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Blog Post: Everything Has Changed

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New blog post by Rachel McCarron

Everything Has Changed

Monday January 11th, 2016.

I awoke to a text from Becky.

Becky: You okay, Sal?
Sarah: Yep. Why?
Becky: Haven’t you heard the news?
Sarah: What news?
Becky: About Bowie

Shit. What? I checked the Guardian website to find the top headline: David Bowie dies of cancer age 69.

Sarah: So that’s what Blackstar was all about.

Suddenly it all made sense. I’d been playing the album on repeat since its release on Friday and it had me unsettled. I loved it. It was nothing short of brilliant. But it lacked the fight of his triumphant comeback, The Next Day. And now I knew why. This was the outpouring of a man who knew he was dying when he still had so much to give – the body giving up long before the mind was ready to let go.

Becky: I thought you’d be more devastated.

I suppressed any feelings of devastation beneath the grief I carried from the death of my father not two months earlier. Why the greater urgency about this particular piece of bad news? Just like Becky to be the one to break it to me. A nice little piece of inconsequential drama for her. She was never a fan the way I was.

‘We were lucky he stayed as long as he did,’ I told her later. ‘Given the lifestyle, it’s some miracle he didn’t die much younger.’



I went to work feeling queasy about living in a world without Bowie whilst still adjusting to a world without my dad. But I was just one of millions of mourners. I could not pretend to be special. My existence was as inconsequential to the Starman as his non-existence would be significant to the world he left behind.



But I did have a relationship with him, albeit of the imaginary kind.



My first memory of David Bowie is from just before my sixth birthday when I saw the video for Ashes to Ashes. Disturbing and compelling. I wanted to take Pierrot-Bowie’s hand and walk with him on the beach where the colours were a wonky shade that I couldn’t understand let alone reproduce with my crayons. I never had a fear of clowns growing up.

Around that time, I remember being in church, staring up at the Stations of the Cross – rectangular slabs of pale blue stone with images in relief picked out in gold paint. I thought they were made of Blu Tack. A pious child, I tried to think Holy Thoughts to banish the distracting sounds of Ashes to Ashes playing in my head and the vision of Bowie on the beach with the bulldozers extending his hand for me to join him. It made me feel different, as if life would never be the same again, but I wasn’t quite six years old, and I didn’t understand what any of it meant.

As I gazed at the Third Station, the one nearest my pew, it began to change before my eyes. In Jesus’ place, I saw Pierrot-Bowie and watched him fall. For a moment he fell right out of the picture. I saw the Blu Tack and gold paint in a heap on the floor below, lying like Bowie in the corner of his padded cell in the video. When I looked again, Jesus was back in the picture, falling for the first time, but not the last.



A decade later, I saw him in a nightclub in Blackpool. He looked at me with alien eyes and raised his glass. I raised my own. We drank to our encounter. Then he was gone.

‘You did not see Bowie in Illusions,’ said Becky.

‘I swear it was him. He looked like Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

‘It was just a tourist.’

‘An alien tourist from another planet.’



He’s been in my dreams for most of my life. In the nineties, I lived with him in an attic bedroom like the one in the Look Back in Anger video. We lay together in bed while he asked me how I was feeling and told me everything would be alright. That dreamtime co-habitation lasted years, always with joy and never an argument.

I don’t remember when those recurring dreams drifted away, but even now, he’ll crop up sometimes, always a reassuring presence.



At work on the morning the news broke, I learned that one of my patients had passed away the day before. An expected death. Every possible comfort in place for the end of a long life with family by his side. Like Bowie. But twenty years older.

Iman, Lexi and Duncan Jones would be going through what many families do. Would it make any difference to know that the world mourned with them? Is it any less painful for the family of the man who wasn’t famous? Is it of any consequence that he died on the same day as the Thin White Duke?



Meanwhile, over at my favourite independent record store, the tills were ringing. Kerching! Every time a famous musician dies, Rog of Roger’s Records does a roaring trade on the back catalogue. He’s not mercenary; it’s just a fact. He says it makes him sad that all these people didn’t think to listen to the music during the artist’s lifetime. ‘Ambulance chasers,’ he calls them. The biggest sales are of the most popular albums or greatest hits compilations, but there’s always someone who’ll buy up the whole blacklist and claim to be the biggest fan.

Nine years on, Bowie’s still a big seller, as are Prince, George Michael and Leonard Cohen who followed Ziggy Stardust in the exodus of 2016. There’s been a recent flurry of interest in Kris Kristofferson and Marianne Faithful. Rog is holding out for more big departures before he retires.



But aside from the good fortune of record sellers following Bowie’s demise, 2016 wasn’t a great year for the rest of us, what with the US election and the EU referendum results. And the video cassette recorder going out of production.



‘Everything went wrong after David Bowie left the planet,’ I complain to Becky.

‘It was going wrong long before that,’ she says.

Maybe, but it was good to know he was around.



I saw him again the other night.

Upon the beach, nothing quite right.

The tide too far out while the sea rose all around

Under North Star



Dancing across the water, solarised in pink and blue

sunset came the Pierrot. As if he knew.

Get up my baby, walk tall, shine fine

Here’s the Lodestar



I reached out my hands and looked to the sky;

I believe I’ll believe all the way.

I raised my voice to bravely cry

I’m a Blackstar
---

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