Bowie – Ten Years Gone

It’s no surprise that I came to Bowie as much visually as I did by his music.

I can’t remember which of my three cousins, all older, skinnier and in their mid-teenage years was the record buyer but when I was spending the day with them we would go to the record department in the local department store. No cool record shop this one, back then cool hipsters were only just emerging from bedrooms that form them, an area surrounded by the furniture and the appliances sections. But the treasure trove inside, was to this 11- or 12-year-old, becoming very alluring.

It is difficult to describe to this generation the wonders of the LP record sleeve. It was the early to mid 70s, rock and roll had hit early adulthood and was now the leading art and cultural movement of the western world. Thousands of recording artists exploding rock and roll into 100 different directions and all producing their music for consumption in only two ways - live performance or vinyl records. And how to telegraph visually just what your ears could expect from a particular album? The record sleeve.

Imagine to those impressionable eyes the impact then of Bowie’s 1973 release Aladdin Sane. On the way home I remember a sense of unease amongst my cousins as if my aunty and uncle might not approve of their decision but I might be imagining that. I know I was spellbound by the cover and I remember listening to some of the tracks especially the Jean Genie, the titillating [even then I knew rock and roll was about sex, whatever that was] Stones cover Lets Spend The Night Together and weirdly Drive In Saturday but I would be lying if I said I was captivated. My cousins also had T REX singles and they sounded better to me.

But it was a piece of puzzle falling into place because I realised this was the same performer who I had taped off the radio singing a song called Space Oddity. If I had heard anything from the Ziggy Stardust album on the radio I had not made the connection then. Later that year a song named Sorrow reached number one on the Australian charts and by now I was starting to recognise David Bowie’s voice. The next piece was hearing Starman on the radio one day in January 1974. A massive flood had hit Brisbane and a business that my parents had contracted to buy went deep underwater. We were helping the old owners clean up the stinking sodden mess and at the same time trying to get out of a contract for something that was now just a damp shell. The song was two years old by then but I had not heard Starman on the radio or if I had it had not registered. It registered that time.

Mum and Dad did get out of the contract and we bought a newsagency way on the other side of town on the edge of suburbia. So I began my grade 7 year in a new school. An only child with no friends in a place where there was a still working dairy farm next to the school.

I felt very alone and out of place but I had my radio and cassette recorder and my burgeoning love of rock and roll. What sealed the deal was an hour-long Bowie special on the radio where I heard other Bowie songs like Ziggy Stardust, Changes and Life on Mars. Who better for a lonely kid with a big imagination at the beginning of puberty, than an artist who looked like he was from another dimension, singing songs about aliens and what we now call much later, gender fluidity.

Owning a newsagency meant I had access to every rock and pop magazine going and soon Ziggy Stardust posters were on my bedroom wall. There never was a sports team or sport star poster on my wall. Only surfing posters, band posters and Bowie. Ziggy aka Bowie was now THE man and now I had a record player so I bought The Man Who Sold The World album. I was flummoxed, it was like Ziggy but not, heavier, kind of sludgy. I didn’t realise the impact of going back further in time. Artistic development not being a concept the 12-year-old me had grasped.

By this stage I had seen footage on TV of the Ziggy Stardust concert and of the Spiders from Mars playing on BBC pop shows. I remember thinking to myself is he actually male or female? Either way it was thrilling but I was running two years behind the action. And as we were all to discover, Bowie was first and foremast a chameleon. By David Live, his 74 American tour live album he was finished with Ziggy and glam rock. In its place was Broadway, R&B and Philly Soul.

And if that threw me than the Young Americans and Station To Station albums lost me. I just wanted more of the same and I didn’t get it. Of course by that stage my musical interests were developing but growing up in Brisbane as a white middle class kid your exposure to soul and funk were minimal to that nasty disco came along. So my friends and I wallowed in our Zeppelin and Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, AC/DC etc.

Bowie just kept looking forward and always ahead of the pack. He didn’t care if I didn’t keep up and so by the time disco hit us with its white boy smoothed out take on Philly Soul in 1977 he had already moved on. Bowie was in Berlin, creating pioneering art rock and electronica albums like Low and Heroes, neatly pre-empting post punk by three or four years. Just as I caught up with those albums and embraced punk and new wave he became a commercial superstar with Ashes to Ashes and Lets Dance.

I have spent my life chasing his tail, discovering aspects of his work through others be they fellow fans or creative spawn. While always in admiration, I lost my desire to try and keep up in the 1990s and 2000s. Life got in the way and by then Rock like a universal Big Bang had used up 99.9999% of its energy and begun its fall into entropy. Some of Bowie’s work reflected that although time could not exhaust his intelligence, creativity, warm personality or fantastic dress sense. Then ten years ago David died, but not before leaving two excellent final albums filled with Bowie innovation and bower birding.

In the end all you need to know is everything they say about Bowie’s career and artistic sensibilities is true. It is possible that in another ten years his stature may have declined. I have a 20+ year old daughter who can’t identify a Beatles track. Time is cruel like that but I think we will feel the same about Bowie then as we do now. His wide-ranging influence ensures it. The most important artist of rock’s most important decade by a light year and then some. That’s an artist you don’t forget.

Great artists have great album tracks and rarities and Bowie was no exception.

Here are some personal faves, most of which highlight his fantastic choice of collaborators, another critical part of the Bowie story.

How good were Mick Ronson and the Spiders Of Mars? How about Mike Garson’s piano from Aladdin Sane onwards or Eno’s and Robert Fripp’s contributions to the Berlin albums. Carlos Alomar, Nile Rogers the list goes on and on.

Black Country Rock from The Man Who Sold The World

The Bewley Brothers and Queen Bitch from Hunky Dory

Star and Hang On To Yourself from Ziggy Stardust

Aladdin Sane and Drive in Saturday from Aladdin Sane

When You Rock And Roll With Me from Diamond Dogs

Wild Is The Wind from Station To Station

Bowie’s cover of The Kinks classic Waterloo Sunset

I Can’t Give Everything Away from Blackstar

Sound and Vision 2013 remix