David Bowie
Ziggy Stardust

I’m doing it – this feels brave. I have been told for so long how much I would love David Bowie, and repeatedly, I have always said I don’t get it. It took me long enough to get Kate Bush when people did that trick with me (walking home after rehearsal with Lucy Jubb past the Kwik Save)…it’s so English…all the stories drifting through…like a musical or a magazine. It seems to be halfway between the artless feelings of punk and the pomposity I’m used to associating with that kind of glam/prog rock…and still somehow related to the BBC and the rain…

This is supposed to have some kind of story, right? I feel amazed; this is so much more intelligent and interesting than I thought it would be…it leads me to ask myself how much of this was written by Bowie? What’s his role...? I know that Brian Eno and Phillip Glass became involved as Bowie became “established” but I don’t know if he wrote everything/sang everything/I have no idea. Because he’s so show-y (and of course my formative experience of him was Labyrinth so really…how seriously can I have taken him previously? A couple of times when I made Jon a cup of tea he called me “Little Wonder” and sang a bit of the relevant song, which I remember from my last few years in Bolton too…that seems to be it for Bowie references until we skip forward to Bristol and people reeling in horror when I say I’ve never really listened to any).

I was talking to Sylvia, my counselling supervisor about Susan Faludi, this feminist writer from the 90s. We talked about the anger inherent in the 1970s/80s model, and how quickly it dated, and how easily it became a target for further abuse. OK, it’s ironic to see that even the feminist movement should be quiet, gentle and not make any trouble, but we talked mostly about how quickly zeitgeists date…the lyrics of the last song “Freak out in a moonlit day dream” rumbled in my head as dated, in the truest sense of the word I think I’ve ever thought if it…reminded me of the closing bits of Easy Rider…there’s something about the sound of the guitars as well, but that dates classically for me, like columns.

I’ve found another Bowie reference, I realise I know more of him than I thought…my first disastrous boyfriend (that reads accurately both ways…) had some greatest hits CD that had this “Starman” song on it…I feel less impressed, I remember always being bored by this song, among other things. Not sure how much of it has to do with the weird creepy Christian rhetoric that goes through it or the campy piano, but my appetite for Bowie dulls on this song. Something about invoking children in a song (even Brian Wilson…even…is guilty of this) strikes me as unforgivably cheap.

Perhaps my expectations which kind of shot up around my ears with the first two songs have let me down; I feel disappointed with the rest of the album…it doesn’t’ seem to do anything, or perhaps that’s because I don’t know it…it seems to have disintegrated into lazy rock and roll/blues kind of stuff…in fact to be precise that’s exactly what it’s done, the next song is called rock and roll star and I lose all patience. To have promised so much with the first two songs, to have fucked around with the time and orchestration so easily and skittishly, and now go into dull and boring moving-right-along COCK is quite a disappointment.

People talking about Bowie as if he’s a genius, but I can’t hear anything (yet) apart from eye-shadow. Ziggy played guitar; as if that’s enough.