Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Five Years, and the sadness of David Bowie's death still lingers
David Bowie Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
It was precarious, but if you got it right you could just about balance the stereo speakers on the bedroom window sill. Then you could play tennis outside and listen to Station to Station. Noticing this, a cool friend, the enigmatically named Budgie, slipped me the earlier Ziggy Stardust. I started listening to ‘Five Years’ whilst doing my homework.
This changed everything. Nobody at that age, I hope, wanted to go to their room and do Irish. But going to your room to do Irish and listen to Bowie was different. And going to your room to listen to Bowie and do English, read Henry James say, well, that was different again. A little interior world started to grow in me of books and films and music. Bowie was at its head.
This relationship should not have survived the arrival of punk. The Sex Pistols made me a zealot. I was busy loading the buses with older bands, hippies, anyone with facial hair or songs over three minutes when I heard Low. It was futuristic, lean and different, more the new world than the old. Bowie wasn’t getting on any bus.
He became my constant companion. If you had met me then I would have been either holding one of his albums or a magazine with him on the cover. When I had to repeat a subject in the Leaving Cert, working by day and doing grinds at night it was Heroes waiting for me when I got home. With my parents asleep, I would lie on the floor, a speaker by each ear.
It was just my luck that when I got to meet Bowie he was in Tin Machine. Even he struggled to pull that one off. I was in rehearsal with Something Happens in a place called The Factory. In the canteen I had just ordered a tea when a voice beside me said ‘I’ll have one ‘n’ all.’ It was Bowie.
We said warm hellos. He asked "You guys a band?" We nodded furiously and settled at our respective tables. Nothing to see here folks, just two bands on their break. Two bands, one god.
Tin Machine played the Baggot, a pub venue in Dublin. I stood about ten feet from Bowie, looking on, speechless. The last time I would see him was the Reality Tour at the Point, 2003. That night 'Life on Mars' that was transcendental. The applause went on so long he had to ask us to stop. He touched his heart to show how much it meant. We touched ours too.
But Black Star, his last album, threw me. There were so many oblique references to death in the lyrics: "I’m dying too", “If I never see the English evergreens”, and “I know something is very wrong”. But it was the sample of 'New Career In A New Town', that caught me.
'New Career...' is the last track on Low, my favourite track on my favourite album. I loved it so much I played it before I left the house to sit every exam from the Leaving onwards. It’s an instrumental but evokes its name brilliantly. It suggests a car, pulling out into traffic, travelling on and away, the past behind you, who knows what in front.
“I think Bowie is dying,” I told my wife later. Talking to her I realised that my relationship with him predated everything in my life: our marriage, the children, the band, radio… all blows-ins by comparison. It was like I had always been holding an invisible hand.
The next night was Sunday and, as luck would have it, his long-time Irish guitar player Gerry Leonard was in town. We did a two hour Bowie special on radio. Gerry told stories of he and Bowie’s shared love of coffee and of David calling in unannounced at his home in New York, looking for a cup!
The next day, Monday, is the one day of the week, due to my late hours, that I do the school run. I was filling cereal bowls and buttering toast when my wife came downstairs. I knew something was off and my phone started to buzz as she caught my eye: “Did you hear about Bowie?” she asked, as gently as she could.
It remains one of only three times my children have seen me cry.
