EDIT - I've left this blog alone for a year, as is my wont. I've just found this draft post, and was going to extend and finish it, but I like it the way it is, sort of.
Bowie's passing makes me sad even now. I never met him obviously, but would name my first male child after him in a heartbeat. I think the fact that Finn is my favourite name for a boy puts my love of the Veils in perspective (I wonder what Finn would think if he knew?), but Finn Bowie Hutchings is a pretty rockin' handle.
Anyway. The Dame went, then about a fortnight past. Time took a cigarette, as they say.. and I wrote this:
"As you're sat there in the future, you'll be inimitably aware that David Bowie has died, and will probably have processed this fact. Back here on my sofa in Devon it's only just happened (well, it happened while we were asleep this morning). We woke up to a more-mournful-than-usual Shaun Keavney intoning glumly about someone's 'amazing legacy' over Sound & Vision and I instantly thought something fell had happened overnight. He had his Sad Newsreader Serious Voice on, the poor man.
'Shit, I think Tony Visconti's died', I said to a half-asleep Tam. What I really meant was: 'Shit! I hope in my heart that David Bowie's not died, but in fact someone seminally important to his life and work has instead.' This is not to wish ill on Tony Visconti - he's pretty awesome by the looks of it - but you know. To actually articulate that David Bowie, the great unknowable avant-pop overlord, has finished with this plane of existence, is out of the question when you've only been awake for 32 seconds.
Typically, a quick scan of Facebook brought up my beloved mate Rob's characteristically unfluffy prose style: 'BBC are reporting that David Bowie has died.' he said, if not flatly, then matter-of-factly. Rob is not one for great emotional outpourings, as I'm sure you'd agree.
It is now quite late, by my standards - five to eleven as I type this. I'm still not entirely sure what this means. This is very difficult to articulate, but David Bowie meant a great deal, both to me, and to my generation, and to our parents. He was, I think it's fair to say, an icon of the 20th Century. That he's gone at 69 (jeez, liver cancer, thanks so much for that) feels unjust and early and yet, as details emerge of his life in that self-imposed 10-year 'exile' from the public's gaze, my respect for him just grows and grows.
So it seems that after suffering a heart attack (or at least a major scare, I'm not certain) in 2004 he decided not to tour again, and this master of the showbiz disappearing act took to his new role as a stay-at-home dad to he and Iman's youngest child. Laudable, but he probably also felt it necessary. After all, during the childhoods of his other children, Bowie was very busy being Bowie on an international basis, and wouldn't have been all that present in their lives. Speculation aside, that seems to have been his routine, but we also know that he was a prolific consumer of literature, arts, films and music throughout this 'exile' period and it seems he began writing new music, both for a stage musical and for his own ends during this time. As well as, you know, just enjoying being a quiet, massively successful cultural icon who's married to an impossibly beautiful former supermodel and activist. Sounds alright.
Then on his birthday in 2013, The Next Day dropped. Cue pandemonium, reverent cross-examination and general freaking-out. I have to say for the sake of full disclosure that I've not heard a great deal of this surprise from beyond the horizon, but the bits I have heard - Where Are We Now and a few other cuts - I really liked. As ever, Bowie was on terrifically oblique form, but looking back at it from here, with The News still dominating the media, there was a finality to it all. There's always been a sense of melancholy, either explicit or implicit, in Bowie's work, but here it was closer to the surface than recent releases would suggest. In the video for Where Are We Now, we delighted in seeing a man clearly still in possession of considerable powers reminiscing about his time in Seventies Berlin 'sitting in the Djungel' and 'getting the train from Potsdamer Platz - you didn't think I could do that'. It was heartfelt, and wry and touching. I loved it, and thought that, even if Bowie wasn't going to tour, he was at least out in the world, being Bowie. Being quietly better than everyone else at being a super-intelligent taste-making cultural polymath. That made the fact that Katy Perry was the biggest-grossing pop star in the world more palatable. Because Bowie was still out there, being cool enough for all of us.
A few singles arrived subsequent to The Next Day, as if signposting this very fact: 'I'm still here, please carry on', they seemed to say. Videos featured Bowie, and then not, but that was OK too, because you don't need to be in a pop video to be in a pop video. It's all artifice and suggestion, and who's better at that than Bowie anyway?
Blackstar subsequently emerged, and weeks before his death, this great chameleon at the centre of our culture appeared to be preparing us for his departure, lamenting his own mortality, celebrating his achievements /and/ leaving us witty little riddles to play with in his absence.
RE-EDIT: Almost a year on, and nothing has changed. Blackstar is still a landmark in a career of landmarks. To have done everything he did so well and to still be full of passion for his work despite knowing what he was facing is a mark of the man. I still miss him, and the world really is a little dimmer without knowing that he's around.
Maybe there will be more material subsequently - a new album of material from the early Eighties is mooted, for example. But still, a truly unique figure of immeasurable influence leaves us. Thanks, Mr. B. :)
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