Starman Waiting in the Sky: A Tribute to David Bowie

Phoebe Philo, creative director of Céline
“For me Bowie had the best covers. I love the morphing between an animal and a person, to create something romantic but also very fantasy, a little bit weird.” – AnOther Magazine S/S 03

Mick Rock, photographer
“A lot of people were at the Ziggy farewell dinner at the Cafe Royal in Piccadilly, after David's gig at the Hammersmith Odeon – Lou Reed, David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Everybody was so young and pretty. And this is the height of the glam season, summer of 73 , so they’re all wearing black nail varnish. Ziggy Stardust has said farewell and this was some kind of Roman bacchanalia to celebrate. It was a very cuddly evening and late in the night I found David sitting on Mick Jagger’s knee. I didn’t hear what they were saying, they were whispering so low, but it looks pretty intimate.” – Mick Rock on Café Royal in 1973, AnOther Magazine A/W 04

Lindsay Kemp, dancer and choreographer
“I was doing a little show in 1966 at a tiny theatre in St Martins Lane and David Bowie came. He was very surprised and pleased to hear a track off his LP, When I Live My Dream. Oh God, I was in love with him. A wonderful, plaintive voice with a story. He came backstage enthralled and entranced by the performance, a kind of backstage circus show – ‘Oh please teach me!’ he said. Well he taught me a lot... He started doing classes with me at the Dance Centre. We began working the same day, probably on another little show of ours, Pierrot in Turquoise. At the time he was considering going to take his vows at a monastery near Edinburgh. He thought he was a Buddhist monk. He was getting nowhere in the music business. When I met him he was actually working in an office. Orlando, David and I put that show together. At the end of the tour, we fell out. It was quite heavy. I was utterly in love. It was wonderful when we were together, but it never lasts – especially with a rock ’n’ roller.” – AnOther Magazine A/W 15

Edward Enninful, stylist
“When David Bowie saw my book, he could not believe it when he saw the [Bowie-inspired 2003 Vogue Italia] pictures of Tilda. He thought it was him. He was like, ‘When did I do this shoot?’ He was floored. Even he couldn’t believe how much she looked like him.” – AnOther Magazine S/S 07

From a feature on Kansai Yamamoto, fashion designer
“In the self-expression obsessed climate of the early 70s, Kansai’s vibrant, energetic designs struck a chord, in particular capturing the imagination of one young fan, a certain David Bowie. The story goes that Bowie had seen a photo of a girl with red spiky hair in a 1971 issue of Honey magazine, taken by Kansai. It was to be the genesis of one of the great collaborations in rock history. Kansai was commissioned to create the iconic copperhaired, gender-bending look of Ziggy Stardust and his one-armed Lurex zig-zag knit unitard, and the swirling, shiny, striped, flared, black and white ‘Rites of Spring’ spacesuit. During the 1973 tour Kansai said of Bowie, ‘He has an unusual face, don’t you think? He’s neither man nor woman... which suited me as a designer because most of my clothes are for either sex. I love his music and obviously that has influenced my designs but most of all there’s this aura of fantasy that surrounds him. He has flair.’ – AnOther Magazine S/S 08

Nicholas Roeg, film director and cinematographer
“You weren’t able to put him into a box, David. Put him in the box and you’d find him standing next to the box. When we were shooting The Man Who Fell to Earth, he kept himself distant, and didn’t get too friendly with anyone. There is a lot of Mr Newton in Bowie, and I think it got into him. Actors usually have to keep something of their star quality, but David kept discarding his own personality completely. One of the executives who was visiting the set said, ‘I’m worried about his performance,’ and I said, ‘I’ve seen it three days running, it’s wonderful. How does an alien act? More like Robert De Niro?’ He gave a lot, and I’m flattered at the amount he gave to it. He’s definitely in my life, and I’d like to feel that I am in his life.” – AnOther Magazine S/S 10

Rachel Weisz, actor
“I thought Bowie was a poet in touch with God. For me, he really dramatised not belonging in a really powerful and poetic way and when you’re 14 and you feel grotesque, it’s like: ‘I’ve found a friend!’” – AnOther Magazine A/W 11

From a feature on Jean Genet, dancer and choreographer
“Étienne Daho cites David Bowie as one of the artists that had the most impact on him when he was a teenager. As he explains, ‘Bowie quoted Jean Genet as one of his own sources of inspiration and I’ve always heard that the song The Jean Genie is a tribute to him. It opened a door, awakening my curiosity and my desire to ‘meet’ Genet.’’ – AnOther Magazine A/W 10

Tim Blanks, writer
“David Bowie once played a vampire, but that’s not why I credit him with an ultraterrestrial prescience. Nothing worldshaking, just the simple knack for nailing the essence of an idea. In 1977, he released “Heroes”, one of the most uplifting songs in the rock canon, a defiant celebration of the triumph of love and humanism, made all the more so by the fact that it was composed in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, one of recent history’s tragically futile obstructions to human community. But what did Bowie do? He slapped inverted commas round the song title. Not Heroes, but “Heroes”. Not heroism itself, but a comment on it, a deliberate distancing, an acknowledgement, perhaps, of the impossibility of the ideal. ‘And you, you can be mean / And I, I’ll drink all the time / Cause we’re lovers, and that is a fact.’ That’s how Bowie saw his “heroes”: love before valour. And then, later in the song, ‘We’re nothing, and nothing will help us / Maybe we’re lying, then you better not stay’.” – Another Man, A/W 09