Ricky Gervais’ favourite David Bowie album
They say never meet your heroes, but that certainly didn’t hold true for Ricky Gervais. As the comedy legend recently remarked on the Graham Norton Show: “David Bowie was my hero for about 25 years, then I met him, and I invited him to do Extras and he said yes! It was just incredible.” And it didn’t stop there.
“I co-wrote a song with him,” Gervais continued, “the song that we sing in Extras. I sent him the lyrics, and I called him, and I said, ‘did you get the lyrics’ and he said, ‘yeah’ and I said, ‘good, could you give me something kind of retro like ‘Life on Mars’? and he said, ‘oh yeah, I’ll just knock off a quick fucking ‘Life on Mars’ for you.’ He was amazing! Just incredible, and artist right until the end.”
This comic kinship was the start of a blossoming bromance. As Gervais explains: “The first time I met him, I was sort of newly famous and I was invited to one of those things at the BBC. The Office has just come out on DVD and I was invited by Greg Dyke the Director-General of the BBC at the time. We went to watch David Bowie with a few other people. Then after he said, ‘Oh you’re a big Bowie fan, aren’t you? Come and meet him!’” That’s not an offer he was prepared to pass up.
Gervais then describes how he was nervously cajoled along with an ever-amassing army of stars present that fateful evening, including the name-dropped writer Salman Rushdie. Bewildering swept up with a handful of famous people, the green Gervais eventually nervously met the “very polite” Bowie, who didn’t know who he was. “And I remember the next day,” Gervais humorously recalled. “I was in the pub with my mate, and he said, ‘what did you do last night?’ and I went ‘…nothing.’”
Thereafter, however, Gervais and Bowie would become great friends. As he recalls: “Then I got an email from David Bowie, saying, ‘so I watched The Office, what do I do now?’ and we sort of became pen pals. Then he invited me to play a benefit in New York, my first New York gig. It was at Maddison Square Gardens, and he introduced me. The crowd didn’t know he was going to be there, and they went crazy! He just came out with a harmonica and went ‘Chubby little Loser’ and just sang the song and it was amazing and that was his last live appearance.”
For Gervais, this was a pinnacle. Bowie had been inspiring him for years and one album, in particular, ranks among his favourites. “And now for one of my all-time favourites,” Gervais told the Guardian. “David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. This won out of all the great Bowie albums because it has melancholy beauty mixed with hope. Some would say this is pretentious, but it’s not – Robbie Williams is pretentious when he thinks he’s writing profound lyrics and in fact, he’s just trying to find words that rhyme.”
Gervais went on to conclude: “Bowie is a brilliant singer, songwriter, musician… He’s got it all.” He certainly has, and Aladdin Sane is an exhibition of that. The 1973 epic when “Ziggy Stardust goes to America” was a trip that we’re still reeling from. “Aladdin Sane was my idea of rock and roll America,” Bowie once said. “Here I was on this great tour circuit, not enjoying it very much. So inevitably my writing reflected that, this kind of schizophrenia that I was going through. Wanting to be up on stage performing my songs, but on the other hand not really wanting to be on those buses with all those strange people.” That duality makes the record a masterpiece that continues to stir.
