Are We Not David Bowie?

The music legend is long gone. So I interviewed seven David Bowie impersonators instead.

Seven David Bowie impersonators. That seemed like exactly enough. Six David Bowie impersonators would be too few. Eight would be way too many. But seven, that’s the perfect number of David Bowie impersonators.

Let me explain.

This time of year is always tough for David Bowie fans. Tomorrow would have been his 77th birthday. And a few days later, on January 10th, is the eighth anniversary of his death from liver cancer.

Losing the artists we grew up loving is just a sad reality of life. And it’s going to happen with increasing regularity as we get older. But there was something different about Bowie. Unlike most celebrity deaths, the sting of Bowie leaving hasn’t dissipated over time. If anything, I just find more truth in that tweet from 2016 that gets repeated or plagiarized every few months.

This week is also my annual reminder that I missed out on my chance to interview him. Is there another reason to be a low-paid journalist that everyone thinks is destroying the country besides getting to meet your heroes and hopefully not being soul-crushingly disappointed by them? Even when Bowie was alive, I never landed my White Whale interview. I came close. When he released an album in 2013, The Next Day, his first new music in over a decade, I scrambled (along with every other self-respecting music scribe) to book an interview with him. But according to his publicist, he “wasn’t doing publicity at this time.”

So I did the next best thing: I tracked down seven David Bowie impersonators.

I didn’t do it as a gag. My heart was true. That man’s music is in my bloodstream. I love him more than it should be possible to love another human being you’ve never met. I sincerely wanted to know what he was thinking and feeling. And who better to unlock those mysteries than people who’ve devoted their lives to talking like him, dressing like him, being as freakishly sylphlike, and likely just as bored of singing all the “hits” from Changesbowie?

But even the most cunning David Bowie impersonator is still making educated guesses. To increase my odds of getting inside the real David Bowie’s brain, I needed more David Bowies. I needed a tribunal of Bowies. A David Bowie think tank, if you will. I needed the David Bowie equivalent of a thousand monkeys typing in a room. I needed just enough Bowies to get it right.

So, seven. Seven David Bowies. There’s something significant about the number seven. Seven deadly sins, seven days in a week, seven dwarves, seven colors in a rainbow. Also, Bowie released a single in 1999 called “Seven” that nobody remembers. It had to be seven, there was no way around it.

I talked to (separately) David Brighton (of California-based Space Oddity), John O'Neill (lead Bowie of London’s Absolute Bowie), Kevin Connelly (from Toronto’s Life on Mars), Paul Henderson (of the U.K. Bowie tribute Aladdinsane),  Laurel Katz-Bohen (lady Bowie from New York’s now-retired Ziggy Starlet and The Spiders From Venus), Geoff Ball (keeping things hunky dory for San Francisco’s The Jean Genies), and Laurence Bowie (the 26-year vet of southern England’s The Bowie Experience).

When I spoke with them, they ranged in age from early 20s to mid-50s and came from three different countries, multiple time zones, and a staggering array of regional accents. Roughly 14.29% of them didn’t (at press time) have a penis—which, it could be argued, was a fair and mathematically accurate representation of Bowie's sexuality. Individually, they were just people who dressed like David Bowie and sang songs they didn’t write. But together, I hoped they’d become pieces of a larger puzzle.

I will never stop mourning David Bowie. And I’ll never stop feeling sad that I never got a chance to meet him and ask him stupid questions. But at least I got to talk to seven people pretending to be him. And that’s… close, right?

Don’t answer that.