Festival review: Dublin Bowie Festival, Sugar Club, Dublin

David Bowie did plenty that was beneath him, and, at the first event of the second Dublin Bowie Festival, that’s where we started, suffering through Bowie’s twee ’60s ditties and their worse videos. One wondered if, as the festival continuaed, someone would be found arguing that Outside deserved reconsideration.

At last, Enda Walsh took the Sugar Club stage, along with his interlocutor for the evening, Tony Clayton-Lea. Walsh, a self-confessed Smiths fanatic, came rather late to Bowie, and knew him personally and professionally as he was discovering a renewed focus, when a masterful, successful late period, that began with The Next Day, in 2013, was coming to a climax.

Walsh’s finely tuned sense of absurdity was always to the fore as he related how he ended up being interviewed by Bowie in New York for the job of collaborating on the musical Lazarus. Walsh described a formidably well-read Bowie, who was, nonetheless, a “unpretentious”, “sweet man,” who’s main joy in life was “making stuff up.”

The pair’s friendly working relationship had genuine feeling on both sides, it seems. As Bowie became ill, Walsh said, the work itself became a proxy for and the vehicle of a “conversation about the last moments of your life.” There was poignancy in how he described the last time he saw the man, saying goodbye to him and his wife, Iman, outside the New York Theatre Workshop after the opening night of Lazarus.

The festival continues until Tuesday. The Light House Cinema in Smithfield will be showing The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Labyrinth. A free walking tour of where Bowie played and stayed in Dublin takes place today and on Sunday.

There’s an Ashes to Ashes cabaret, a tribute concert at Vicar Street on what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday, etc. Irish guitarist Gerry Leonard, who played on three Bowie albums, also plays at Whelan’s on Monday, and will engage in a q&a about his encounters with the singer.

• Full listings: dublinbowiefestival.ie