Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

movies rolled into one.”
Perhaps reckoning with his first misstep put
Bowie on the defensive when it came to his younger
musical rivals. “I’ve seen a few of Gary Numan’s
videos,” he quipped to an interviewer that year. “To
be honest, I never meant for cloning to be a part of
the eighties. He’s not only copied me, he’s clever
and he’s got all my influences in too. I guess it’s best
of luck to him.”
Numan and Bowie were actually booked to
perform on the UK talk show The Kenny Everett
Video Show in late ’79, but Bowie refused to be in
the studio at the same time. The younger performer,
a lifelong fan, was crushed. “If I’d met him before
Kenny Everett I’d have stood awestruck,
overwhelmed and probably dribbling like a
simpleton,” he says today. “If I’d met him in the
weeks after Everett I’d have called him a smallminded
cunt and gone about my business. He had
no reason to be afraid at all. No matter what we
achieved, whether we became more successful or
not, nothing could be taken away from his amazing
career. If he’d handled it differently I would have
remained his biggest champion. He was legendary
even then and I was just part of the latest wave of
new upstarts. I think the majority of the new electronic
people worshipped the ground he walked on, so it
came as a huge shock to me to see that he
obviously felt threatened in some way. I couldn’t
believe that he would A, have me thrown out of the