FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

David Bowie Would Have Hated the Tribute That The Brit Awards Have Planned For Him

The problem is, it’s not very exciting – and exciting was something of Bowie’s speciality.

One thing you can rely on awards shows for is their penchant for the one-off “supergroup”. Chart-toppers hobbled together and pushed towards stage, competing in a three-legged race to take first place as the year’s most zeitgeisty YouTube moment. It’s PR pop at its worst—and it’s the approach the Brit Awards are rumoured to be taking in order to honour David Bowie at next month’s ceremony. Adele, Coldplay, Bono, Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher are all said to be in talks to perform together at the show in honour of the late icon.

Advertisement

The problem is, it’s not very exciting – and exciting was something of Bowie’s speciality.

Regardless of their respective talents, fame, or lack thereof, none of the acts on the reported billing come close to matching Bowie’s electrifying cultural presence. Neither do they have any tangible connection to Bowie’s legacy, nor the man himself. Coldplay admitted that he wouldn’t even work with them.

There’s no doubt that the Brit Awards are trying: they’re rounding up every big hitter in British pop they can think of. And no doubt these acts have huge respect for Bowie themselves because Britons love Bowie. We fucking love him! He’s someone who makes us proud to be British. Fellow English oddity Kate Bush summed it up perfectly in her statement on his passing: “I’m struck by how the whole country has been flung into mourning and shock. Shock, because someone who had already transcended into immortality could actually die. He was ours. Wonderfully eccentric in a way that only an Englishman could be.”

That possessive “ours” feels real—particularly in the UK—but while Bowie was undeniably “wonderfully eccentric”, that eccentricity transcended his Englishness. Once exported from the British Isles, Bowie never really looked back. He spent his most prolific years in Berlin and America. So Britons may be proud of Bowie, but Bowie never seemed exceedingly proud of Britain. In fact, he seemed a tad disillusioned by it. Speaking of Croydon, the borough in which he went to college, he commented “It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about somebody or something: ‘God, it’s so f*****g Croydon!’” Evidently a man who dallies in the cosmos doesn’t have much time for his own earthly origins.

It seems arbitrary, then, to pay him tribute by clumping a few compatriots together for a tawdry singalong. Gallagher and co may want to celebrate Bowie, but would Bowie have wanted them to? He shunned the Brit Awards when he last won in 2014 and sent Kate Moss (arguably the only other stratospheric star Croydon’s birthed) to accept the award instead. Before that, his name was on the 1984 list of winners that included Annie Lennox, Culture Club and Michael Jackson. He was in better company back then.

So why not try to gather British performers of Bowie’s ilk to celebrate him? There’s no shortage of eccentrics from his isle and era. But then, Britain’s not so great at wheeling out national treasures – even for the Queen. So if the Brit Awards’s only criteria for this tribute are Who’s British? and Who’ll perform? then the star-studded line up serves only to draw attention to the event itself and not the man they purport to honour.

David Bowie was one of Britain’s finest; it’ll be a long time before even Adele's record-breaking chart success can compete with his legacy. The man deserves a dignified farewell, not an ugly chimera of performers whose only link to him is a monarch and an English accent. In Bowie’s shadow, a supergroup is little more than pub karaoke on a televised stage—and besides, Brixton already did it better.

Rachel Wilson is a quality tribute kind of person. Follow her at @iillson