The first time I ever heard David Bowie …
A crowded Dublin beach … Dollymount … 14 years old … lying on my back on the itchy, sandy towel. After an hour of frenetic football.
A break from the gang now, my gangly legs tired and my shins stinging from the hard plastic Mayco football.
My fluttering eyelids cannot quite close out the shimmering ball of flame overhead and I can feel it reddening my rumbling belly. I’m thinking of those soft ham sandwiches with lashing of butter we’ve brought with us. I rub my tummy and my too-big royal blue nylon swimming togs are almost too hot to touch.
A transistor radio is on nearby, the usual jingles and fruity-voiced DJ pap … just summer noise on a packed beach …
And then …
What’s THAT on the radio?
Sun, sea, air and time itself are no more, as I plug into the ca-ching-ching-ching of an acoustic guitar, then the tum, tum tumping drum, and finally the song itself begins …
Something about a starman, Waiting in the sky …
Tinny and light above the summer chatter and screeching birds … entrancing somehow.
Above the beach, above the earth, above everything else.
My imagination rising to meet it even as my bony body lies there.
Who is that?
The first time I ever saw David Bowie …
Top of the Pops days later … what is this?
This unbelievably skinny man/woman but with a strong, man’s voice and movements in some kind of blue, gold and red spangly spacesuit thing, playing a big blue acoustic guitar …
God, his band are all so skinny too, but it’s him you have to look at … or he’s the one looking at me, smirking right through adolescent, untried me with those laughing, challenging eyes … so confident and far out.
Yes kids, this show was BIG once upon a pop time
As the Top of the Pops kids dance around these exotic creatures in their usual desultory, hyper self-conscious way.
I simply can’t look away. Something strange about those eyes, one darker than the other, or something, thick dyed hair all spiky and standing up…
Oh, my God, is that lipstick, and make-up!!!
Thin face framing subversive grin through sinister tombstone teeth. Leading this spangly guitar-driven wah, wah wah wah wah wonderful song.
A starman.
So many human years ago.
A time when a daydreaming 14-year-old boy believed in myths and legends, long before he learned that myths and legends too can be assembled and even sold.
Yes, David Jones invented and reinvented himself, lived it ten times or more, but David Bowie showed us other possibilities and other worlds.
A star man indeed.
Requiem of a thin man: from Bowie’s posthumous final album Blackstar
A starman who fell to earth, but he lives on in the cosmos, a Blackstar himself now.
Ashes to ashes .…
(C) Enda Shepherd
