According to his song, we could all be heroes,
but just for one day. He looked from his apartment
window and saw watchtowers by the Berlin Wall;
border guards almost close enough for eye contact.
Under such surveillance was not the perfect place
to kick drug induced paranoia. Rock music
was the medium through which he moderated
his personality disorders. Eclectic
in influence, neither of the Old nor New Wave,
he gave expression to a whole generation
of dreamers who might otherwise have surrendered
their sanity. Art shaped from alienation
entered the mainstream of pop culture, in contrast
to the rising tide of naff consumerism.
To have a hero with a cocaine habit was
copacetic for a while, until the schism
between mania and money healed. He became
another straight blonde bloke in a powder blue suit,
as much concerned with his pension as with poses
on the stage. Later, he subsisted on the fruit
of his earlier success; on back catalogue
re-issues and the futures market. Each new song
he recorded showed the second-hand influence
gleaned from latter-day bands of Ziggy sing-along
clones. He had his five years – and more besides -
managing to survive by shedding his old skin
in a form of metamorphosis that owed more
to Kafka than the creation of a fashion.
