News
Clare Bowen
12 January 2016
Goodnight Major Tom. A farewell to David Bowie (1947-2016)
Yesterday was dominated by the unexpected news of David Bowie’s death. The spontaneous outpouring that gathered momentum throughout the day across radio, television and social media is testament to the massive impact of one man’s music and its place within media. Radio stations spontaneously dropped schedules to devote airtime to Bowie’s music and reflections on his impact. There aren’t many musicians who can sustain a day-long playlist and stir that kind of response.
I was 13 when some family friends bought me a ‘Best of Bowie’ CD for Christmas. As I was growing up, my family’s collective music taste was quite conservative. Listening to David Bowie opened my ears to a rich and strange new musical world. Bowie is at the fulcrum of so many personal music memories for me.
Working in radio, Bowie’s significance is obvious. He identified radio as his only gateway to music as a boy growing up in South London. In turn, it was radio that bought Bowie to generations of new fans. There’s a tribute to the medium in Starman, when the radio becomes the connecting device between the dancing youth and the eponymous celestial character. It’s a great illustration of music’s power to unify artist and audience.
Leaving aside Bowie’s visual legacy, the impact of his lyrical storytelling alone is extraordinary. Bowie rarely wrote straightforward boy-meets-girl love songs. He created different sorts of fairy stories – about space boys, lovesick Pierrots, ethereal rock gods and lonely runaways. Radio at its simplest is about stories and songs and Bowie nailed them.
It’s interesting that despite being part of the cultural landscape across five decades, the feeling that Bowie’s death evokes isn’t pure nostalgia. He was uniquely timeless and was always forward looking in his output and attitude. In a 2000 interview, Jeremy Paxman is typically dismissive of the internet. Bowie says:
“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society – both good and bad – is unimaginable. I think we are on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
Incredibly, at a time that the internet was used largely for email and Google was just 2 years old, Bowie foresaw the impact it would have as a vessel for content creation, audience engagement and cultural exchange. Bowie knew that evolution was essential for survival and that the internet would be a fundamental part of it – a lesson that is applicable whether you are an artist or you work in art, advertising, radio or media more generally.
The past 24 hours have when filled with a public desire to articulate what David Bowie meant to them. Vigils across the country will have put the end to thousands of dry Januaries. But Bowie was a professional who was working and creating music until the end. He will never be truly missed because his work ensures that he will always be with us. We can all be heroes just for one day. Few of us can manage as many as David Bowie did. His credo was to adapt, evolve and inspire. He famously said on his 50th birthday: “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” Can there be a more affirmative and creative call to arms for all of us?
Now, Let’s dance to the song they’re playing on the radio….
