I’ll miss Simon House. A great musician, but also a very understated witness of what went on around Bowie, with no axe to grind. I remember going straight home from visiting him in his ilttle flat in St Leonards, overlooking the beach with a CCTV camera also looking directly into his room, and writing a chunk of the book that evening into his transcript. I think it went straight into the pretty much final version and gave me, and us, such a lovely overview of the crazy routine of life on tour.
It was on stage the band truly came together; an hour and ahlaf of bliss, insterspersed with musical communiqués or jokes – Dennis Davis was the key perpetrator, on-stage and off; oten he’d attempt to render the whole band helpless by, for instance, playing a hugely extended drum fill, rolling over every drum in his kit in turn in a kind of mad extended rhythmic monologue that would crease up all fo the band. (Offstage, he was much the same, taking the mic whenever they were on the bus and delivering a mad, surreal, pseudo-tour guide commentary).
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