BOWIE, CURATED

FIVE YEARS AFTER THE ICON’S PASSING, A FAN REVIEWS THE POSTHUMOUS RELEASES

- PHIL BRETT

I remember when I first heard that David Bowie had died. I was half-listening to the radio as I prepared for work. I was stunned. I just looked at my partner. To my surprise, a tear ran down my cheek. I had always been rather sniffy about people who got emotional when famous people died, people, they had never met, who had never heard of them, who had lived lives of wealth. But, as we drove to work in silence, there was real grief in the car. Bowie was gone.

Bowie had always been in my life. It was a single of his that introduced me to the power of vinyl. “The Laughing Gnome” (1967) may now be regarded as a cringe-worthy novelty record, but when I was 5, it was magic.

The color and spectacle of glam followed, and Bowie, with Ziggy, hooked me. As my friends matured and got into “serious” music, I stayed with Glam, with Bowie.

Then punk exploded. Much of that so-called serious music was now derided. Bowie wasn’t. He could match the experimentalism of post-punk with his Berlin trilogy. As the RCA advertising slogan so neatly put it: “There’s Old Wave. There’s New Wave. And there’s David Bowie.”

I painted the Aladdin Sane flash on my cupboard doors. Decades later, it’s still there. The ghost of Bowie still has a presence in my childhood bedroom.

Following Let’s Dance (1983), Bowie went through a decline in quality, but I remained loyal when others didn’t. The Buddha of Suburbia OST (1993) signaled a return to form, followed by the seriously under-rated trilogy of Outside (1995), Earthling (1997), and Hours (1999). Then came Heathen in 2003: David Bowie—my David Bowie—was back.