The DJ and sage Mark Radcliffe once said that he didn’t think he could ever like anyone who didn’t love David Bowie’s song ‘Heroes’, and while that might be going a bit far, I can see what he means. As it happens, ‘Heroes’ is still my favourite Bowie song, and Low and Heroes are still my favourite albums, slightly more than 38 years after they were first released. No one told us when we were teenagers that our barely formed music tastes would stay with us for the rest of our lives, but if we didn’t even suspect it then, we know it for certain now.
If you do have to die, though, you might as well do it as Bowie has just done, without anyone outside your intimate circle having an inkling and thus with dignity and integrity intact. For most of the first decade of this century, when Bowie made no records at all, we thought he was seriously ill and possibly dying. We seem to have been wrong. Then, after The Next Day appeared from nowhere in early 2013, we thought that if he had been ill, he was now back to rude health. We were wrong about that too. In our barmily overconnected world, where everyone knows everything about everyone, Bowie withdrew into private life, gave no interviews, didn’t play live, didn’t play the game. We would see him only in the occasional video, finally looking his age or something approaching it, and demonstrating a frailty of voice that Tony Visconti’s artful productions made no attempt to conceal. But still he had that amazing hair. You can’t be ill if you have that hair, can you? Of course not.
The clues were probably there if we had been paying attention.
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