“It is indeed true,” said someone from his management office when I contacted them that morning. “We found out about an hour ago, and we’re finding it very difficult to function. He really is gone.” It was 6:40 in the morning, but I know I wasn’t the first person to call. Oddly, I heard myself through that by now rather old-fashioned form of communication, email, as various friends and colleagues sent messages, both from the UK and the US. I checked my Instagram feed, and saw a flurry of posts, iconic images accompanied by heartfelt commiserations, and distress.
A few minutes later, requests to write obituaries followed.
All of which obviously swirled around the shocking news itself. When people die, especially significant people, others can busy themselves, freely expressing emotion, offering professional consolation. With Bowie, it was different, as I know so few people whose lives were unaffected by him.
For me and members of my generation, the Bowie generation, his death was more momentous than John Lennon’s. Of course, it would be invidious to compare the two, but it is still difficult even now for me to grasp just how much he meant to me. I was a teenager when he emerged, and was one of the many people who saw his performance of “Starman” on Top of the Pops in the summer of 1972, one of the many millions whose lives were altered at such an impressionable age.
For my generation, it is difficult to overemphasize just how important David Bowie was to us, not just in terms of music and fashion, but also in terms of how we carried—and continue to carry—ourselves in the world. I remember exactly where I was when I heard about Lennon’s death, but Bowie’s passing will stay with me in a more permanent way.
On the day Bowie’s death was announced, I was in the middle of Men’s Fashion Week at Victoria House in Holborn, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It would be a cliché to say that everyone felt numb, but then clichés are clichés for a reason, because they’re true. Almost everyone in the building appeared to be moved. Some had fallen in love with him when they were teenagers, others had only come to him recently, discovering him as a heritage artist; but nearly all of them had a relationship with him and his music. Almost every show I saw that day made some kind of nod toward Bowie’s passing, and when I walked into the Burberry show in Kensington Gardens a few hours later, “Where Are You Now?,” his melancholic comeback single from 2013, was blasting across the park. As I sat waiting for the show to start, I got an email from a famous musician, one for whom Bowie had been a huge influence: “What is extraordinary and wonderful and a measure of the man is that the very last song David gave to us all is up there with some of his greatest tunes,” he wrote, referring to a song on his final album, Blackstar—released the previous week, on his birthday. “He placed what is probably the best song on Blackstar (with its now poignant widow’s weeds of a cover) last. ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away,’ he sings. An artist to the last. We are all David Bowie.”
I knew Bowie a little, and unlike many famous people who can have some of the sheen rubbed off them when you meet them, Bowie became even more intriguing when I did, because his curiosity, his obsession for “the new,” appeared to be genuinely innate. The first time I met him, in 1982, he asked me for a light for his Marlboro. I was an extra on the dreadful vampire movie The Hunger, in which Bowie was starring with Catherine Deneuve. It was my job to walk up and down the metal stairs in Heaven, the gay nightclub underneath the arches in the Strand, in London, as “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” by Bauhaus blared out of the speakers. For a twenty-one-year-old Bowie obsessive this was a dream come true, a day that turned into an anecdote that would eventually kick-start a very odd relationship, one that continued for over thirty years. My last brush with Bowie happened the summer before he died, although it was merely a chance encounter with the landlords of the hotel Bowie had stayed in when he was building his house in upstate New York. It would be betraying a confidence to tell anyone what they told me, but it seems Bowie had not lost his ability to charm.
He was as important to the ’70s as the Beatles were to the ’60s, and yet his reach and his influence continues today in a way that we have yet to quantify, try as we might.
I knew he had been ill—many did—but I had no idea it was critical. Having been in touch for several decades, when he became sick around a decade ago—caused initially by a series of heart attacks—he disappeared from view. I knew he had bought a huge apartment complex in downtown New York, I knew the people who sold him his house in Woodstock, and I knew his personal publicist and management company extremely well. Yet recently every communication had been through a third party, almost as though he was pushing himself away from the world.
Like everyone who grew up with the man, Bowie would confound, annoy, and occasionally disappoint me, but I never found him less than fascinating.
In a way he was my own personal fascination, and maybe yours too.
Even when he became ill, he kept an almost obsessive eye on those in his orbit, especially if they were writing about him. A few years ago I wrote a book about Bowie’s performance on Top of the Pops in 1972, an extended essay that tried to form an opinion about the ’70s from those four short minutes on a television program. I needed various permissions from Bowie to use certain photographs in the book, and over a period of a few weeks he eventually agreed to me using them. However, I also included several facts in the book that I knew to be wrong—some descriptions of the BBC dressing room, some quotes, and some outfit changes that I knew to be inventions (as I had actually invented them). I did this as I hoped he might contradict me, and actually give me some more material for the book. Perhaps this was conceited, expecting him to actually read the manuscript, but then I also knew that he had the power to not release the pictures I needed. But Bowie remained mute: even though he had tacitly endorsed the book, he would rather I print the myth.
That was Bowie all over.
In fact, his entire professional career was one of myth, legend, and invention. Brilliantly so.
When I was writing my first Bowie book, as I was finishing the final chapters, I went to visit my father in Cheltenham, in his flat in the shadow of GCHQ (this turned out to be the last significant time I saw him before he died). He asked me what I was working on, and I told him that I was writing a book about Bowie’s extraordinary performance on TOTP, and how he influenced an entire generation of future music and fashion obsessives. When he asked me why, I reeled off the various elements of his performance that had been so challenging, so inspiring, and so transgressive. I described the way in which Bowie had toyed sexually with his guitarist Mick Ronson, the way in which he had dressed like a pansexual spaceman, the way he sashayed across the screen like a 1920s film star, and, saliently, the way in which his flame-red hair, his Day-Glo jumpsuit, and the general glam color fest had almost colonized the program. I explained that this was the moment when the ’70s finally outgrew the ’60s, when the monochrome world of boring, boring southeast England had exploded in a fiesta of color.
My father looked at the floor, took a moment, and then said, very quietly: “You know we had a black-and-white television, don’t you?”