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David Bowie’s new single Where Are We Now, the prequel to an album apparently, is certainly polarising. Some people thinks it’s the greatest, others that he’s just talking his way through it (Bowie is 66, Leonard Cohen gets away with it) and who’s Bowie anyway?
He was one of the three icons of the great age of British pop music, along with The Beatles and the Stones. Nobody else has come close really, although Amy Winehouse might have.
Anyway, here’s the new Bowie:
Bowie has always been a master of re-invention, we all know his Ziggy Stardust period (well I do) but he first hit the charts with this cheesy opus.
Marvelous.
So, to return to the question we asked in the headline, will Dave’s second or third or fifteenth coming spark an explosion of interest from ad agencies who are desperate to latch on to a musical trend?
Well it just might. If the new single and following album sell then they’ll be all over Bowie. But only if teenies and twenty-somethings buy it alongside their one-time hipster parents.
Bowie was one of the first artists to sell his catalogue to financiers, a bit like raising money on your mortgage. So I suspect he’d be interested in a deal.
So will Ziggy front up for John Lewis and Adam & Eve/DDB next Christmas? Or for a competitor?
Maybe not.
