Tom Dunne: 10 years on from the awful day we heard about Bowie's death
David Bowie in the Blackstar music video, released in 2016, just before his death.
Ten years since we lost Bowie. For a man who worked to a series of five-year plans that is two entire Bowie eras. Sadness will be the main emotion people experience as they recall him. Except in this house, where it will be sadness tinged with guilt.
Yes guilt. Ten years on I still find it hard to accept that my two-hour radio special the night before he died was not somehow connected to his passing. You make a holy show of “honouring someone while they are alive” and the next minute...
Spooky, at the very least. But you have to see the context. Bowie’s re-emergence in 2013 had stunned me. And the fact that the completely unexpected release of The Next Day had been broken to me by someone with form in my life had contributed greatly to this.
This particular news bearer was a radio researcher. I’d often meet her at 7am at the DART station. She never seemed to have good news. Broke Michael Jackson’s death to me in 2009, Amy Winehouse’s in 2011, and later Prince’s in 2016.
So, her cheery “Did you hear about Bowie?” that cold January morning made me suspect the worst. But I’d been wrong. He wasn’t dead. He was releasing a new album in March and a single that very day! It had been recorded secretly. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known.
That lead single, Where Are We Now, and the subsequent The Stars (Are Out Tonight) — with Tilda Swinton in the video — were magnificent. An older Bowie contemplating age and past glories. His first number one album since Black Tie, White Noise in 1993. Bowie was back.
In March I saw a rare opportunity to do something I hadn’t done in years. I bought the vinyl in Dublin city and travelled home with it under my arm like an excited schoolboy. I ripped off the sleeve when I got home and asked to be left alone. It was like nothing had changed.
But Blackstar, released again on his birthday, January 8, in 2016, hit me differently.
I again bought it on the day of release, a Friday, and did the same DART journey home. My initial impression was that it was even more magnificent. But then I noticed the lyrics.
“I can’t give everything away” and “If I’ll never see the English evergreens” struck me as odd. There were death references everywhere. But it was what a piece of mouth organ on a track called I Can’t Give Everything Away that stopped me in my tracks.
It sounded incredibly similar to the mouth organ refrain on A New Career in a New Town, possibly my favourite track from the Low album. It’s a hauntingly beautiful instrumental that conjures up images of a road journey, of pulling out into a freeway and disappearing in a trail of taillights.
But here, with that sense of motion set against a lyric saying “I know something is very wrong” it suggested an altogether different kind of journey. It was crushing, stark and tellingly, the last track.
I was struck by an odd thought. Bowie had been a part of my life for longer than my wife. A love of Bowie, a connection to Bowie, the company of Bowie had been things in my life, special things in my life, since long before this hearth or home had existed. The idea of a world without Bowie was startling.
This was Saturday, January 9. As luck would have it, Gerry Leonard a one-time member of much-loved Irish band Hinterland and now, incredibly Bowie’s guitarist, was in town. A hastily convened two-hour special was planned for the following night, Sunday, January 10.
Gerry had not known how unwell Bowie was. He told me tales of Bowie calling to his house to have coffee and we wondered if touring was really as out of the question as Bowie had indicated. It was a hopeful, joyous two hours. Little did we know.
The next day is one I am unlikely to ever forget. It wasn’t the researcher this time. My children, then nine and seven, somehow knew the news before me. “Mum has something to tell you,” they said. It was 7.30am.
This may seem like a very personal take, but I think that was the glory of Bowie. We all felt it was personal. Bowie was ours. Our personal connection to a world far cooler than this one. Our Starman. Our Blackstar.
- David Bowie, January 8, 1947–January 10, 2016
