David Bowie

• Posted by Andrea Caskin January 30, 2016 2,519 views
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  I know this is late in tribute terms, but I’ve been staggering around Europe with travel/work recently and had no time to sit down and think this through!

  It is hard to underestimate the affect David Bowie had on my early life, it is a cliché that he gave thousands of androgynous souls at the time the permission to be themselves rather than wear the beige uniform expected by the social ‘normals’ of the time.

  He was the pathfinder, the squadron leader, the ringmaster, the starship captain, the volunteer, the our androgynous agent and representative…..the David against society’s goliath…..and I for one, happily, gleefully, prettily trotted along in his wake. I felt the growing confidence sitting in a dreary West London 1970’s flat, stick thin legs poking out of my skirt at the crappy wooden dressing table, thick long curly hair dyed red and lashings of mascara with Ziggy calling to me from the Dansette record player on my unmade bedsit bed and shouting encouragement to reach out and slide into a skin-tight pair women’s midnight blue with stars all over, velvet trousers, a loose lace blouse and setting of into the cold night air to meet a group of friends and lovers in the basement of the Sussex pub in Covent Garden, then after drinking white wine and getting mellow with some large shared spliffs, moving on to a party at some friend’s house in Camden and being seduced by excitable boys with moppet haircuts!

  He lit up this period of time with a delicious glamour and creativity that was unlike anything that had been before or to be honest, that has come after.

  He was an artist who blended music, theatre, fashion, sexuality and social style into his own lexicon of art, part of his magic was that he seemed to change alongside your own developing life-story. I was living in Germany when his album Heroes came out, it seemed magically to be synchronised precisely and emotionally to my own life and experiences and became literally the soundtrack to my life.