David Bowie

Changesbowie
EMI, 1990

Every year another critic decides it is their turn to announce the death of pop music, or at least its impending demise. Such articles are infinitely boring and more often than not mean the author is getting old and wishes they were young again, or simply couldn't think of anything more interesting to write before deadline. Sometimes they do make me wonder, though. Will we ever get to see another group like The Beatles, or more importantly, another David Bowie? I should stress that even if we don't, it doesn't mean the end of pop music. Perhaps it just means the end of rock stars, and by that I don't mean whichever singer is on the cover of Rolling Stone this month. I mean the kind of rock and roll deity that can inspire an entire generation, or inhale ridiculous quantities of drugs and play to sold-out stadiums for five decades running, or, in Bowie's case, have twelve records in the top ten charts in eighteen months and who can be equally famous as a cross-dressing space alien in London, a white man playing funk music on Soul Train in Chicago and an experimental pop composer writing songs about the wall in Berlin.

Bowie, born David Robert Jones, had his first hit in 1969 with 'Space Oddity', a fey acoustic song about an astronaut with overtones of drug use released a few days before the Apollo 11 moon landing. He returned a few years later in the guise of Ziggy Stardust, a glam-rock sex god from outer space who came to Earth to offer hope in the face of the Apocalypse, and after giving up that persona attempted to write a musical based on George Orwell's 1984. He then travelled to the US and reinvented himself as an icon of "plastic soul", a sugary mix of black funk and soul music, and later to Berlin where he recorded a trilogy of low-key works with minimalist composer Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti. And that's just the first half of his career. As a teenager I used to lie in my bedroom listening to the singles album Changesbowie on repeat, underneath a giant poster of Aladdin Sane. It was one of the records my mother's boyfriend lent to me and I think I wore it out. To this day I have never heard a more perfect collection of pop songs. Bowie forever.