Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

Bowie liked the move and used it later in his video
for ‘Fashion’!”
The song, the first single off Scary Monsters, was
a bit of a Bowie revival itself. While musically it’s
synth driven and New Wave–ish, lyrically it
reintroduces Major Tom, the hero of “Space Oddity.”
“Do you remember a guy that’s been / In such an
early song?” Bowie sings, in a clear, earnest
falsetto. He could easily be singing to Steve
Strange’s generation.
They, of course, not only remembered but still lived
for Major Tom. The Face magazine, founded by
Nick Logan in the spring of 1980, fast became the
monthly of record as far as fashion, art and style
went for London’s youth culture. For the editorial staff
and readers, many of them grown-up Ziggy kids as
well, Bowie was not only untouchable but a template
for all the profile subjects and models included in this
new culture bible, from Duran Duran to Boy George
to Echo and the Bunnymen. Even its stylists and
photographers were all Bowie-mad early on. “There
would not be a Face without Bowie,” says Jon
Savage. “And The Face was essential. Avant-garde.
I mean, I don’t know what the phrase is now … What
is the phrase now when marketers want to get the
kind of future thinkers and the elite group? It was
those kind of people. Trendsetters would buy it.”
That Bowie was still actually breaking new ground
justified all this adoration and made looking back at
the early seventies, for the time being, anyway, less
of a slippery slope than it would soon become. The