Blog: The David Bowie Impersonation

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I wasn't going to say anything on here about David Bowie dying because GOODNESS KNOWS enough has been said by people much more qualified to do so than me. However, last night I was listening to the new Totally Acousic Podcast (featuring Jenny Lockyer, Matt Tiller and The Indelicates) and realised that the audience participation David Bowie impersonation that Jenny leads in one of her songs was probably the last David Bowie impersonation any of us did while he was alive. That "The David Bowie Impersonation" is SUCH a recognised thing that everybody will quite happily join in with at any time, day or night, is perhaps not THE greatest tribute to his life and art, but it is at least A tribute to it.

On Monday morning when I told The Starman Waiting In My Sky what had happened I'd just thought "Oh dear, how sad" but as the day progressed it hit me what a MAJOR death this was. In terms of MY life his music was right at the start of me knowing there was more to life than Paul McCartney, as Dr N Brown played me his records and Mr C Lawson made me learn the basslines to his songs. I distinctly remember playing "Boys Keep Swinging" with the latter for HOURS in our shared house in Leicester, with me MARVELLING at the fact that I'd never heard this AMAZING music, and wondering what ELSE there might be out there.

More importantly for EVERYONE though was the fact that, in terms of Pioneering British Music That Changed Everything And Was Also Pop Music AND Remained Fun, he was second only to The Beatles, and there was only ONE of him, not four! This THORT was reinforced for me throughout Monday as everything KEPT being about him - almost every post on Twitter and Facebook was people talking about the effect he'd had on them, for hour after hour, and it wasn't until teatime that the naysayers finally got going (usually they start right away). It was an honest response to the removal of somebody who, we suddenly realised, had become a MASSIVE part of what it meant to be alive and British.

With that in mind, maybe doing a David Bowie impersonation isn't such a bad tribute after all? He spent all those years showing us a different, more exciting, funny and WEIRD version of ourseves, surely the least we can do is keep on doing the same?

posted 13/1/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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