fans looked to him with anticipation, with acceptance, and glorify any change, even if they weren’t able to go there with him. They understood that it was a needed change. And they would just wait until the next one came, when they would revisit him again and find them enhanced all over again. Our curiosity was what we were looking for in David. To make us look more curious, and not let us settle for the same old thing. There was one artist who was never able to be put in a box, and that was David. There’s always got to be one. Every artist has a moment, but for an artist to be there more than once for you? Look, you were fourteen years old when you heard him, then you were twenty-four, thirty-four, forty-four, fifty-four, and he’s still talking for you? Jesus Christ, who does that? I’ve got a lot of things to be grateful for, and one of those is knowing David Bowie.
FRANCIS WHATELY: He’d said throughout his life that it wasn’t so much the getting old that he feared, but the dying. And from what I have learned, he was terrified of death. I think a lot of people are who have what he had, which is a very complicated relationship with a higher power, with a God, whatever we want to call it. Throughout his life he rejected formalized religion, but I think as he got older, he was ticking off the answers he wanted to be answered. He had that relationship with Buddhism, but his mother was a Roman Catholic. You can’t get away from that. You can’t get away from the fact that he was English and was brought up with Christianity to some degree as well. The fact that he wore a cross for most of his life; I think it possibly was more than simply a symbol. The fact that he protested that he believed very much in God, around the time of the Freddie Mercury concert. I think, like all of us, perhaps he was terrified at the end that that was it and that there was no afterlife. I think he rejected the simplicity of the modern cult of atheism among a lot of his peers. There are two Lazaruses in the Bible—and I think it’s interesting that he chose the one who came back to life. I think everything was thought through and I do believe in that last album he was saying a lot of things that he hadn’t said before and wanted the audience to read into it. I really do.
BAZ LUHRMANN: Through my wife, who has a close tie to the disease [schizophrenia] in her family, I’ve come to know a lot. And yes, if it’s very present in your family, it’s a reasonable summation to think that there’d be a degree of fear in the members of the family. Of course, kids develop mechanisms to deal with fear. That mechanism can be the use of the imagination. Now of course, it can manifest in violence and anger, but it also can trigger an escape into the imagination. So was David in his work dealing with this? Absolutely yes, not overtly but that environment that he grew up with and the presence of that in his life. I would proffer, as an outsider, and looking at David’s life as a story, I would suggest that when his work isn’t quite firing in the early stages that there comes a moment when he decides to self-medicate his fear and anxiety through his work. I’m guessing that there would’ve been a personal moment that none of us would know about. I certainly don’t, and I’m guessing here, but some personal moment where he is alone, something is happening, and the fear and inside voices are being dealt with by going, “I’m going to create my way out of this and be someone and something else and guess what? My work happens to be such that I can do that in front of people.” He goes into a chrysalis and comes out completely transformed; what’s on the inside is suddenly shown on the outside but in the most fearless and expressive way. I think that’s the moment at which the self-medication resulted in creative energy. It was a creative force. I really believe that. And not only do I believe it, I think it’s actually a fairly classic pattern for particularly remarkable creative artists. I mean, go back to Alexander the Great. You’ll see there’s a fear in the childhood in the relationships growing up that is turned into moving energy.
FRANCIS WHATELY: When I was filming people for the documentary I made after his death, I asked them all at the end what they would have said to him if they’d been able to say goodbye, and they all said, “I love you, thank you,” but mostly thank you for being a part of their lives.
Perhaps a final word should go to the midwife who delivered Bowie into the world in his parents’ house in Stansfield Road in Brixton, in 1947. “This child,” she said, “has been on this Earth before.” His mother thought it “was rather an odd thing to say, but the midwife seemed quite adamant.”