David Bowie - Everyone Says Hi

In 2002 someone gave me a ticket to a concert David Bowie was playing at the BBC Maida Vale studios. It was being recorded for Radio 2 and there were only a couple of hundred people in the small room: some other journalists, a few members of the fan club, Ricky Gervais, David Baddiel, Gavyn Davies, who was at the time chairman of the BBC. Jonathan Ross was the compere.

Bowie played an hour’s worth of tunes, some from much earlier in his career - Alabama Song, a reworked Rebel, Rebel and, notably, the first ever live performance of The Bewlay Brothers (using lyrics sheets perched on a music stand because “it’s got more words than War and Peace”). The band was great, he was relaxed and conversational and it was extraordinary to watch someone whose music I’d grown up with, playing that music just a couple a feet away from me.

He had just released Heathen, his 22nd studio album, which hadn’t been particularly well received and is nobody’s idea of vintage Bowie. But naturally enough he played some songs from it: the title track, a cover of the Pixies’ Cactus and a couple of others.

About halfway through the concert he introduced a tune from the album called Everyone Says Hi. On record it feels quite throwaway, a simple song about missing someone who’s travelling (“Said you took a big trip/
They said you moved away/Happened oh, so quietly/They say”). Nice enough, but nothing special, even on a fairly ordinary album

When Bowie introduced it at the concert he explained that Everyone Says Hi is a song about loss. When he wrote it he’d been thinking about the death of his father in the late 60s and the deaths of close friends over the years. At those moments, he said, he found it hard to escape the sense that the person had taken an extended holiday and that, sooner or later, he’d see them again: it takes time before you resign yourself to the realisation that they are gone for good.

You can hear the concert here. The song, and Bowie’s introduction, is at about 30 minutes in.