Everything’s hunky dory as Bowie makes his comeback

THERE are lots of reasons to love January. Not the January sales — ugh, like Christmas shopping wasn’t horrendous enough without going back for more.

No, one of the great things about January — apart from its restful frugality — is it’s the month that gave us David Bowie. He turned 66 this week — just four years from the formal oldness of seventy, yet still able to command international attention by doing nothing at all in terms of publicity.

No other performing artist on earth could make the broadsheet front pages just by releasing a single, yet there he was, plastered all over the papers this week. There’s a new album coming too, but nobody knew about it — in the digital age, this lack of hype takes some doing. Serious current affairs programmes on the radio solemnly announced Bowie’s new song, in between the daily economic gloom and Syria. They don’t do that for Justin Bieber, even if he does have 32,739,145 (yes, really) followers on Twitter.