1) Bowie
- The year began with Blackstar and the end of Bowie.
- Suddenly, the buskers of London, who for as long as I had been here had played House of the Rising Sun, began playing Starman. Not as well as Bowie but what the hey!.
- We had a gig early in January and we'd already planned tributes to Lemmy, namely Silver Machine and 1916 so there was no room for a Bowie tribute song so what did we do?
- Instead I inserted Future Legend into Abyss and we played a chorus of Jean Genie in the middle of our version of Sympathy for the Devil.
- I never got Bowie when he first came out. I saw Space Oddity on Top of the Pops as a child and liked the SF theme because that was my specialist subject at age nine but I never understood Bowie after that until Heroes came out and I saw the blessed Nico doing it.
- Around the same time, I saw Christiane F and understood Christiane's obsession with him as he stood above the adoring Berlin crowds and sang Station to Station.
- So then I looked at Bowie's back catalogue and discovered such brilliant gems as Running Gun Blues, Panic in Detroit, John I'm Only Dancing and Rebel Rebel.
- And I'd forgotten how good Mick Ronson was!
- Prince too, what is the world coming to?
- Not much of his work is available out there on the Internet.
- I love 1999, and When Doves Cry and Sign O the Times
- But here's Purple Rain!
- Of course, another artist associated with Prince, namely Vanity also died this year.
- But this was the year that we were reminded that you don't need to be a celebrity for your death to be heard worldwide. When Viola Beach plunged into a Swedish Canal and died along with their manager in February, their songs Boys That Sing and Swings and Waterslides went straight into the charts.
- In August their debut (and only) album "Viola Beach" reached number 1 in the Album Charts.
- Vi Subversa aka Frances Sokolov died in February aged 80.
- Not only was she a punk icon in her own right in Poison Girls, but she was also the mother of Pete Fender and Gem Stone of Fatal Microbes and later Rubella Ballet.
- Just after Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, I remember saying it should have been Leonard Cohen.
- Shortly afterward Leonard Cohen died. Here are some of the songs that made me love his lyrics so:
- The Traitor; If It Be Your Will; The Future (here shown in Natural Born Killers); First We Take Manhattan.
- But the song we chose to cover in tribute was Democracy, of course, what with him dying after the Presidential election.
- The thing with Cohen though was that despite a marvellous voice, his songs bring out marvellous covers from other singers.
- I particularly love Imogen Heap's version (the one they used when Marissa died in the OC).
