Ashes to Ashes Indeed

Most of us would love to believe that we are strange, mercurial creatures with an alien inside. The truth is usually more mundane; most of us are pinstripe prim – at least on the inside. But we grew up chafing against conformity – a single earring here, an attitude (that most didn’t notice) there. I went out around a small market town – Hereford - in bondage trousers and a combat jacket, with a punky bounce and I thought, a sneer. I was but a tiny tiny speck in the universe – a nothingness. Yet there was Mr Bowie – that voice seems to cleanse my blood and make me want to scale mountains while shouting down ‘see you suckers’ to the people below, spiky finger in the air to the world.

As a teen your emotions are undulating bloody monsters. Bowie in a single song could tap into melancholy, that disconnected anarchy that goes on in the black soul of an arrogant but terrified teen. He made you feel that strange was norm, that the normal people were the freaks. I had a very beautiful German boyfriend – Paul Schindler – who was an enormous fan. So, as with all of us, Bowie will mean a place, people we knew or attitudes we struck where we were most happy. Mine would be Berlin, I think, running up one of those high-ceilinged hallways to someone’s flat, or watching Marianne Faithful ride in black leather in Girl on a Motorcycle, in a shabby building in Berlin that had been turned into a cinema with seats from a bus. The wall had just fallen and it was an exciting time to be in the city.

Tomorrow I will be fine but today has been a rather discombobulated one and I have returned to adolescence – just for today, to indulge, to listen to a lot of Bowie. I was about to buy The Man Who Fell to Earth for my own teen but I am sure that they will show it on TV.

We all love the alien. We may never be alien and we can plod through our lives carrying our secrets and our stubborn strangeness. So thank you Bowie for all you gave us, how some of will share the grief and then we can smile and dance around to you. We won’t talk about Absolute Beginners and we won’t mention Tin Machine. We all make mistakes, my darling boy and we can forgive you much. For the songs, for the wonderful wonderful weirdness that made us all feel sane in our difference.