Star Man - David Bowie

Star Man provided sound track to my sexual journey.

 

It’s the New Year, a time for reflection, resolutions and renewal. It is also the month when many couples call it and march off to the divorce courts. If you are one of them take a breath, and if it’s still something you want to do then maybe you should.

‘I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring!’ - David Bowie (on his 50^th Birthday).

Bowie influenced my life in significant ways. His music and his chameleon style gave me all sorts of confidence so I am so saddened by his death. As I write this I have Sky News on in the background. They announced his passing earlier and are now covering the greatness and death of my Star Man. He is the genius who single handed defined my taste in music and men!

We all have those songs that take us back to those frothy adolescent moments when we believed that no-one in the entire universe could feel as much love as you. This was true love, deep, romantic, uncompromising and everlasting! Nobody could understand.

And then it broke your heart and every relationship thereafter has been tarnished and judged with those lessons. It is those lessons than mess with what may be happening in your life right now.

As we get older and fall in love again, begin and end relationships, I have no doubt that special songs play a part. We hear those songs now and get transported back. For me it is inevitably a Bowie song that is woven through the thread of my love life.

I remember playing ‘Sorrow’ and cutting my hair into Aladdin Sane spikes after being publically humiliated by a boyfriend who named his car after another girl. I have owned that album on Vinyl, cassette, CD and now iTunes. I must own about 18 of his albums including the latest ‘Blackstar’ released last Friday on Bowie’s 69^th Birthday. He died 2 days later. But what does this have to do with sex and relationships? For me – absolutely everything.

My first great love, (not the car idiot), the love by which all others have been judged, really introduced me to Bowie’s music. We were at university and I loved him from the minute I saw him. It took a couple of weeks to get a date after which we were inseparable for 3 years. He left university a year before me and I thought I’d die from longing. We remained close and now 30 years on we are both heartbroken at the death of a man who ruled our world. I am filled with ‘what if’s?’

I remember the mixed tape he made me with the obscure works I had never heard. He sang ‘The laughing gnome’ to me. I remember laughing at the song and his voice and I was happy. We were in love.

We experimented with sex, it was as vanilla as it could possibly get and many years later we would meet up in hotel rooms and play with sex in less vanilla ways. These experiences shaped and peaked my sexual curiosity and sent me on this journey I share with you. We were listening to Bowie.

I listened to Bowie when I said goodbye to him when he immigrated. I remember the album, it was Space Oddity. I wondered ‘Can you hear me Major Tom?’

After my divorce the very first act of independence and defiance was to fly to Australia to see Bowie perform live in Sydney. I played hard, danced on bars, lay on the beach topless and all the while listened to Bowie. I still have the T-Shirt.

I have also heard him perform in Melbourne and Birmingham; very special friends attending phoned me from the stadium and let me listen for a short while.

His music helped me discover my soul. I have loved, hated and longed listening to his music. He gave me permission to challenge perceptions and dare to be different. His death has made me reflect on the all the what if’s. If I’d tried harder, if I’d demanded more respect, if I’d tried to understand a little more, if I’d loved less, would it all have been different?

So before you call it quits and march off to the divorce court ask yourself whether you really have tried your best. Not in the quick fix kind of way because ‘This is not America’. If you have, then go ahead because as the great man once said, ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.'

RIP my David Bowie, I will look for you in the stars.