BOWIE WEEK: Tom Artrocker - my life with David Bowie

He was that hippy guy that wrote 'Space Oddity'. That was the total extent of my knowledge of David Bowie until one night at youth club when a trendy young teacher came up to me with an LP in his hand: “Play this” he said, “I think you’ll like it.”

I wasn’t so sure; I was quite happy with the James Brown album I was playing, getting on the good foot and funking down. But I stuck it on anyway; he was a teacher after all.

“It’s just rock’n’roll” was my conclusion and Bowie took his place next to Slade in my mind, in the file marked ‘don’t bother’. The album in question was the newly released Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and to make matters worse it didn’t even have a gatefold sleeve.

But the teacher wasn’t about to give up, the next thing he played me was the first Roxy Music album, and that did the trick. Unlike Ziggy this album contained music the like of which I’d never heard before, and suddenly James Brown seemed lumpen and earthly compared to the heavenly Ladytron with its end of the world oboe. I cut my hair and pushed it back into a quiff in tribute to Ferry and Mackay, not in reference to Bowie, but that didn’t stop me getting my head kicked in for being a ‘poof’. Oh no.

Having discovered the world of Roxy I thought I’d better have another listen to Ziggy, but the teacher had all the Bowie albums, including Space Oddity on the Phillips label and the album before Ziggy – Hunky Dory. And this was the album that hooked me, full of subtlety, art and cleverness, songs about Andy Warhol and The Velvets, Kooks and Life On Mars, it fitted nicely alongside the Roxy album and when it did get rock’n’roll, as on Queen Bitch, it did so with humour and an adrenaline un-matched on Ziggy.



But Ziggy was a sleeper ‘til the Starman appearance on TOTP when the blockheads who’d beat me up for my haircut all dyed theirs red and started wearing make-up. And Bowie exploded. I was lucky
enough to catch the Spiders From Mars tour at Birmingham Town Hall and left unimpressed by Bowie, who left all the high notes to Mick Ronson, for me the real star of the night.

Roxy remained my go to boys, much as I loved Hunky Dory. Aladdin Sane had a few neat tracks like Time, and featured some lovely piano and Pin Ups jumped onto the covers bandwagon created by my guy Bryan Ferry, but not as effectively. And then came Diamond Dogs, a complete hound of an album that gave many prog acts a run for their money in the pretentious stakes.

Young Americans wasn’t going to convert an old funk-head like me; I had the original source material at home. Station To Station pointed the way here and there, but failed to gel as an album, perhaps making more sense to the coke-heads out there but missing this teenager in Birmingham by miles.

Which brings us to 1977, in the January if which I left home and moved to London in search of work, an increasingly rare commodity in the mess created by Heath, Wilson and the Unions.

I moved into a house of art students in Wimbledon and the punk scene I’d read about in the Midlands suddenly came to life in our living room. The ramma-ramma post Ramones machine gun attack punk was already sounding a bit lame by then, and hipsters like my good self were turning to Kraftwerk and Jazz for some intelligence. And then Bowie released Low.



It was the Bowie album I’d been waiting for, created with the help of former Roxy God Eno it contained a nod to the past and a guide to the future, full of wit, Sound and Vision. It completely befuddled the ‘standard’ Bowie fan, I mean, a whole side of instrumentals? From Bowie? But for folks like me, looking to Throbbing Gristle to scare the straights, it was bliss.

And now Bowie did a clever thing, he took all he’d learned from Eno and managed to make a pop album containing one of the greatest anthems of all time without ever losing sight of the art.

I recall a girlfriend had it, even though she had a tin ear, and would play the title track over and over with tears running down her face: “This is about us Tom” she’d say, and she was right, Heroes was about us all in a period of unsettled insecurity brought about by the raging storm clouds of The Soviet Union and the ever present likelihood that the UK would soon sink into some sort of communist chaos. It really was that bad. It wasn’t until 79 that the new strong leader that Bowie had fantasised back in his Station To Station period of coke induced madness put a stop to the downward drift.

Lodger and Scary Monsters continued to defy expectations. I was in pig heaven.

Then came Let’s Dance, and the end of the affair. Bowie moved from RCA to EMI and made a commercial album, his best selling album ever, a piece of trash.

And I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to an entire Bowie album since, which says more about me and my prejudices than it does about Bowie.

These days I worry about him – is he OK? Is he dying? Is he dead? And I slip Always Crashing In the Same Car onto the hi-fi and give thanks for David Bowie.