From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads E-Book

James Briggs

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 399

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

James Briggs had never known what David Bowie's Life on Mars? meant. And twenty-five years later with a career stealing his soul, a relationship in stasis and a hairline in furious retreat, life on earth had him cornered. So when a lightning bolt of inspiration strikes, he leaves everything behind to cycle one of the song's lyrics, 'From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads' to discover what life, love and Life on Mars? really mean. What followed was life-affirming, inspirational and often hilarious. Criss-crossing Europe, he visited French chateaus where Bowie recorded, Spanish Olympic stadiums he played, former communist states where his music was banned, and the Berlin Wall he helped topple - all while navigating angry Soviet ballerinas, suspicious village mayors, and an irate Cliff Richard fan. James found kindred spirits and a new love (and occasionally hatred) for cycling as he discovered what happens when, instead of following the crowd, you follow the lyrics and music of the greatest artist of the 20th century. As the world reconsiders its priorities, From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads is a clarion call to embrace the strange, blaze your own path, and live as fearlessly as the Starman himself.

Leseprobe

‘One of the funniest navigations of the mid-life crisis – and half of Europe – I’ve ever read. I loved it.’

JOHN NIVEN, author, screenwriter and music writer

‘There’s a fine line between midlife crisis and sacrificial offering to the memory of your pop hero. And if you’re James Briggs, it’s the cycle route from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads – or, depending on which way you look at it, from one end of his perineum to the other. I wholly enjoyed following the former, but maybe I’ll give the latter a miss.’

PETE PAPHIDES, music journalist, broadcaster, author of Broken Greek

‘A curiously engaging (space) oddity of a book: part rock biography, part memoir, part sociological study, part endearingly off-kilter conceit.’

MARK RADCLIFFE, BBC 6 Music presenter, journalist and author

‘Sweet, touching and funny – a proper fan’s odyssey.’

JUDE ROGERS, music journalist, author of The Sound of Being Human and BBC broadcaster

‘When two of the greatest things collide (Bowie and Bikes), there’s only one possible outcome. I love this story. I’m rather jealous that I didn’t think of it first.’

NED BOULTING, sports broadcaster, author and podcaster

‘Hugely readable, charming and poignant.’

LEAH KARDOS, author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2025 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-311-8

ebook: 978-183773-312-5

Text copyright © 2025 James Briggs

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

Appointed GPSR EU Representative: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218

Address: Mustamäe tee 50, 10621, Tallinn, Estonia

Contact Details: [email protected], [phone]

For Mum and Dad

CONTENTS

Prologue

1The Flash

2Life on Earth

3From Ibiza …

4A Star Map is Born

5¡Hello Iggy Pop.. Hola Surrealism!

6Dreaming Of Dalí

7The Passenger

8Isolation

9Wild is the Wind

10Make-Up & Mountains

11Golden (Tax Free) Years

12Marriages & Cheating

13The Earworms of the Burgundy Canal

14Middle Age & Mars

15Inspired by Frankie

16Dirty Love

17Le Château d’hérouville

18The Taming of the Beast

19The Railroad to Russia

20Totalitarian Times

21East to West

22Berlin Years & Tears

23Where Are We Now?

24Sound and Vision

25Lifeless on Mars

26Kosmische & Crap

27Heaven on Earth

28The Secrets of Northern Holland

29The North Sea Chorus

30The Pianist’s Village

31The Meaning of Mars

32… To the Norfolk Broads

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

They say lightning never strikes twice, but it happened to me. In 1994, the first bolt sent me hurtling to the stars, which was a good thing, because I was fourteen and awkwardly shuffling around a school disco having a terrible time trying to kiss girls. Marooned on the edge of the dance floor, I felt cut adrift, abandoned to another planet. The whitewashed assembly hall pulsed with the sound of novelty records, the air brimming with the sickly scent of gobstoppers as a hundred and forty hormonal teenagers desperately tried to get off with one another.

The DJ played a collection of frenetic beats that encouraged hyperactivity. A slick mix of beeps and bops that had prepubescent geeks bobbing around like barrels in an ocean. My head lolloped from the neck of an extra-large Global Hypercolor T-shirt, my trainers wanting to move but held prisoner by a slick of Panda Pops. It didn’t matter. I had gangly arms to wave. I desperately tried to keep time with the music but looked more like an octopus trying to high-five a swarm of electric eels. This wasn’t the mating dance the girls of year 9 had been waiting for.

I smiled at Amy Fraser but her fingers were deep in a bag of cheese and onion crisps. I scanned the room for help. The DJ, Steve Baker’s dad, thumbed a wallet of counterfeit CDs – then fumbled the lot, sending them skidding across the laminate floor.

The music went dead.

Boys and girls stared gormlessly at one another. The only sound, the slop of bubble gum rattling around teeth and tonsils. Then, from nowhere, a piano note dropped from the heavens. Boys with wispy beards fell from plastic chairs, girls’ bubble-gum bubbles popped in an apocalyptic frenzy and Amy Fraser’s jaw dropped open to reveal a row of shimmering braces that sparkled like Elizabeth Duke diamonds.

That note, that piano chord, couldn’t have been more electric if it was thrown by Zeus himself. Impudent bass followed, pouring from speakers, bristling between centre-parting haircuts; piano notes chased, tap dancing around fluorescent hair bobbles, while serene orchestral strings pirouetted under billowing jeans and chequered culottes, searching for the stars. The seventies had transported themselves to nineties Somerset. As the poetic lyrics transformed young ladies with hairspray-stiffened fringes into girls with mousy hair, a dizzying finale erupted, and we were hastened to look to the skies and question if there really was life on other planets.

Oh man! What a ride.

Off my tits on Dolly Mixture, my head swirling with galaxies and supernovas, I couldn’t begin to comprehend the bounty of surreal images that waltzed before my eyes, blazing like stardust as they went. I had no idea what it meant, but David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’was the greatest thing I’d ever heard.

1. THE FLASH

It was winter when lightning struck again. Two decades had passed and it was a normal day. But every day had been normal since we lost him. Barely a month had gone by since Bowie blasted off to another planet for good and anyone with a musical soul was still in mourning. I was in no better frame of mind myself; I passed my bicycle, propped among the clutter of my hallway, which was also my front room, and shuffled towards the shower. The pre-dawn parade: wash away the morning blues, awaken the senses and gather your thoughts for the day; perhaps remember that it’s your mum’s birthday, you need to pay the electricity bill, or, as a 36-year-old man, consider buying a leather jacket.

I stared down at the swaddle of stomach blubber – too many post-work beers – as clumps of thinning hair washed down the drain for ever. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Not yet. I’d travelled a bit in my twenties but got stuck in my thirties. I had a career that was grinding every ounce of life from me and a relationship in which I was happy but hadn’t said the ‘L’ word. Even without the cloud of steam and shower gel suds gathering in my love handles, I’d worked myself into a right middle-aged lather. I looked down at the blocked water pooling around my ankles. I was in a rut, an expensive one-bedroom London rut – with dreadful plumbing. I’d lost my way, as well as my hair.

Fortunately, my record was cued. I was softly and sadly singing the lyrics to David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’ – slowly murdering the first verse and chorus. But among the foam, dead hair follicles and monotone murmurings, a storm was brewing. The rumblings of my mind fired off neutrons, a maelstrom of errant thoughts criss-crossing one another like intergalactic rockets – the bike in the hallway, the regrettable decision to grow a moustache, the impending misery of another working week. The pressure built, the humidity fizzing to an unsustainable crescendo, and at the sixth line of the fourth verse, it collapsed – a flash of fury, a bolt of lightning: I should cycle that; I should cycle from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads.

Ordinarily, lightning bolts in showers are a no-no if you want to continue padding around this earth, but this one had a certain spark. I could follow Bowie’s lyrical path, make a pilgrimage to the Starman, chat to Bowie fans from around the world and find the meaning of life or, at the very least, the meaning of ‘Life on Mars?’

As I wrestled damp socks onto damp feet, the implications of such mid-life heroics began to dawn on me. I had a career. I had a girlfriend. And this wasn’t ideal holiday territory with either. Why had it been that song stuck in my head, why not ‘Kokomo’ by the Beach Boys? As those lyrics tease, I could be swanning from the Caribbean to the Florida Keys. Instead, I was going to be awful and spend time pedalling the unglamorous hard shoulders of European motorways. I broke it to Lucy, said this was the holiday Bowie would have wanted: get off the beaten track, lead don’t follow, find our own path. I suggested we do it together, maybe on a tandem.

Lucy fancied Greece.

‘Greece would still be there next year,’ I offered obviously and ignorantly.

She politely said, ‘No, thanks.’ But, seeing the words ‘blistering mid-life crisis’ emblazoned across my forehead, encouraged me. Next, I had to convince my boss that this was an important pilgrimage, a creative sabbatical that deserved a light ripple of applause rather than a P45. After a short period of wrangling, it was tenuously but suspiciously approved, letting the idea consume my thoughts.

Had anyone cycled a song lyric before? More importantly, had anyone died cycling a song lyric before? Anyway, the path was set. Or at least I thought it was. In truth, I didn’t really have one. A common theme over the next few weeks was pub conversations going around in circles a lot like this:

‘I’m going on a cycling trip!’ I’d announce like the screaming mid-life crisis cliché I clearly was.

‘Oh, right. Whereabouts?’

This was the kicker. I’d take another sip of beer and casually say, ‘From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads,’ somehow restraining myself from clambering on the table and performing an elaborate jazz hands routine. After explaining to the less enlightened that this was a major Bowie lyric and not a minor breakdown, the snippets of wisdom came pouring forth.

‘I don’t know why anyone would do that,’ said someone I thought of as a friend.

‘The Spanish are drunk drivers,’ said an English drunk drinker.

‘That’s weird,’ offered a colleague who had exactly the same sandwiches at exactly the same time each day.

Then the drama was ratcheted up even further.

‘That’s a long way, aren’t you worried about bears?’ proffered someone with a fear of distance and furry man killers.

It’s true, I hadn’t thought about the size of Europe or razor-toothed forest assassins. But there was one particular query that was infinitely more bothering.

‘Yeah, but where are you going to go?’

‘I’ve told you, from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads,’ I replied, performing jazz hands under the table.

‘Yeah, but where?’

Jeez.

‘From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads,’ I said, whistling the melody and pointing from floor to sky like it was some kind of star map known only to those dumbstruck by lightning.

‘Yes. But where, specifically?’

I was getting tired of waiting for the applause and handshakes to roll in. I sighed wearily and sang the lyric for the fourth time.

‘We know that, you blathering testicle, but what do France, motorways and mountains have to do with Bowie?’

Ah.

I’m sure Bowie probably was massively fond of France and motorways, plus I remembered reading somewhere he liked to ski, so that’d be no problem. And we all know DB is everywhere. Look around you, gaze lustily at the star-strewn skies, he’s embedded in the very fabric of the universe. Isn’t he? So that would include Norfolk, obscure French B-roads and Ibiza, definitely Ibiza.

The black hole in my plan had been exposed. This probably merited further investigation. I know, I’d ask the fans: the David Bowie Wonderland message forum – a fantastic source of Bowie trivia and nuggets populated by Starman fans left, right and centre of the galaxy – they would have the answer. I applied my fawning index fingers and tapped out a long, meaningful message:

Did Bowie visit Ibiza?

July 26 2016 at 9:54 PM

I’d let that percolate for a day or two before announcing to my friends that my plan was sound because Bowie loved Ibiza, French motorways and long aimless bike rides. Either that or, like all internet forums, it would spiral out of control and end up with people talking about their cat, a dead grandparent, or their cat who killed their grandparent. But always trust a Bowie fan; they have more substance, if not clarity on the matter. Fans were playful, saying the Ibizans were keeping quiet to keep the tourists away, suggesting Cyprus was his island – a nod to another Bowie lyric from his Lodger album. That or delivering small socio-geographic essays outlining the extremities of them as holiday destinations, arguing that the Norfolk Broads was a traditional spot, whereas Ibiza was more for the middle classes on the lookout for a leisurely getaway.

The evidence was thinner than my hairline. A sudden fright took hold, the possibility of a slow descent into madness while cycling nearly three thousand miles, occasionally bumping into people eating packets of Mini Cheddars in service stations and asking pathetically if they liked David Bowie. As I hunched over my laptop in my miniscule flat, far away from the jazz hands of the pub, I began to realise there’s nothing more reckless than a man on the brink of a mid-life meltdown with access to a bike and Google Maps.

Poking around on the internet, I began to see that Bowie was kind of everywhere. As I typed ‘Bowie France’ into Google, a not too shabby 11.3 million search results cascaded down the screen. ‘Bowie Space’ turned up a whopping 18.3 million titbits, and even ‘Bowie Motorway Service Stations’ a teasing 323,000 leads.

As I cast my net wider, I began to see the cosmos – a shining path of everything Starman, places he’d played, studios he’d recorded, houses he’d lived. I frantically jotted them down, plotting a loose constellation across Europe. A ‘Star Map’ – a route that would free my soul and, using Bowie as a compass, start to unravel the mysteries of ‘Life on Mars?’. I hoped the answers I found would propel me in the direction I sought from my ageing life on earth.

Unfathomably, Bowie had written the song at 24. Twenty-four. Let’s put that in perspective: in my early twenties I was failing anatomy and getting fat at university. So tubby, in fact, that when I came home for the summer my mum ignored the laws of mothering and spent two months actively feeding me down, rather than up. But why had it been that song that dribbled from my mouth in the shower?

Everyone comes to Bowie in a different way. We’re familiar with the stories of how he made it OK to be different, to dress how you wanted, to be yourself, embrace your identity and sexuality, and to be downright weird. But these people were from the Bowie generation, they’d grown up with his music. This would be another problem for me. I’d spent much of my formative musical years exposed to my dad’s taste: Barry Manilow, Genesis – crap like that. I’m not sure what happened, he had a good record collection – Motown, Hendrix, The Stones – but sometime in the eighties he slipped down a side road of musical bilge inhabited by the likes of Richard Marx, Wham! and Michael Bolton. My sister and I used to sit with our ears pressed to a Celestion speaker as ‘Uptown Girl’ by Billy Joel wo-oh-oh-ed from the coils with Dad air-drumming furiously behind. Like the Bowie fans, I was different alright, just in a pop and soft rock kind of way.

I had to furrow my own path. Take things into my own hands. Which meant an act of juvenile delinquency – nicking my sister’s CDs. The Stone Roses and Nirvana, the gateway discs to an indie rabbit hole where the likes of Pulp, Blur and Oasis were waiting to steal my ears. A Somerset childhood meant that, by 2000, I was jumping the fence at Glastonbury where Bowie delivered an ‘Oi, don’t forget about me’ elbow to the ribs. In a field of black and orange, cider and substance highs, he sashayed through a career-spanning set, playing to the biggest festival crowd ever assembled. With his flowing bleached-blond hair and Alexander McQueen suit he introduced ‘Life on Mars?’

‘I’m very fearful tonight,’ he teased, ‘because I got struck down by laryngitis this week. So, if I give out and any of you know any of the words – for gawd’s sake join in. Counting on you!’ As the immortal lyrics drifted over the Somerset ley lines, my sticky school disco feet were knocked off balance again. While small fires burned and wellies stuck in gluey mud, we heeded Bowie’s call to sing our little hearts out.

I was desperate to claim that, as a child of the eighties, it was Bowie’s ball-smothering trouser turn in Labyrinth that did the trick, or that, being born in 1979, I’d caught the breeze of the Berlin Trilogy. But really, after having my world shook twice, both at the school disco and Glastonbury, I was still playing hard to get. The following year, 2001, was lost to the restricted blood flow of skinny jeans and shades-wearing bands from New York, but by the following year I was ready. I’d love to say I cycled to Our Price to experience Low or dug deep in record racks for an original copy of Aladdin Sane. But there was another reason, and it wasn’t cool. My official inauguration into one of the wonders of the musical universe was a Best of Bowie double CD. A greatest sodding hits. The album cover shows a mosaic of Bowie characters and personas spanning his career – released in 2002 as EMI / 5 39821 2 (for those aroused by catalogue numbers).

So, where do you start with all this? It doesn’t take a steamy shower to realise that if you’re going to do a Bowie pilgrimage properly, you’ll need a sense of David in your direction. I returned to the Greatest Hits CD and ummed and arred over a route, pressing play as I mulled over the size of his cosmos.

If I was going to do a Bowie bike ride properly, I’d need a proper bike. My rust-bitten racer was unlikely to withstand the weight of my middle-age spread. Another option was required and, sadly, buying a bike meant talking to people in bike shops, and a good few out there are dastardly plonkers intent on belittling you for not knowing your wheelies from your endos.

A few sample conversations to support my case:

‘What valve you after, mate?’

‘Oh, you know, a good one.’

‘Presta or Schrader?’

‘Pardon me?’

It was like a secret code for those in the know to humiliate you with.

‘Put your hand on the butts.’

Was he the leader of a sexual cult?

‘Both of them.’

He was.

I’d later learn the ‘butts’ he referred to were more commonly known as ‘hoods’. The place you rest your hands over the brake levers, but it may as well have been a sub-dialect of Northern Mars.

It made more sense to start this journey where Bowie did, so I made a pilgrimage to 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, South London, where David Robert Jones landed on this planet on 8 January 1947. On a bright summer’s morning, the three-storey Victorian terrace shrouded by an ash tree bore no sign of its famous son – no flowers, letters or records. But there was a bike shop nearby. As well as being a short walk from where Bowie was born, the good folk at Brixton Cycles were not egotistical eggs. As I was talked through the various options, lots of bikes were thrillingly described as ‘bulletproof’. Not planning on any form of warfare, my priorities lay rather more prosaically along the lines of something that wouldn’t get too many punctures. Choosing one of the lower-end models for a test ride, this wasn’t guaranteed. As I edged into Brixton Road, aligning myself with chugging buses, marauding taxis and lunatic cyclists, my feet became tangled in foot braces and my legs whirred like Wile E. Coyote mid-cliff. Before long I was panting like a polar bear in a sauna. At least the bike felt reliable and, more importantly, sturdy enough to withstand the weight of my blossoming moobs.

I returned to the shop, where I breezily picked up items I hoped would prove useful, things with odd names like hex tools, bidons and panniers: not only bulletproof, but waterproof. Finally, with all the gear and one silly idea, I hopped on my steed and cycled back to Bowie’s birthplace, gave a hearty salute and placed the first pin in my hastily jotted Star Map.

2. LIFE ON EARTH

So I had the T-shirt – a Ziggy Stardust one – and the bike. Now I just needed to do some training. But anyone who goes near London roads knows they are an aggressive shitstorm of taxi drivers, pedestrians and cyclists all intent on injuring one another or, if that fails, lobbing volleys of abuse at each other. But on last night’s cycle home, pedalling between chuntering cabbies, Lycra dingbats and gormless phone-tapping pedestrians, I think I figured out why.

Now, I’m quite partial to a mutter at people’s driving habits, just loud enough to vent my frustration, just inaudible enough for them not to hear and get out and smash me in the face with a tin of travel sweets. I remember cycling through London and seeing a car cut up another cyclist by veering left without indicating, provoking a shout of, ‘Nice indicating, knobhead!’ But then he made the same left turn, again without indicating, and I found myself shouting after him, ‘Yeah, nice indicating, knobhead!’ I was so incensed at the cyclist’s hypocrisy that I then also slung a left without indicating. Faintly, in the distance, I heard someone shout, ‘Yeah, nice indicating, knobhead!’, before they too peeled left without indicating. Indeed, if you listen very carefully at any time of day in London, you’ll hear the words, ‘Yeah, nice indicating, knobhead!’ echoing like wildfire across every borough.

Things had somehow happened all too quickly. Winter was coming, I’d booked a flight and only had time for one last ride. Judging by the Tour de France hopefuls riding round London getting asphyxiated by their Lycra outfits, I’d probably need some specialist clothing. Bowie wasn’t a conservative dresser, but I needn’t have worried, most cycling apparel is handily arranged in the colour palette of vomit. It’s also made from body-hugging Lycra, so a tube of glitter here and some superglue there and I was bang in showbusiness. I slapped a £20 note on the counter of a budget sport shop and stepped out looking like I’d mugged Mr Motivator.

With the omnipresent dangers of being called a knobhead, it made sense to do my last training ride in a quieter part of London, so I took my garish green shorts and man-tit hugging space fibres to the suburbs. Prime territory for Bowie – and Bowie fans, kooks who, like me, had ordinary, humdrum childhoods spent getting our kicks behind fly-postered bedroom doors from music, fashion and art. In preparation, stuffed into my panniers were four litres of water, two bags of Jelly Babies and half a loaf of sandwiches. All of which did nothing to keep me dry in the torrential downpour emptying itself over South East London. As my energy receded around Blackheath, so did the city, the gallivanting concrete jungle melting into the suburban order of Bromley. Clocking a not so cosmic twelve miles, I fired my burners at a big hill until those same burners fizzled out with a whimper and left me gasping against a garden wall like I’d been thumped in the windpipe by a gorilla.

I’d hit zero – and Bowie’s suburbia.

With my cover assured by the garden’s pampas grass draped over my limp body, I earwigged on a Sunday conversation. ‘Well, we’ve got a hedgehog, which is what I wanted,’ said a middle-aged woman, as if spiked mammals were high on the suburban bucket list after a three-bedroom bungalow with a bird bath and a gnome that looked like a sexual deviant. I lobbed some sweets into my mouth, remounted and slipped along the sleepy streets. As I did, I began to see a strange alchemy of contentment and boredom. People either drove too fast or too slow. For every open car boot with protruding flat-pack furniture, there was a brainlessly smashed alcohol bottle littering the pavement. For every dazzling flower bed, a scattering of discarded nitrous-oxide canisters. You can take your boredom as you please out here, contentment and frustration living side by side.

I was about to provide another outlet for it.

‘Faggot!’

My colourful presence hadn’t gone unnoticed. As flab stretched against Lycra, three twelve-year-olds stood sniggering like the acne-flecked turds they clearly were. But I wasn’t just here to try to run over pimpled youths at speed. No, because in 1953 the Jones family moved from Brixton to Bromley and 106 Canon Road. I ground to a halt outside a two-up, two-down; another bygone Bowie residence which in direct defiance of the young homophobes was painted a fabulous blancmange pink.

Bowie’s parents switched between various houses in the area, moving to Plaistow Grove, where David would walk to the local school, Burnt Ash. He became part of the choir, a teacher describing his voice – perhaps in the biggest miscalculation ever – as ‘adequate’. Bowie wasn’t deterred. While most of us were trying to save up for records, he wanted to make them. He was fascinated by the sounds coming out of America, especially Little Richard with his unusual standing-up piano-playing style, androgynous look and hints of sexuality in his lyrics, confessing to Vanity Fair that when he first heard him his ‘world was set on fire’.

He took a job at a local butcher’s delivering sausages on a heavy iron bike. Like me, he was pedalling to escape order, routine and calm. But his aspirations were loftier; he wanted to save for a saxophone so he could play in Little Richard’s band. London was only a short distance from where his legs whirled as his mind travelled ever faster. He wanted to be just like the man who stood at a piano playing rock and roll, he wanted to sing, he wanted to play – he wanted to be famous.

After earning his bacon delivering sausages, he bought that saxophone, took lessons and threw himself into his dad’s records. He studied singers and performers like the creative tour-de-force Anthony Newley. He was inspired by his half-brother Terry, diving into beat poetry and devouring Kerouac. A restless mind in too restful a place. As the suburbs slept around him, they became a conduit for his creativity. He searched for identity in a series of bands: The Kon-Rads, The King Bees, The Manish Boys, and The Lower Third.The latter’s‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’ song expressing themes of leaving home, a sign of the restless direction in which he was heading. He set up a folk night which would become the Beckenham Arts Lab. His foppish hair and liberal tendencies meant he surrounded himself with mime artists, musicians and actors, learning not only how to sing but how to project different personas. His self-titled debut album, released in 1967 on the same day as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts ClubBand, was a set of precocious and parochial teenage tales set to vaudeville and music hall stylings, which received little fanfare, although two songs did have lyrics about bicycles.

Regardless, Bowie was moving fast, travelling through suburban space and time as the sixties rocketed into the seventies. He was drawn to the lights, sounds and textures of London; journeying with Terry to Soho where fashion, girls – and boys – became a fixture in his cosmos. He used the capital to pilfer ideas and clothes from dumpsters, toiled with musical genres like mod, folk and music hall, each influence sending his imagination spiralling higher into the stratosphere. On his second album, he finally achieved blast off. Inspired by the moon landings and a mind-expanding cannabis joint, ‘Space Oddity’ became his breakthrough hit; and from there it was only a short journey to Mars.

I felt like I’d already done a lap of the galaxy, my lungs howling in protest as I swerved into Croydon Road Recreation Ground. Like Bowie, I’d undertaken some childhood bike training. My schoolboy paper round ran a gauntlet of frothy-mouthed dogs that menaced back and forth behind frosted glass looking for wrists to sever. Sailing through the thick of dawn as the winter sun set light to my imagination, I had dreams, too – I’d be an explorer, a footballer, a tub-thumping drummer. Hunching over the handlebars I’d pick up pace, the cold air burning at my knuckles. Then, unburdened by the weight of newspapers, I’d cycle as hard as I could back to the shop and exchange a dew-drenched bag for a small manila envelope. Payday. This is where Bowie and I took different paths. He bought a saxophone and changed the fabric of the music universe; I bought, and slowly killed, two goldfish.

My childhood dreams faded into the distant London smog as I sugar-crashed between two palm bushes and began tearing at jam sandwiches. Faculties restored, I turned to face a tired green fence surrounding an Edwardian bandstand. On its roof, a crown and mitre postured alongside a sorry-looking weathervane. Wooden roof slats lay hither and thither, blistered and world weary. Blue and white balloons hung lifelessly from once ornate ironwork. And cracks in the paintwork revealed that burning roots of rust had laid siege to its foundations. Its only redemptive feature was a flower bed erupting with a poem of oranges and yellows. It had certainly seen better days. But it had also seen greatness – because this is where David Bowie sat and wrote ‘Life on Mars?’:

‘This song was so easy. Being young was easy. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. “Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap.” An anomic (not a “gnomic”) heroine. Middle-class ecstasy.’1

Bowie, rightly so, was rather pleased with his afternoon’s work under the shade of the bandstand. I sat and looked out – another beautiful day. I narrowed my eyes and tried to picture it. Did he see what I saw? Two young mums with pushchairs, a big Alsatian walking a small Indian man, and a white feather bustling across the grass at the whim of a shallow breeze. I wondered if it was all circumstance that led to those lyrics. Could it so easily have been, ‘Doooooogs weeing on the seesaw’? It could, and it might have. Bowie’s original lyrics differed wildly from the ones we all know. There are mentions of stars but also shoulder rock movements and great lords sighing in vain. Then it’s a muddle of wordplay about buying and bargains being made before he arrives at the song’s title. Either way, the seed was planted:

‘I took a walk to Beckenham High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts but couldn’t get the riff out of my head.’

I was hooked. I didn’t chase a bus to Lewisham, but I inhaled the belching fumes of one as I skidded into Southend Road. It was here where Bowie set up home with first wife Angie and a rotating cast of squatting musicians. Haddon Hall was a rambling gothic mansion with stained glass windows and ceilings painted with swirls of silver; it was here that he knocked up the music to ‘Life on Mars?’.

‘Workspace was a big empty room with a chaise lounge; a bargain-price art nouveau screen (“William Morris,” so I told anyone who asked); a huge overflowing freestanding ashtray and a grand piano. Little else. I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Nice.’

David Bowie there, making it sound as if writing one of the greatest songs of all time was like knocking up a slice of buttered toast. To him it probably was. I gazed around Southend Road, Haddon Hall now demolished, renamed Shannon Way, and replaced with retirement homes. The comings and goings of Bowie’s ‘Beckenham Palace’ – the groupies, band members, wild fashions and artists – replaced by delivery drivers juggling towers of cardboard and slinging them in hedges when they thought no one was looking.

All of Bowie’s suburban frustration and efforts to break free had manifested into a girl who daydreamed about life on Mars. Who was she? Someone he knew, someone who saw the world the same way as him? In 1971 he went to record the song in Soho’s Trident Studios with his band, The Spiders from Mars. Mick Ronson on electric guitar, mellotron and strings; Woody Woodmansey on drums; Trevor Bolder on bass and classically trained collaborator Rick Wakeman on piano. The lyrics he’d written on the Beckenham bandstand, an intergalactic swirl of themes and abstract imagery of other worlds, all tied together by the yearning of a disillusioned girl, now had music. ‘Life on Mars?’ was ready for the godly universe.

As he hurtled towards Mars our stars aligned, kind of. While Bowie entered the slip road for the intergalactic highway, I took a two-hour jaunt back across London as a stream of taxi drivers, pedestrians and cyclists all turned left without indicating and the word knobhead gathered again and again in the grey sooty skies. But troubled skies were the least of my worries. Mum and Dad had grown suspicious of the recent uptake in middle-aged pursuits. The sudden interest in maps, bike racks and mutual benefits of the E111 health card. They smelled a Mars-shaped rat and, under duress, I told them the plan. They immediately threw a Steve and Pauline shaped spanner in the works, handily transcribed through more ‘Life on Mars?’ lyrical themes.

Because my mummy is yelling, No!

Because ‘dual carriageways are full of terrible drivers and it’s dangerous to camp by the side of the road’.

And my daddy has told me to go.

Dad hadn’t told me not to go, but he did say, ‘David Bowie? He’s weird!’, before counterbalancing his argument with, ‘Made some great records, though.’

The spanners came down thicker and faster. In an act of corporate arse-clownery, work had decided not to let me go after all.

Hi James,

Not sure this is going to work. We’re just too busy. Let’s talk.

Susan.

HR Manager

The demands of the corporate world were too pressing, the need to flog this little minion more urgent. That’s that then, I conceded, a little too easily. I’d always been a shit rebel. Never quite going the distance, forever on the edge of minor anarchy: putting extra penny sweets in my bag, mumbling at a teacher, perhaps coming into work ten minutes late – those wild, rebellious sorts of things. I sighed. Cycling around London was fun, and it was a nice dream, but ‘Life on Mars?’ and its otherworldly meaning would have to stay unresolved.

And yet, I was already in character, like the girl in the song who was also addicted to the silver screen. Although hers is a fantasy world born of boredom – a silver screen her escape, one she longs to be in – my own inertia, my life-sapping ennui, was all wrapped in a similar longing, except I wasn’t a teenage girl or a starry-eyed child; I was a middle-aged man. One who had just eaten six chocolate biscuits before 11am.

There were obvious parallels, I could see that. My silver screen was grey, the computer I idly stared into for fifteen hours a day, most weekends and then every other second of my increasingly flabby existence. Indeed, if you focused a camera down, you’d see a harmonious triangle of laptop, sedentary human and biscuits.

I would cycle my jowls home and be too exhausted to do anything: to plan for the future, to give Lucy the time she deserved. I had tried to find myself by throwing myself into a career, but found myself stuck. I’d never known which direction to take. I’d never really known what I wanted to be, whereas Bowie had from the moment he picked up that saxophone.

Was he going to save me?

Or was I going to save myself?

I rolled the dice.

I could do this …

Hmm, I did like sitting around eating biscuits.

What if I just went for it …

Excitedly race home on bike.

Exhausted from work, barely talk.

Patchy sleep.

Ruinous thoughts.

Repeat.

For ever?

It came worst at night. My bed a temple devoted to sighing. If I wasn’t sleeping, I was huffing, tossing, worrying; a tangle of confusing thoughts raced against themselves to no destination. Panicked introspection chased – shouldn’t I know what I was doing with my life by now? Under the cloak of night, it went far beyond the exhausted reasoning of daylight. I scrunched it up and buried it inside. I felt like I was drowning, but I wouldn’t talk about it. I’d play it safe, be sensible, sit still in a straitjacket of low-level depression. More late nights. More working for the man. Progress, careerism, conformity. My road mapped out for me. It was OK, I told myself. I could go next year, or the year after. Work comes first, pay the bills, run faster than the rest of the rats. The world would keep turning, Bowie’s legacy would keep shining. But one night, in between some particularly frenzied bouts of sheet wrestling, I broke what Lucy must have thought was a sponsored silence and confessed, ‘I’ve got to do it, or I’ll never do it.’

Feeling my desperate muggy night breath she said, ‘Then go, do it.’

As it turned out, Bowie’s legacy was besmirched by my filling the office with deep dramatic sighs and passive-aggressive stationery behaviour. Staplers were noisily dumped onto tables, crocodile clips weren’t returned to rightful owners and Pritt Stick lids were carelessly left off. The ‘A’ in James A. Briggs finally stood for Anarchy rather than the more passive Andrew. In the dying embers of summer, my dream of a reckless cycle odyssey only burned brighter, a raging flame that refused be extinguished.

What was I going to do? What would Bowie do?

‘If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.’2

As big thoughts gathered in my small brain, Bowie’s words stirred my soul and begged me to stick two fingers up at sensible and give the bird to pragmatism. My stationery dissent hadn’t gone unnoticed, and I was hauled in front of HR Susan. My voice cracked as I laid it on the line.

‘I have to go.’

‘I see,’ said HR Susan with a sympathetic nod.

‘I’ve got to do it.’

‘I see.’ Second sympathetic nod.

‘I’m sorry, but it means a lot to me.’

‘I see.’ No third nod.

HR Susan was good at seeing, like a blouse-wearing Cyclops; I literally could have said anything right now.

‘I’ve eaten all the Post-it notes.’

‘I see.’

‘Been stealing toilet roll for years.’

‘I see.’

‘Been dealing the office milk to cats.’

Seeing was all very well, but I had to start doing. I took a deep breath, doggy paddled to the deep end, and as the floor fell away beneath me let go of the corporate towline.

‘If I can’t go, I’m leaving.’ Inside I was moonwalking and shitting my pants.

‘I see.’

HR Susan could see the bright burning cosmos. Unfortunately, my boss couldn’t. The news filtered through to her unsympathetic ear on a Sunday night, resulting in a testy phone call where my threat was called out in a bluster of corporate aggression.

‘Is it true what you said?’

‘Afraid so,’ I said, standing my ground.

She took a moment. ‘Well, I think it’s pretty shitty.’

As I mentally packed my panniers and saw the open road unfold before me, I could only think of one thing to say: ‘I see.’

Pretty shitty felt pretty good right now. I mean, it might cost me their permanent resentment, any prospect of promotion and I had to agree to be ‘on call’ should the demands of men in suits so require, but, crucially, I was free. I had six weeks to go and cycle a David Bowie song lyric.

Countdown to Mars

T-minus 10 …

10.With all that said and done, what’s left to say? Bowie has already conquered the world and I don’t need to flagellate my private parts on a bike seat designed for a small marsupial. Grow into middle age gracefully, keep the career, leave it there. But the wheels were too far in motion.

9.Friends were more excited than I was. My three-ish training rides were entirely different to cycling across a continent. How do you prepare to ride a lyric a 24-year-old had written while simultaneously shopping for slacks and shoes?

8.I found myself doing things I hadn’t done for many years, or ever, like hanging around in a plumbers’ merchants asking for lagging to protect my bike and saying things like, ‘Yeah, mate, six mill oughta do it,’ without having the faintest idea if this would actually ‘do it’.

7.Buying blow-up pillows which, at best, could accommodate half a human head. Writing ‘to do’ lists I had little intention of doing, and proudly dismantling my bike without any idea how to put it back together.

6.Bowie had‘Life on Mars?’ on his setlist, but my packing list had barely got beyond a spare inner tube and a compass, and even after three YouTube tutorials I wasn’t sure how to use either. Fortunately, Lucy provided a ‘kit’ with useful things like plasters, bandages, even a penknife. Funnily enough, that’s how Bowie’s name came to be, christened as he was after a Bowie knife because it cuts both ways.

5.Mum was right, I couldn’t sleep by the side of the road. At least not without a tent. I consulted an outdoorsy website. This one-man number I was eyeing was ‘fantastic’, apparently, but you have to question the ‘fantastic’ nature of a tent that was discontinued two years ago. Perhaps it disintegrated in rain, or was highly flammable. Maybe they’d found it attracted menstruating bears and several unsuspecting campers had been heartily dismembered. Well, maybes aren’t definitelies, so I found one on eBay and bought it anyway.

4.I visited Stanfords map shop where I learnt how big France and Spain are, even when shrunk to 1:25 inch scales, while the poor staff learnt I couldn’t refold maps as I left them in a crumpled mess near the Eastern Europe section.

3.I procured two Aladdin Sane lightning-bolt stickers and proudly applied them like go-faster stripes to my panniers. I used bungee cords to tassel my camping gear into a big blue IKEA bag but got them tangled in the spokes and nearly lost an eye when they pinged back out.

2.Someone who’d done a long-distance bike ride advised me to get chamois cream for my backside, but at £14.99 I thought it too pricey and scoffed at their suggestion.

1.And, in a final homage to Bowie and our bicycling youths, I took the train home and recreated my old paper round. Tipping anything lying around into my panniers: door stops, tea towels and a handful of Dad’s crap records. It was a breeze. I was older, wiser and those bloodthirsty dogs had long gone. By the time I’d whistled up the hill a second time, I had no fear of the Pyrenees, no fear of cycling a song lyric; all I had to do was figure out what the song meant, and I had around three thousand sprightly miles to do so.

Lift off!

1David Bowie speaking to the Mail on Sunday, 29 June, 2008.

2David Bowie in the 1997 Michael Apted documentary Inspirations

3. FROM IBIZA …

On 29 March 1974, David Robert Jones fled London, crossing the channel on a ferry, and ditched England as his home. On 11 September 2016, I did likewise, leaving London to look for the meaning of a song, and in doing so, abandoned all sense of reality. On a glorious autumn morning I loaded up and turned to face the strangest journey I would ever undertake. The night before, in between bouts of unbridled panic, I’d tried to get into Bowie’s head. It quickly became apparent that Bowie’s head was a difficult place to get into, so I resorted to farting around on the internet trying to find out what the lyrics to ‘Life on Mars?’ meant.

I wasn’t alone.

‘The million mice reference further pushes socialist/communist ideas. Giving them homes both in the Mediterranean Isle of Ibiza, all the way to Norfolk, in the Northeast of England, it adds tension in the form of real places. This is not Mars. This is Earth,’ Atwood Magazine opined.

Good to know, as I didn’t have a map of Mars but did have a couple of southern Europe.

I suddenly realised Bowie wasn’t being particularly complimentary about the folk who go on holiday to mass tourist destinations like Ibiza and the Norfolk Broads, and I was setting out to go to both. Sorry, David.

I had more apologies to give – to Lucy. I’d stolen any chance of us having a holiday together and packed it into my panniers. She knew whatever the hell I was doing was important to me, but what was it going to do to us?

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.

‘Don’t worry,’ she offered gently.

‘I am, really.’

‘It’s OK, you should do it.’

Throwing in a few lip wobbles, kisses and drawn-out hugs, she came up for air and wiped away the snot I’d dribbled on her shoulder. I waved goodbye and stuttered into the punch of early morning sun. Hoisting my steed, which weighed about the same as three shire horses, onto the street, I didn’t so much slip a disc as Frisbee throw my entire spine across the neighbourhood. The random bits of clutter I’d ‘trained’ with had been a lot lighter than this camping gear, cooking equipment and hefty stack of European road maps I’d bought, but hadn’t unfolded for fear of not being able to refold them.