The album was released a year later, again on his birthday in 2016. We all stayed up past midnight, hitting refresh in Apple Music waiting for the downloads to appear. What we got was easily one of his best albums, experimental and jazzy, with callbacks to the vocal style of his earliest albums, the haunting sounds of the Berlin trilogy and the world music themes of his later work.
The title track has the line ‘Something happened on the day he died’ and I distinctly remember feeling a shiver go through me the first time I heard this, wondering also exactly what a Blackstar was. The second track, Tis Pity She Was a Whore also caught us by surprise - Bowie said cock! The cheeky scamp!
Lazarus returns to the theme of mortality - ‘Look up here, I’m in heaven. I’ve got scars that can’t be seen’ - accompanied by a haunting saxophone line. The song concludes ‘Ain’t that just like me?’ and is followed by Sue, which sounds like one half of a cryptic conversation with references to x rays and saying goodbye, sounding like someone putting their affairs in order, saying things that needed to be said, accompanied by a frantic jazz beat that builds to a wail of feedback.
Girl Loves Me gets even stranger with lyrics in a mix of gay Polari slang and the Nadsat constructed language from A Clockwork Orange. ‘Where the fuck did Monday go?’ he asks and we feel like time is running out. Dollar Days combines a soulful sax arrangement with lyrics wondering about never seeing the English evergreens again and the lines about ‘I’m trying to, I’m dying to …’ as the song builds to a pitch, crossfading into a beat as we reach the final track.
Seein’ more and feelin’ less
Sayin’ no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That's the message that I sent
As the music faded out with one final, endless chord, we knew we’d heard something extraordinary, a message from someone we’d known all our lives.
That's the message that I sent
As the music faded out with one final, endless chord, we knew we’d heard something extraordinary, a message from someone we’d known all our lives.
Two days later we woke up to the news that he’d died.
We came together on our social accounts, sharing a mix of disbelief, grief and also appreciation for a lifetime of music that had soundtracked our lives from those early days on Top of the Pops, to teenage discos, to discovering hidden gems and scouring them for hidden meanings, to 80’s cool (and cheesy pop), the blast of Tin Machine and the Buddha of Suburbia, and then rediscovering it all again.
Rest in peace Starman.
We came together on our social accounts, sharing a mix of disbelief, grief and also appreciation for a lifetime of music that had soundtracked our lives from those early days on Top of the Pops, to teenage discos, to discovering hidden gems and scouring them for hidden meanings, to 80’s cool (and cheesy pop), the blast of Tin Machine and the Buddha of Suburbia, and then rediscovering it all again.
Rest in peace Starman.
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