In 2012 a friend and I began listening to every Bowie album
from Space Oddity to Scary Monsters. It was the first time I’d played a Bowie
album since 2003. When The Next Day and Blackstar were released we listened to
them immediately.
I wouldn’t describe myself now as a David Bowie fan. I think
I stopped being a fan in 1974 soon after I’d heard Diamond Dogs.
Now five years after Bowie’s death I’ve been revisiting some
of those records and re-living the memories from that fan life. It’s been quite
interesting. Also nostalgic, sentimental and a little inspiring.
Huge congratulations go to Bhanu Kapil who has won the 2020 T. S. Eliot poetry prize.
The collection contains a series of poems in which the narrator, separated from family members and home, addresses her host who has taken the narrator into her home. The collection partly explores the relationship between host and guest. Quickly we realise as we read that we're not just reading about a personal relationship between landlord and tenant but about the relationship between a country of origin and host country. In Kapil's case, India and the United Kingdom. At times, Kapil portrays the host country as a mother figure, and at other times as a predator. She's generous and selfish. The guest/tenant is presented as grateful but also trapped and a victim. She tries to escape and become her own person.
Other poems inhabit the collection. They are poems about home and family. They are poems of loss and longing.
Bhanu Kapil
Here's a reading from How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil
Here's a video from YouTube showing a reading and introduction to Kapil's poetry from Churchill College Cambridge. I think it must have been recorded during the first lockdown between March and July 2020.
But that wasn’t the end. Although I’d dropped Bowie. That
fan life opened up a whole world of music and poetry for me.
However, my old vinal album collection includes Pinups and
Young Americans. I bought Pinups soon after its release on the 3rd
November 1973. I can’t remember when I bought Young Americans.
In 1981 I went to Hatfield Polytechnic. The student in the room
next to me use to play Heroes and Low. She played them a lot and I really began
to enjoy them. I bought them both. I wasn’t a fan. I just liked the music.
My fan life with David Bowie
lasted 21 months. It was intense. I plastered my bedroom walls with Bowie
posters and bought, the LP’s Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, Space Oddity and The
Man Who Sold the World.
At its height, I remember one
afternoon, nervously propping the Aladdin Sane album cover up against the
pillows on my bed and kissing his lips.
It all started on the 3rd
July 1972, I’d just turned 13, the night Bowie performed Starman on Top of the
Pops. And ended on the 24th May 1974, when Diamond Dogs was released.
I didn’t like it.
Will Brooker is both fan of David Bowie and an academic specialising in Cultural Studies. The book contains both aspects of Brooker's life. In 2015 Brooker undertook a yearlong research project reliving one year of Bowie’s life
during his stay in Berlin – 1976 -1979. The book draws together aspects of
Brooker’s own trip to Berlin, recalls Bowie’s own visit, includes some critical
theory analysis of songs and videos from Bowie’s last album Blackstar and
assesses Bowie’s impact on contemporary culture. For example the book considers
Bowie’s contribution and impact to the LGBT community. Actually I think that’s
been quite huge.
I was in our sitting room watching Top of the Pops the night
David Bowie pointed at me. That moment inspired artists like Mark Almond and
Boy George and many others. It also inspired me. Bowie was mesmerising. He seemed
out of this world. I wasn't sure if he was a man or a woman. He seemed to be neither and both.
In doing that he completely broke down the very narrow idea
I had of what it meant to be a man. I
was thirteen and a student, a sort of prisoner at a secondary modern boys
school.
It’s been five years since David Bowie died. Television and
radio have been full of documentaries and programmes about him. I’ve been
listening and watching some of them. At Christmas, I got given a book. Why
Bowie Matters by Will Brooker. Brooker is a Bowie fan and academic and has
written a unique biography and personal memoir of Bowie. I loved it – despite its
many failings. It has enabled me to review my own personal experience of being
a Bowie fan and has inspired me to write a couple of poems. I’m going to share
some of my thoughts here.
This is a pre-historic picture of a purplish pig adorning the walls of a cave hidden in a highland valley on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. They now estimate that it was painted a staggering 45,500 years ago. If that date is correct, the find in Leang Tedongnge cave could represent the earliest known example of figurative art, which is created when painters illustrate objects from the real world rather than simply abstract patterns and designs.
