Blackstar

This album has been added to 4 private lists and 6 public lists:

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  David Bowie

  Neil Hopkins

  Bowie started working on this album on the 8th of January 2015, his 68th birthday. He was working in the same low-key, no publicity way as the Next Day, with Tony Visconti as producer again. What no one, not even the musicians he was working with, realised at the time is that he was suffering from terminal liver cancer while recording this.

  The album was released a year later, again on his birthday in 2016. We all stayed up past midnight, hitting refresh in Apple Music waiting for the downloads to appear. What we got was easily one of his best albums, experimental and jazzy, with callbacks to the vocal style of his earliest albums, the haunting sounds of the Berlin trilogy and the world music themes of his later work.

  The title track has the line ‘Something happened on the day he died’ and I distinctly remember feeling a shiver go through me the first time I heard this, wondering also exactly what a Blackstar was. The second track, Tis Pity She Was a Whore also caught us by surprise - Bowie said cock! The cheeky scamp!

  Lazarus returns to the theme of mortality - ‘Look up here, I’m in heaven. I’ve got scars that can’t be seen’ - accompanied by a haunting saxophone line. The song concludes ‘Ain’t that just like me?’ and is followed by Sue, which sounds like one half of a cryptic conversation with references to x rays and saying goodbye, sounding like someone putting their affairs in order, saying things that needed to be said, accompanied by a frantic jazz beat that builds to a wail of feedback.

  Girl Loves Me gets even stranger with lyrics in a mix of gay Polari slang and the Nadsat constructed language from A Clockwork Orange. ‘Where the fuck did Monday go?’ he asks and we feel like time is running out. Dollar Days combines a soulful sax arrangement with lyrics wondering about never seeing the English evergreens again and the lines about ‘I’m trying to, I’m dying to …’ as the song builds to a pitch, crossfading into a beat as we reach the final track.

  ‘Seein’ more and feelin’ less Sayin’ no but meaning yes This is all I ever meant That's the message that I sent’

  As the music faded out with one final, endless chord, we knew we’d heard something extraordinary, a message from someone we’d known all our lives.

  Two days later we woke up to the news that he’d died.

  We came together on our social accounts, sharing a mix of disbelief, grief and also appreciation for a lifetime of music that had soundtracked our lives from those early days on Top of the Pops, to teenage discos, to discovering hidden gems and scouring them for hidden meanings, to 80’s cool (and cheesy pop), the blast of Tin Machine and the Buddha of Suburbia, and then rediscovering it all again.

  Rest in peace Starman.

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  20 Albums That Influenced Me

  Buffy Leigh

  This album radically changed the definition of "deep dive" for me, and is perhaps the first/only record in my collection I would consider sacred (in a non-religious sense). It's also my least listened to favorite album because I never want it to become background music, and each listen is almost a rite. I essentially only put it on for Bowiemas/Bowienalia.

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  vinyl dreams

  Chase

  my first bowie album... and sadly his last

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  My Current Rotation

  Tim

  David Bowie's "Blackstar," released two days before his death in 2016, was as forward-thinking and progressive, and mind-bending as any of his other material, and that's saying a lot. Track down the story of the band backing him up, it's worth it.

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  2016 Favorites

  Andrew R
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  Top 30

  Anton Engelbrecht Nielsen