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.

In an age of celebrity overshare, where fame means tweeting pictures of your dinner and telling everyone everything all of the time, where ‘private life’ has become an oxymoron, Bowie remains the master of elusive. If he as much as goes for a stroll in Manhattan, in a flat cap, dark glasses and hoodie, his image is splashed all over the press: Bowie Pops Out For A Pint Of Milk. Hold the front page.

I love David Bowie. It’s hard to describe quite how much without sounding like a gibbering fangirl. Which I totally am — the only icons on my desk are a statue of the Buddha, and a picture of Bowie. He is pure creativity, distilled into a single being with mismatched eyes and a Brixton accent. Never mind that he hasn’t made an amazing record in 30 years. He’s bigger than that.

Do you remember your Bowie first time? Mine was in 1980, a couple of weeks after my 13th birthday. I turned on Top Of The Pops to see this strange bleached-out man in a clown suit walking in front of a bulldozer, with gothy looking freaks walking alongside him. I was transfixed. The song entranced me, the singer even more.

Obviously, you couldn’t google anyone back then, so I did the next best thing — legged it to the nearest record shop, to the ‘B’ section of Rock & Pop. There he was. With spiky orange hair. With straight blonde hair. With curly hippie hair. With a blue and red lightning bolt across his face. With no eyebrows. With long hair, in a dress. A school friend lent me her sister’s copy of Hunky Dory. I was hooked for life.

In March the V&A are putting on a Bowie retrospective. He’s not coming, even though he’s lending his archive of costumes, letters, lyrics, memorabilia. He didn’t come to the Olympics either, despite Danny Boyle begging him. I’m glad he didn’t. You should never meet your heroes, not even digitally.