With his endless reinvention – from alien androgyne to exiled Berliner – David Bowie provided the soundtrack for a generation. Here veteran music writer and editor Neil Spencer remembers pop’s chameleon
• Read tributes to David Bowie from Blondie, Kate Bush and more
Among the first tributes paid to David Bowie after the announcement of his death last Monday morning was that by David Cameron, who spoke of Bowie as “a genius who provided the soundtrack of our lives”, citing his own days at Eton listening to a friend’s copy of Hunky Dory.
Putting aside the unlikely image of the prime minister rocking out to Queen Bitch, Cameron was shrewd enough to recognise that someone very special had checked out, and that the nation’s collective heart would face the working week sorely bruised. It made quite a contrast to the silence with which Margaret Thatcher greeted the assassination of John Lennon a generation earlier. If Cameron’s remarks show how deeply assimilated into our culture pop has become, Bowie’s death highlights how far pop’s powers of subversion and invention have atrophied. Over the tempestuous decade of his 1970s glory years, Bowie illuminated popular culture in a way unequalled since, and which is unimaginable in the X Factor era.
He was an emaciated, snow-blind wreck, cowering in his Beverly Hills home, in terror of psychic attack from warlocks
He watched as Joy Division and New Order borrowed Low for their template, and the New Romantics borrowed his clothes
Few fans would choose his last 20 years as their favourite chapter, but for Bowie it was his truest era, his 'real life'
Continue reading...by Neil Spencer via Electronic music | The Guardian
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