Vintage Item No.8: Hunky Dory by Bowie

In a house full of music I’d never found a favourite artist of my own. My Mam played vinyl records in my earliest memories. Dylan, Rod Stewart. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s album, ‘Easy’, all of which I still adore. Later in the Seventies my Mam and stepdad had a music centre in smoked glass, all black and sleek and we had records by Ian Dury, the Clash, Blondie.

But I was a kid who loved comics and books and cartoons. The only records I really had were Disney albums (‘Bobbing Along…’) and that Geoff Love record of disco-ed up space themes.

I had friends who were obsessed with punk, New Wave bands, Goth. Michael learned to play guitar. His sister was in a band influenced by Genesis. They loved dark, gloomy music. At home we loved the charts and had the Top Twenty blasting out of the radio on Sunday nights. We went on road trips to the Lake District with Abba’s ‘The Visitors’ or ELO’s ‘Out of the Blue’.

But I never had a musical hero of my own.

Until I was fifteen and Bowie played Live Aid. In amongst all the sweaty guitarists in their vest tops and sunglasses, here came David. He swished onto stage in a fifties’ style suit with pointy shoulders. A lilac suit. He had on powder blue eye shadow and fuschia lipstick. His hair was teased into a golden quiff.

Of course I’d been aware of him before. Michael’s sister Angela lent my parents ‘ChangesOneBowie’ on vinyl. My Mam had said how unusual she was, as a teenager, liking not just contemporary stuff, but old classics like Bowie, famous from when she’d been little. I was aware of others’ infatuation with him – but how he’d recently gone commercial with his EMI tour and his Let’s Dance stuff and his top ten hits. He’d spoiled himself. He’d been so much better as Ziggy Stardust.

There was a glamour and danger about him. This spikey, queer, alien being.

A New Town like Aycliffe is the perfect place to grow up dreaming about a character like Bowie. It’s sort of sterile and culture-less. You have to make your own distractions. Make up your own fantasy life. There was one book about him in the tiny town library. The market in our town precinct was on Tuesday and the bloke there sold bootleg cassettes of Bowie gigs: three pounds a time for all of this jumbled, precious noise.

At home I dug through the million cassettes in racks in our house. I found a compilation my stepfather had made. A bit of Hunky Dory, bit of Aladdin Sane. My favourite bits of both albums, as it turns out. All the outrageous stuff with Mike Garson’s piano going full tilt: all the stuff that sounds like vaudeville cabaret stuff on Mars. To me at fifteen, listening properly on headphones, and absorbing myself in his lyics, in his world, Bowie was like some glorious, faggy, draggy macabre clown. Slightly reptilian, chilly, unearthly. His voice like no one else’s. Decadent, carefree, bonkers. He was building a whole world in these songs: a land of prairies and ruined cities. Touches of Ballard, Eliot, Waugh, and Ray Bradbury. He had a charming gleefulness and there was a nostalgia in his music… but it was nostalgia for a time we hadn’t even been to yet.

That tape of highlights from the early Seventies was the first time – in a house of music, of vinyl and tape – that I felt I had found an artist of my own. Within a year I’d heard everything of his up until that point. Within a year I was trying to convince myself that the soundtracks to ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Absolute Beginners’ were worth saving up for, getting excited about. Within two years I was standing in the rain at Roker Park, watching him do the ‘Glass Spider’ live… waiting for a glimpse of something that would take me back to that moment of first listening to that bright orange home-recorded cassette.

Nothing ever does take you back to that moment, though, in things like this, it seems. Maybe ‘Hunky Dory’ does. I bought my first vinyl copy of that album the week after Live Aid, upstairs in Boots in Durham. That was when shops like Boots had record departments. They were like a cross between boutiques and laboratories, with everything kept in protective plastic sleeves.

Maybe there’s still magic and fairy dust trapped in the grooves of that record. I can still put on ‘Hunky Dory’ and be back in that land of prairies and cabaret bars in dark cities and laughing gnomes with Warhol wigs on a radioactive beach and manic clowns playing grand pianos in bombed out cinemas, or drag queens in New York with their bippety boppety hats.