I time travelled back to a David Bowie concert in the 1970s and saw Janelle Monáe in the audience
Through circumstances too tedious and myriad to go into, I found myself in the audience of a David Bowie concert in 1972.
To my surprise, I saw Janelle Monáe amid the melee of flared trousers towards the front. However, her recent reports that the Starman was in stunning form that night are wildly exaggerated. If anything, Bowie was woefully withdrawn, clearly showing signs of the substance abuse that led him to curtail Ziggy Stardust, and the drinks being served were verging on poisonous.
Monáe, the modern musician and amateur chrononaut, however, was barely even watching the show, spending most of the time uttering things like “iconic” into a device that I recognised to be an iPhone 17 Pro Max and arguing with the merch stand woman about not accepting American Express cards.
She even left at the interval, muttering something about “cross-temporal synergy” and wanting to catch up on Married At First Sight. I wasn’t far from joining her, in fairness. My suspicions about the ale being off were near enough confirmed when three men from Kent collapsed onto the sticky floor of the Corn Exchange during a meek ‘Moonage Daydream’.
While I couldn’t substantiate her claims that she met him “backstage”, Monáe’s presence undoubtedly made a mundane gig from the generational Starman all the more meaningful. Not least was I surprised to see a musician born in 1985 in the audience. I was further confounded beyond belief to see that she wasn’t even recording it on her phone to show absolutely nobody, before being forced to delete the footage to make space for a picture of a fry-up seven months later, when storage space is sparse on the cloud.
But beyond that, I knew – or rather sensed – that she would one day regale this incident to Lucy Dacus for a Rolling Stone cover story where she would inexplicably not be pressed to provide further details by a shocked indie starlet who simply buried the mind-boggling tale of temporal concert inspiration under the carpet, and the conceit would be thus: the future is so unfathomable that even our fantasies now arc back into the past.
Bowie remains a vision of hope so illusory among the warped present that even an unprecedented time-trip to see him perform is met with vague details about him being ”incredible” and ”queer”, but no venue (it was the Corn Exchange, May 12th, 1972 – 3.5 stars, solid band but lacklustre showmanship), and direct sense of the inspiration can truly be solidified.
So, I shuffled out of the concert, alongside the rowdy drunks of ‘70s Kent who poured into their Ford Cortinas for a collision-packed drive home, and I felt ambivalent about the fact that the concert hadn’t come close to his Glastonbury 2000 show. Puzzled by the whole thing, and displeased by the taste of flat Babycham, I awaited the Wi-Fi signal to return in the cold.
