Using Bowie seemed, to many, implausible. Taking popular music seriously was largely ridiculed, especially within academia. I was met with sceptical, quizzing looks when I claimed that my main-man was in fact the biggest influence on my (then) young life outside of my family. Several people looked askance, or just thought I was taking the piss, when I told them I was writing my doctoral dissertation on David Bowie. Not so…īack in the late 1980s and early ’90s I was a PHD student at Liverpool University. And with tribute after tribute from journalists, musicians, politicians, and even an astronaut, you might reasonably have thought that Bowie had always been revered. Bowie fans always felt special, theirs the biggest cult within popular culture. Before the internet, as writer Paul Morley commented, Bowie was a one-man Google search engine.īowie always had the cleverest and brightest fans (if you don’t believe me, look at a recent a YouGov survey). It was through him and him alone that I learnt about William Burroughs, Iggy Pop, Kabuki theatre, Nic Roeg, Arcade Fire, Tony Newley and Neu!, just a fraction of the cultural shopping list Bowie gave us. He was a friend both to those close to him and to his millions of admirers for whom he represented freedom, adventure and release from convention. He was singer, writer, musician, producer, designer, actor, painter, video artist, performer and entrepreneur. In many an obit, Bowie was dubbed a ‘rock star’, a reductive and insulting epithet because he was much more than that. The death of David Bowie, broken to the world on Monday 11 January, was for me and so many others a moment that has defined us culturally. A month on from Bowie’s death, he reflects on his own relationship with the artist, and the outpouring of grief that has consumed fans. Author David Buckley has spent years chronicling the life and work of David Bowie, in academia and in books such as Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The Definitive Story and The Complete Guide To The Music Of David Bowie.
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