Bowie: Five Years.

… so there's the time I was over Hilly Fields and a girl my age was standing on the bandstand singing Life On Mars and I didn't know what it was but it was softly weird and beckoning, and there's the Gordon Road discos where they always, always played Jean Genie, and there's hearing Sorrow when the bloke at Number 16 made us listen to it and loving it, even though He didn't even write it and it was a bit straight, man, and there's my Mum tutting furiously when He came on Top Of The Pops even more than she did when Suzi Quatro came on, and there's never being forgiven for missing a family do because I had tickets to see Him at Earls Court and being completely thrilled and baffled by his austere beauty, and there's me wishing I could be a thousandth as happy with my not-fittingness as He was, and there's that warped, bleeding-brown cover art on Diamond Dogs and this ain't rock 'n' roll, this is genocide, and there's Bewlay Brothers and thinking I was the only person who ever liked it, and there's singing 'Ah, hear this Robert Zimmerman...' with Steve in Dylan's voice, and there's that bit in Young Americans that always does make me want to break down and cry, and there's seeing Him in Milton Keynes and getting sunburned and thinking He was a bit disappointing but it didn't really matter, und dann sind wir Helden, and there's Máiréad texting me about a sadness that leapt out of all the other sad texts, then reminding me about giggling to The Laughing Gnome, and there's me being jealous because Karen saw him more often than I did and Garret hadn't let him disappear into fond memory like I had, and there's knowing that my Mum would actually be really sad: a little for herself, and a lot because I've lost one of the friends she thoroughly disapproved of but secretly liked…