I stopped listening to David Bowie a year ago.\u00a0 My love for his music was undimmed but I had come to the conclusion that old tunes were crowding out the new – at least on my playlists.\u00a0 I decided that, for a while at least, I would embrace the contemporary.\u00a0 In fact, I gave up listening to anything recoded before 2010.<\/p>\n
To fill my soundscape, I read reviews, sought the views of friends and experimented. The experience has reinvigorated my love of music.\u00a0 It has, however, led me to a paradoxical observation.\u00a0 It is possible, I discover, to immerse oneself in newly-recorded music while retaining a resolutely 1970s sensibility.\u00a0 I have loved Low Cut Connie – who owe more than a little to Villa Nellc\u00f4te era Rolling Stones.\u00a0 Natalie Prass has significant echoes of Dusty In Memphis<\/em> and Taylor Locke has produced the album with which Fleetwood Mac should have followed up Rumours<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Spitfires sound like The Jam\u2019s first album.\u00a0 Courtney Barnett megamixes Jonathan Richman with Pulp.\u00a0 Royal Headache would not have been out of place on the Anarchy Tour.\u00a0 Straight lifts from disco, soul and new wave of that era can be found just as easily.<\/p>\n Perhaps that is quite normal – reinvention and rediscovery has always been at the heart of music.\u00a0 Despite this however, no one has ever created either sounds, or personas to rival David Bowie.\u00a0 You can find his influences, of course, but there isn\u2019t an artist at any time since his vault to stardom who approaches his scope, ambition or otherworldliness.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t proffer profound insights in to his trajectory from south east London to stardom.\u00a0 A couple of years ago, however, Woody Woodmansey, the Spiders from Mars\u2019 drummer, shared his recollections of his early years with Bowie with an audience at the Latitude Festival.<\/p>\n I had long wondered about how this encounter took shape.\u00a0 The realty was a hundred times better than I had imagined.<\/p>\n The bones of the tale are well-known.\u00a0 By 1969, Bowie had skirted success for several years and was living semi-communally in Haddon Hall, a gothic pile in Beckenham, south-east London.\u00a0 He needed a band and through chain migration assembled Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Woodmansey, who knew each other from performing in the pubs and clubs of their native Hull.<\/p>\n I did not take notes at the event, so I am quoting from memory.\u00a0 Suffice to say, the trio of Yorkshiremen, who had given up manual\u00a0trades only days before departing for the capital, found their billet at Haddon Hall mind-expanding.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were birds – girls that is – loads of them, and people who you could not tell what they were.\u00a0 There were lots of drugs and folk who just floated in and stayed for a while and then floated off again,\u201d Woody recalled.\u00a0 \u201cFor quite a while, we couldn\u2019t really believe our eyes\u201d.<\/p>\n They were impressed with Bowie\u2019s musical vision and the three exceptionally capable rockers were soon adding their own magic to the songs that would eventually appear on Hunky Dory<\/em> and Ziggy Stardust<\/em>.\u00a0 Bowie\u2019s ideas about clothing, however, were rather harder to stomach.<\/p>\n \u201cHe took us all to Liberty (the department store) to show us all these pink satins that he thought we should wear\u201d, Woody explained in his board Yorkshire brogue.\u00a0 \u201cWe had never seen \u2018owt like it before. Eventually Mick cracked.\u00a0 \u2018I\u2019m not dressing up like some kind of pansy\u2019 he exploded.\u00a0 \u2018They have telly in Hull, you know, me mates and me mam might see us\u2019.\u201d\u00a0 With this, the guitarist stormed off, swearing to return immediately to the East Riding and its sartorial certainties.<\/p>\n Woody was deputised to save the day.\u00a0 \u201cI chased him all the way to Kings Cross where he was actually on the train before I begged him to come back\u201d, Woody said.<\/p>\n Thanks be that he did.\u00a0 Ronson\u2019s intuitively liquid guitar licks, not to mention his full embrace of glam-rock gender bending, were a significant contributor to Bowie\u2019s breakthrough moment on Top of the Pops in 1972.\u00a0 That he and Bowie are spoken of in the same breath as Jagger\/Richards, Page\/Plant shows just how important his contribution was to the Spiders\u2019 success.<\/p>\n What can be drawn from any of this in this moment of Bowie\u2019s demise?<\/p>\n Two things, perhaps.\u00a0 One that in the parthenon of popular music we will have a long wait before Bowie is rivalled in his capacity for reinvention,\u00a0and defining the myriad musical styles he embraced.\u00a0 More importantly, though, however otherworldly he appeared, his artistry was ultimately rooted in the same prosaic, everyday considerations as the rest of us.<\/p>\n Bowie once said: “I’m not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman.\u201d\u00a0 We might lack his transcendental powers of expression but, I think, the same is true of us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I stopped listening to David Bowie a year ago.\u00a0 My love for his music was undimmed but I had come to the conclusion that old tunes were crowding out the new – at least on my playlists.\u00a0 I decided that, …<\/p>\n