I WAS reading the Guardian newspaper the other day when my attention was suddenly grabbed by the headline, 'DAVID BOWIE SNUBS OLYMPICS CLOSING CEREMONY'.
I'll admit I am a tabloid writer and tabloid animal at heart, and that headline summed up for me all that is wrong with the so-called 'classier broadsheets'.
Yes, I know the Guardian is a Berliner format (sized somewhere between tabloid and broadsheet style) but it is of the same mindset as the broadsheets: the arrogant, sneering contempt it holds for the tabloids being one of its common traits.
Yet that headline was worse than anything the tabloids did on Bowie. Of course, most did not even mention that he turned down an invitation to play at the Games' finale.
Why would they?
They knew, as I am sure most of the population of the UK knows, that David Bowie was NEVER going to play, so he hardly needed to turn it down.
How could he when he is not in the best of health, holed up in his penthouse home in Lower Manhattan?
In 2004 he suffered a heart attack that rocked him spiritually and mentally, as well as physically.
From that point on, he has stayed largely anonymous in New York, preferring to live the quiet life. He picks his daughter up from school and, when he does venture out to the shops (usually book stores) he does so incognito. He likes his privacy and has no yearning to make music, play music and certainly not to do live shows.
A friend of mine told me that David has suffered other physical ailments of late - another claims to have seen him coming out of a clinic renowned for its treatment of cancer, although, of course, Bowie could have been visiting a friend there.
What is clear is that David Bowie was never going to play at either of the Olympics ceremonies, so I don't know how the Guardian saw his non-appearance as 'a snub'.
Perhaps the paper should look at itself first, before laying into the tabloids?
Talking of David, I have heard that he did watch both ceremonies and enjoyed a chuckle when his hit, Fashion, was played as the backdrop to the closing ceremony's tribute to the British fashion industry.
Doh! Didn't the producers of the show know that the song is actually an ATTACK on fashion rather than an endorsement of it? A close listen to the lyrics would have confirmed that.
Now why didn't the Guardian mention and comment on that irony when a downmarket tabloid hack like me can spot it so easily? It certainly would have been a better angle for them to latch on to their crude attempt to demean one of the two greatest British rock icons of all time (Lennon being the other).
FRANK WORRALL
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