Few musicians had as much impact on or involvement with David Bowie’s career as Mike Garson. Bowie’s longest-serving musician, the New York-born pianist joined the Ziggy Stardust tour, and went on to play on 19 Bowie albums from 1973’s Aladdin Sane to 2010’s A Reality Tour (a live album from Bowie’s final tour, recorded in 2003). Bowie once explained that Garson wasn’t just an exceptional pianist but: “very few musicians understand the movement and free thinking necessary to hurl themselves into experimental or traditional areas of music, sometimes, ironically, at the same time. Mike does this with such enthusiasm that it makes my heart glad just to be in the same room with him.” Here, Garson remembers his friend.

Mortality wasn’t something David discussed, but he sang about it a lot. I think he saw the pain and felt the suffering in life more than most. Many of us put up filters and go into denial. I don’t think he ever did that, and that came out in his music.

When we were on the tour bus in 1996 or 1997, David said, “Somewhere in the late 70s I met this psychic, who told me I was gonna die around the age of 69 or 70,” and he said this with total certainty. It didn’t sound like the ramblings of one of these crazy people: it was something which he absolutely didn’t doubt at all. I never told anyone about it, but it never left my mind. It was my first thought when the news came in. At the same time as I was enveloped in shock, I was thinking, “He told me that”. Every year, as it’s been getting closer, that’s been on my mind, because we were friends and musical comrades.



I had no idea he was ill. A year ago, someone was writing a biography about me and they sent me a compilation of 50 of the best songs I worked on with David. After I’d listened to them I thought, “My God, we really did some magic together.” So I immediately wrote that to David in an email. Five minutes later he wrote back: “Mike, we did an amazing body of work over those years.” I can’t explain it, but it felt final, like we were never going to work together again. I wasn’t thinking death. I just thought that he was moving on. I realise now that he knew he was dying.



I was on stage with him in Germany in 2004 when he had his heart attack and we had to cancel the last 14 shows of the tour. It was more serious than people realised at the time. He could have died then. I think when something like that happens it really scares you. Around 2006, he called me and asked, “Mike, do you think we should be touring?” I said, “David, only if you’re feeling it.” A year later he told the drummer Sterling Campbell, “I’m not feeling it.”



Three months before the heart attack, his doctor had put him on cholesterol medicine, and he was very upset. We had a trainer, a chef making really healthy food. He’d stopped all the drinking and smoking and was living a beautiful life. I’d meet him in the gym. But the past took a toll on him physically. I do believe he recuperated fully from the heart attack, but I’m not sure you ever recover mentally from those things, because it puts the fear of God into you.



‘I realise now that he knew he was dying’ … David Bowie in the video for Lazarus

Even before the heart attack, he had told me, “Mike, I don’t think I’m going do much touring now.” He had a daughter, Lexi, and he wanted to be present for her childhood (which he hadn’t been for his son Duncan) – and he was. When he found out he was ill 18 months ago, he really would have wanted to stay close to home.



Before he became successful, I don’t think he quite realised the price that fame would exact, in that it brings you all the money and adulation and all the rest of it, but you lose your anonymity. I used to walk him to the limousine because he couldn’t go out, and I don’t think David or anyone else can ever quite prepare themselves for what that can be like. I think it took a lot of the joy out of his life. So in the past few years, out of the spotlight, he would have been able to get that back.



I played with him at the last concert he ever did, in 2006 – a private Aids benefit in New York with Alicia Keys. He didn’t allow it to be filmed – perhaps because it was for charity, and he liked to do those things quietly, but also maybe because he was a little gunshy, because he’d not sung for a while. But it was an amazing show, just piano and voice. David and Alicia singing Changes was just magical. It was the first performance since his recuperation, and he actually said that if he hadn’t done that, then maybe he’d have never sung again. Of course, he went on to do two more albums, but that was physically the last time I saw him.



We kept in touch by email. When he recorded The Next Day he emailed me saying, “There’s no piano on this, so you’re not needed”, and with Blackstar I think he was just after a different sound. That’s David.



We worked together so much. Most of the time on Aladdin Sane was just me and him in the studio, with him laying down the guitar parts. We spent a lot of time together, and he was always talking about the creative process, or jazz, or Stravinsky, or Vaughan Williams. My regrets are that we never got to do some of the things he talked about. He wanted to do an album of Philip Glass songs. He wanted to do a big band jazz album. He wanted to do a Broadway show.



I haven’t listened to Blackstar a lot: I can’t quite go back to it yet. It’s too dark. But knowing David, he went out with the same bang as when he was doing anything. He even stayed alive long enough to see the acclaim for the record. That’s David: life and death was art for him.



I’ve worked with a thousand singers, and he was so far above everyone else. I’m going to miss that. We just have to keep on finding things that he recorded, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot to emerge that we’ve never heard. He leaves behind a body of work that would have taken anyone else five lifetimes. As a planet, we’ve lost a great, great artist.

