David Bowie was the first music star I came to appreciate, at about aged 12. A few years later a friend once asked me if he could look through the Cassettes in my car for music to play. There was about a dozen. “They’re all Bowie!” he declared. Not a problem. I’m still listening decades later.

Two days ago I bought Bowie’s album Blackstar on its release on iTunes. Watching the tracks BlackStar and Lazarus was haunting in a way I struggled to define.

Listening again in the car this evening on hearing of his death, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was listening to his funeral songs.

I’m in shock in a way I haven’t been about the death of a musician or other public figure.

For me it’s a personal story of music threaded through almost my whole life. John I’m only Dancing in the early seventies, 1984 at the time I read the Orwell book of the same title, Station to Station which builds and builds and was one of the longest tracks I had at the time,  Heroes blasting in the car so loud you couldn’t think; China Girl  with its New Zealand video and Let’s Dance into the Eighties. Changes forever. There’s so much of his music I’m passionate about, it’s hard to know where to start – these are just off the top of my head, as is the title of this blog, so that’s what it’s titled.

I was there at Western Springs in the largest concert ever held in New Zealand. I’m pretty sure I’ve got all his music. For me none can compare. And he was a funny man. When interviewed on the Holmes show one evening by Susan Wood he was asked how he managed in public without being hassled.  ‘I put on a hat and buy a Greek newspaper, no one bothers me then’ was his reply.

Like the chameleon he was, leading to his death the expectation of which we knew nothing of, he had us all wondering about the music. Even my mother declared yesterday ‘Lazarus, has he run out of ideas?’ (I’ve no idea where she came to learn of Bowie’s new album or even have a passing interest but such is his power). He’s gone now and it’s sad. But we have no rights to not be shocked. A private man who lived his life away from the glare of publicity right to the end. A man without peer. As tragic as it is, he must have wanted Blackstar to speak to us after he was gone. And it does.

Thank you.  I have to borrow his title and say that these have truly been Golden Years of music for me.

Stephen