There’s a pronounced musical flavour to I. NY, a new Limerick-based festival celebrating the relationship between Ireland and New York “one story at time.”
Running from October 5-15, standout events include Qool DJ Marv (5 & 6 @ The Granary); Gerry Leonard in Conversation & Performance (8 @ Dolan’s); Glen Hansard in Conversation & Performance (11 @ Lime Tree Theatre), and Damien Dempsey & Chris Byrne (15).
Add in a slew of film screenings – In America and Brooklyn among them – and other trans-Atlantic cultural events, and it promises to be a cracking event.
A Clontarf native, Gerry Leonard was David Bowie’s Musical Director for over a decade, and spoke at length to Hot Press’ Roisin Dwyer shortly after his death…

“I got a real shock,” the Dubliner tells Hot Press. “The birthday gig on Sunday night was such a joyous occasion. I hung out with the reprobates until about 2.30am and then went to bed. The phone rang at 7am. It was somebody from a radio station saying, ‘Have you heard the news? David has passed away. Do you want to talk?’ I just mumbled something like, ‘I don’t know, you’ll have to call me back’. I went and had a coffee and tried to get my head around it all.
“I didn’t know whether to talk or not talk, but they said on RTÉ that Dave Fanning was going to be on the Ryan Tubridy Show and I thought, ‘If he’s doing it, it feels right’. So I gathered my thoughts, and spoke to Ryan and some other stations, which had a sort of cathartic effect until around five o’clock when I just started repeating myself.”
Asked whether he had even the vaguest inkling that Bowie was ill, Gerry shakes his head mournfully. “No, I didn’t,” he says. “David has always been a very private person. When The Next Day came out and he wasn’t talking, I asked, ‘Do you mind me doing interviews?’ and he said, ‘Fine, just don’t mention my personal life’. We were good friends, but not in a ‘I’ll be over for tea, Dave’ way. There was a line. With David there were always concentric circles; the inner circle obviously knew and the rest of us didn’t, which I think is fitting. And what a glorious exit: Blackstar is a work of art!”
Gerry only got to hear Bowie’s latest avant jazz adventure on the day of its release.
“Yeah, I downloaded it from iTunes like everyone else,” he smiles. “It was the same with The Next Day. Even though I was involved with it from the very start, and heard mixes as we went along, I didn’t hear the finished record until the day of release. I suppose I could have gone down to Tony Visconti’s studio or called up the office and said, ‘Hey, remember me?’ but it’s not in my nature to do that.”
How were things left after those The Next Day sessions?
“David had been extremely positive during them, showing up early, working really hard and loving what we were doing, but there was no, ‘See you next year’. There were a bunch of leftover tracks, which he could have added two or three more to and had an album, but I thought to myself, ‘No, that’s not his style. David’s going to do something else’.”
When did Gerry realise that that ‘something else’ was a Kendrick Lamar and Boards Of Canada-influenced record involving musicians Bowie had mostly never worked with before?
“Tony Visconti’s son asked me to be part of the house band he put together for his Dad’s 70th birthday,” he reminisces. “I was honoured to do it and we got to play T.Rex and Bowie and Wings and all that other stuff Tony had worked on. David came to the party – it was great to see him and he gave me a big hug and we chatted. He was like, ‘I’m doing something else. I’m not going to call you for it, but don’t worry, I’ll be seeing you again’. That was really reassuring.
“When he worked earlier in the year with Maria Schneider on ‘Sue’, I wrote to him and said, ‘That’s awesome!’ He wrote back, ‘You like it?’ and I replied, ‘I really like it, she’s a genius’. And very kindly he said, ‘Not unlike yourself, Gerry’. That’s a tremendous compliment – but I also take it with a pinch of salt!”
It’s been widely reported that David and his family had moved to upstate New York but, no, Gerry reveals, he was still a Manhattan resident.
“David had been building a house in Woodstock ever since he was up a mountain there making Heathen, fell in love with the place and bought a property in the town,” he explains. “He spent summers upstate because Iman and his daughter, Lexi, loved the countryside. I think the new house is finally done, but David wasn’t the squire with the wax jacket. He loved the city. I live in Woodstock too, so when we were doing The Next Day, I’d get a call saying, ‘Get the drum machine and the coffee ready, I’ll be over to work on a song’.
“I think he called around three times that autumn,” Gerry continues. “He recited The Owl And The Pussycat to my daughter who was eight at the time, and played with her. They’re both characters, so they had a grand old time. His daughter’s a similar age, so he’s really comfortable with kids.”
Another of his fondest Bowie memories is when they played The Point in 2003 as part of the Reality Tour.
“It was incredibly nerve-wracking for me because it was a sort of homecoming,” Gerry recalls. “I was also really proud because all my family and friends were there, and I was returning as a guitar-player with David. You couldn’t ask for a better situation than that. The two Dublin concerts were being filmed for a DVD, and I was the Musical Director. There were a lot of logistics. I was really trying to stay focused. I practiced some meditation and Buddhism when I went to America and, I tell you. I was pulling that stuff out! There was lots of fun backstage. David wanted an Irish phrase. The one I came up with courtesy of my brother-in-law was ‘Tiocfaidh Ar La’. I said, ‘I got to tell you in advance this is a little controversial’, but he loved it. If you look at the concert film, it’s the first thing he says when he comes out onto the Point stage, and the crowd go crazy!”
The details are sketchy, but Bowie’s mother, Mary Margaret Burns, is said to be of Donegal stock.
“I dont know whether that’s true,” Gerry tells us. “It’s not something we discussed. He never seemed terribly concerned with nationalism to me.”
Does Gerry feel he got to know David Jones as opposed to David Bowie?
“I got as much of David as he wanted me to get. He’s not a sentimental ‘Remember that time?’ person. He’s more like, ‘What are we doing now? Have you heard about this?’ Or he’d be checking out my bookshelves. He got very excited when he spotted a Spike Milligan one that he loved. Usually, though, it was very current. David was so illuminating to be around. He was such a great conversationalist.”
During the late ‘90s/early naughties, virtually every hip young band returning from the Big Apple spoke excitedly of Bowie turning up at their gig.
“He would always want to know what you were listening to and debate it, which was a little terrifying!” Gerry laughs. “He’s such a musicologist and also has this razor eye for fashion and art. He’s very discerning and knows exactly what he likes and why he likes it. I’d send him a few songs from somebody new I was into and he’d have no problem saying, ‘No, I’m not getting it...’ David spotted Arcade Fire really early, and was into Mumford & Sons before they broke. He’d have made a great A&R man!”
Did they go to gigs together?
“We went to see his old pal, Robert Fripp, in the Winter Garden; you wouldn’t believe how quickly doors open when you’re with David Bowie! He’s very supportive of the people he’s played with, so we went to Gail Ann Dorsey’s show in Joe’s Pub. He wasn’t in the mosh-pit, but he was a good audience member. We were in the studio one day doing The Next Day, and he said, ‘Do you want to turn it up? I like a bit of loud!’ He’d stand in front of the PA, no bother!”
It’s noticeable that 72 hours after learning of his death, Gerry is still referring to David in the present.
“It’s going to take a lot of us a long time to compute,” he rues. “I’ll miss his laugh. I’ll miss his voice on the telephone. ‘Gerry, Gerry, what do you think about this?’ ‘Gerry, Gerry, I’ve an idea’... I’ll miss those chats about music. He was such an amazing creative force. I’ve played with a lot of great people, but nobody will ever take his place. I knew that from the moment I started working with David. He was able to channel and distill so much from so many different sources and frame it in a way that made it accessible to people.
“He also had that outrageous sense of fashion, yet somehow it didn’t seem out of place,” Gerry adds. “And there were always these arresting images, like the ‘Lazarus’ video he left us with. He had that incredible sense of self, and was able to say, ‘Okay, I know what’s coming and I’m going to put my house in order’. Blackstar is like David speaking to us from the other side.”