Some artists age beautifully. Johnny Cash aged beautifully, Bruce Springsteen remains young in an absurd way and all members of the Rolling Stones turned into convincing zombies after their unnoticed deaths in the seventies changed. Leonard Cohen has been wonderful for at least 50 years.
And let alone the one person I had most hoped for that would not age wonderfully. David Bowie suffered a heart attack a few weeks after I saw his concert in Ahoy. After that, he disappeared from the spotlight. He was still occasionally spotted around Moby, someone spotted a faded old pop star on a London street and someone threatened a musical. David Bowie languished. I was preparing for it. No bang to end with, no grand farewell, just more and more noise and eventually an obituary, and not even on the front page, because his generation had already disappeared just as gently from view.
My first real Bowie contact was a cassette tape of Ziggy Stardust. Every song was, of course, about me. Little did I know then that every fan thinks that about their star. 'Starman' was my key. It's about a little boy who suddenly gets a message on his transistor radio from a man from outer space. That who would like to visit. He calls his best friend to share the news. It was completely fitting, because many of my evenings were spent at the analogue shortwave radio on which I listened to my first pirate stations. That was a magical world full of coming and going music, fuzzy beeps and super-fast morse codes. Very spacy.
That fans have always toyed a little with the idea that David Bowie was really a male from outer space is not surprising. He himself did nothing more than keep that suggestion alive. And if he tried to deny it at all, fans did see it as confirmation.
Sometime in 1996, the Starman released a prerelease out of a new single, called 'Telling Lies'. You could download it from the internet, which was then still accessible via modems with speeds of 9600 bits per second on an analogue telephone line. The download took hours, the sound quality was lousy, but that very fact increased the value enormously: once again Bowie was seeking contact with the world, after we had lost him for a while, again entirely in line with the magic we attributed to the media of the time.
If Bowie was then not a man from space, not an incarnation of the astronaut who stepped out of his capsule in a 1969 bout of Space Oddity, he was at least someone who sensed the future down to his capillaries.
And then he had that heart attack and things went quiet.
Until I saw a tweet from Nico Dijkshoorn. That there was a new single by David Bowie and that it was beautiful. And yep. On Youtube, only viewed by a few hundred people yet. Where are we now. Released with no press campaign, no posters, no hype, just on the shortwave radio of the early twenty-first century. All for ourselves to discover, and to call your best friend about it in delight.
The Starman is still there. Waiting in the sky.
He grows old fragilely, as only David Bowie can grow old fragilely. A projection on a rag doll, a voice that grows thinner and thinner.
Ziggy Stardust is back. And again, we don't know where he comes from, and for how long he stays.
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