It’s major, Tom

There’s a common internet meme: that everything went bad after David Bowie died.

While things going bad has been a factor throughout human history – ask the neanderthals – this rings true.

Bowie’s death in 2016 wasn’t sad just because we lost a musical genius, but because his death signalled the end of pop music as the primary driving force for social change. When he left us – and having yourself made into a crystal and shot into space was a very ‘Bowie’ way to go – we had to accept that things had moved on.

While you can’t replace Bowie, you can still admire him, and the writers, film-makers and photographers who documented his work. And nobody captured David Bowie better than Denis O’Regan, Bowie’s official tour photographer, who accompanied him on two world tours and over 200 concerts.

There’s a common internet meme: that everything went bad after David Bowie died.

Now O’Regan’s favourite images have been collated in a new book, David Bowie. In it, you’ll find everything from a pensive portrait of Bowie in a hotel room, to wild images of the great man on stage at a Milton Keynes mega-gig and onto a joyful snap of him with Mick Jagger.

The book covers over two decades, so you can witness Bowie’s endless cycle of transformation. One minute, he’s the shifty eternal outsider at London’s Olympic Studios, the next, looking like the owner of an Australian vineyard for the Serious Moonlight tour of 1983.

What all these images show is that Bowie was both extraordinary and surprisingly approachable: there’s a reason his old mates still called him ‘Bromely Dave’. But there’s also a feeling of melancholy that the man at the centre of this joyful, crazed pop-culture storm is gone. And that our world is a lesser place for his departure.

Not that Bowie would have much truck with this. He’d be onto the next thing. Head in the clouds, eyes fixed firmly forward.

Opening image: Hammersmith, 1983

Above: Sound and vision, 1983

Below: Bowie, 1987

With Mick Jagger, 1987

In Berlin, 1987

Fan-tastic, Bowie performs China Girl, 1983

At the Berlin Wall, 1987

Live in Milton Keynes, 1983