Pure pleasure with David Bowie
Pure pleasure with David Bowie
David Bowie is 24, shimmering with possibility, and he has slipped quietly out of the Sydney night into your small house, still carrying the electricity of the concert on his skin.
He shrugs off his jacket and you see the full glory of his Hunky Dory self: long, flowing hair falling over his cheeks, wide–leg, high‑waisted bell‑bottoms, a fitted waistcoat that catches the light, and boots that make a soft, certain thud on your floor.
He looks both casual and impossibly composed, as if this outfit is just something he happened to throw on before changing the direction of popular music.
You apologise for the simplicity of the meal, and he waves it away with a small, amused tilt of the head, as if to say that paratta and lentils are as good a reason to live as any encore.
At the table, the two of you sit close enough to smell the faint mix of sweat, cologne and cigarette smoke still clinging to him, the scent of backstage corridors and dressing rooms.
He folds himself into the chair with a dancer’s ease, and when he thanks you, the words come in that soft, careful south‑London voice, rounded and polite, almost shy, more English gentleman than swaggering rock god.
He tears a piece of paratta, dips it into the lentils, and smiles at the unexpected comfort of it; for a moment he is just a young man far from home, hungry after work.
On the sideboard, your Sonos speaker blinks to life and the opening piano of “Changes” spills into the room, his own 24‑year‑old voice looping back from vinyl time into this quiet Sydney kitchen.
He glances up and notices the poster on your wall: the slightly androgynous figure you have lived with for years, the sharp cheekbones, the knowing gaze, the suggestion that gender is something you can slip on and off like a jacket.
He studies it for a heartbeat longer than you expect, as if he is seeing a stranger he knows intimately; then he smiles, half‑rueful, half‑proud.
“You’ve kept that one,” he says, almost to himself, and there is the faintest glimmer of surprise that this version of him still lives in other people’s houses, in other people’s private mythologies.
The man at your table looks softer than the poster — less lacquered, more human — but the beauty is unmistakable, the bone structure made for stage lights.
Conversation comes easily, not as an interview, not as fandom, but as two people comparing notes about being alive.
He asks about Sydney, about growing up in Colombo, about the heat, about what it is like to grow up under a sky that feels this close and this wide at the same time.
You ask about the songs, and he shrugs, saying they’re just ways of thinking out loud, of trying on different selves until one fits for a while.
He talks about wanting to be different in a world that keeps trying to iron everyone flat, about how clothes and hair and make‑up are just tools, little rebellions stitched and painted onto the body.
There is no speechifying, no performance; he speaks in measured, reflective sentences, the way he did in those early interviews, gently amused by the seriousness with which people take him.
Plates empty, lentils smeared in small golden arcs, you both lean back and let the music fill the spaces between sentences.
“Life on Mars?” floats through the room now, the piano bold and bright, his recorded voice bigger than the walls, while the real Bowie at your table taps his fingers lightly in time, almost as if listening to someone else’s work.
You notice how he closes his eyes on certain lines, like a listener with a favourite verse, and you wonder which parts of his own lyrics still surprise him.
Outside, the city hums on — buses sighing, a siren somewhere far off — but in here the night has narrowed to this small domestic miracle: two glasses, an empty pot, and David Bowie sitting at your table as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world.
When he finally stands to go, he does it without drama, only a quiet thank you and a warm, steady look that makes you feel unreasonably seen.
At the door he glances back once more at the poster, at that beautiful, androgynous boy frozen forever on your wall, and then at you, the person who invited him in, not as an icon but as a guest.
You close the door behind him and, in the soft after‑silence, the house feels at once exactly the same and gently rearranged, as if all the ordinary objects in it have been turned a fraction towards the light.
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