Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

code warning, and then, all too suddenly, we’re into
the chorus.
From the disturbingly new, we shift to the
reassuringly familiar: as he croons out ‘There’s a
star —man …’ Bowie’s voice leaps up an octave. It’s
an ancient Tin Pan Alley songwriter’s trick, signalling
a release, a climax. And as we hear of the friendly
alien waiting in the sky, the audience suddenly
recognises a tune, and a message, lifted openly,
outrageously, from ‘Over the Rainbow’, Judy
Garland’s escapist, Technicolor wartime anthem. It’s
simple, singalong, comforting territory, and it lasts
just four bars, before David Bowie makes his bid for
immortality. Less than one minute after his face first
appeared on Top of the Pops – the BBC’s familyfriendly
music programme – Bowie lifts his slim,
graceful hand to the side of his face and his
platinum-haired bandmate Mick Ronson joins him at
the microphone. Then, casually, coolly, Bowie places
his arm around the guitarist’s neck, and pulls Ronson
lovingly towards him. There’s the same octave leap
as he sings ‘star—man’ again, but this time it
doesn’t suggest escaping the bounds of earth; it
symbolises escaping the bounds of sexuality.
The fifteen-million-strong audience struggles to
absorb this exotic, pan-sexual creature: in countless
households, the kids are entranced – in their
hundreds, in thousands – as parents sneer, shout or
walk out of the room. But even as they wonder how
to react, there’s another stylistic swerve; with the
words ‘let the children boogie’, David Bowie and
The Spiders break into an unashamed T. Rex