Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

used more than once to describe how he benefited
from other musicians’ creativity. Yet, in reality, he
rarely took from them – he inspired them, as Garson
points out, to summon up ideas that would never
have existed without him. In these years, David
Bowie was always modest about the achievements
to which he laid claim; but he was demonstrably
correct when he told Livewire.com: ‘To not be
modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of
exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked
with have done their best work by far with me. I can
shine a light on their own strengths. Get them to a
place they would never have gotten to on their own.’
This was a bold claim, but as Garson and others
attest, it was true. He didn’t take. He gave.
Tony Visconti thought that David looked tired when
he next saw him. Reality was released, to a warm
response, on 15 September, 2003, and by October
David had embarked on his biggest tour of the last
five years. In retrospect, the portents had been
stacking up for months, but at the time, the tour was
thrilling: ‘We didn’t sit on our laurels – at one point
we had sixty or seventy songs in our repertoire,’ says
Garson. ‘He would call things out from nowhere
sometimes and we would just play them in front of
3,000 people. It was pretty brave.’ Yet on 12
November, the Toulouse show was cancelled as
David contracted laryngitis; two days later, they
resumed, only for the first leg of the US tour to be
delayed by a week when he came down with
influenza. Come January he was back on the road