David Bowie

Normally I’m of the opinion that God’s a bit of a bastard, but today all he/she/it has done is smile on the House of Clark.
Things started well with Jonny Wilkinson giving Bruce Foreigner a seeing to in Sydney, got better when Everton smited the Wanderers of Wolverhampton 2-0 and reached new heights of wonderfulness thanks to a David Bowie gig that pissed all over anything else I’ve seen this year, the mighty Andrew WK and The Darkness included.
Having spent much of the ’90s self-consciously trying to be down with the kids – Tin Machine, photo ops with Brett Anderson, drum ‘n’ bass albums etc – Bowie has come to the conclusion that there’s nowt wrong with being 56 and in possession of one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll back catalogues of all time.
Which is why seven songs in to his set there’s an audible gasp from the crowd as he exhumes ‘All The Young Dudes’, the song he kindly donated in 1972 to Mott The Hoople and has more or less ignored since. With an 8,000-voice choir accompanying him, it’s a magical moment which Def Leppard get to savour 5,000 miles away in Moscow courtesy of a strategically placed mobile phone (see News section). My Zen-like state of contentment after this is such that I decide not to berate the person who greets ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ with an excited “Oooo, he’s doing a Nirvana cover!” or the drunken Aslan fan who keeps bellowing random snatches of lyrics into my left ear.
It’s not just the obvious crowd-pleasers – ‘Rebel Rebel’, ‘Fame’, ‘China Girl’, ‘Life On Mars?’, Ashes To Ashes’, ‘Changes’ and a remarkable Gail-Ann Dorsey-assisted ‘Under Pressure’ – that have the crowd going ballistic early doors.
No longer feeling obliged to be ‘cutting edge’, Bowie has come up with a new record, Reality, that’s by far and away the best thing he’s done since 1980’s Scary Monsters. It’s represented tonight by four songs – ‘New Killer Star’, ‘The Loneliest Guy’, ‘Never Get Old’ and ‘Bring On The Disco King’ – which all merge seamlessly with the classics of yore and elicit an appropriate response from the masses.
You’re just thinking it can’t get any better when along comes ‘Heroes’ and a wam-bam-thank-you-mam encore climaxing in the triple-whammy of ‘Five Years’, ‘Hang On To Yourself’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’. I should never have doubted you God!