Bowie's legacy is personal to each of us - he helped me survive Kent in the 80s

Some stories are best kept personal.

When I was ten my mum moved The Fitzgerald Family from the adventurous and lively Catford to the quaint and conservative Beckenham.

The contrast couldn’t have been more marked.

Catford was a place that required, no demanded, you kept your wits about you at all times - that part of South East London where the tube doesn’t go but everything else did. It was rough, it was tense, it had a shopping centre with a massive black cat that dominated the skyline - a bit like a Goodies episode directed by David Lynch.

I was ten though. I loved it

And Beckenham?

Well, it was all independent bookshops and half day closing on a Wednesday. I’m fairly sure I even saw a maypole once. An actual non-ironic maypole.

I was livid.

Failing to understand my Mum’s natural desire to better herself, and her family in the process, I couldn’t understand why I’d ended up in this suburb that didn’t even know whether it was in London or Kent - this pocket of the world where nothing happened except stationery.

I was into Madness, Adam and the Ants, and The Jam. That all felt right in Catford, completely appropriate to my setting, but now I was suddenly living in a Pentangle album. And, to make matters worse, I didn’t even know who Pentangle were.

“Mum. Why are we living here?”, I asked, when she was probably ironing (My mum spent most of the ‘80s ironing).

“NOTHING HAPPENS!!!!!! IT’S SO BORING!!!!!!”

She looked up from the ironing and then down at me.

“David Bowie lived here you know. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for us”

David Bowie?

I didn’t really know much about him. I think Ashes to Ashes had just come out and I remember the video where he was dressed as a clown in front of some heavy machinery. That didn’t look very Beckenham to me.

“Really?” I said.

“Yes, really.”

She finished the ironing and took me for a walk, along Southend Road where we lived.

She stopped suddenly, no more than 300 yards from our own house, and pointed.

“There”, she said, “David Bowie lived right there”

The teenage me would probably have said something like “WELL HE DOESN’T ANY MORE DOES HE! BECAUSE ITS RUBBISH HERE!!!!!”

But, as I keep saying, I was only ten. So I probably said something like “wow” instead, in a state of wonder at the revelation that a bona fide international rock star had practically lived next door.

We stayed put. My mum managed to keep a well stocked larder on Wednesday afternoons when the shops were shut and I realised I wasn’t living in the worst place in the world after all.

And then, a few years later, I got into Bowie.

My mum, who I’m now sure was in love with him, gave me her copy of Hunky Dory and suggested I give it a go. At this stage, I wasn’t even a fan of the Bowie I thought I knew, the Bowie of Let’s Dance, China Girl, and linen suits. None of that connected with me at all.

But Hunky Dory very much did.

I played it endlessly, I knew every single bit of it. Without doubt, it was probably the first “thing”, I suppose you could call it art, that I consumed in its absolute entirety. Vivid memories of putting off homework on a Sunday so I could give it just “one more listen”, hoping that “The Bewlay Brothers” would never end, that I’d never have to return to the reality of trying to make sense of algebra whilst Bullseye was on.

Looking back, if I’m honest, I probably spent about 38 per cent of the '80s hoping that The Bewlay Brothers would never end.

And then a journey.

Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and that Berlin period that, I have to admit, I’ve always struggled with. Still, what I loved was more than enough and, it was more than anything else.

He was my first love, my debut into the world of fandom.

He even had different colour eyes. That’s how much he took the piss. He couldn’t even be bothered to have eyes that were the same colour. What a star.

I fell deeper and deeper.

I devoured DA Pennebaker’s film of the final concert of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars - I watched the performance of Width of a Circle at least a billion times. And it always gets me at the end - the way he just declares it’s over. The fact that he knew all along that this was their last concert, that he couldn’t be bothered with the fanfare because he just wanted to move on.

It’s so “matter of fact”, it’s so right the way he does it - it’s over and you hear everyone’s heart break apart from his.

He was the first pop star I bought a book about, the first one that made me want to know more. It’s so vivid, looking back. I see the books, the records, the image of me with wrap around headphones making a dent in my hair - plugged into the family stereo listening to Bowie whilst my mum watched the telly over another pile of ironing. Occasionally she’d hear the leakage and tap her feet, no doubt remembering her own fandom - a girl the same age as Bowie.

He, the Bowie I now knew, had walked the same streets as me in Beckenham and, though I probably didn’t think this at the time, I’m sure it had an effect on me. I’m sure that walking past his house every day represented some sort of beacon of possibility, that it was ok to be different, that it was important to be tolerant. If Ziggy Stardust is your role model growing up you never really think anyone is weird or abnormal - you just accept.

And then another journey.

Just before he announced the break up of The Spiders from Mars at the Hammersmith Odeon, he told everyone to go and listen to The Velvet Underground. So I did. And Lou Reed. And The Stooges. All those rooms that he opened up, that he invited us into due to a lack of reverence for own his back catalogue - his own refusal to wallow. It’s always been the most amazing thing about him - that he isn’t known as someone who was just good in the '70s despite the fact that he was REALLY good in the '70s.

I look at my record collection now and it’s fair to say that, without Hunky Dory, it would have looked so much different - so much worse. That whole alcove, that wall of sound, virtually built from an album.

For all the extrapolations and the wider context, Bowie is someone so personal to me that somehow that talk is meaningless. It happened in my head, in my imagination, and it took me to places - away from the temporal and on to a flight of fancy.

So this morning, when my partner Clare woke me and told me had died, it shocked me but, more than that, it brought all of this back to me - everything that he meant and all the memories of Bowie and Me. And whilst this is personal, deliberately so, I wanted to tell the story this way because I know there’ll be people who will be nodding and agreeing - that they recognise that his legacy is personal, that he happened in their imagination too.

And he always will.

And, finally, at some point today when I’m confident I can hold it together, I’ll call my Mum - a girl the same age as Bowie who taught me just as much.

Martin Fitzgerald tweets @RamAlbumClub and this article first appeared here on his website Ram Album Club.