Mentor, templar, template, exemplar

I've just arrived in London, where the papers are full of news of David Bowie's angioplasty. It seems like a good moment to mention what a huge impact David Bowie has had on my life. I doubt I would have chosen the career I did without his influence. He feels closer to me than any family member. His death or injury would distress me enormously. Like millions of other people, I am, in a sense, David Bowie.

I first heard him when I was at boarding school in Edinburgh in 1972. Mark Hughes, my best friend-enemy, kept singing the line 'So where were the spiders while the fly tried to break our balls?' I'd sit in the Senior Common Room at the top of McKenzie House, overlooking the grey, glowering rugby pitches of a north Edinburgh suburb, listening to 'Space Oddity', 'The Man Who Sold The World', 'Ziggy Stardust' and 'Hunky Dory'. My family was far away, I felt isolated, but Bowie became a new family, a guardian and protector. To this day he appears regularly in my dreams as a sort of kind and inspiring uncle figure, a mentor, templar, template, exemplar.

In the 70s there simply wasn't anyone more creative working in any medium. I listened only to Bowie, or people he recommended. My school essay about 'the most inspiring person' was inevitably about him. My life mapped to his. At around the time Bowie left Britain for America on the QE2, my family left Britain for Canada on the SS France. I bought 'Diamond Dogs' in Fairview shopping centre, out by Montreal's airport, and explored its dark Orwellian landscapes in a lakeside house in Beaconsfield. How much more anodyne that house and the thin blond kid in it would have been without those troubling visions! I still hold it against my parents that they refused to let me attend the opening concert of the Diamond Dogs tour, which started in Montreal. The pictures of the ticket line on the local TV news scared them; so many freaks in one place!

Liking Bowie was so much bigger than 'liking a music artist'. It was more than records, stories and sounds, extraordinary though those were. Bowie provided the then-definitive picture of what it was to be human (a somewhat extraterrestrial vision, as 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' proved), what it was to be an artist (changing, questing, adapting, synthesising, experimenting, breaking out of the narrow restrictions of one's medium, swinging between populism and 'elitism'), and what it was to be a man (macho yet feminine, a slutty Adonis, a 'gouster', a dandy). Bowie was the epitome of cool, but it wasn't cheap cool; he was restless, humanist, spiritual, intelligent. I remember sitting with my parents, breathless with excitement, through the BBC's 'Cracked Actor' documentary when it first aired. My mother couldn't stand the way Bowie sniffed, my father mocked his accent. But his spooky intelligence and creativity shone through -- the metaphors were from space. 'There's a fly in my milk, and it's getting a lot of milk. That's how I felt when I first came to America'.

Bowie, to the teen me, was a one-man crash course in culture. Thanks to his recommendations I discovered Eno, Kraftwerk, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Kierkegaard, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. He lead somewhere. He was 'aspirational'. A pop song like 'Jean Genie' could lead me to the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre's 1981 season of Genet plays. The 'Lodger' album could instill permanent wanderlust, the Berlin trilogy was enough to make a man want to move to Berlin. My one interaction with Bowie -- an exchange during a chat on his website, in which he addressed me as 'Momus', the name I chose partly because its vowels sounded a bit like 'Bowie' -- was suitably extra-musical. I asked him about his choice of art magazines. He explained to me that since he loved painting, Modern Painters was his mag rather than Frieze.

Before my own albums defined what my years felt like, Bowie's albums marked and coloured my calendar. 'Low' is me wearing headphones, gazing out at nocturnal mist in Drummond Place Gardens, Edinburgh. 'A New Career In A New Town' is me heading up to Aberdeen in a blue Wolseley 1300 to start university. 'Joe The Lion' is me messing around with prepared piano, Kleenex-muted guitars and 2-track tape recorders, making inevitably Bowie-esque apocalyptic epics, composing and compiling the songs that will win me my first band (The Happy Family, a bunch of Edinburgh Bowie casualties from a local group called Josef K), my first gigs (supporting The Cure at the Edinburgh Cameo and Glasgow Pavillion) and my first record contract (with 4AD, an exciting enough breakthrough to make me quit university for two years).

Voila, my embarrassing tribute to David Bowie, my art uncle. Get well soon, David! I'm secretly hoping this health-related hiatus will see you retiring from your incessant touring to make some rather more experimental art. Live long and live strange! Without you I'd be someone else.