The Man Who Fell To Earth

Goodbye StarMan

So today many of my generation are feeling a sadness of the loss of one David Bowie. I had thought of getting out the face paints and re enacting an attempt as a teenager to be Ziggy Stardust at a party, fortunately for you as the result was more Clockwork Orange they were gone.
 
It’s not just the face paints that are gone, in a sky full of stars tonight one of them has gone too..
I only found out the news of his passing as I was leaving work tonight, and thinking on the drive home what it was that left me feeling a bit sad, I think it is the associated memories and acknowledgement of loss and moving on.
 
So before the face paint failure, my introduction to Bowie as a younger teenager was next door at the home of my older cousins B and R. They had money and vinyl (and smoked) and we’d play for hours, darts and snooker, in their room and listen to their albums. The albums we mostly played were The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars and Space Oddity, played enough times that they laid down their own indelible groove in my cerebral cortex.
A couple of years later B died suddenly on Christmas Eve, a few years after that R became so ill that if he ever saw me today he’d be unlikely to recognise me or remember those endless games, though I’d like to think he can still lip-sync “This is ground control to Major Tom”
 
Roll forward a few years (OK quite a few), and my youngest B discovered the genius that was David Bowie whilst binge viewing the TV drama series “Life on Mars” with it’s hero “Gene Genie” and subsequently the sequel “Ashes to Ashes”, and I relived my Golden Years as the sound track unfolded with our viewing.
 
So the first Vinyl LP I bought Benji was 1970’s Bowie, the last album he bought me (I suspect the last physical album anyone would buy me given my acceptance of digitalised music) was 2013 Bowie “Next Day”
 
So David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust, the Man Who Fell to Earth,The Gene Genie, thanks for all those memories.
Thank you for giving it live on MTV to MTV about their representation of black artists
Thank you seeing and imagining what the rest of us could never do before you.
 
Only one thing to do with this mild melancholia
 
Lets Dance
Put on your red shoes - and Dance the Blues