The songwriter David Bowie called his “greatest mentor”
While everyone loves a good musical feud, there’s nothing quite as heartwarming as a good musical friendship. Especially when it comes to the top tier of truly god-like talents, stories of them supporting one another, admiring each other’s work and being there for each other at the dizzying heights of fame are always lovely to read. In this instance, David Bowie shared his tender feelings towards one of his peers, not just as a friend but as a mentor to him.
Bowie had a lot of these friends-turn-mentors or even mentors-turned-friends. Even as he moves through so many different phases and eras as an ever-evolving talent, morphing between sounds and characters, his circle of collaborators stayed relatively tight. Tony Visconti is the ultimate example of this, as he worked with Bowie from nearly the start of his final album, Blackstar. Even as their relationship waned over the years, going through a few challenging periods of fallouts, it was that merge of friendship and deep creative respect that drew them back together.
That balance is tricky to manage but genuinely inspiring when you do. Being able to have both a personal relationship and a proper respect and admiration for someone’s talent and ability is the basis for an incredibly special connection—certainly one that Bowie shared with John Lennon.
“It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” Bowie said about Lennon in 1999. With his own career launching when The Beatles were starting to fall apart, Bowie was undeniably a student of the band. It would be impossible not to be, as it’s no exaggeration to say that the Fab Four changed absolutely everything.
Bowie felt that as he said, “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.”
When thinking about the career Bowie would go on to have, where that idea of twisting and turning the very fabric of music was indeed his bread and butter, it feels like Lennon’s influence was everywhere.
So when the pair finally met, it was a massive moment for Bowie. “He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” Visconti recalled, telling the BBC about the moment the ice broke between them while both drawing. “John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John, and they kept swapping them, and then they started laughing, and that broke the ice.”
It was the start of what Visconti called a “great friendship”. Not only did they support one another’s work, but they spent plenty of time together just hanging out as mates do, both acutely understanding the stress of notoriety that the other faced.
In 1975, they collaborated on ‘Fame’. Co-writing the song together was likely a pinch-me moment for Bowie as suddenly his mentor was working alongside him.
