Today, today is the 1st of May

"Today, today is the first of May," sang David Bowie as I was driving through the Devon countryside this Mayday morning.

The Next Day, his first album in a decade, has been sitting in drive of the CD player of my car since my two children clubbed together to buy me the deluxe edition. The line is from the opening of "I'll Take You There," the last of the three, rather good, bonus tracks.

In fact the album is the most enjoyable offering from David Bowie since the early eighties; other than the delightful, "Little Fat Man" put down of Ricky Gervais's character in Extras.

There are nods to the past in The Next Day; my favourite track being "You Feel so Lonely", which is a mature version of "Rock and Roll Suicide" from Ziggy Stardust. There's an echo of "The Width of a Circle" in the "The Stars (Are Out Tonight". "Heat" appears to be about a Berliner's inherited guilt, complete with with a haunting violin which evokes the Jewish ghetto.

My 17 year old nephew thinks that "I'd Rather Be High" is the best track on the CD; Bowie does seem to have written this from the perspective of a 17 year old. In fact it could have been written in the sixties. How music history could have changed if he had released this, rather than "The Laughing Gnome" back in 1967.

It was the single "Drive in Saturday" that made me a Bowie fan forty years ago. I thought it was so cool that, in the pre music-video-age, he had made a film to go with the song, rather than perform on Top Of The Pops in person.  With lines like, "Pour me out another phone" and "She Smiled like Twig the Wonder-kid" this was different to the other offerings in the charts.

After the health issues Bowie has endured over the past few years, I'm glad he's back on form, and still just as cool in his sixties.

Badge of Honour (Update)

The Mail Online has an interview with Blue Peter legend Biddy Baxter, who happened to be the person who invited me to a BBC studio for the first time. How my aunt knew Biddy Baxter, I never discovered, but it was all arranged during a visit to London. My aunt packed my brother and me into a black cab and we were soon sitting in  the Blue Peter studio. I was ten years old and the original team of Chris Trace, Valerie Singleton and John Noakes were carrying out a final run-through of the day's edition of Blue Peter.

The strongest memory I had was the late Chris Trace having fag breaks behind the cameras, every-time he wasn't needed on screen.

Then we were ushered through to a small viewing room to watch the monochrome broadcast of the live show.

To thank Biddy Baxter for her kindness, I drew pictures of Petra and the other Blue Peter animals. A week or so later, an envelope landed on the front mat of our Aberystwyth house. It contained a Blue Peter badge in return for the pictures.

A few scandals have rocked the show since then; The Chris Trace Affair, The Richard Bacon Sacking and Kitty Gate to name but three. However, the badge has remained a treasured item which is far more fondly remembered than that other BBC gong, the now hated  Jim'll Fix it Badge.

Update.

After reading this blog, my brother reminded me that to get to the Blue Peter studio, we had to walk past the Top of The Pops studio, and there was the infamous Jimmy Savile, dressed in white, standing on a podium, cigar in mouth with arms waving about.