A wave of dev­as­ta­tion has encom­passed every­one this morn­ing at the news that David Bowie has died. I have to agree with Lau­ren Lav­erne on BBC6 radio who stat­ed that “for those who feel they should­n’t be feel­ing so per­son­al­ly full of grief,  actu­al­ly, it’s OK for us to feel this way.” Bowie is part of us, for so many of us he was a for­ma­tive part of our youth and shaped our way of see­ing the world, his cre­ativ­i­ty has influ­enced our lives. And his work has influ­enced the course of mod­ern music and enriched the world.

I saw Bowie twice. The first time was in Han­ley, Stafford­shire in the ear­ly 70s. I remem­ber the venue was full but not crowd­ed, and it did­n’t take my friend Jax and I long to maneou­vre our way to the front. That was a ben­e­fit of being only 5ft tall (although it’s had its down­sides too, there are gigs when I’ve spent two hours star­ing at some­one’s back and hard­ly seen the band). Once we’d estab­lished our­selves on the cov­et­ed front row, we had a unin­ter­rupt­ed view of Zig­gy, and at one point he even looked down and smiled at us.

The sec­ond time I saw Bowie was dur­ing the 90s. A friend phoned me in a state of deliri­ous excite­ment one after­noon; a friend of hers played in the house band for The Jack Docher­ty Show (a talk show which ran for a while with the stan­dard for­mat of two or three guests on the sofa) and he’d just revealed to her that David Bowie was set to be a guest that evening. He could get two of us in for the show. My friend and I jumped into her car and raced at ridicu­lous speed into cen­tral Lon­don. We could­n’t find park­ing and end­ed up aban­don­ing the car down an alley­way and ran to the stu­dio just as the show was start­ing, where we were part of a small audi­ence. Bowie was Docher­ty’s final guest and he was amaz­ing­ly fun­ny, upbeat and charis­mat­ic. No airs and graces, just down to earth and charm­ing. After chat­ting to Jack Docher­ty, he per­formed Dead Man Walk­ing, and I recall he stopped the song and start­ed again as it was­n’t quite right. He car­ried on play­ing after the cam­eras stopped rolling. What a won­der­ful and inti­mate per­for­mance we were priv­i­leged to be a part of.

Black­star was released on Bowie’s birth­day on Fri­day, and I like to think that he died know­ing his album was already get­ting a very pos­i­tive recep­tion, even if the full mean­ing of the lyrics evad­ed and mys­ti­fied us till the news this morning.

RIP David Bowie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C‑UTjvHzsA0