Usually a lot of those tough kids would never have listened to someone like him.’ Round my way there were a few blokes who were brave enough to wear a bit of make-up of a Saturday night, which is chancing your fucking arm in Woking. ‘But even though he was androgynous and camp, he was held in such high esteem. ‘A lot of rough working-class kids really adored Bowie,’ said Paul Weller. He was as thin as a broom, wore a horrible multi-coloured jumpsuit and high-heeled boots, and sported a brightly dyed ginger spiky haircut that looked a little like a grown-out girl’s skinhead.
LOU REED TRANSFORMER ZIP TV
It wasn’t until June 1972 when I saw Bowie perform Starman on the kids’ TV show Lift Off that I gave him any more thought. Whatever the reason, I played the record and was duly unimpressed with its rather folksy acoustic tone which I acquainted with the smelly hippies who sat cross-legged in the park, smoked funny-smelling roll-ups and giggled constantly.Īs a result, I didn’t really play the album again for a while, preferring the likes of Slade, Dave and Ansel Collins and Desmond Dekker.
LOU REED TRANSFORMER ZIP MOVIE
I think I picked it because I loved the movie The Iron Mistress, a 1952 drama about 19th century pioneer Jim Bowie. To accompany the item she let me pick a bunch of LPs from the catalogue, one of which was Hunky Dory.
At the same time my mother bought our first record player ‒ a Fidelity Music Maker ‒ from Kay’s catalogue. I acquired my first Bowie recording for Christmas when I was 11 years old. He was this omnipresent force ‒ always there at the back of one’s mind, being reassuringly re- inventive and cleverly chameleon ‒ whose discography charts our journeys from children to adults and beyond. Indisputably David Bowie had a massive effect on my generation and me. The suit was my pride and joy and I wore it into the ground.
The next morning I phoned my mum and said, ‘David Bowie likes my suit!’ I was a 20-year-old whose whole adolescence was influenced by the great man and whose first suit ‒ bought when I was 14 years old ‒ was a copy of the one he wore on the cover of the David Live album that I had begged, borrowed and saved for. He was like your older, funny mate from round the corner, the only difference being those mismatched eyes, which in person was strangely disconcerting. But for the first time in my life I was literally dumbstruck, perhaps because David Bowie in person was not this extraordinary, larger-than-life creature from another planet. He seemed really interested in our little gang of extroverts and even complimented me on my suit. But neither he nor Rusty were there and I’d put Beethoven’s ninth choral version on, which lasted the whole side of an LP, allowing me to play host for a while. He must have popped into see Steve as the release of Ashes to Ashes was imminent. He’d turned up in a long tweed raglan-sleeved 1950s-style trench coat and blue peg trousers, his natural brown hair parted to the side, while his demeanour was down to earth. Still, looking back, we could have been forgiven for not recognising our idol.
Christos launched into conversation while the obviously puzzled Bowie merely smiled and nodded. We had only just opened the doors and, of the 15 people there, only my LSD-enhanced pal Christos Tolera approached him, thinking he was an old soul boy he knew from Ilford. It was only when I looked into his different-coloured eyes that I realized who it was. Accompanied by the model Vivienne Lynn, he came in and humbly introduced himself as ‘David’. I first met Bowie properly in May 1980 when he popped into Hell, a Covent Garden nightclub that I DJ’d at and ran with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, both of whom had recently appeared in his Ashes to Ashes video. Consider, also, some of the albums he produced for other artists: The Stooges’ Raw Power, Mott The Hoople’s All The Young Dudes, Lou Reed’s Transformer, Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life ‒ each one a truly seminal album that sounds as good today as it did back then. Apart from about 17 albums (nine albums reached number one in the UK) that don’t include a single bad track, just listen to the brilliance of singles such as Kooks, Aladdin Sane, Life on Mars, and Heroes. Others, such as Miles Davis or James Brown, certainly had the music, but they lacked Bowie’s diversity ‒ and lost the style plot for decades.īowie was style personified and wrote not just the lyrics and the music but sang, played various instruments, and arranged and produced much of his own product. When it comes to music and style, contemporary or otherwise, only one person has dominated both categories during their own lifetime and that is David Bowie.įrank Sinatra was a contender, but then he didn’t write his own songs.