If David Bowie really has returned to form, I’ll cry

I haven’t heard the David Bowie album yet, but the Amazon order is in and Postie has been alerted as to the importance of the delivery. How often these days do any of us feel so excited about an imminent release? The ten-year gap between Bowie albums might have something to do with it, but the 30-year gap between decent Bowie albums is probably more relevant. And all this is down to the excellence of the single. Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet wept the first time he heard ‘Where Are We Now?’, and I was blubbing well into the song’s third or fourth week on Radio 2.

Nostalgia for lost youth isn’t exactly a new theme, but the song’s grandeur and strange fragility seem to speak directly to the slightly melancholy middle-aged male, which is pretty much all of us. Convention would demand that after the second chorus you would get a third, which would edge the song perilously close to anthem territory. But, no, we cut straight to the coda, so after a long, slow build-up and a peak that is over before you know it, the song actually seems to end too quickly. Anyone who sees a parallel with life itself may already have celebrated their 50th birthday.

So our expectations are raised, possibly to be dashed, as so often before. The satirical website The Daily Mash got it spot-on last week. ‘David Bowie fans are readying themselves to pretend that his new album is as good as when he was good,’ they wrote. ‘With reviewers giving the album four stars before they actually listened to it, fans are writing preprepared phrases to explain why they cannot hum any of the songs.’

It has been the lot of the Bowie fan for more years than we care to think about to buy each new album in the pathetic hope that it truly is the ‘return to form’ all reviewers have decreed it to be.