Will you stay in our lovers' story?

There are multitudes who really loved him. Young misfits found him a transformative influence  and have loved his music and him ever since.  As with a private death the true lovers should be the ones with the greatest right to speak – and to sing.  Analysis of musical and cultural importance will come along soon enough.

Those who complain about other people speaking and singing and weeping should STFU. 

Julie Burchill scored highest for pointless mean-mindedness. I can put up with her going on about her ever fascinating self as she will often chuck in shrewd and funny insights but not this time with her "sob-signalling".

Brendan O'Neill who is usually the most annoying of contrarians wrote an excellent piece about how in the age of tabloid nosiness and celebrity scar flashing, Bowie stayed private.  As Flaubert lived like a bourgeoisie and thought like a demi-god, so Bowie was a public spectacle and left his secrets for his intimates. 

Back in '73 Martin Amis called Bowie 'a mild fad'.   In his pompous youth Amis was sent off to Rolling Stones concerts and the like to produce disdainful writings. though he seems to have had less feeling for rock music than the average teenager blagging the latest album.

Amis's young and amoral characters are anachronistically uninterested in music, quite out of step with the Anglo youth of his times for which it was THE art form – their stories, their feelings, their own dreams as they strummed a guitar for a year or two and scribbled down lyrics. The young of the 70s and 80s without music are as odd as the present day young would be without Smartphones.

Skinheads used the dramatic apocalypse (bang not whimper) 5 Years   

as a theme song and in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting the characters are delicate about the right mood music to accompany their shooting up. Welsh's tribute was this:-

I daresay there are other notables who have refrained from writing one as well and haven't told us about their refraining.

The cybernats  got a splash for their crappy behaviour but the Nats of my Facebook acquaintance were reacting like everyone else, sharing memories of gigs and the musical among them jamming the back catalogue.  Nicola Sturgeon reminisced nicely about how as a wee girl she had listened to Major Tom over and over, to see if it could turn out right for him.  Meanwhile Unionists have taken delight in putting round the picture of Bowie in full Union Flag regalia while Europhiles claim him as a European. 

I am sad at his unexpected death and I can totally understand the flowers and the weeping from the real fans.  I preferred his contemporaries Lou Reed and Pink Floyd and only owned Hunky Dory and Space Oddity. Still, all the well-known songs and words are sloshing in my head and here's one of my favourites played on an organ.

 

 Life on Mars works on an instrument it wasn't written for and it works without the words as well, which is a test of a tune.  It is one of those soaring rock anthems which for the 70s and beyond young people were our epiphanies, our hallelujahs. As Bowie said in Memory of a Free Festival:-

The Children of the summer's end
Gathered in the dampened grass
We played our songs and felt the London sky
Resting on our hands
It was God's land
It was ragged and naïve
It was Heaven
…..

Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon
To paint that love upon a white balloon
And fly it from the toppest top of all the tops
....
The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We're Gonna Have a Party

Comments

[Robin Carmody]

Do you have me in mind, when you talk of Europhiles claiming Bowie as a European?

[Robin Carmody]

I mean, I think it's more legitimate than in most comparable instances because Bowie's music was much less Anglosphere-dominated in terms of its range of influences and reference points, and he lived quite a lot of his life in mainland Europe ... it's like how Paul McCartney could accept a knighthood because he had a basic respect ("the movement you need is on your shoulder" is pop's most 1945 line) for the post-war British state, and Mick Jagger could accept a knighthood because he had a basic respect for the British state which succeeded it (as his parents would have respected the British state which came before), but Bowie could not accept a knighthood because he was in a third, separate position.

[Robin Carmody]

"much less Anglosphere-dominated", that is, than e.g. the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin, or Tory crawlers like Eric Clapton; even when McCartney or sundry prog musicians aspired towards "Europe", it was the old-established high-cultural canon. The only other artists who did something comparable to Bowie in that respect never had anything like the profile or name with "regular" people, or the new-establishment status. So I think that's a perfectly reasonable case to make - and less contrived than other instances I've seen of people wanting people whose music they like to be on their side (the most extreme example of Getting the Future Wrong I have ever come across is probably Richard Gott's 1969 Guardian piece on the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, which completely misunderstands their underlying politics and seems, in retrospect, unnecessarily cruel to the political consensus of the day).

[RosieBell]

"Do you have me in mind, when you talk of Europhiles claiming Bowie as a European?"

No - it's a Facebook group called New Europeans who were talking about a Great European. Certainly the description made sense. I agree - he does fit that description far more than Paul McCartney or Ray Davies could.

[RosieBell]

Also, Billy Bragg is pointing out that Bowie & Rickman were of the working class boy goes to art school generation. Far too expensive now, and less social mobility.

[Robin Carmody]

Ah, I thought you were thinking of my Facebook status almost immediately after his death, where I framed his spirit of pluralism very much as what we would need to invoke to stay in the EU.

The thing with Bowie is that his range of reference points and inspirations was so broad that, to some extent, he was whatever you wanted him to be; black American music was also always very important to him, and while recording 'Blackstar' he was by all accounts listening to Kendrick Lamar, about whom many Guardianistas hold views indistinguishable from Mailite ones. So everyone will have their own interpretation; as ever, I'll be the only one to see all sides and not be partisan towards any.