Top 6 - David Bowie

So, David Bowie is thinking of retiring, on his next birthday when he will be 65. How very gentrified.

For me, he could have retired 35 years ago but for our particular generation he was then as important as The Beatles, The Stones or Elvis Presley before him. Much is made of his magpie or chameleon character, perhaps stealing from or adapting to fashion and then somehow making it look like his idea but I can't think of any musician that didn't take what had gone before and do something else with it.

Wild is the Wind is the first name on the team sheet for a Top 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4&ob=av2n , sublimely made and passionate from the masterpiece Station to Station album.

Rebel Rebel was a kind of mission statement for all the contrivance of gender confusion.

Heroes, equally impressive and more sinister in the German version, was a colossal classic of uber mensch traum but it might be better if we didn't spread this critic vocabulary on too thickly or someone will think it's serious.

Life on Mars? was a god awful small affair but you don't expect zeitgeist kultur like that to get in the charts anymore ( d'oh, sorry).

Word on a Wing is the next off Station to Station, from which virtually any would do.

And, in the accustomed position of having one selection left but a dozen candidates, even though I thought I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long, I'll take Changes.