Times may change me…
Saturday’s Times in the UK has a nice three-page preview of the David Bowie: Pin Up exhibition I’ve been going on about, (See yesterday’s news for the BowieNet day winners) including one of those beautiful previously-unpublished Ken Pitt colour shots I mentioned before.
How cool does the pretty young mod look in that shot? Ten years before Paul Weller with ten times the style. Difference being that, for Bowie, (rather than hang on to something that suited him for decade after decade) it was another fleeting look, honed to absolute perfection, before moving on to the next equally convincing one ahead of everybody else…He makes me feel sick!
There’s a nice wordy piece by Michael Bracewell to accompany the pix in the Times piece, which you can read online by clicking on the mod. (If you get an error, simply search for Bowie and click on Ch-ch-ch-changes 04 Jun 2005) I’ll leave you with the opening paragraph from that very feature:
“If Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the principal figures in pop and rock to invent the mythic identity of the 1960s, then David Bowie did much the same for the 1970s, then post-punk and beyond ? only single-handedly. As a new exhibition of photographs shows, Bowie was the perky suburban mod who went on to fuse hippy bohemia with Warholesque decadence, sci-fi melodrama, beat occultism, black American soul chic and Weimar elegance; in so doing he not only reinvented himself as a succession of era-defining personas, but also inspired a whole generational cult of self-reinvention.”