Remembering Bowie, Ten Years On

On this day ten years ago, the death of David Bowie - the Ziggy Stardust, Thin White Duke and Aladdin Sane changeling - was announced to the world.

The day before, I had bought a copy of his 1971 Hunky Dory on vinyl as a gift.
"When he passes - God forbid," the vendor said as we exchanged the music for money, "these are going to be worth a fortune."

Passing through Brixton on the bus the next day, standing by his famous mural, messages flooded in from friends and family who knew him as my favourite artist. Standing in the area where he was born - the place that earned him his "Brixton boy" sobriquet - I looked at both the mural and album in disbelief.

David Bowie worked in eras. Never one character for too long, he moved on before any version of himself could settle.

In 1972 he went on Top of the Pops as a bisexual alien rock star and made gender play part of primetime television.

By the mid-70s he had taken soul and funk seriously enough to top the US charts with Young Americans, then stepped away from fame altogether to make three austere, electronic records in Berlin with Brian Eno - albums that would later shape bands from Joy Division to Nine Inch Nails.
In the 90s, when most of his peers were trading on nostalgia, he released Outside and Earthling, folding drum'n'bass and industrial sounds into his work.

Even at the end, Blackstar was an experiment - a jazz-inflected, unsettling record released days before his

At this time ten years ago, my sixteen-year-old self sacked off revising and headed to the overflowing streets of Brixton. Under the Ritzy cinema sign reading "RIP Brixton boy", I picked up the lyrics of intermingling groups singing - Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, Starman - and watched the projections of him on the walls.

No longer here, but somewhere else entirely. A star man waiting in the sky.

Wherever he is, we can take comfort in words from his 1997 Q magazine interview:
"I don't know where I'm going," he said "but I know it won't be boring."