David Bowie – Why I’m Sad

I’m not his biggest fan

I never even saw him live

He wouldn’t be my specialist subject on Mastermind

But I’m allowed to be sad, and so are you.

It’s ok to be sad and nobody should ever feel that they have to justify their sadness to anyone. It’s a strange world and where once we would wait for obituaries to be printed, news of ‘celebrity’ deaths travels fast and the outpouring of grief, loss and sadness spreads across social media. It sounds less personal, more detached, but there is the same feeling behind it and today that feeling was palpable, raw, real.

Spilling our thoughts and reflections out all over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram might sound insincere to some, but it’s how things are and that’s what people do now – what’s worse than that is those who view it as some kind of grief competition and worse than that, people who question why someone like me would be so bothered. I have my reasons, and so does everybody else.

I wasn’t one of those cool kids whose parents took me off to festivals. My parents were more into classical music and folk than rock and pop. Me and my sisters would plead from the back of the car for them to turn off Tchaikovsky and play us Now ’38 instead. We were clueless.

So I didn’t discover Bowie until later on, but what a discovery he was, and his music changed my life. I was sick, in hospital, mentally unstable and struggling to find any motivation to want to get myself better. I’d kind of given up. A friend sent me a mixtape and the first track on it was David Bowie ‘Changes’. I played it every day. I was there for 9 months.

Still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets and
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet

It just made sense, and it helped me, and that’s why I’m sad.