THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.13 - BOWIEWALLOW PT.1

Episode Date: March 8, 2016

Adam Buxton considers how he and others responded to the death of David Bowie in early 2016. Featuring contributions from BaaadDad (from 1997), Dara O'Kearney, who talks about how the internet brought him closer to Bowie, Kathy Burke who talks about how TV reality show Celebrity Big Brother dealt with Bowie's death and Adam's old friend Dan Richards makes a lo-fi debut on the podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast contains strong, strong language. If you prefer a bleeped version of this podcast, then why don't you jolly well go away and jolly do one your jolly self. Alright? I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton. I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this. That's the plan.

Hey, Adam Buxton here. How are you doing? Happy New Year, everyone. I think technically you can say that up until July the 1st, right? Just out walking through nature with Rosie. She's up ahead. See if she'll come and say hello. Rosie! Rosie! Rosie come and say hello. Rosie! Rosie! Rosie! Come and say hello. Rosie, come and say hello.

Rosie, come and say hello. Rosie! Rosie! Come and say hello. Oh, she's coming to say hello. Run very fast, and then when you arrive, say, sausages. Hey, how you doing? Nice to see you. Can you say sausages? No. Just trying to prove that I am actually walking with a real dog there, rather than talking to an imaginary one, which I have done in my life. So look, welcome to podcast number 13. Now it's been over two months and I've got to say

I don't think much of David Bowie's new phase. I think he should go back to the earlier more alive stuff. Some ironical levity there to cover the fact that like most people I was taken completely by surprise not only by the manner and the timing of David Bowie's exit on January 10th but also by my response to it and let's face it that's really the most important thing isn't But seriously, it blew a hole in me. And into that hole rushed real sadness, actual heartache. And I have to assume that that was partly to do with the fact that my father had just died six weeks earlier. And then after Bowie's death, I really felt as though I'd lost my two dads. I don't know how I'm going to deal with it when Paul Reiser and Greg Evergan die. They were in a TV show called My Two Dads,

which you would only have seen if you're over 35 and your life went wrong. Anyway, I didn't really feel able to join in with the Bowie tributes back in January because I just felt too mental. But I really liked hearing other people's reminiscences, so I felt like I wanted to contribute too. And now, of course, my whole life is fairly Bowie-shaped at the moment. I'm doing live bug Bowie specials. Bowie shows music videos and other related nonsense. I'm doing those around the country here and there at the moment and of course there's this podcast too which I've split into two parts because I thought just one long part would be rather unwieldy. So in this

first brilliantly wieldy part I'll be wallowing through my response to the Zeth of Zavid, and considering what some people saw as a kind of hysterical overreaction to the whole thing. This includes a short contribution from my dad, my late father, Nigel, a.k.a. Bad Dad, who pops up in digital ghost form. You'll also hear from a Bowie fan who got to see another side of his hero. And you will also hear briefly from actor and Big Brother obsessive Kathy Burke about how the worlds of Bowie and reality TV collided in the week of his death. So that's in this first part and when you finish part one part two will be waiting for you and that features a a few insights from the director

of bowie's last two music videos for blackstar and lazarus johan ren. He Skyped me and told me about what it was like working with Bowie in those last months. There's also a rambly Bowie-related conversation with Jonathan Ross, TV and radio personality and fellow Bowie obsessive. Bowie Obsessive. And at the very end of the second part of the podcast, the mighty Gaz Coombs has recorded a brilliant cover of one of my favourite Bowie tracks, exclusively for this podcast. He put it together in his home studio and it's really great. Anyway, thanks very much for checking out this podcast. It's a bit of, it's not a typical one. The rest of the run of podcasts for the next few weeks will be more straightforward conversations, rambly conversations with various people. But you know, I had to deal with the Bowie stuff. So let's deal. Here we go. On the morning of Monday 11th January 2016,

I got up and checked my emails on the toilet while brushing my teeth. I need to multitask, because I'm important. There was a message from a friend that read simply, Adam, just woke up to the news. I'm so sorry for you. So I thought, oh great, now what's happened? Something that's national or international news that has a direct bearing on me personally. So what's that? Someone's secretly filmed me dancing naked to Party Pom Pom and it's gone viral? Well, it was bound to happen. Why do I never draw the curtains?

Or maybe ISIS have kidnapped my mum? Or what? Well, probably someone's died. But who? Oh God, please not any of the Kardashians. So I looked on the BBC news page, and there it was. It was David Bowie. I felt quite matter-of-fact about it at first.

It wasn't a total shock. Rumours about his ill health had been circulating for a while. I just thought, well, what a shame. But what strange timing. Just days after his birthday, and the release of his album Blackstar, as if he'd planned it that way. Isn't that just like him, I thought. Outside the weather was grim, but Rosie needed a walk, and so did I, so we leaned into the incipient rain and trudged up the track behind our house. A car approached, my wife returning from the school run. She pulled up, wound down the window and put out her hand. Oh love, everyone's playing his music on the radio.

All at once I was overwhelmed by the urge to cry. I gave my wife's hand a squeeze and, feeling out of control, marched on up the track and into a field, a bedraggled Rosie shaking her head as she slouched along behind. I often make voice notes on my walks 2016. David Bowie died. And I feel genuinely sad, you know. What is it? Why am I so sad? I don't understand. It's so weird. You know, it's totally mad, isn't it? Why am I so sad? Never even shook hands with the guy.

Saw him in a corridor once at Maida Vale. Stood next to Jonathan Ross and Ricky Gervais. That was my... that was the closest I got. But he was my pal. Right the way through... Since I was about 10, I suppose, when I was at school. Now I'm thinking about, come on old man crying voice, fucking hell. I'm thinking about, about Transformer.

That's the thing, it's like when Lou Reed died, I was not crying. I think it's because I did love Bowie personally, you know. I just thought he seemed like a nice man. And I did love him in a romantic way as a youngster. I thought he was so

beautiful and exotic and lovely looking. He wasn't all bristly and sporty. Fuck all that. He was like a lovely hybrid. Just to be clear, I've always loved Lou Reed's music and I felt very sad when he died. And I've also come to respect Sport and Bristles. I don't want a big fight with the Sport and Bristle fraternity.

But I've never had an emotional connection to those things the way I did with Zavid. And as that day in January wore on, it became very clear that, of course, I wasn't the only one who felt that way. wore on, it became very clear that, of course, I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Sean Keaveney on his six-music radio show sometimes sounded like he was struggling to keep it together. Messages of love for Bowie poured in throughout his programme and Lauren Laverne's thereafter. I went to try and start some work, but I got distracted by Twitter. It was a grief-o-rama, the kind of thing that would have baffled my dad. He wasn't a fan of public displays of emotion, especially in the media. I remember the evening of the Paris attacks in October 2015. I went to check on my dad and found him watching BBC News 24 and looking

glum. I asked him what he thought about it all, and he replied, I think the coverage is as bad or possibly worse than the attacks themselves. I told him he should tweet that and see how it would go down, but he decided against it, as he'd forgotten how to use Twitter. He felt that the facts of this kind of tragedy should be presented dispassionately and that individuals should be allowed to judge for themselves how to feel about them. I agree with him about that. He also felt that the media increasingly encourages public displays of emotion at times of tragedy and he found that distasteful. He was from a generation that valued keeping it all tucked in over letting it all hang out.

That was also his policy on shirts and willies. Back on the morning of Monday the 11th of January, radio and TV news programmes began getting in touch with me. Desperate to pad out reports on Bowie's death and aware that I was a mega-fan, they were asking if I would speak about his influence and say things like, he made it okay to be different, he was the chameleon of pop, he was always on the cutting edge. But I didn't feel like going anywhere. Perhaps I'll say something on Twitter, I thought, especially as a lot of people were sending me sympathetic messages and sharing links to footage of Bowie in his prime that were making me more and more emotional. What to say, though? I don't want to be too soppy, but I don't want to be glib.

Does the world really need another tribute, though? But I reasoned I was taking comfort from other people's messages, so perhaps someone might take comfort from mine. With eyes brimming with tears, I carefully composed a heartfelt tweet. Before pressing send, I stared at it for a while, considering whether it could possibly be interpreted as racist, sexist, transphobic or an expression of male privilege. I really couldn't see how it would, so, with a click, I gifted it to the grieving masses. Here's what it said.

Isn't life tough? Bowie always made it better, and will continue to do so long after we've shuffled off. I absolutely love you, David. Almost immediately, I began to regret the tweet's cloying aspect, and could imagine it being read in an entirely different way. And what a sad day it is. Keep those sad messages coming in.

We've got one here from Adam Buxton in Norwich, who says, Isn't life tough? Bowie always made it better, and will continue to do so long after we've shuffled off. I absolutely love you, Zavid. He's misspelt David there, but never mind. Here is the chameleon of pop himself

with Absolute Beginners Actually, if someone had read it out like that I would have been pleased That was very moving But the overwhelming outpouring of Bowie-related grief and the attendant media hagiography was too much for some And later in the afternoon

I started to see messages from people who found the whole thing insufferably insincere, self-indulgent or just annoying. Times newspaper columnist Camilla Long tweeted, So many people quotes crying or quotes in bits over Bowie, and then in caps she writes, in bits over Bowie, and then in caps she writes, Fuck you! You are not ten, you are an adult. Man the fuck up and say something interesting. Admittedly, that's what I say to my 11 and 13 year old sons when they start complaining about having to switch the computer off, but I don't know if I would say that to someone who just expressed sadness over a person's death, even if I doubted their sincerity,

or believed that they were merely responding to what Camilla Long, quoting Julie Birchall, calls sob-signalling. Regrettably, if unsurprisingly, Camilla Long then spent the next few days reaping the crazy online whirlwind as angry mourners, hurt by her comments, did their best to hurt her back. On the plus side, for her, she was able to get a Times column out of the experience, entitled It's the freakiest show as a lynch mob of Bowie blubberers chases me online. Many of the comments beneath the article are typical of the kind of opinions I heard expressed in the weeks following Bowie's death by people fed up with all the hysteria. Here's one that says,

Unfortunately, these days, many people feel the need to show the world how upset-slash-indignant-slash-virtuous they are as a way of making themselves feel good. Another says, I liked Bowie's music, but let us remember he was just a singer and at times someone pretending to be someone else, open brackets, i.e. actor, close brackets, for which he was handsomely paid. He did not, as far as I'm aware, change society for the good. I know many people

who devote their time to help others for no remuneration. Those are the people I shall shed a tear for when they die. And finally, here's another comment from a fellow who says, Possibly my favourite live concert of all time is Bowie's much-derided Glass Spiders show in Sydney in 1987. But he's not the soundtrack to my life. My children were, and still are, as too are the other people, other music, movies, TV shows, and all other things that fill your senses as you progress through the years. It's great to really admire someone, and I was certainly saddened by his passing, brackets, and yet another reminder of my own mortality, close brackets, but to say that

someone whom you've probably never met was your whole life is just melodramatic self-indulgent tosh now with that last one i'm more or less tuned out after he said his favorite live concert of all time was glass spider which i also saw at wembley stadium in 1987 but don't think i enjoyed it nearly as much as he did but i do kind of know what he's going on about, and I remember feeling something similar when Princess Diana died. I was making the Adam and Jo show for Channel 4 at the time, and we had drafted in my dad, Bad Dad, to review a selection of chart singles.

Elton John's Candle in the Wind, re-recorded in tribute to Diana as Goodbye England's Rose, had become the fastest-selling single of all time up to that point. And for my dad, that summed up everything that was wrong with how many people had reacted to Diana's death, as he makes clear in this outtake from one of his Adam and Joe show reviews in 1997. The popular reaction to it was an undignified, unrestrained gut reaction to something which stirred the emotions. sorrow or the expressions of regret were not expressed with any dignity, with any profundity, but were expressed with monumental superficiality as witness of the high priest of pop, John Elton, in Westminster Abbey. It was all part of a pop whole and ironically a hole which was stage managed produced by the

very forces which we're told contributed to the tragedy itself which is to say the tabloid press and with the tabloid press all those who then react to the tabloid press the comment those who then react to the tabloid press, the commentators, the television presenters, the producers of the television programmes, and the whole thing snowballs, the whole thing becomes a cascade of cheap sentiment. You see, it's all John Elton's fault, isn't it? Anyway, suddenly, there I was, nearly 20 years after Diana's death, a middle-aged Bowie blubberer surfing the cascade of cheap sentiment,

along with every media outlet that wheeled in pundits to trot out the same soundbites about Bowie's genius, every magazine that rushed out Bowie specials, and every high street store that blasted out Bowie's biggest hits. But honestly, it didn't bother me. After all, you wouldn't do very well as a Bowie fan if you were upset by things that were occasionally crass. The trick that week was to concentrate on what was most interesting about him, which, for me, tended to be the most obscure stuff. For this, Twitter and YouTube came brilliantly into their own, and I followed link after link to clips I'd never seen before. Bowie in 1979, goofing around

with Kenny Everett after a performance of Boys Keep Swinging. Or in 77, miming to the hero's instrumental track Sense of Doubt for an Italian arts programme, or in 1983, politely admonishing an MTV presenter for marginalising black artists on their channel. Perhaps most satisfying for me were some clips from a 1997 documentary called Inspirations by Michael Apted, in which several artists, including Bowie, discuss their creative process. In one section, David demonstrates a piece of software he's created with a friend which scrambles words and phrases to emulate the William Burroughs

text cut-up technique that he showed off in the documentary Cracked Actor in 1974. He's named the computer programme The Verbiciser. With a combination of bluff and shyness, Bowie shows us how he uses the verbosizer to write lyrics and gamely tries singing the resulting word bollocks over improvised avant-garde rock jazz. You may not have witnessed the birth of a classic Bowie song, but you have witnessed an artist still unafraid to let experimentation lead the way, even if that way is down a little cul-de-sac behind a jazz club where they keep

the bins and all the jazz people do their wee-wees. In those days after Bowie's death, I also found myself reading dozens of blog posts which, like most of the newspapers that week, featured personal anecdotes about how people's lives had been affected by Bowie. British satirical magazine Private Eye ran the headline, Bowie made it possible for all of us to be completely different, says everyone. Then beneath, it listed the contents of an imagined 94-page tribute special that included stories on the Bowie I knew, the Bowie who knew me, the Bowie who I didn't know, the Bowie who didn't know me but would have liked me if he did, It was a good swipe from Private Eye, but like Camilla Long, it seemed to be dismissing all the anecdote sharing as self-serving and superficial.

No doubt some of it was, but with a career as long and varied as Bowie's had been, he ended up being important to a lot of people in all kinds of different ways over the years. Now he was suddenly gone, those people reached out to each other to share stories that offered surprising perspectives on someone that us fans felt we knew, even though of course we really didn't. Of all the personal stories flying around that week, the one that cheered me up the most was on a blog by a competitive ultra-marathon runner turned professional poker player called Dara Okani. He was nice enough to respond when I asked if he'd talk to me about Bowie for this podcast,

and on a Skype call from his home in Dublin, he told me about his relationship with David. I became a boy fan when I was 18, which was the year I left school and left my parents home, which I think is a big year for most people. It's kind of a, you know, that's one of the summers that you remember. And that summer was the summer that I got into Bowie's music. I'd heard Let's Dance on the radio, seen the video on TV, went and bought the records, loved the album, went back to the record store, found to my surprise that he actually had

all these other records already what was it like being a let's dance fan and and drilling back into that older stuff because it's so different and so strange yeah tremendous shock uh i mean even like even visually i remember being in the record store looking at all the records and going like this can't be the same person this just doesn't even look like the same person you know you've got blonde david bowie in a suit or shadow boxing on the cover of let's dance and then you you've got ziggy stardust um or diamond dogs and all the different looks and then i bought the albums one by one and varying degrees my reaction to them all was almost the same it was like i would start listening to it and going what on earth is this It doesn't even sound like music to me. And then I'd listen to it for two weeks and end up loving it. But that was basically how I spent the summer, just sort of catching up with all of

his stuff. So by the end of the summer, I was a pretty big boy fan. That continued on to the next few years. And it kind of went past the music to the point where anything that was written about him, I was interested in reading. You know, this is is pre-internet so it was actually harder to get stuff back then so you know you had to buy physical books magazines or whatever but the more I read about him the more intrigued I got because it wasn't just that you know I thought his music was the best but his whole approach just seemed so different from the other stuff that was around so I became a pretty uh obsessive fan over the next 10 years or so. So right the way through the 80s and on into the 90s, that would be.

Yeah. Yeah. So then the early 90s come. And I guess the next big cultural development was the arrival of the Internet. And the early days of the Internet was sort of it was different from what it is now in the sense that there were. Well, first of all, there were far less people online. Yeah, there were only it was different from what it is now uh in the sense that there were well first of all there were far less people online um yeah there were only it was just weirdos exactly no pretty much weirdos and you know people who worked in in technology yes tech weirdos rather than um the kind of weirdos you get nowadays exactly exactly and like it was pre-social networks pre all that stuff so the way it kind of sprung up was there was email

where you could email people. There was use net groups, which was this weird sort of news group network where people set up different news groups to reflect their interests. So, for example, there was an alt.fan.davidbowie, and that was the main point where people spoke about Bowie on the internet at the time.

And then gradually over time, websites popped up as well. So by this time, I had read pretty much everything that had been written on Bowie, or at least everything that I could find. So I retained a lot of information about him. So it kind of went from me reading, seeing what other people were writing to somebody would ask a question. I would have read the answer somewhere so i'd give the answer and that was kind of how it proceeded i was you know somebody who answered questions about bowie online right so you became a kind of star pupil in the bowie discussion groups exactly yeah it's funny to think of it now because you know everybody's

on the internet now but back then again it was a much smaller subset and and people were drawn to different things there were people like me who were basically train spotters i'd say i guess you'd almost say who were looking for information or sharing information then there were other people who were you know playing around and impersonating celebrities there were people who were early incarnations of trolls exactly the whole troll thing yeah so yeah like a lot of my social life started revolving around interactions with fans then. And the fan site started Teenage Wildlife and Boy Wonder World and a few other fan sites. And there was a lot of interaction there as well. personally and interact with them, I was still going to boy concerts whenever he toured, buying all the albums and all that stuff.

And then in 98, I believe, around the middle of 98, he launched what he called BowieNet, which was basically his own Internet service provider where fans paid a subscription fee and they got their internet access to his provider um now i was actually quite critical of that at the time i never understood why he did it because was that before or after he did his bowie bonds and things like that it was after he had done his bowie bonds but boy bonds was sort of mid 90s uh this was a separate thing and the way i saw it at the time um which looking back was a little unfair but i basically I saw it at the time which looking back was a little unfair but I basically just saw it oh he's just turning his his fan site into a pay site and charging people for access right cash grab as my son would say yeah yeah so I was really quite vocal in my

criticism about this then I started getting these emails from somebody speaking from Bowie's perspective, more or less along the lines of, well, what are your actual problems with Bowie now? Why are you so exercised over the issue? Because you were voicing your disapproval on the site itself, were you? Not on the actual site, because I never actually joined the site, but on the other fan sites that were around at the time. Right. You were just saying, what the hell's bowie doing with this what's the point yeah and it was and and there was a very active debate going on i mean i wasn't the only voice there were lots of people who you know also had the view yeah this is just a cash grab and then other fans are arguing no no this is different this is you know bowie providing something for his fans and um there was there was basically like a

large spit uh in in the fan in the online fans at least and a very active debate going on and i would have been probably the most vocal person on the uh the anti-bowie net side and so what was this person how were they um explaining the the whole bowie net thing what was their argument for it? Their argument was that it wasn't just a fan site that was charging money, that there was another dimension to it. Essentially, the argument that was presented was that BowieNet was kind of what

the social media became afterwards, social networks like Facebook. It was providing a place where people could interact, a platform for all of that. And that cost money, so therefore had to be charged for. And that was the argument that was presented, that it wasn't just purely a fan site. Did you have a suspicion at that point that you may be talking to Bowie himself? My initial reaction was, no, this isn't Bowie.

This is some very clever impersonator. Because people had written to me before in the past and and either said i'm david boy or tried to imply that they were david boy and and they were always pretty bad impersonators and so my initial reaction to the emails was oh this is just a very clever impersonator it sounds like boy it's expressing views that you would expect boy to express in the way that you would expect him to express them. But obviously it can't be Bowie himself, because why would he be, you know, getting involved in this stuff? Yeah, he's got a life. Exactly.

So but then it kind of reached a point where the discussions were were so intensive. I thought, well, actually, maybe, maybe you know there's some possibility that this is actually bowie or perhaps somebody in his camp yeah uh who who understands his viewpoint and uh wants to see what the what the counterpoint to that is um probably like a really big moment for me was um i think late 99 he did a famous interview with jeremy paxman on bbc um tv and he spoke extensively about the internet in that um interview and all the points he made were points that this person had made to me or that we'd made together in the course of our email correspondence and there were some of

it was literally like word for word line for line so that that was the point which i thought oh shit this might actually be boring now and did you say was your next message then um like hey is this actually you or did you never actually call him out explicitly basically i sent him a message saying i saw the Paxman interview and I'm actually starting to think now this might be you. You know, one of the things we were talking about was how quickly we thought the internet would take off because at that time, even in the late 90s,

the numbers were still quite small. Most people weren't on the internet. And the question was, you know, how long was it going to take to the point where we're at now, where pretty much everybody's on the internet, even grannies are on Facebook. And at the time, a lot of the technological experts were saying, oh, it's going to take 50 years, it's going to take 100 years, or it might never happen. It'll just be a kind of thing that only a certain age group and demographic does.

And I made the point to him that technology experts always underestimate how fast technology catches on because they're just looking at the early picture. And early adopters tend to be a very small subset of the overall population. And they don't understand that it can just suddenly explode from that base to a point where almost everybody is involved. And the example I used was the first president of the telephone company in the States. He gave a speech in the early days of telephone, and he made a very bold prediction that within 20 years, every town in America would have a telephone. And that was as big as he could see the market ever getting.

You know, every town would have one telephone. So my view was the internet was going to be something similar. There would be a certain sort of critical mass point where it would just suddenly explode. Here is Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman talking to Bowie about the internet in 1999. You don't think that some of the claims being made for it are hugely exaggerated?

I mean, when the telephone was invented, people made amazing claims for it. I know, the president at the time time when it was first invented he was outrageous He said he foresaw the day in the future when every town in America would have a telephone Now that what how dare he claim like that absolute bullshit No, you see I don't I don't I don't agree. I don't agree I think the internet I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society,

both good and bad, is unimaginable. The fan in you must have just been exploding. Your mind must have just been melting, wasn't it? Oh, totally. No, it was a huge thing. I mean, I was a massive fan, I mean, at the end of the day, and that was one aspect. But the other thing was like,

because I had never assumed that I was actually talking to Bowie, the correspondence had a certain character where, you know, I was quite cheeky and in some cases derisive because I didn't think I was dealing with Bowie. I thought I was dealing with an impersonator. So it certainly changed the character of the communication afterwards.

Did it? And do you think that he noticed that and that he sort of thought, hey, hello, why have you gone all respectful? Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure he did. Because he probably liked it that someone was being cheeky with him. Possibly, yeah. I mean, I still try to be cheeky on occasion, but it's very difficult when you think it is actually David Bowie.

Of course. I'm sure he did notice it. The weird thing is he was always extremely respectful. I mean, I think that was just his personality. He was a naturally respectful person. So he never rose to the bait? He never got touchy with you? No, that was quite a remarkable thing

because when I'm arguing a point, I could argue the point very vehemently and sometimes quite personally. But yeah, like you say, he never really rose to the bait. Wow, that is impressive, isn't it? I mean, I wonder if he remained that way throughout his remaining years on the on the Internet, because, boy, that's not easy to do,

is it? No, it's not. No, it's not. It seemed to me like he was genuinely massively fascinated by the Internet from, let's say, the years of 95 to 2003, 2004. And he spent a lot of time on there when he wasn't working on other stuff. And clearly it was the kind of thing that he sort of went on for a few hours every day. But I'm pretty sure he's interested way in over time. And certainly after he had his heart attack in 2004, it seemed like he just sort of lost interest

to a large degree in the internet. So after the Paxman interview, were you suddenly thinking, oh my God, I can ask him anything I want? Or were you careful? There was sort of a period of that where I probably asked him too many questions about his own work, thinking, oh, this is brilliant, I can ask him anything. I quickly got a sense that he wasn't that interested in that sort of stuff right but do you remember the kind of things you were asking him yeah just different aspects of his career you know what was the inspiration for this or you know what's the link between this and this uh is this a reference to this writer you know all very

trained spotty so i like i don't think that was very interesting to him and that and that's perfectly understandable the last thing he wants is is 100 questions on songs he wrote 25 years ago so I quickly got a sense that wasn't very interesting to him so you know I would still ask him occasional questions when when I was intrigued he seemed much more keen to talk about any work that was current let's say rather than something which was from the 70s. He was generally happy to talk about his inspirations, what he was reading at the time, what he was into, what he was watching. I was fortunate in that, like, my favorite writer is Samuel Beckett. And that was one of his favorite authors as well. So we were able to talk quite a lot about that.

So there were certain areas where we had sort of commonalities of interest. And then there were other things that he would recommend. I'd go back and watch old English comedians. So I'd go off and buy the video and watch it. And then we'd talk about that. What kind of things did he recommend? Do you remember? I remember the first thing he ever recommended was Tony Hancock, a thing called The Blood Donor, which is actually, it's so old, it's before even I was born.

That's how old it was. That's quite a famous, I mean, that's a classic. Yeah, well, I'd never heard of it. I mean, this is how clueless I was on. That's quite a famous, I mean, that's a classic. Yeah, well, I'd never heard of it. I mean, this is how clueless I was on classic British comedy. If that had been me, I would have been watching it thinking, oh Jesus, I hope I like this so I can infuse about it. Yeah, I mean, I think our senses

of humour were very similar. I don't remember him ever recommending anything to where I, and like humour is so personal because even now, like I have friends who say like, oh, you have to watch this. And then I watch and I go like I didn't laugh once what on earth do they see in this yeah but that but that never happened with him um so yeah I think our senses of humor aligned reasonably well and it was mostly sort of classic British comedy let's say that he liked um you know Tony Hancock, Pete and Dud,

Goon Show, all that sort of stuff. Yes, of course, because he and... I read that he and Eno would do the Pete and Dud voices when they would be in the studio. Yeah, I think they were probably his favourites. There were a lot of references to that. What about TV stuff? Was he ever... Would you talk about TV as well? Yeah, yeah, we talked quite a lot about tv um i actually remember

mentioning your show to him and he had seen it oh the adam and joe show the adam and joe show yeah from what i remember one of you guys used to get your dad on that's right that was my dad nigel that was your dad yeah well yeah that was the part he predictorily liked i think he uh he used to get a kick out of that uh yeah so like he watched quite a bit of tv um but he read an incredible amount i mean he always seemed to be reading three or four books and i couldn't really keep up with him on that front to be honest he'd say like you should read this and then three days later you should read that and it was like if i read all this stuff i wouldn't have time to do anything else. So I think he was a voracious reader himself.

I said before that he provided me with a kind of roadmap, certainly musically, that he would go back and investigate other bits of music, either because of people that he'd worked with or people that he'd name checked. And almost invariably, there was something intriguing and likable about those things i mean very few times i think have i followed up on something that he's talked about and got nothing from it you know yeah i agree completely yeah no he definitely steers marked our cards really well and all that stuff um i mean there's a lot of my favorite artists now that um i really got into because he had essentially approved them what kind of people uh you know lou reed iggy pop velvet underground and then moving forward uh arcade fire you know through all phases of his career it seemed like he was uh craftwork in the 70s he was always

looking around and and making judgments and recommendations yes Yes, that's right. And it was so exciting as well when my interests would join up with his. Like when we were at school, me and Joe were big fans of Thomas Dolby. And, you know, I was aware of Thomas Dolby because he was in the charts. She blinded me with science and wind power and all this kind of stuff. But me and Joe got seriously into his albums. Golden Age of Wireless and The Flat Earth especially were big ones for us that we very much unironically loved. And then when Bowie did Live Aid,

there was Thomas Dolby on keyboards. And of course, Thomas Dolby produced Prefab Sprout and we also loved them very much. And so it was like, oh my God, different sections of our world were suddenly connecting and it was so exciting and yeah i think that was one of the great things about boy you didn't feel he was just a pop star pushing his own catalog it seemed like he had this sort of cultural world of which he was a part but not all of it um and there were all these other

artists that he that he recommended recommended and was into as well. And the whole culture and milieu, as it were, was interesting. Did you tip him off to any amazing stuff and say, hey, look, David, in future, when you find something very funny, you can just say LOL. And it means that you're laughing out loud

and you've saved yourself a huge amount of time yeah this is like when we whenever we discuss this or anything this this was the kind of thing that he was much better at than i was i would just know the technology and i would say well this is going to happen or you know we're going to move away from email and we're going to move move towards this weird new thing called social networks where people are going to live their life out on the screen in a different format because the access speeds are going to get so much faster that suddenly it's going to be all about pictures and videos rather than you know text um and he was really good at anticipating this is what people are going to use the internet for and this is how it's going to affect the

culture and music is going to become less important because people are going to be far more focused on the internet uh one of the things i remember he said which was striking to me was he said that like the reason he went into music in the first place was that he grew up in an era where music was central to the cultural conversation music was pretty much it if you made it as a music star you were the biggest star that there was and by the noughties he didn't feel that that was the case anymore he thought that music was sort of moving backwards towards a being almost a cultural backwater and i remember him saying that like if i was starting now meaning the noughties i don't think i would go into music i think i would go i you know i'd be an internet entrepreneur or something i'd be a professional troll um that's amazing and so how did your relationship progress then?

Did it progress at all when you were communicating online? And how did it conclude? Did you converse with him right up until his death? Yeah, I mean, it went from, let's say, I guess, late 99 after the Paxman interview to where I decided, yeah, this is this is almost certainly a boy that I'm talking to now. And that that changed the character of it. But it continued on very intensely. It kind of moved from us talking about the Internet mostly to us just talking about things that we were interested in and stayed fairly intense up until, I guess, the reality tour, which was 2003.

So for the reality tour, he came to Dublin to the Point Theatre to play two concerts, and they were going to be filmed for the concert DVD, which turned out to be his last ever live album slash DVD. So that was obviously a big deal for his Irish fans. They knew that the concerts were going to be filmed. And by then, his popularity had sort of picked up again after sort of a rocky spell in the 90s. He'd come back with Heed,

and that was a very well-received album at the time. And so the concert sold out pretty quickly, let's say. Is that your diamond dog in the background? It is indeed, yeah. There's somebody she doesn't like at the door, I guess. So, yeah, so he came to play two concerts. They sold out really quickly. Now, I was still able to get tickets because by then, like, I knew so many fans

and I knew the people that I didn't really think it was going to be a problem. But he sent me an email saying, oh, I see that the two shows sold out in Dublin instantly. So so I put your name on the guest list. So I thought, OK, well, that's brilliant. I mean, even though I have two tickets, I don't need to tell him that. Yeah. Any freebie is good. And then I started having doubts again, thinking, well, maybe this is the punchline of the joke five years on now. This is where I go along on the night and say, oh, I'm on the guest list. And they look at me dumbly and go like, no, you're not.

And whatever troll I've been talking to for the last five years finally gets the payoff. So I thought, OK, well, what I'll do is I'll keep my two tickets anyway. I'll go up. I'll try and see if I am on the guest list. And if I'm not, I'll walk away with my tail between my legs and I'll come back later and use the tickets and loads of fans were looking for tickets and contacting me saying can you get us tickets and I was saying well no like they're sold out so there's nothing we can do but there were there was one guy in particular who really really wanted to go he'd never seen Bowie kind of felt that this might be Bowie's last tour um and really really wanted to go so I thought okay well I'll give him my tickets if i can get in

for free so i arranged to meet him then i went off to the point to uh to see if i was on the guest list uh dealt with some very unsympathetic bouncers who um were looking at me going like like are you sure you're on the guest list why do you think you're on the guest list and then they go off they get the guest list and they find out that, yeah, there is actually a very short guest list and I'm on it. Oh, what a moment. Yeah, that was the moment of relief.

Yeah, I'm not utterly deluded here. So yeah, so I remember running back, giving the two guys the tickets and coming back and getting in and watching the concert with my son. And it was an amazing concert. You watched it with your son? Yeah.

Wow. That's great. And did he play lots of good stuff or was it one of those ones where he said, right, I'm just going to play B-sides from my new album? No, it was really good. But then he went through that phase in the 90s where he was just doing the current stuff and very obscure all the stuff because he had he had kind of announced the retirement of the the hits let's say yes because he did the sound and vision on the sound and vision tour precisely so after i think he kind of thought at the time sound and vision was going to be his last tour anyway so i think he thought well yeah i'll do all the hits and he announced that he was never going to play the hits again and that sort of i guess became a selling point for that tour

that you know people would go along for one last time and see the hits so lo and behold a few years later he's touring again um and he's playing obviously his current stuff but he has to play some other stuff as well so he started picking non-hits let's say um so he started doing songs like quicksand which he hadn't done on the hits tour and yeah some some more obscure um older stuff but by the time he got around to reality he kind of gone past that and he was now playing rebel rebel and ziggy stardust and you know all all the crowd pleasers um and and you know that's that that made for a much better concert. And it was really like he was doing really long shows on those tours, like three hours, three and a half hours.

But certainly at that time, he was clearly very happy with life, very happy with to be performing. And the concerts were amazing. And yet that cloud had only bloomed for minutes when I looked up it vanished on the air. That was Dara Okani talking to me there and I'll post a link

to the original piece that he wrote on his blog on my website. And I'll also try and post links to a few other bits and pieces that I've referred to in this podcast as well. Did you notice, incidentally, that when Dara asked whose dad it was that used to be on the Adam and Joe show, I said, yes, that was my dad. Listen. From what I remember, one of you guys used to get your dad on. That's right. That was my dad, Nigel.

That was your dad. Yeah, that was the part he predictorily liked. I think he used to get a kick out of that. Yeah. That was really just an excuse to remind you of the fact that Bowie used to watch the Adam and Joe show. It's a good possibility that he thought it was all terrible, except for my dad, but hey, he saw it, right?

Now, before we conclude part one of this two-part Bowie wallow, let's hear from my guest on next week's podcast, actor, writer and theatre director Kathy Burke. Kathy loves the reality TV show Big Brother and was watching Channel 5's Celebrity Big Brother the week that Bowie died. One of the guests in the house, along with the usual selection of reality stars and variously damaged celebrities, was Bowie's former wife, Angela. Kathy, who's never missed an episode of Big Brother, was transfixed. Andy, where's my 15 minutes? Well, so what happens is, is Angie Bowie is in the house, in the Big Brother house, and she has been told privately that David Bowie has passed away the night before.

Meanwhile, one of the other house residents is David Guest. David Guest is a house resident and David Guest is poorly. So David Guest has been advised by Big Brother to go back to bed. So he does. Angie Bowie calls two of the guys into the diary room to tell them the news of the death of David Bowie. And she's going to need a little bit of looking after. But she doesn't want anybody else to know.

So they're fine. They're absolutely... Did the producers tell her not to tell anyone else in the house? No. I think that was her decision. Right. Was that she just wanted to tell two people so that she could process it privately and then would maybe reveal later on. Anyway, in the meantime, there's a woman in there,

a black woman called Tiffany, who I didn't know who she was. No, she's a New Yorker. She's in a reality show. She's in a reality show over there, you see. Great, great girl. I think she's wonderful. Magic. But anyway, so Tiffany spots that something isn't quite right with Angie Bowie.

And she says, are you okay? You look a bit. And Angie Bowie's like, yeah, yeah, you can see there's something not right. And she went, yeah. She went, okay, I'll talk to you. She sits Tiffany down. And she says, you're not to say a word to anybody else. And Tiffany says, of course not. Of course I won't.

What's the matter? And Angie Bowie says, David's dead. So Tiffany, quite rightly, reacts in a way that she is completely horrified and completely freaked out because she's just been in the bedroom with David Guest and he's got a duvet over him. So she, but Angie Bowie doesn't, so in Angie Bowie's head, she's thinking, oh, my God, I didn't realise she was such a David Bowie doesn't. So in Angie Bowie's head, she's thinking, oh, my God, I didn't realise she was such a David Bowie fan. Yeah. I must calm her down.

Right, because she's so going, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. And her legs are buckling. I mean, she cannot believe it because she's completely freaked. Because as far as she's concerned, there's a dead body in the room next door. And at first she thinks that she's joking, right? So she's like, why would you say that? Yes, because I suppose because there are tasks

where they have to wind each other up and all sorts of stuff. So then Tiffany takes it upon herself, I have to share this. This is not something we keep to ourselves. So she goes out and tells the rest of the house that David Guest is dead and this causes all sorts of mayhem well I couldn't breathe from laughing

and also it was quite a sort of extraordinary day that day when the news came out that Bowie had died and I was sort of on Twitter all day looking at people's you know tributes to him and people finding beautiful photographs and so the whole day was about bowie you know and then for it to end with this extraordinarily hilarious fucking know, miscommunication and misunderstanding.

It felt quite Bowie-ish. It felt very, it was art in all its forms, you know. And I just fucking loved it. I loved every moment of it, you know. Kathy Burke, who, as I said, will be talking about her career thus far in next week's podcast. Thank you. Lazarus, Jonathan Ross, chatting with me about why Bowie's loss has been felt quite so keenly, and Gaz Coombs with a Bowie cover that is quite a peach. It is quite literally a peach. It's not literally a peach. It is metaphorically a peach. Thanks very much to Dara O'Carney, Kathy Burke, and to my new podcast production support team, especially Seamus Murphy Mitchell.

Thanks to Omar Adam as well for additional editing. Hope to see you in part two. Till then, I'm going to leave you with a slice of Sunday afternoon at Buckles Towers. This was a couple of weeks after Bowie died, and my old friend Dan was visiting. After lunch, as he so often does when he's round, he sat down at the shitty piano that we have and started channeling some classic Zayvid. I took out my phone, put it on the side and pressed record. So I hope you'll feel that

you're just sat on the sofa with me and Rosie. My wife's in the next room trying to get the children to do their homework. And we're just listening to Dan. Sorry, can you just, would you mind using a coaster for the, yeah, thanks. Also, is there any way you could put some clothes on? It's just Sundays, we tend to wear clothes. It's cool. Just enjoy. This is an advert for

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Yes. Gjødning Læs merke til at se hva som sker. Let's pray. Christ is risen. Yeah. That's why I come. Take the cactus by your wonder So pace the prairie of your room A bath spins to its collision Parapets over between the pool Vulcan shoves down on the west side Oh, cats, I find a home But the key to the city

Is in the sun, the that builds the branches to the sky Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon