Song 20: Little Fat Man

Little Fat Man - David Bowie

PS: 8th January 2013, the day after the evening this post was written! - I wake up this morning, David Bowie's 66th birthday, and find, fantastically, that the whole premise of my post has become utterly irrelevant. I forced him out of the woodwork! Who'd have thought? So read if you want, but only to laugh at how spectacularly wrong I got it. 
Right now, reader, I am purchasing and listening to the new David Bowie single, which, frankly, makes 'Little Fat Man' considerably less important to the history of the world, and makes me look like a big chump.
My real-time review? Nice! Very nice, Dave ... and, you know what, it's also "soulful" and lacks the layer of artifice I mention below. If ever anyone needed direct, damning evidence that David Bowie can never be second-guessed, this is it.

'Extras' was a good show - not as good as 'The Office', I grant you,  and sometimes a bit self-indulgent, but there were some great moments. This is one. Ricky Gervais's Andy Millman trying to bond with a fellow "celebrity", only for the mighty Bowie to write a scornful song about him.

I'm not sure who wrote the song, I can't find out - considering Gervais was in an early 80s new romantic band called Seona Dancing, it could have been either him or Dave.

What's particularly notable about this clip, though, is that there's a very good chance it is the last new musical material we will ever get from one of the greatest artists in the history of popular music. Because David Bowie appears to have retired.

What a way to bow out!

If David Bowie has retired, as most people who know anything about him believe, then good for him. Perhaps more rock musicians should retire. His silence over the last few years has led to various rumours of ill health. Though there was a heart scare some years ago, there is no evidence he's not doing just fine; any occasional sightings of him seem to show him looking hale and hearty.

He's just, for whatever reason - whether to take care of himself, his family, because he's bored with music, because he's lost his self-confidence - stopped.

And that's pretty gutting really. I remember almost getting tickets for Bowie in around 2003 and then deciding against it because it was too expensive. So I'll never see him live. If you add together the cost of the amount of crap I've seen over the years, it's safe to say it would have been worth shelling out to see David Bowie.

How great is David Bowie? What do you think? I suppose what I've always thought about him is that he seems like the cleverest man in the history of rock'n'roll. The man who worked it all out, who thought it all through, who did it before anyone else and knew exactly what he was doing, the man who took care of everything, from the music to the dance to the look, right through, one imagines, to the reaction he got from other people.

What's he been criticised for? Well, mainly for artifice. When we were living in Kenya, my friend Wieland, who sometimes thought I had a problem with expressing things sincerely, had a dream where, if I remember correctly, he gave me a birthday present and I was so incapable of thanking him that I had to fetch David Bowie to thank him for me. So far down the chain of sincerity was I!

I get the argument (not about myself, but about Bowie) ... for all his great, great songs, how many of them are cris-de-couer, on how many of them is he really baring something of himself? Gosh, even one of his most loved compositions, "Heroes", has quote marks around it. And is written about other people. Maybe 'Kooks' is personal, and it's very sweet, but generally there's always some kind of layer with a Bowie song. Which doesn't make the songs any less wonderful.

My friend Pete once sustained a whole evening's discussion at university with the phrase "David Bowie: the last true rock star?". Daft as that evening was, is there a grain of truth in it? Has anyone since been as utterly other-wordly as the idea of a rock star ought to have been? While making such great music in the process.

Perhaps David Bowie just thought he wasn't making great music any more - people tend to say that he was never quite so good again after 1980. I don't really know if that's true - he was still making pretty good records into the 2000s, but I suppose what's the point if the fire's not burning.

Maybe it won't end with 'Little Fat Man' - he's only 65 (66 tomorrow) after all, so Leonard Cohen's got an awful lot of years on him and he's still going strong. One can only contemplate what his imagination might have come up with since his last album, 'Reality' in 2003. But the main lesson for me is not to take our great rock stars for granted - before you know it they'll be off drinking tea in New York and not giving you, their (dis)loyal fan a second thought.