For me in 1983, Bowie’s music was a soundtrack to imaginary films, the music playing during the love scenes and end credits of movies that were never made. It was a glimpse into a sophisticated, adult world – not deliberately shocking, like his singles of the 1970s, but gleaming and stylish, with lyrical cross-references and casually dropped ideas that hinted at the intelligence behind them. March of flowers! he declared on the discordant ‘Ricochet’. March of dimes! These are the prisons! These are the crimes! I listened repeatedly, carefully writing down the words; I felt like I was engaging with something challenging and avant-garde. I analysed them as if they were a poem from English class.
It wasn’t easy to fit in at my school – you needed just the right Farah trousers and Pringle sweaters, the right sports bag, the right haircut and the right couldn’t-care-less attitude. I studied too hard and couldn’t afford all the proper gear, so I was a boffin, a tramp and probably a poof too. Lads at school said David Bowie was gay. I loved looking at his videos. I recorded them from the Max Headroom TV show, rewinding and freeze-framing them. I liked his sharp suits, his sharp teeth and his pained expression, as if he were struggling with something. In the ‘Let’s Dance’ video, backed against the wall of an Australian bar and surrounded by the glares of hard-drinking men, he didn’t look like he fitted in either. Maybe I was gay for feeling that way about David Bowie, but he made me feel it didn’t matter.
It turned out I wasn’t gay, and it turned out Bowie wasn’t either. It didn’t matter. We both got married, to women. Nobody told me the groom wasn’t meant to have his own theme song playing when he walks down the aisle, so I entered to an instrumental version of ‘Modern Love’, wearing a suit I thought Bowie would appreciate. I landed a job as a university lecturer. One winter, towards the end of the last century, I flew to Australia for a conference, via Japan. I took a new Walkman, with only one cassette: a personal Bowie collection I’d compiled for the trip. It was my first time alone on the other side of the world. I listened to nothing but Bowie for a week, discovering new songs as I walked by the Brisbane River under the surprising December sun. On the way back I was stuck at Narita Airport, and was taken by coach to a remote hotel overnight. I knew nobody, and didn’t speak a word of the language. I’d never felt further from home. I listened to one song, on repeat. Now ‘Ashes to Ashes’ made sense to me, in all its alien strangeness and isolation.
I changed, and Bowie changed with me. I feel he was travelling alongside me, on that journey and on many others – or rather, that my own version of Bowie was my companion, because this ‘Bowie’ was a person I had helped to create, through our experiences together since 1983. You had your own version of him, no doubt – similar but different – who played a part in your life, and was shaped by the moments you shared.
Bowie and I both grew older. I was promoted to professor. Bowie seemed to enter semi-retirement, then returned ten years later with a comeback album in 2013. And that October, Lou Reed died. He was Bowie’s old friend, of course, since the sixties – Bowie was one of the first British fans of the Velvet Underground – and I’d loved Lou’s music since the eighties. But more importantly, I knew Lou Reed was only five years older than Bowie, and the refrain from the old song now sounded like a warning. Five years, that’s all we’ve got. My rock idols were dying, already. I’d always assumed Bowie would go on for ever, and suddenly I came to terms with his mortality. He was in his mid-sixties now. I wanted to do something to thank him, to celebrate him, to pay tribute to him, while he was still alive.
Like every kid, I used to draw, and sing and dance. At nursery and infant school, we’re encouraged to dress up, to perform and paint. We all do it, without shame and without a sense of being good or bad. And like most of us, I started to give those things up from adolescence onwards. It was hard enough as a teenager, trying to fit in, without having artistic hobbies too; and school also encouraged my generation to progressively narrow down, to focus only on what we were best at. Eight O-levels – my year was the first to introduce GCSEs – and three A-levels, then one subject at university, with a possible minor. (I rebelled in a small way by choosing a degree that was half English, half film: I even included an analysis of a Bowie video in a third-year essay.) By the time I was eighteen, I’d accepted that my drawing and singing were average at best, and that I was good at research and writing. So that’s what I did as a career. I became an academic. And in 2013 I decided to study Bowie as an academic project. I began my research in May 2015.
I started by drawing up lists, from biographies and online sources, of all the books Bowie had read; then all the songs he’d listened to, and all the films he’d enjoyed. By immersing myself in his creative input – the art and culture that had influenced him – I hoped to gain a new understanding of his work. In Australia and Japan I’d listened to nothing but Bowie for a week. Now I was committing myself to his music for a year. I structured twelve months of my life around the various phases of his career, from the late 1960s to the present day, and devoted myself to one album at a time. As a sign of that commitment, I had my hair cut and coloured in the Man Who Fell to Earth style from the mid-1970s. I wanted to be reminded of my project every time I saw my own reflection. I wanted to connect with him, to merge with him in some way; to become an in-between Brooker-Bowie hybrid. As Bowie knew, ‘Die Brücke’ is both the name of an art movement, and the German for ‘bridge’. It’s also, of course, a near-rhyme for my own name. It seemed to fit. I was trying to build a bridge between us.
Immersing myself in his influences wasn’t enough. I grew up about six miles from David Jones, and I spent the summer of 2015 exploring his childhood and teenage territories, walking his old streets and discreetly checking out the houses where he’d lived with his family. I trained in filmmaking and photography in my twenties – again, something I gave up as a career – so I’d mixed with hair and make-up artists, but never had the experience of being on the other side of the camera, under the lights. I decided I needed to try it. I had photos taken of me, styled as Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. I posted them online. Times Higher Education magazine got in touch to find out what I was doing – a professor spending the summer break dressed as Bowie was enough for a news feature – and published a short article. Then other magazines got in touch, and newspapers, and radio, and then TV shows. I had progressed to the Thin White Duke phase – I’d commissioned a tailor for an authentically 1970s white shirt with a tall, wide collar – by the time This Morning asked me on for an interview with Eamonn Holmes. The next day, I got up early for a slot on Sky’s news show, then took a taxi to a studio at midnight for a live broadcast in Australia. ‘What are you doing next?’ the reporters asked me. ‘I’m going to Berlin,’ I told them. And so I had to go to Berlin.
I was contacted by media and literary agents. I was invited to the Bowie exhibition as it toured to Melbourne, in Australia, and then to Groningen, in the Netherlands. I was interviewed in languages I didn’t understand, and heard my words translated and voiced by an actor for news broadcasts around the world: I appeared in Swedish, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese newspapers. I’d become, in a small way, an international figure, borrowing something from Bowie’s celebrity. I was performing different versions of myself, my personality splitting into public and private. I understood something of what Bowie must have experienced when he first became famous.
And then, in January 2016, Bowie died. I was in New York City that winter, wearing a replica I’d had made of his Alexander McQueen ‘Earthling’ coat; I’d had my hair clipped and spiked, and had grown a goatee beard, as he did for his fiftieth birthday. I was reliving Bowie’s 1997 as I walked down another of his home streets – Lafayette, in Lower Manhattan – on a tour of his favourite bookstores and coffee shops. He was six storeys above me at the time, in his luxury apartment. He had a fortnight to live.
On 9 January I was back in Berlin, shooting footage for a video diary of my experiences. I’d been drawn into photography and film again; I’d also dug out my old cine camera and was using Super-8 for the first time since my teens. I flew home late that night. In the morning, the news felt like a bad dream. I did one interview, then refused the rest. I felt too shocked and sad, and had nothing much to say. That evening, I accepted an invitation from Radio 4, with director Julien Temple. We had a