SIMON LE BON

I know exactly who I was at 16. This was before punk and I was just getting into David Bowie. I remember Space Oddity being on the radio, but didn’t buy a Bowie record until Aladdin Sane. I found the song Drive-In Saturday absolutely compulsive. This modern, clean, young fresh world he painted, this utopia. Bowie inspired this feeling of optimism in me and it made me tingle. It’s very different from the feeling at the moment. There’s not a lot of optimism around, is there? I miss it.

I had stopped being so shy but two years earlier I didn’t have any friends. I remember walking into town in my CND greatcoat from the army surplus, walking around, buying a bar of chocolate, walking home again and not talking to anybody. I’d like to tell that boy who used to walk around,