Waiting in the wings

He would have turned left out of Stansfield Road into Dalyell Road, left again into Pulross Road near the point where it joins up with Ferndale Road sneaking in at an acute angle under the railway, round past the post office, and into the main road.  Perhaps in his pram, initially, looking out and “facing the strange” (although it was said of him that he looked as though he’d been here before), then later, on his own two feet. From the quiet, slightly claustrophobic grey back streets, in just over five minutes, into the heart of Brixton, then as now arguably the most sensual, aurally and visually stimulating, informationally intense nexus anywhere in residential London. Markets, big stores, a war-battered populace struggling to get by in those icy, austerity winters, the clatter of green electric trains echoing through gaps in the buildings (the archetypal sound of south London)  – ricochet, ricochet - from viaducts high up and at unexpected angles; steamed up buses, crowds, humanity, the awareness of central London just a couple of miles away. Life itself.

 © R. Abbott 2016

Could these surroundings in any way have contributed to genius, to ambition, to a sense of mortality and of being an outsider, to an urge to make the most of what might be a tragically truncated life? Can places sometimes influence us to become what we become? Can they tell us what to do, can they reflect back at us who we are or should be? Some students of psychogeography might believe so.

I first heard David Bowie in the summer of 1969, on the radio. It was the same afternoon that a short, violent thunderstorm came and went, and had much the same effect – leaving one feeling … what was that?

By the end of the Sixties one was used to musical oddities, but this one, ‘Space Oddity’, was clearly something else. Apart from being a brilliant and timely song, as the manned Apollo lunar launch approached, after a few listenings one realised that this was in a league of its own. Here was a singer/songwriter who thought differently from most, who was thoroughly at home with wordplay of all kinds and with the most peculiar kinds of synaesthesia and obscure allusion, and who wrote about unconventional subjects in offbeat ways. To start with, the punning title itself, then the amazingly physical sensation of lift-off and bursting through clouds and atmosphere into space; the economy of the lyrics – “the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” and the double meaning of “planet Earth is blue”; the homonymic segue “can you hear me Major Tom, can you hear/here am I floating round my tin can”; and most bizarrely of all, the distortion of the vowel sound in “Major”, its increasing “cockneyfication” simulating Doppler shift. Even Lennon-McCartney rarely managed anything quite as concentratedly, cleverly weird.

Then nothing much for a year or two. I was on a train in Italy, joining a compartment of young Americans. “Hey, you’re British”, they exclaimed. “Do you know David Bowie?” There was some transatlantic difference of opinion about how to pronounce the surname; ambiguity even in something as fundamental as that. Interesting.

So, over more than forty years, we have been treated not just to an amazing  productivity of gorgeous songs, but to all kinds of extramusical and verbal intrigues,  fusions of styles and genres – as well as all the haircuts, the outfits, the different voices, the chameleonic adoption of styles and personas, the teasings about gender and sexuality, the acting roles, the manipulation of celebrity, that wonderful laugh, and all the rest of it. This was a man who, even at the age of 68, could invent funky yodelling (‘Girl Loves Me’) and produce the fabulously enjoyable cacophony that is “’Tis a pity she was a whore”. Genius, surely, if not actually a superman.

And it all began in those echoing streets near the railway lines. Though he never penned a specific anthem to the city he loved, in the way that Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’, there were plenty of references, in ‘The London Boys’, ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, and elsewhere, to central London as an attractant, albeit a fickle one, for a suburban adolescent craving escape and success. While domiciled in Berlin, LA, Switzerland, Mustique, Manhattan or wherever, London was, I suspect, always his psychological base.

Finally, posthumously, “Our Brixton Boy” was claimed back, by a district in some ways unrecognisable since the late Forties but in other ways unchanged. The trains are no longer uniformly green, the railway bridges have been boringly cosmeticised, the markets sell more exotic items, more languages are spoken, the tube has put in an appearance, but for the things that matter, still the days seem the same.

Bowie’s death was shocking, not only because it came so suddenly, so early, so unexpectedly against all the apparent evidence of continuing creativity but because, totally unreasonable though it is to say so, this was a man who, if anyone could manage it, would be – should be - immortal. All the while, though, as I’m sure he knew from an early age, time was waiting in the wings, its trick being David Robert Jones himself … and you and me. All the while, in those south London streets, from Brixton to Beckenham and Bromley and even the much maligned Penge (where you can sleep while dreaming of walking about in New York), time has been waiting. It’s still there, seeking another victim. Meanwhile, the sounds of those magnificent songs in the mind’s ear still haunt the streets, streets for now emptier, sadder, less hopeful.

From what we can guess, Bowie was a religious person, perhaps not conventionally so, but one who took the parable of the talents to the extreme. He set out to do what he was capable of doing, didn’t just do what anyone else can do, made the most of the gifts he had been given, gave immense pleasure to millions along the way through his extraordinarily fluent and glorious creativity and, while having fun with all the poses and images, remained just an ordinary guy from a backstreet. Any one of us. Well, almost ordinary. That is one of the reasons why we admired him and why we feel the loss so intensely now; he appealed to the outsider in us all, to anyone who has ever plodded the city streets wondering what to do with one’s life, asking forlornly what does it all mean? A protean human being onto whom we could all project ourselves.

 
In the end, though, not the air crash he for so long feared, not the loony’s bullets that did for his friend and hero John Lennon, but just a common and cruel disease. As mortal as the rest of us, for “everybody gets got” and, as is so often observed on such occasions; how utterly stupid and tragic and wasteful. His death, after and despite such immense achievements, after such a fascinating journey through life, brings home to us all the inevitability of our own future demise. But we were blessed to have had him around during our lifetimes.