Tag: Life On Mars?

10 Years of Blogging, 500 Posts and A David Bowie Anniversary

Well, I didn’t know if I could do it but I have timed things to perfection and this will be my 500th post, just ahead of this blog’s 10th birthday, which is tomorrow. 500 posts in 10 years won’t seem like a lot to some of the daily bloggers, but my efforts are usually quite long, require a fair bit of research, and at times I’ve been MIA (regular followers know why), so I’m quite chuffed with myself. Of course the fact I wrote 100 posts in my first 10 months of blogging shows that I’ve really slowed down over the years, but 50 posts per year seems like a good average to me. I hope to get an achievement badge from the WordPress people once I press the publish button on this one, and a birthday badge tomorrow!


I started this blog, by coincidence, the day we heard the news that David Bowie had died, so it was inevitable my first post would feature him. I had planned to write about “music and memories” – pick a song from my past and write about what life was like back then, with a few musical anecdotes thrown in. The decade I was most invested in chart music was the 1970s, as anyone born right at the start of the ’60s will probably agree. The songs you listen to then stay with you for life, and in a Pop Quiz, I am the expert on the Top 30 for those years.

And so it came to pass, on day one of the blog, I was writing a tribute for one of the few true icons (that word is used far too loosely nowadays) this country has ever produced. It didn’t take long for me to realise this would become a pattern as if I was getting older, my pop idols of the ’70s would be getting even older. David Bowie died of cancer, on this day in 2016 at the relatively young age of 69. We didn’t ever have to watch him get really old and infirm which is a bit of a blessing, and right up until his death he was still crowned the best-dressed Briton in history. I’m sure, however, his family would have liked to have had him around for a lot longer.


The very first song I shared around here was therefore Life On Mars? and I have pretty much shared a Bowie song every year since on this date. The film for Life On Mars? (we didn’t yet call them videos) still looks pretty avant-garde today, 53 years on. This leads me to believe I was born at just the right time for a life-long fascination with the theatre, frills and falderals of pop music. In the 1960s we watched our favourite pop stars in black and white, and in the main, especially on UK prime time telly, they were dressed fairly conservatively – men in suits and women in those evening dresses that looked a bit like nighties. It was starting to change at the tail end of the decade but once we started to watch them in colour at the start of the 1970s, glam rock had really taken hold in Britain, and boy were we in for a treat. David Bowie was definitely the most flamboyant but we also had T. Rex, Sweet, Slade and Roxy Music. What a great time to be entering our teenage years and I know many of my blogging pals still hold those years very dear indeed.

Life On Mars? by David Bowie:


Here is something I haven’t mentioned before – last summer I started following the Official UK Charts again, and I get an email every Friday at 6pm telling me what’s changed since the week before. As the months have gone by I’ve become familiar with the runners and riders, but because we consume our music so differently nowadays, via streaming mainly, the charts are nothing like the ones my friends and I used to follow with avid interest in our teens. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Top 10 was hogged by only three artists, Taylor Swift (with three songs from her The Life of a Showgirl album), Olivia Dean (with three songs from her The Art of Loving album) and three songs from the stars of the animated film, KPop Demon Hunters (the most watched film in Netflix history). The song Golden stayed at the top spot for weeks in the autumn of last year, performed by the fictional, animated, K-pop girl group Huntrix (the first time this had happened since the Archies achieved the same feat in 1969 with Sugar, Sugar).


I don’t think K-pop is really for my generation (you don’t say!) but for the youngsters of today, it seems all pervasive. During the month of December the Top 10 stayed pretty much the same with Wham!’s song at the top spot, Mariah Carey as runner-up and the usual suspects filling the other slots (all songs from 40-60 years ago). Now we are into the new year we’ve had a song that’s been sitting around the Top 10 for quite a while finally reach the top spot (Raye’s Where Is My Husband!), and yesterday I got an email telling me that it had been replaced by someone called Djo. Who the heck is that I thought, and blow me down, if it isn’t the musical moniker of Stranger Things actor Joe Keery, aka the handsome Steve Harrington. His song End of Beginning was originally released in 2022 and has hovered around the lower rungs of the chart since then, but with Season 5 just having ended his fan base have taken to streaming his song in big numbers. Another Netflix show that has influenced our UK Singles Chart. Here is Joe/Djo with his song.


Well I don’t know about you, but I think the Top 10 of my teenage years was far more innovative and interesting, with big change happening every week. In the interests of research however I will keep tabs on things and give all of you who would rather poke your eye out with a sharp stick than listen to the current Top 10, an update!

I didn’t really expect my 500th post to go this way but I often don’t know what I’m going to write about until I sit down at my computer. The really great thing that’s happened since I started this game 10 years ago, is that I’ve made an awful lot of new like-minded friends, both virtual and in the real world, which I certainly didn’t expect. There are regular features I join in with, like Rol’s Saturday Snapshots, John’s Photo Challenge and Ernie’s Pun Fun. We’ve had four quite big BlogCons in cities all over the UK and a fair few mini meetups with two or three bloggers. It’s not how we made new friends in the old days, but it’s how things happen nowadays, so maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive of how the teens of today operate.

I’m definitely going to keep going, and if I’m spared I’ll aim for another 500 posts in 10 years. Whether blogging and WordPress will still be around at that point is anyone’s guess, but I hope it survives in some form.

To end, I really think I should share something else by David Bowie on this, the anniversary of his death. Here he is singing 1977’s Heroes [starts at 1:00] at Live Aid in 1985. There is no bright blue eye-shadow this time, but just like in the film above, his hair is tinged with red and he is sporting a well-cut pale blue suit – an homage I suspect. I still have my copy of Words magazine from when the song Heroes was released and back then they wrote, “Of all our current top rock stars, David Bowie is the one most likely to remain a major musical force decades hence… .” And they continue, “Listening to this [Heroes], you realise that Bowie’s strength and durability lies in the fact he refuses to fit neatly into any specific category. He will constantly surprise even his most dedicated followers, while maintaining an unvarying high quality of performance.” They weren’t wrong.

Heroes by David Bowie:


Until next time…

Heroes Lyrics
(Song by David Bowie/Brian Eno)

I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen
Though nothing, will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be heroes, just for one day

And you, you can be mean
And I, I’ll drink all the time
‘Cause we’re lovers, and that is a fact
Yes, we’re lovers, and that is that

Though nothing, will keep us together
We could steal time, just for one day
We can be heroes, forever and ever
What’d you say?

I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim
Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, forever and ever
Oh, we can be heroes, just for one day

I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen
Though nothing will drive them away
We can be heroes, just for one day
We can be us, just for one day

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side

Oh, we can beat them, forever and ever
Then we could be heroes, just for one day
We can be heroes
We can be heroes
We can be heroes
Just for one day

We can be heroes
We’re nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we’re lying, then you better not stay
But we could be safer, just for one day
Oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh

Postscript

I did get my achievement badge for publishing 500 posts so have edited it in above. Yeah me.

And now my birthday badge.

David Bowie, “Life on Mars?” and The Mortality Reality Check

Ironically I had already chosen this day, 11th January 2016, to start a blog. The idea behind it was to jot down those memories conjured up by a random piece of music heard in the course of the day. And what a day it turned out to be. News broke this morning, as we were all waking up, that David Bowie had died after an 18 month struggle with cancer. I had noticed a few days earlier that he’d just released a new album to coincide with his 69th  birthday (suddenly prolific in his later years after a long gap with little output), but like most of us I was unaware that he was so ill. A video clip showed him with stylish short cropped hair, smartly dressed, but looking old I thought which made me sad. Sad perhaps because of my own mortality. If our musical heroes were getting old then so must we. This morning’s news confirmed that “The Man Who Fell To Earth” was indeed not immortal.

bowie 2.jpg

Only three times in my life can I remember this much media attention having been paid to the death of a person from the world of music, and they were:

Elvis Presley, who died the day I went back to school after the long summer holidays in 1977. I was only 17 and had been a big Elvis fan mainly because of the movies we had watched on television and then the massive events that were the ’68 Comeback Special and the ’73 Aloha from Hawaii concert broadcast live around the world. In a career stretching back to the mid 1950s it’s sad that so many only remember Elvis from the later jumpsuited, Vegas years when until the early 1970s he truly was still the King of Rock and Roll.

John Lennon, shot down by Mark Chapman at the end of 1980. I was a 20-year-old student at the time and stayed in bed most of the morning listening to BBC Radio 1 which played the music of both The Beatles and Lennon himself. Andy Peebles, a DJ of the day had recently recorded an interview with Lennon, so he found himself suddenly the man of the moment in terms of contributing to the day’s output.

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop. It was June 2009 and we had just come back from my daughter’s school’s version of Britain’s Got Talent.  She was one of eight performers that night (one of three solo singers) and was by far the youngest contestant at 13. After tremendous praise from our local panel of celebrity judges who forecast her being “snapped up by Simon Cowell”, she ended up not being placed so was upset. A tremendous rush of adrenaline following weeks of preparation which led to disappointment and the low that comes with it. It was when we got home that we heard of the death of Michael Jackson and as we watched footage of him as a very young boy totally outshining his brothers with his singing and dancing, it did make me glad that my 13-year-old daughter had perhaps had her wings clipped as I can think of very few child stars who have gone on to have a long and happy life.

And now we have Mr Bowie. At 69 he has actually had a long life compared to the others listed above who died at 42, 40 and 50 respectively. It is sad that his family and friends will no longer be able to talk with him, work with him and spend time with him but I am not sure if it is true that it is “sad” for the rest of us who did not know him other than through his work. It is more a massive shock that someone who has been around for such a long time as part of the fabric of Britain’s music culture, is suddenly no longer with us. Back to the mortality, reality check. It is sad that his body of work is now complete but what a body of work to leave – it will be added to, new material will be found and it will be reworked for as long as people have the appetite to do so. With a creative force such as Bowie whose work never did fit neatly into a particular genre or period, it will keep on appealing to new fans.

So back to the original premise to this blog – The random piece of music heard in the course of the day. I’m going to pick Life On Mars?.

Life On Mars? by David Bowie:

I have watched many video clips of Ziggy Stardust today and heard much analysis of how Bowie pushed boundaries with his androgyny, but here’s the thing, when Life on Mars? hit the charts in June 1973, I was just a 13-year-old girl who loved Top of the Pops and Radio 1’s chart show. I sat poised with my cassette recorder and microphone on a Thursday night at 7.30pm desperately trying to capture my favourite songs with no annoying applause or voice-overs. I liked Life on Mars? a lot, because it’s a great sounding song, but at 13 I really wouldn’t have understood what androgyny meant and having taken in lots of telly from the mid ’60s onward, he was just another flamboyantly dressed pop star (we’d had the hippy era already and glam rock was well and truly underway by this time). Looking now at the lyrics, they are fairly bizarre and my 13-year-old self wouldn’t have given them much thought. The weirdest thing about Life on Mars? foray into the charts is that it coincided with The Laughing Gnome’s second release after failing miserably to make an impact first time around in 1967. Not part of his grand plan to have both songs around at the same time I imagine but the economics of the recording industry being as they are, his former record company weren’t going to miss out on an income stream from a now popular artist.

My older self now realises what a massive a creative talent David Bowie was and I look forward to revisiting his back catalogue as we all do when something like this happens. When I said earlier that he was just another flamboyantly dressed pop star, I will concede that he was indeed the most flamboyant of them all. The striped, sleeveless swimsuit affair and the one-legged jumpsuit ensembles are still deeply troubling to look at today. I will try to make sense of it all, although I am not entirely sure we were ever meant to. He was unusual in that he was primarily an actor and artist whose biggest success came in the music industry. Only an actor could reinvent himself, so often, so successfully, into so many great characters.

But when all’s said and done I would just like to know, once and for all, how to pronounce his name. Is is Bow-ie or Bo-wie? Still working that one out but maybe that’s just how it should be, for the master of reinvention.

RIP David Bowie.

Life On Mars? Lyrics
(Song by David Bowie)

It’s a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling “No”
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks
through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
For she’s lived it
ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on

Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man!
Look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

It’s on America’s tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
‘Cause Lennon’s on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns

But the film is a saddening bore
‘Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It’s about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on…

Postscript:

A brilliant television series, first shown in 2006 was also called Life On Mars. The main character Sam Tyler went back in time to join the 1973 Manchester Police Force. It had a really clever fantasy-esque plotline and a great soundtrack of ’70s songs which made it a must-watch show, especially for me. It was inevitable that Life On Mars? the song, would be heavily used throughout the whole series and probably contributed to it becoming my favourite Bowie song.