Paperback, hardback, posh leather-bound
Dog-eared, well-thumbed, maybe slightly browned
A brief inscription, words of love profound
Lurking in between the leaves, a random bookmark found
Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory
Bowie’s works in all their glory
On vinyl discs from years before they
Made a digital world become mandatory
The high street banks are off the map
To spend a penny we need an app
That ‘I promise to pay the bearer’ chap
Has lost his job, deserves a slap
Technology has us by the balls
So in a thousand years when duty calls
Historians discover that sod all’s
As good as what’s on cavemen’s walls
They’ll never see what we have seen
On our ninety-nine-inch TV screens
Only microchips and polythene
Fill the hole where civilisation’s been
This worldwide web is all the rage
You’ll find all you need on our homepage
But culture’s gone, it’s left the stage
As we’re welcomed along to the New Dark Age
Photograph: My own photograph of my own vinyl copy of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album that I bought from Scene & Heard Records in Fish Street in Leeds on the day of its release which was Thursday 19th April 1973 when I was fifteen. I’m now sixty-six and it hangs in a glass frame in pride of place on my Bulgarian living room wall. The record sleeve’s appearance was enhanced when I pasted on to it the ticket stub from when I went to see the man himself in concert at the Apollo Theatre in Renfrew Street in Glasgow on Monday 19th June 1978, the night before my Ship Stability & Stress exam at Glasgow College of Nautical Studies. Miraculously, I passed the exam but the highlight of the week, and the 1970s, was the gig. There is nothing that is produced in the world today that could ever be as precious to me as this record.