Flashback

Helen Bellany remembers David Bowie stopping by for lunch

After John’s transplant, Billy Connolly joked ‘Did you get onions with the liver?’

THIS PHOTO WAS TAKEN in 1988 – just three weeks before John had a liver transplant. He was very ill at the time and we had no idea whether he would receive a liver, so we weren’t exactly on top form.

At John’s retrospective exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1986, we were told that David Bowie had been a collector of his work for a long time, which gave John a boost. The gallery also said David wanted to meet him, which thrilled us, so we invited him to lunch.

When he arrived, our son Jonathan answered the door. He had just made himself a bacon sandwich and had no idea David was visiting, so he was stunned when he opened the door to find him standing there. David spotted the bacon sandwich and asked a dumbfounded Jonathan if he could have one too.

He brought his son Duncan with him. Our children, Jonathan, Paul and Anya, were there and we had the most inspiring few hours together.

David said he had come across John’s work while he was a student at Croydon School of Art and John was at the Royal College of Art, and he had followed his career ever since, acquiring paintings when he had the money.

There was a lot of laughter that day and it was as if John and David had always known each other. They spoke about the arts, books, films, life and death. Their sense of humour was identical, and there were lots of hilarious anecdotes.

A strong friendship followed and shortly after John’s transplant, David invited us to a concert in London. So I took John, newly out of intensive care, and we set off in a limousine to The Dominion Theatre for a one-off benefit show. Billy Con- nolly was there and kept cracking jokes like, ‘Did you get onions with the liver as well?’

After that, David visited us in our house in Edinburgh, and John did his portrait in our home in London. Eventually he brought Iman, his second wife, to meet us.

David was one of those very special people. He wasn’t the great pop star when he came to our door, he was a genuine, deep-thinking, intelligent, lovable person and we were very privileged to know him. It was an enormous sadness when we learnt that David had died, but of course John [who died in 2013] had gone by then, too.

Thinking back to that day, I realise it really was a meeting of minds and souls, two artists greeting each other on the same wavelength.

Helen, John, David Bowie, Coco Schwab (David’s assistant) and Duncan (David’s son)