In his song Five Years, Bowie imagined a dying Earth. Five years on from his death, it seems to have come true – yet he continues to uplift us
On 11 January 2016, in pitch darkness, I turned on the radio at 7am and heard the news that David Bowie had died. I switched rapidly between stations hoping to find a parallel universe in which he was still alive, but there were only the halting voices of presenters choking back tears alongside snippets of Bowie’s incomparable musical world, collapsing into collective grief.
My first reaction was to think magically: “But he can’t be dead!” Bowie had just released his 25th album, Blackstar, only three days previously, on his 69th birthday. His official website had recently posted new photographs of him, sharp-suited and yelling playfully into the camera. Occasional news of what the critic Paul Morley called Bowie’s “cheering, ongoing life” – especially in the decade after Bowie suffered a heart attack on stage in 2004 – had been enough to reassure me and his millions of fans that he was still around. Not that he owed us anything, but a world that still had David Bowie in it couldn’t be all bad. And now he was gone from it.
