David Bowie, who spent most of the '70s establishing himself as a master of psychological disguises, is spending the '80s trying to convince us that he's just a regular fella - or at least as close to one as a millionaire pop star can be.
I knew about things like Iggy Pop and The Velvet Underground, weirdly, before I knew about David Bowie. I didn't know what David Bowie was, when I was a kid. I thought he was like Visage.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
I'm remembered as a model who dated a rock star or 10, among them Steven Tyler, Todd Rundgren, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, Jimmy Page, and Rod Stewart.
I was in L.A. with my wife in a restaurant, and I spotted my great hero David Bowie at another table. Of course I wasn't going to bother him. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder, and it was Bowie, and he squatted down to talk to me. David Bowie came down to my level - so gentlemanly.
I think there's something antagonistic about bedroom pop. We're reappropriating pop and saying you don't have to be an ex-Disney star to make pop music. You can be from Shepherd's Bush and have spent most of your life listening to the Smiths and still make a pop record.
David Bowie used to cover loads of people, and there was an element of "David Bowie did it, so we wanted to do it," because we're kind of obsessed [with him].
David Bowie's music is a moving target. Just when you think you got the bullseye, it shifts. And to his credit, on to death, it's still shifting. David Bowie is a moving target, even after he's gone.
David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.
If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.
I have always loved David Bowie. When he began to experiment with pop music in the 80's, I really thought there was a really fascinating reverence for it. A lot of people looked at pop music as just idiot music, or dance music, and with this he was giving it a lot of respect.
I was always interested in acting and writing, and I honestly thought I'd make my name as a scriptwriter one day. But somehow, I ended up in London in the early '70s, and that's where I had my David Bowie adventure.
[David] Bowie had a genius for continual change himself, reinventing his sound and his image throughout the decades. Each album seemed to find Bowie in a different persona, with a new sound to match his new look.
It's a miracle that David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop are actually still alive today, given how hard they lived.
The most intolerant advocate is he who is trying to convince himself.
Usually when I make a record, I know what the potential is going to be, but I didn't know that 'Just A Friend' was going to be that big. 'Just A Friend' opened a world up where I never knew the difference between being a pop star and a regular rap star. It was crazy.
My joke is a picture of David Bowie on his balcony in the '70s in a suit in Paris, and unless that's you, I'm not interested. There are very few aesthetic types that I have, and people who look like that are not always necessarily good for me.