Hot tramp, I love you so

When I was 10, my dad gave me one of his old mixtapes. I rushed to put it in the HiFi I’d recently been given for my birthday, no idea of how epochal this moment was to be. The contents were an eclectic mix from the 60s and 70s. Some I’d heard before, others I hadn’t. The Mamas and Papas, Dionne Warwick, T-Rex, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Beatles.

And David Bowie. A man who should never share a sentence with anyone else.

There were two Bowie songs on that mixtape: Starman and Changes. I remember hearing the first few seconds of Starman. It was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy leaves monochrome Kansas and the world explodes into glorious Technicolor. It was a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me.

I was electrified, awakened, instantly obsessed.

I grabbed the cassette box, quickly counted down to the third song on the first side and saw his name written in my dad’s handwriting. David Bowie. Starman. And there was his name again - on the other side. I played both songs on repeat, bewitched by the music, his voice – and most of all, the words. I hadn’t heard lyrics like these before; poetic and playful, ethereal yet colloquial, an originality that felt so light, so effortless. He was speaking about me, about us:

“And these children that you spit on as they try to change their world, are immune to your consultations, they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.”

Oh! My rebel heart! As an adult, I understand what I wouldn’t have been able to articulate at the age of 10: true authenticity will always shine through. Thirty years later, I’m yet to hear anything that’s made me feel how I felt the first time I heard David Bowie.

The thing is, I’m not much of a fan girl - I’ve never really had a favourite actor, become obsessed with pop stars or read biographies of famous people. I’ve never felt invested in any person that wasn’t a real person in my life. Apart from David Bowie.

He’s been with me for over three decades, his songs the soundtrack to my days, weeks, years. His pictures on my walls, his words etched on metal pencil cases - and somewhere, deep inside me.

As a card-carrying atheist, he might be the closest thing I’ve known to God. His music is the overarching narrative, the voice that’s always there. It connects all my iterations; past, present and future. And even when I haven’t listened to him for a while, it remains, like a tattoo. Indelible.

A few weeks ago, on Bowie’s birthday, I went for a walk. I listened to his version of ‘Mother’, a John Lennon song I’ve always loved. I clenched my fists and tried to block them but the tears came. Apparently too British to roam the streets weeping, I made a beeline for the nearest bench, which just happened to be in a church graveyard (how’s that for dramatic effect) and had a good old cry. The way his voice breaks, the inimitable Bowie vibrato, how he lives every word: “Mother you had me, but I never had you.” It was too much. Can you miss someone you’ve never even met?

I’m not usually one for revisiting the past. I like to leave it where it is - partly because my memory is so hazy but also because the past is icky and uncomfortable: a mortifying moment or failure waiting to pounce around every corner. It often takes someone else reminiscing to ignite recollections, and even then they appear more like tableaux vivant than reanimated realities.

But now time’s gone funny. It’s going fast and slow at the same time, like it’s been bent out of shape and doesn’t know what it is anymore. A ruler that won’t draw a straight line. I like to live in the moment, which is nice but can get you in trouble. But now the present has no motion, no action - it’s been paused. The minutes pass but what can you say of them? I look out of the window at a pigeon perched on an aerial - it hasn’t moved for an hour.

The future isn’t much to look at either; shrouded in mystery, blurred from vision. So that leaves the past, suddenly a more appealing timescape, full of the things we crave. After all, what can be more certain than the past? I find myself with a sudden strange fascination for it: the comfort of nostalgia.

Nothing takes me there more than Bowie. Leaving Newcastle for London at the age of 18 was possibly the most exhilarating moment of my life. For as long as I can remember I’d wanted to move to London. London was where things happened, where minorities weren’t so minor, where nobody cared what colour shoes you were wearing. I took some books, my HiFi, all my CDs and moved into a house in Swiss Cottage with two girls I knew from Newcastle - they were going to Central, I was going to Drama Centre. I promptly painted my bedroom floor red, the walls blue and the ceiling turquoise. We had a second-hand sofa and a landline, a roof terrace and a laundrette underneath. I came downstairs one Sunday with a full face of make-up, wearing leopard print from head to toe and announced I was ready to go to Sainsbury’s. We laughed till we cried. I went to the cinema by myself for the first time to watch a late showing of Taxi Driver. There was a book market in the little square across the road from us every Saturday. This was London! Walking home from a cinema at 2am, floating around markets buying second hand books, the tangible sense that you were becoming a person.

My favourite stall was called Neil’s Books. I presumed the man who presided over it was Neil. Now, in my head he looks like Dylan Moran from Black Books. Obviously. He was old, like 35, with floppy hair and an occasional hat. Browsing his wares one Saturday, my eye was caught by a big paperback book. The cover was the Hunky Dory album cover. I grabbed it and opened it to find it was a book of David Bowie album covers - each one a big square image. It was £7 - a lot when it’s 1999 and you’ve got £20 to last you two weeks. There was no way I wasn’t buying it. I asked Neil if he’d give it to me for £6, he said yes. Good old Neil. I went home and cut every picture out before sticking them on my bright blue wall in two diagonal lines. People would come round for the first time and say ‘Oh, you like David Bowie’. Sometimes I’d wake up to my HiFi alarm playing Wake up you sleepyhead put on some clothes shake up your bed, the slices of morning light illuminating Diamond Dogs or Aladdin Sane. I’d look at them for a while, wondering about nothing in particular.

Now, the pictures I have of him are not cut from a book - and they cost more than £6 for a whole bunch. They sit in frames, in the places they need to be. But they have the same effect.

When I first heard David Bowie, my connection to his music was completely pure, organic. He had me at ‘Hey now now’. Nobody had told me about him, I had no prior knowledge. He was just waiting there on a dusty old mixtape amongst so many other musical greats. I was 10. I knew nothing of, well, anything. My reaction was visceral, instant. I was face to face with the man who changed the world - for me, anyway. When I listen to him now, the connection isn’t just to his music but to my younger self, to those moments of discovery, to the years passed. I wonder if perhaps we need that now more than ever.

As I write this I keep glancing at a small black and white print of Bowie on my desk. He looks like a friend, one who’s taught me about courage and boldness and words. To me, he is a genre in himself, unlike anyone else. He burns the brightest, still after all these years. While I feel an ache at the thought of never hearing a new Bowie song, I’m consoled by the words he left behind. And I always will be.

I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man

Just a mortal with potential of a superman

I'm living on