Neither death nor Covid hair can stop David Bowie

Ziggy ripped it up again last Sunday at Glastonbury, writes Declan Lynch

DAVID Bowie came out for his headline gig at Glastonbury last Sunday night with Covid hair — longer than it would usually be, but because it was Bowie, perfectly stylish. Okay, let’s look at that one again. Some of you may have heard that Bowie isn’t around any more — so yes, it was a showing of his Glastonbury spectacular in the year 2000, on BBC2.

Indeed, it was apparently the first complete TV run of the gig, so there was something new about it — but the first really magical thing was the Covid hair, the fact that this is exactly how you’d imagine Bowie would look if he’d been putting on this performance for the first time last week.

Not even death can stop David Bowie being somehow in tune with the spirit of the age, with the spirit of any age, and all ages.

Yes, he was performing at a certain time, in a certain place, but it felt that we were looking at something that was beyond time. Bowie had played at the first Glastonbury Fayre in 1971, early in the morning on a Pyramid stage not unlike the one in 2000. In shape, at least.

In many other ways, in the 29 years between 1971 and 2000, rock’n’roll and Glastonbury itself had largely changed from being a part of the counterculture into a high class of corporate entertainment.

And yet Bowie had not really changed — because he was never really part of anything in the first place. He was, by his own assertion, from outer space... if you can be an extra-terrestrial and also be quintessentially English.

Then again, if you are Bowie, you can be anything you like. And this sense of him existing in some other dimension was deepened by the realisation that it may have been 29 years between his first appearance at Glasto and this one, but it is now 20 years since he played the gig we were watching.

If you were 20 years of age then, you’d be 40 now. And no doubt you’d be aware of that, if you could add 20 and 20 — yet it is still startling to think of all that time, and how it gets away from us.

Leaving aside the minor complication that he died in 2016, it never got away from Bowie. It certainly never stopped him writing great songs for about 40 years, and this was just one of the wonders of the show which he put on for us last Sunday — when you started to recall some of the songs he hadn’t played, it was just ridiculous.

He didn’t do Space Oddity, for example, or Young Americans, or Five Years. Many of the headliners we have seen at Glastonbury over the years would have done a much better show than they did with a set containing only the songs that Bowie left out of his 2000 set-list.

Indeed, there was one of those Covid paybacks in the fact that you couldn’t possibly have had a better gig than this in 2020, in real time. But we’re talking about time again, in the usual sense, when really in the most meaningful sense, this was timeless. It was monumental too, and tragic in a grander way. We mentioned the Englishness of Bowie, an Englishness shared by other giants of our culture such as The Stones and The Who and Led Zeppelin. An Englishness that was a guarantee of a certain kind of greatness, unimaginable in what Englishness has recently become to the wider world.

Yes, it is time to consider the fact that David Bowie and Boris Johnson belong not just to the same species, but to the same nation. That the reason we were watching Bowie last Sunday was because Johnson and his gang of Brexiteers had screwed everything up again, this time with their delinquent and dishonest management of the coronavirus.

But it is all they can do; it is their destiny to screw up the England that they have polluted with their endless upper-class twattery. Railing against the “liberal elite”, they have reinstalled an older elite of posh lads who aren’t much good at anything except poshness itself.

Yes, it is incredible to think that until recently, when people thought of England’s contribution to the wider world, they thought of men of genius such as David Bowie.

Now when they think of England, into the mind’s eye floats the visages of men such as Dominic Cummings.

And the way it’s going, there will not always be an England — but there will always be a Bowie.