From Yukio Mishima to George Orwell, Angela Carter, James Baldwin and Viz, the rock icon's top-100 book list has actually managed to make me love him even more
Just when I thought it wasn't possible to love David Bowie any more than I do, I find it is. At my age it's very "heaven", the discovery of another chamber in my heart. Just for him. This might be embarrassing were it not for the fact that this love supreme is shared by so many. This bringer of joy remains a constant in my life, ever since he first crashed into our crowded living room radiating all kinds of possibility. Of what, I wasn't sure, but of an existence so arousing, so alive, so damn clever. Some of it was to do with music but some of it was way beyond music. Maybe it was "art" but, back then, art was just something that girls who weren't good at science did. Maybe it was sex. At the time, the world was obsessed with gender bendery. Did he ever look like a woman? Seriously? No. But he made many boys tart themselves up enough to be desirable. Even to me.
Decades later he pops in and out of the house all the time. Recently he was in the kitchen singing the backing vocals to Lou Reed's Satellite of Love. He is now on the mantelpiece; my youngest made me a birthday card: a picture of me asleep, eyes closed, wonky mouth surrounded by handwritten Bowie lyrics. Cut and pasted.
At 12 she may not know about Burroughs cut-ups or have read Bowie and Burroughs bitching about what a weird colour Warhol was, or riffing on Genet. But when I see Space Oddity on her iPod I think, as ever, the little girls know. She asks me why someone so weird seems so normal as she has only ever seen him on Ellen. I have no answer. I just marvel at his reach. To me, to her, to one of my eldest's boyfriends – who, inspecting my CD collection, told me that I really should do myself a favour and really listen to Ziggy.
And now after the exhibition and the magnificent not-dead-yet album, the man who inspires gives us a reading list: 100 best books and I want to rush into every school and say here you go. Read this. Yukio Mishima, George Orwell, Angela Carter, James Baldwin and above all Viz. It's like "someone passed some bliss among the crowd and we walked back to the road unchained".
Some say he inhales books. Some say it's all show, the trunk of books he lugged to the desert when making the Man Who Fell to Earth.
But I don't mind. I am not obsessed like the fans in Fred Vermorel's immortal Starlust who fixate on Bowie. He appears in their dreams but if he wont befriend they become angry. They want so badly to connect, they will kill him. "Then at last he'll be mine – like that guy who got JFK." No, I am the other way inclined. When we were both in the druggy basement of a New York club in the 80s, I pretended I didn't know who he was. When I saw him years later at an art do, I studiously ignored him because rushing up and saying, "You are life itself to me," seemed a bit inappropriate at a cocktail party while he was next to his stunning wife.
Then, when Brian Eno kindly agreed to come and be interviewed by me for the students at St Martins and rushed in from the studio saying, "I didn't know whether to bring David or not," I mumbled, "I could have coped with that," which was a complete lie.
So perhaps knowing he laughs at Viz and Puckoon makes him a little more human. Perhaps the time-lapse grace of Where Are We Now? makes him more mortal. But when he sings of the Earth only having five years left in Ziggy Stardust, he's already acknowledged mortality in a way I was yet to. In 1972, in a Rolling Stone interview, Bowie told William S Burroughs: "Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything … it's no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite." So he resonates for each generation, his relevance accelerating. Each fan carrying their own personal Bowie, Starman, coked out and lost in Be My Wife, the Thin White Duke, the soul man, the bricoleur showing us synths and Krautrock.
And now, nonchalantly, he chucks us an idea of what to read. Not enough poetry for a poet perhaps. But so much contemporary stuff, new fiction. John Cage, Burgess, Laing. Every book a book of dreams and imagination. And connection, from a guy who got the internet long before most of us.
Only two of the books were written before he was born but then the boy who went to Bromley Tech is an autodidact who gave birth to all of his own incarnations. And so the story goes, the years of being a Bowie fan are their own reward. He opened my eyes, my ears and my mind. He changed me because he changed popular culture. "Pretty soon you are gonna get a little older." Indeed. "Time may change me but I can't trace time." But does anyone else trace time and space quite so brilliantly? Thank you, sir.
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