What David Bowie meant to me... writers, artists and musicians remember a hero

Ken Scott, co-producer of Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the and Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups. He is now a Visiting Senior Lecturer in the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett University.

I had fallen out with the studios’ new manager at Abbey Road which meant that I left shortly after completing engineering work on The Beatles’ White Album.

So I went to work at the independent Trident Studios and one day during a tea break I got chatting to a guy about wanting to become a producer. It happened to be David Bowie, who was there to help out on a friend’s record.

He asked me if I wanted to work with him on what turned out to be Hunky Dory, which was my very first producer’s job. I thought he was an exceedingly nice guy, but at that point I didn’t think he would be a superstar. Tony Visconti, who had been his producer and bass player, had taken control of the musical side of things up to then.

It was only when David came round my house a few weeks later and we started to go through demos of the songs to figure out what we were going to record for the album that I suddenly realise - hang on, there’s a lot more to this guy than I thought. I realised at that point he could be huge.

Technology today is astounding, but the singers will only sing the chorus once and then they’ll copy and paste it across. David performed every one of his vocals and 95 per cent of them were first takes. Performances like that just don’t happen today.

Driffield-born drummer Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey who was part of David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars.

I’d known Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson from the 60s music scene in Hull, but I didn’t know much about the man himself. I’d seen one flyer and just thought he was a folkie. Mick and I had come up through hard rock, progressive rock, Hendrix, Jeff Beck and the blues, so it was a long way apart.

But when I first met him I thought, ‘this guy really means it’. David lived and breathed being a rock’n’roll star. He even ate his breakfast dressed to the nines. Once he answered the door clothed in a rainbow T-shirt, bright red corduroy trousers, bangles and some slip-on shoes that he’d obviously dyed blue and put red stars on each one. I thought maybe everybody dressed like that in London, but it turned out they didn’t.

We ended up all living together in Haddon Hall. It was a commune-type place but it had a modern edge to it. You’d have Marc Bolan walking through one day, Arthur Brown, lots of different artists would drop in for a chat. Bowie would be writing in one room with his guitar and he’d have a piano in another room and then he’d shout, ‘Woody, I’ve just finished one, come and have a listen’. David had just got married to Angie so he was, how shall I say, occupied a lot of the time. He would give us the chords and tell us the concept of the song, sometimes a few lyrics and sometimes no lyric, then it was like, ‘OK, put it together’.

As a three-piece we just jammed and got a feel for what we could do, then at the end David came in and did his vocals on top.

When I first saw the cover of the The Man Who Sold The World, which carried a photograph of Bowie wearing a dress, I was stunned. It probably worked against us at the time. Back then not many people knew men who wore dresses.

Russell Senior, former Pulp guitarist and author of Freak Out The Squares: Life in a Band Called Pulp.

When I was watching Top of the Pops in 1972 at the age of 11, Starman by David Bowie came on. What was this? Was he human? Was this even music? He prowled the stage like a leopard inviting you to stroke. “Is that a man or a woman?’ asked my dad.

In the stodgy north, the idea that someone could look so weird, so gloriously otherworldly was transforming and enervating. Bowie was a through-the-looking-glass figure who showed that another world could exist.

My mate started to talk in a fey Cockney accent and we stayed up late reading the lyrics on Bowie’s album sleeves about spacemen and streetwalkers, trying to decipher their meaning.

When Bowie announced he had killed Ziggy I thought it was all part of the act, that Ziggy would come back and the joke would be revealed - but he never did. No more lightning strike face, no more leaning against Mick.

What a life, what a loss.

Rosie Millard, chair of Hull City of Culture 2017 and former BBC arts correspondent.

As a teenager my bedroom wall was covered from floor to ceiling with posters of David Bowie and it was right there that my lifelong love of his music was born.

I saw him play at Milton Keynes after my A-levels, but it was his concert in Brixton which meant and still means the most. It was shortly after the riots and it had none of the pyrotechnics of his big tours, but was so much more special for it. I was there in the front row and while the word legend is vastly overused, that night he was the very definition of one. Ten years later, I was hanging around Regent Street before a shift at the BBC. One shop was playing Young Americans and I wondered what David Bowie was up to right at that moment. Before heading to work, I popped to see a friend Bernard Jacobsen who owns an art gallery nearby. When I got there he was waiting for a friend to go to a Picasso exhibition at the Tate. A car pulled up outside and his friend got out. It was David Bowie. Bernard kindly introduced me, but I had no words. There were a billion questions I could have asked him, but I was struck completely dumb.

It didn’t matter. I had met David Bowie and I told that anecdote to pretty much everyone I ever met.

I like the fact that Bowie so rarely gave interviews. He didn’t need to speak. His music said everything. His voice was authentic, intellectual, poetic and brilliant. He moved millions of people, but I always thought that he was speaking just to me.

I still have my sister’s vinyl copy of Hunky Dory. On her instruction I have put it on and turned it up loud. There is nothing else to do.

Mick McCann, author of Coming Out As A Bowie Fan in Leeds.

It was my sister’s fault. It was she who first let me listen to Hunky Dory and by the time Bowie was about to unveil Ziggy Stardust on Top of the Pops I was beside myself.

People talk of how Bowie changed society, but along the way he also changed a million lives. He wasn’t political in a tub-thumping kind of way, but the social commentary in his songs was both personal, compassionate and quietly powerful.

Whether he knew it or not he was a champion for the marginalised. He made it ok to be a bit of a freak.

If anyone doubts what a genius he was then I say listen to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s a great song. Everyone loves it. I love it. But straight afterwards listen to Bowie’s Sound and Vision. It was released the same year, but there is simply no comparison. He created a soundscape the like of which no one had heard before.

I saw him live a few times, but after a gig in Milton Keynes in the 1980s I swore that I never wanted to see him again. It was too big. It was too impersonal. On that grand stage the bond which had felt so strong since I was a school kid in Leeds dissolved. It was why I will forever be thankful that I later got to to see him play the Town and Country Club in Leeds. That night there were just 500 people in the crowd and the truth was it felt like just the two of us.

When I first started listening to Bowie I had to defend myself at school from the ridicule of Slade fans. Gradually the world came to love him. That was fine too, but he was and always will be mine.

Joolz Denby, Bradford writer and artist.

Bowie was the soundtrack to my youth. When I was 17 I wanted to dress like him and look like him, he was such a big influence.

I saw him in the early 70s at Harrogate Theatre. He was playing an acoustic set reclining on a chaise lounge wearing a kaftan. I dragged a friend along who wasn’t very impressed, she said ‘what is this?’

But I thought he was wonderful because not only was he a brilliant musician who wrote these fantastic, legendary songs, but for a visual artist like me he was a huge inspiration.

He was very stylish, he set fashion trends he didn’t follow them. There’s a lot of copying around today whereas Bowie was an original, which you don’t often see.

He was also very brave, he didn’t care what people thought of him. When I was growing up some of my friends’ parents forbade them from watching Bowie on Top of the Pops because he was seen as a pernicious influence which seems funny today.

In the 80s, New Model Army [formed in Bradford] toured with Bowie and he went into their dressing room to thank them for supporting him. They played with some really big names but none of them did that, he was an absolute gentleman.

What I admire about him is he was an artist and he was prepared to make mistakes and he was prepared to fail in order to explore. It’s so different from today when so much music is safe and corporate.

Dave Simpson, author and music journalist from Leeds.

I was always a massive Bowie fan. When I was about nine me and a couple of mates went to get a ‘Bowie’ haircut at this traditional barber’s shop on Town Street in Horsforth. I came out with this Aladdin Sane-style quiff and I remember the look of horror on my mother’s face.

I saw Bowie several times, including in Leeds, and Space Oddity was one of the very first songs I bought with my own money.

It wasn’t just Bowie’s music that was important to me. I was a red-haired kid and I got called all kinds of names so when Bowie, who was the biggest pop star in the firmament, came along he suddenly made red hair look cool.

There was that element of other worldliness about him. When I first saw him on Top of the Pops he was playing Life On Mars and the next day there was a very serious discussion in the playground about whether he was an alien because he looked so different from anything we’d seen before.

A few years later I remember seeing a big billboard at around the time Heroes came out saying, ‘There’s old wave and there’s new wave and there’s David Bowie.’ And that sums it up perfectly, he wasn’t like anybody else.”

Chris Charlesworth, music journalist and editor at Omnibus Press.

I interviewed him several times between 1970 and 78 and later worked for his record company which is when I got to know him.

He was the most charismatic performer of his generation. He was also the most beautiful to look at and one of the cleverest. He was ahead of the game and he didn’t stand still. He had a real sense of drama, you saw that in the way he killed off Ziggy Stardust and it continued throughout his career, we saw it when he released his last album without any fanfare or publicity.

He was very clued up about culture in general, not just music. He would quiz you about what films you’d been to see and what books you’d read.

He was a cultural polymath. I remember taking a group of journalists to see him playing the Elephant Man on stage in Chicago. It’s not the easiest of roles but he was very good and it transferred to Broadway. I can’t think of another rock star who acted on stage like that.

“He was charming and gracious and women adored him. I think one of his greatest performances was at Live Aid in 1985. He played one of my favourite songs of his, Heroes, and he just sounded phenomenal. That was Bowie at his best and that’s how I’ll remember him.”

Martin Bedford, founder of the Leadmill in Sheffield.

It was 1971. David Bowie had just released Hunky Dory and he came to play a pub in my home town of Gravesend. He was like nothing any of us had seen before. No one had played a pub like ours wearing a dress and he was only on for four songs before a fight broke out.

When a few years later we heard he was going to play the Town Hall, a few of us met up before school to make sure that we got tickets. We stood outside, patiently waiting for the box office to open, but when it did we were told, ‘Sorry, lads, the gig’s been cancelled. We didn’t think there would be enough interest’. A few months later Ziggy Stardust had become a global phenomenon and we’d gone to the next town to watch him play.

He was like no other and not just because of his incredible music. Back then, working class lads didn’t tend to be very opened minded, but he opened us up to new ideas and he made us more tolerant and more accepting of those who were different.

I last saw him when he played at Glastonbury. He hadn’t performed live for years and if I’m honest he sounded a little nervous. Not that it mattered. He was always an incredible force of nature on stage and the world will be a poorer place without him.

Alan Johnson, Labour MP for West Hull

I was a big fan of Bowie from the start. I had his first LP when he was Davy Jones. Then in 1969 Space Oddity came out which was a truly amazing record and sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday. After that I followed him from Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust up to Aladdin Sane. Bowie was a master of melody, if you listen to Life On Mars and Changes and songs like that, they’re all very melodious. He never went out of fashion because he never went out of tune and whatever genre he was working in the songs were fabulous.

Dave Best, guitarist with Leeds band The Pigeon Detectives.

Bowie was always there. He was one of those artists whose back catalogue seemed to be ingrained in my mind form a young age. When I was about 14 and seriously starting to ‘get into music’ David Bowie’s albums, along with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, were my education. The Beatles were my Gods, The Stones were my mischievous rock and roll mentors, and David Bowie helped me with my first steps into a more ‘alternative’ world.

The greatest thing about Bowie for me was that he was a bit weird. He looked sort of strange, with his mismatched eyes and androgynous looks, but he was a mesmorising presence and his songs were wacky masterpieces. Rather than hide his quirks, he embraced them and used them to his advantage.

He constructed his songs in such as way that meant they were unbelievably catchy, whilst maintaining a certain ambiguity, both melodically and lyrically. He sang about odd things, in an odd way and made himself a megastar in the process – an achievement has to be applauded.

In a world where social media means we know what our favourite musicians have had for breakfast, Bowie was one of the last mythical beasts of rock and roll - enigmatic, legendary and truly one of a kind.