David bowie

Monday

Duncan Fallowell

David Bowie, 1947 – 2016: the only Englishman to have landed on the moon

David Bowie has died at the age of 69. In 1972, Duncan Fallowell was quick to highlight his merits in The Spectator’s pop column: I am writing about David Bowie, and had originally intended to do so by jotting down on pieces of paper all the appropriate epithets and phrases, putting them into a silver top hat, shaking it all about, you know, selecting them at random and typing out the results with a dash between each. It began as follows: Deciduous/carnivorous — sleeve as tattooed prophylactic — erectile lyric, retractile music — car mechanic catamite — henna in the works — lurex (that word contains everything) — butch drag

Steerpike Steerpike

Jan Moir predicts a ch-ch-change to David Bowie’s peace of mind

This morning the nation has gone into Twitter mourning after news broke that David Bowie had passed away following a battle with cancer. As hacks and fans rush out messages of sincere condolences, Jan Moir may well be regretting the timing of a feature she has had published in today’s Mail. In the article — entitled ‘the bitterness of Mrs Bowie’ — Moir speaks to Bowie’s first wife Angie. In the piece, Angie hits back at Bowie in ‘viciously indiscreet style’ — leaving the ever-insightful Jan Moir to note: ‘Dear old Angie has been quiet for years, but her painfully discreet ex-husband can expect some big ch-ch-changes to his peace of

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Please spare us the sob signalling over David Bowie

By 9am this morning, I’d turned down two offers from two newspapers to write about the freshly-dead David Bowie. I told both plainly what I felt: ‘I haven’t been a fan since I was a teenager, when I worshipped him, and I don’t want to add to the chorus of people with nothing to say, but who’ll say it anyway, for a fee.’ However, humour is always the exception to the rule. By 10am I’d posted this (totally true) status on Facebook: ‘To illustrate how odd my voice is (accent and speed) I just spent five minutes waking up my husband Dan and telling him that David Bowie had died. I told him that

Steerpike Steerpike

Listen: newsreader announces death of Cameron instead of Bowie

As the nation goes into mourning over the death of David Bowie today, one radio presenter appeared to be having trouble even taking the news in this morning. In fact when the newsreader Fiona Winchester’s read the news for Heart FM in Scotland during a morning bulletin, she seemed to have a world exclusive on her hands. https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/newsreader-accidentally-announces-death-of-david-cameron-instead-of-david-bowie ‘David Cameron has died,’ the Scottish presenter declared. However, the penny soon began to drop that she had not actually meant to say the Prime Minister’s name. Instead it was another David who had passed away: ‘David Bowie has died after a secret 18-month battle with cancer’ Knowing David Cameron’s reputation north of the border, Mr S

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

David Bowie’s dignified death is a reminder of the sanctity of private life

Everyone is paying tribute to David Bowie’s musical feats, as well they should. Seldom, if ever, has one man made such a massive, beautiful dent on pop music and pop consciousness. A gender-bending, genre-hopping genius, deserving of all the accolades coming his way today. But I want to pay tribute to another of Bowie’s feats, which strikes me as quite extraordinary: the fact that he kept his cancer private, or ‘secret’, as the press insists, for 18 months. This, more than anything, has blown me away today. In this era of too much information, when over-sharing is virtually mandatory, Bowie’s decision to suffer away from the limelight, among those closest

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

The new sexual revolution

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedisasterofthesnp-silliberal-one-partystate/media.mp3″ title=”Jenny McCartney and Paris Lees discuss the new sexual revolution” startat=1710] Listen [/audioplayer]The first thing you need to know about the new sexual revolution isn’t how to do it: it’s how to talk it. Confining yourself to terms such as straight, gay and bisexual — which once, perhaps, covered most of what you thought you needed to know about a person’s orientation — is indicative of adherence to a ‘binary’ view of sexuality. It is fast becoming the equivalent of walking around in plus-fours, peering at human desire through a monocle. These days, people — particularly those in their teens and twenties — are declaring themselves ‘pansexual’, ‘genderfluid’

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

Music for the masses

As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though aware that this is an art form approaching the end of its time. Having had the pleasure of opening the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume history of the Beatles and then fallen into a deep sleep attempting to read it, I feel only a sense of impending doom when presented with yet another vast tome of unimpeachable scholarship into the ephemeral. Peter Doggett, a long-serving toiler at the pop coalface, has produced a whopper here, a near-700-page history of pop’s 125 years, with the accent on the popular.

Monday

William Cook

How Kraftwerk did more to shape modern music than anyone since the Beatles

Normally, few things in life are quite so tedious as listening to a bunch of academics discussing pop music. However this week’s Kraftwerk Konferenz at Aston University may be the chinwag that refutes this rule. Why so? Well, speakers includes former Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flur, plus Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire and Rusty Egan of Visage – remember them? OK, so these real-life pop stars are still outnumbered by a host of earnest academics, delivering lectures with mind-numbing titles like ‘Kraftwerk and the Issue of Post-Human Authenticity’ and ‘Kraftwerk and the Cultural Studies of Cycling’. However if any band can withstand two days of pointy-headed discourse, it must be Kraftwerk.

Wednesday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Frieze Week Diary: Will my marbles be the first to go, or my liver?

This diary first appeared on Apollo Magazine’s website. Monday, 13 October There was something weird in the London air, and it wasn’t the rain. E-mails from PRs were hitting my inbox like the salvo from a battery of Gatling guns, and I’d already bumped into one art critic on the point of nervous collapse. ‘Just. Don’t,’ she shot at me when I asked her about all the launch parties I wasn’t invited to. So here we were: on the verge of Frieze, waiting for the ice to break. By the end of tomorrow, art dealers, PRs and journalists would be running screaming through the streets of central London, from Regent’s Park to the river.

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Paul McCartney telling me to vote No makes me want to vote Yes

‘Scotland, stay with us!’ David Bowie declared back in February. And what Bowie says (or doesn’t, quite – attentive readers will remember that he got Kate Moss to say it for him) others parrot. A few days ago, Sir Paul ‘Macca’ McCartney added his name to an open letter urging the people of Scotland to join the Bowie bandwagon. He was late to the party – the other signatories make up a bizarre (and almost entirely English) cross-section of the British entertainment establishment, from Simon Cowell to David Starkey to Cliff Richard. An impressive love-in, then. But it begs the question: will it actually swing any votes? As a young-ish

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Nicolas Roeg interview: ‘I hate the term “sex scene”’

‘Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!’ said Nicolas Roeg, 85, and still one of the darkest and most innovative of post-war British directors. We were sitting in his study in Notting Hill; nearby in Powis Square is the house Roeg used for his 1968 debut, Performance, starring Mick Jagger as the rock star who entices a gangster (James Fox) into a drug-induced identity crisis. The film was shelved for a year before Warner Brothers dared to release it. ‘The critics didn’t always get it then — but they do seem to now,’ said Roeg. Roeg was born in 1928 in St John’s Wood into a

Friday

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend

When Lara Pulver hit our screens brandishing a whip and wearing little more than a pair of high heels in the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes-influenced drama Sherlock, she became something of a viral hit, with that episode becoming one of the most-watched items on the BBC website. Now she’s back, this time in Da Vinci’s Demons, a big-budget American TV series looking at Da Vinci’s ‘lost years’, and we sent Will Gore along to meet her. Here’s what she had to say on Benedict Cumberbatch, Renaissance rulers and James Bond. From a beautiful woman to beautiful men. This week’s film review stars both Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper – which makes

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

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