Everyone Says Hi. (10/1/16)

Don't expect this to make any sense. Don't expect it to be in any order. The obituaries are going to be impossible, aren't they? There's so much to cover, there's too much to cover. He changed more than any other solo artist; changed himself, changed music, changed what was acceptable in society. Legendary, iconic, brilliant, influential. List your adjectives, they all apply and they're not enough to sum him up. Not even close. I can't tell you what any of it 'meant' but I can tell you what it meant to me. Which is probably the same thing really.

I was in HMV last Friday. Jesus, that's only three days ago? Really? Honestly? How does that work? First thing in the morning. Knew that I would be, had planned to be all week. I don't have a CD player in the house, don't have an amp for the turntable that's sat on my desk and the speakers are in the loft. Listen to everything at my desk on Spotify. Knew that I'd be listening to Blackstar on Spotify but knew that wouldn't be enough. I'm not buying physical product now but Blackstar? Buying that, playing that in the car, owning it physically because - as I tweeted at the time - it's Bowie and there's thirty five years of ritual in this. I could have gone to Asda, it's a damn sight closer, but it's Bowie, you buy Bowie from record shops and I've still got affection for the old place, so HMV it was. Did the same thing for the release of The Next Day - and god knows, I've covered The Next Day in a bit of depth here in the past, I'll probably retread a bit but such is life - my shop was closing down, we weren't getting new stuff so I deliberately put myself on a late shift and went into town on the way in so I could buy Bowie on day of release. Because that's what you do, you buy Bowie on day of release because it's Bowie and you need it now.

Except for Tin Machine. I've never bought Tin Machine. Remember it coming out when I was in Lord Street. Dave Watson was working with us at the time and, as one of the hugest Bowie fans I've ever met, he tried to defend it. You couldn't defend it. Not to me, not at the time. Even after the light and thoroughly eighties pop of Tonight and Never Let Me Down - works he was later critical of - the volte face of Tin Machine seemed like a bizarre left turn that nobody asked for. But we didn't ask Bowie for things, he gave us what he wanted at the time he wanted it and it was pretty much always the right thing to do. Tin Machine was the right thing to do because Tin Machine took him from the mainstream and made him different again. He was always best when he was different. Still never bought Tin Machine despite owning Tin Machine II (come on, it's got 'You Belong In Rock'n'Roll' and 'Goodbye, Mr Ed' and they're both majestic). Was going to buy it on Friday with Blackstar but there was this woman, bit older than me, stood in front of me in the back catalogue section flicking through everything twice and I thought 'come on love, you must own all that' and then thought about the irony of the fact that I clearly didn't.

The ritual started in 1980. Turned on to him by a cassette in Ste Beb's. Hunky Dory on one side, Aladdin Sane on the other, played endlessly in the summer that we finished fifth year and waited for sixth form, getting into Time and The Prettiest Star and Lady Grinning Soul and Kooks and Life On Mars? (The question mark's important) and Andy Warhol and not knowing that I was waiting for Ashes to Ashes and then knowing for a stone cold fact that I was waiting For Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) to come out and the way that I remember it is that it was delayed by a week and then a week and then a week but maybe I imagine that and I was definitely visiting Tudor Records in Walton Vale every week waiting for it. And I was't disappointed. Might be the most important album I ever bought. Life changing.

Not my first exposure though. First exposure was in a Pontins holiday camp in 1973. Drive In Saturday. Didn't know what it was. I was nine. It was the most alien sounding thing that I'd ever heard. It still is. It's beamed from some other universe where it's always the 50s and 'his name was always Buddy and she'd sigh like Twig the wonder kid and turn her head away' and there's this version from the Russell Harty show where he debuts it and he gets the words wrong and laughs at himself and it's honest and human.

I remember Billy Butler getting excited about Bowie's new album on afternoon radio and playing a track from it. The album was Heroes, the track was V2: Schneider. V2: Schneider on daytime radio. The world was a better place then. Obviously.

Live Aid. I've seen Bowie live on telly, that's worth a tenner isn't it? Ring up and pledge just on the basis of the fact that he's done 'Heroes' (the inverted commas are vital there) live at Wembley. And the Freddie Mercury tribute where he suddenly decides that The Lord's Prayer is what he really needs to do and kneels and leads the audience in it. It's brilliantly baffling and it's honest to god actually right.

1997. The Royal Court. The Earthling Tour. Back in the days when you could rock up at a venue on the day that the tickets went on sale in your lunch hour and get one. For David bloody Bowie. Everyone expected a night of drum'n'bass from the album he was supposedly pushing. He walks on stage dressed head to foot in white, totally alone, clutching a twelve string acoustic and plays Quicksand. Quicksand from Hunky Dory. And I'm twenty feet from David Bowie and I'm nearly in tears. Been in tears this morning. Various moments hit you. Seu Jorge's Portuguese version of Life On Mars? was the one that did it first. Beautiful and lonely and heartbreaking.

Where do you start? That's right, haven't actually started yet.

Grab the albums. They're always close by. I know where I'm ending, I'm just not sure how long it'll take to get there yet.

The Next Day - he does that. There's been nothing for nearly ten years and he does that. You go to bed one night and there's been one whispered rumour that nobody really believes and you get up the next and there's a new Bowie single and it's 'Where Are We Now?' and it's brilliant and it's a meditation on his time in Berlin and we recorded The Anfield Wrap's AFQ last Friday and one of the questions was 'Which era David Bowie would you most want to hang out with?' and Robbo demurred and said 'ask these two, they're both big Bowie heads' and Mike Girling went first and confidently with 'Berlin period, coolest man on Earth' and I could only agree.

Young Americans. We're a year on from Diamond Dogs - and don't think 'Rebel Rebel' when you think about Diamond Dogs, think the sweep across 'Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)' and the ease in which it moves across songs in the same way that Blackstar would forty years later. Forty years? Really? Seriously? How do you stay that good, that ahead of the game for forty years? The Diamond Dogs tour starts off all dystopian future and somewhere along the way, Dave gets really into soul, specifically the Philly Soul from the Gamble/Huff era and Diamond Dogs becomes 'Philly Dogs' and it's something else and the next album is pure soul. It's as far from Ziggy Stardust as is possible to be; it's taken three years. Three years. Name an artist that's ever changed so much. The Beatles, that's it. Nobody else, ever. And The Beatles did it for a decade, Bowie did it for near as damn it five of them.

Black Tie/White Noise - this is just the order they're sat in. Jump, They Say, how bloody great is that?  It's about his brother

David Live - he never rated it apparently 'David Bowie is Alive and Living in Theory' he claimed. It's the Philly Dogs tour and it's bloody marvellous.

Lodger. Way better than people let you think it is. Supposedly a disappointment, it's better than most people's careers and it's got Fantastic Voyage (I'll never say anything nice again, how could I?) and Look Back In Anger

"You know who I am," he said
The speaker was an angel
He coughed and shook his crumpled wings
Closed his eyes and moved his lips
"It's time we should be going"

Come on. How great do you want a lyric to be? There's a world in that lyric and it doesn't matter if you know what it means or not.

Let's Dance - Lauren Laverne's just played the title track and I'll gladly tell you that it's my least favourite Bowie album and I was thinking the other day that if he toured again - and you could still dream then - I'd happily live without Let's Dance and China Girl and Scary Monsters' Fashion but then you hear it and it's fantastic pop while you listen to it,
every time you listen to it.

Heathen and Reality. They're a pair. They seemed for a while to be the last pair. They were stately and manic in equal parts and the constituted the last tour, the tour that I didn't go to 'in case he was only doing the new stuff', I'm genuinely stupid sometimes. Watch the live DVD, it's immense and Reality has 'New Killer Star' and Fall Dog Bombs The Moon and Bring Me The Disco King and it's probably the 9/11 album from an artist who lived in New York and started the Concert For Heroes sat cross legged on the stage playing Simon and Garfunkel's 'America' alone on a small Casio and making it sound like the best thing ever. Because it probably was. Heathen has 'Everyone Says Hi' which is beautiful and heartbreaking and is about leaving people behind when you move on, when they move on and knowing that that's just the way that life has to be sometimes. And that song gets more beautiful and heartbreaking the older you get and it's got me through stuff and this morning it's just special and right and perfect.

1.Outside was the reunion with Eno, the move back to the Berlin approach and we were having a conversation on Friday on Twitter and one of the regular decent Twitter lads said he thought it was Dave's post Scary Monsters masterpiece so I listened to it on the way into town to buy Blackstar and thought he was probably right and marvelled at how 'Hallo Spaceboy' sounds even better in context than it does alone and it sounds great alone.

Station To Station. An album with six songs but what songs. It's rock and metal and soul and funk and indie and alternative all at the same time and it's better than all of them on their own and the title track is a symphony. It's not the side effects of the cocaine. Honest. It's the return of the thin white duke. Golden Years though? Golden Years is Cathy Pinder and Joanne McKay singing in a sixth form common room in 1981 and always will be.

Low. As me and Mr Girling were saying on AFQ, Low invents the 80s. Everything that comes after low is quite definitely post low if you know what I mean. Side two is instrumental. Anybody want to tell me which major stars do this? That's right, the answer, as ever, is none. So he took it out live and played instrumentals in the middle of the singles so you get Warszawa - which is so good that Joy Division originally called themselves Warsaw for it/because of it - in the same set as Ziggy.

Ziggy. Come on, it's Ziggy. He becomes someone else. He doesn't pretend to be someone else, he BECOMES someone else. And when he gets bored he kills that someone else off and becomes another someone else. And it's got Ziggy, obviously and it's got Starman which changes the generation just slightly before me with that Top Of The Pops appearance and the important bit isn't even the bit where he slings his arm round the brilliant, brilliant, incomparable Mick Ronson, it's when he sings 'I had to call someone so I picked on you' and points down the BBC camera at you. At YOU. At every you ever, the you's that were watching it on the night, the you's that have seen it since, the you's that will watch it on technology we haven't invented yet. He's talking to you. Just you. Nobody else.

And then he gets bored and invents Aladdin Sane and there's that piano solo, that brilliant atonal piano solo.

And there's the first album where he sounds like Anthony Newley and it has Love You Till Tuesday and Rubber Band and Join The Gang and there's Laughing Gnome knocking round that moment and the time when he did the Sound and Vision 90 tour where he retired the hits (spoiler - he didn't, he really didn't) and wanted the fans to vote for the songs he'd play and NME tried successfully to mobilise the entire fanbase into voting for The Laughing Gnome and he and the band were rehearsing a Velvet Underground version of the novelty tune until he realised it was a fix. Wish we'd heard that.

And that takes us to the 'other' first album. What came to be known as Space Oddity. But Space Oddity is the least of that album. That album is all about 'Letter To Hermione' and 'Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud' and it sounds nothing like he'll ever sound again.

As doesn't The Man Who Sold The World which is all heavy rock and dirty guitars and massive riffs and has the song that a generation think Nirvana wrote and has The Width Of A Circle and The Supermen and he's moving on before he's even finished it because before it's out he's thinking of the next. And the next and the next. always the next.

Which is what made The Next Day so good. It was the next. It was another next, a next we never expected and it lived on the fact that it pulled so many threads from his past together and referenced and played with and reinvented because it was the reinventing that was always important and The Next Day cleared the decks for more reinvention in the way that Buddha of Suburbia had with its conscious referencing of Absolute Beginners and I hope my phone doesn't go any time soon because my ringtone is Absolute Beginners and has been for a long time and probably always will be.

Which brings us to Blackstar. I know I said this but... three days? Really? Feels like I've known it for years. It's incredible. It's new and challenging and sounds like bits of his previous work but then doesn't and it pulls other things together and carries David's long admitted love of Scott Walker within it. And it's got the title track which was so tied to that glorious video premiered on Sky last year with its mystery and its darkness and the way it starts off as one thing, becomes another and then returns to its root, in the way that Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise) did so brilliantly, so, so long ago. Lifetimes ago.

And it's got Lazarus. And the video for Lazarus was premiered last week and when I shared it on Facebook I spoke about how much I could write about the way that it referenced so much of his past; of the way that the hospital room recalled the reinvention of Space Oddity in 1979 on the Kenny Everett show which presaged the rebirth and killing off of Major Tom the next year. Of the way that his appearance recalled the movement of Ziggy and Aladdin but held the movement of a man who knew that the years had passed and that he was still the same man but older. Of the way that the jerky movements at the desk, which now hold the aspect of a man hurrying to get his ideas out, recalled German expressionism in 1920s films and so summoned up the Berlin period. Because everything links. Now, the most important image seems to be Bowie, blindfolded and button eyed as he was in the Blackstar video, clutching the sheets of his bed to his chin.

He knew. It's obvious that he knew. The album was recorded last year, his family have said that he passed away, peacefully, surrounded by his family, after a courageous eighteen month battle with cancer. Tony Visconti, so often there at the beginning, the lover at the wall kissing as the guns shot above his head, there again for the last two albums of rebirth and goodbye, has confirmed something of the art this morning. The album's intent is exactly what we believe it was. The album is a goodbye, a last message. He's left us this and then left us. He's been in control of everything all the way to the last moment. Even his passing has been on his terms. He releases his last album on his sixty-ninth birthday to a world that has no idea that he is ill and three days later we wake to find that he's gone. Shockingly, heartbreakingly gone.

The last track of Blackstar is I Can't Give Everything Away' and I was talking on Twitter the other day, saying that it's as beautiful as 'Everyone Says Hi'. You know that's already high praise. Listening to 'I Can't Give Everything Away' repeatedly over the last few days, it felt like a statement, felt like a summary, felt like a man saying 'this is what I did, this is what I meant, that's all there is'.

'I know something's very wrong, the pulse returns, the prodigal sons, the blackout heart, the flowered news with skull designs upon my shoes' carries a portent of mortality now, more than it did on Friday, Saturday, Sunday but this -

'Seeing more and feeling less, saying no but meaning yes, this is all I ever meant, that's the message that I sent, I can't give everything away'

That's a goodbye. I assumed that it was a signal that there would be no more albums but hoped that I was wrong. There are no more albums, there are no more songs, the work is done. Oh, and what work it was.

Thanks David. Thanks for every moment of the thirty five year ritual that you gave me. Thanks for every single wonderful, magical, beautiful, irreplaceable, unique moment. It meant everything.