Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

oogie rhythm. For a generation of teenagers, there
was no hesitation; those ninety seconds, on a sunny
evening in July 1972, would change the course of
their lives. Up to this point, pop music had been
mainly about belonging, about identification with your
peers. This music, carefully choreographed in a
dank basement under a south London escort
agency, was a spectacle of not-belonging. For
scattered, isolated kids around the UK, and soon the
East Coast of America, and then the West Coast,
this was their day. The day of the outsider.
In the weeks that followed, it became obvious that
these three minutes had put a rocket under the
career of a man all-too recently dismissed as a onehit
wonder. Most people who knew him were
delighted, but there were hints of suspicion. ‘Hip
Vera Lynn,’ one cynical friend called it, in a pointed
reference to ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ – the huge
wartime hit that had also ripped off Judy Garland’s
best-known song; this homage was too knowing. A
few weeks later, to emphasise the point, David
started singing ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ over
the chorus of ‘Starman’ – as if to prove Pablo
Picasso’s maxim that ‘talent borrows, genius steals’.
And steal he had, with a clear-eyed effrontery as
shocking as the lifted melodies themselves. The way
he collaged several old tunes into a new song was a
musical tradition as old as the hills, one still
maintained by David’s old-school showbiz friends
like Lionel Bart, the writer of Oliver!. Yet to boast of
this homage, to show the joins, brazenly, like the lift