Opinion Among the stars

David Bowie

He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature/ Shooting up pie in the sky.” These two lines from “The Bewlay Brothers” are shorthand for the life and career of David Bowie, who passed away on Sunday after an 18-month battle with cancer, having turned 69 last Friday. Born David Robert Jones, Bowie changed his name to distinguish himself from Davy Jones of The Monkees, well in time for his first UK singles top five, “Space Oddity” (1969), which, in the year of the moon landing, told the tale of an abandoned astronaut. The change in name set the template for one of the most influential pop icons of all time, whose signature, apart from his music, was the periodic re-invention of his persona. David Bowie, over the decades, was Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane (or “A lad insane”?), the Thin White Duke. He fell from grace in the late 1980s and 1990s, disappeared after 2006, and returned, re-invented and rejuvenated, in 2013 with The Next Day, critically acclaimed as the “most glorious comeback in pop history”. On his birthday last Friday, Bowie released Blackstar — a return to his often unacknowledged jazz base, saxophone intact, answering sceptics about how an old man finds new inspiration.

Bowie the person, hidden by his personas, was as difficult to fathom as his music was difficult to categorise, having traversed pop, glam rock, art rock, electronic. Long before the “androgynous decade” of the 1980s, Ziggy had embodied questions of sexuality and self on the stage. Called the Picasso of pop, Bowie became an archetype of the postmodern artiste, who understood before most others the necessity of innovation and the persistence of play. He was the music industry’s very own permanent revolution.

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Having looked back at his past in The Next Day and looked into the future in Blackstar, Bowie could say few have the artistic privilege to sign out in his fashion. His “spaceship knows which way to go”, because the “stars are never sleeping”.