By bike to find meaning in a song, and in life too

At 36 years old in 2016, the year Bowie died, he found himself as a man with belly blubber and thinning hair, in a rut. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Or as he puts it, “I’d travelled a bit in my twenties but got stuck in my thirties. I had a career that was grinding every ounce of life from me and a relationship in which I was happy but hadn’t said the ’L’ word.”

And then a bolt of lightning struck – he should cycle from Ibiza, an island off the east coast of Spain, to the Norfolk Broads, an area of rivers and waterways in England. Any half-decent David Bowie fan – and James Briggs was a big Bowie fan – should instantly recognise the line from the enigmatic Bowie song “Life on Mars?” on his 1971 album “Hunky Dory” – “See the mice in their million hordes, From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads”.

It’s a song about an unhappy girl, a lost child at odds with her surroundings and disconnected from her family. She seeks solace in a cinema but finds that not even there can she escape from life’s problems. The imagery is obscure but it’s the way that Briggs himself was feeling. So he would be pedalling nearly 3000 miles (4800 kilometres), and that’s excluding Bowie diversions along the way by train to Moscow and Berlin.

It may seem odd that “Hunky Dory” had been released eight years before Briggs was born in 1979, and that he had never heard “Life on Mars?” until 1994 when he was 14 years old and the DJ played it at a school disco. Young James was immediately awestruck. Here was the 1970s transported to 1990s Somerset, a song where, as he heard it, the “poetic lyrics transformed young ladies with hairspray-stiffened fringes into girls with mousy hair, a dizzying finale erupted, and we were hastened to look to the skies and question if there really was life on other planets”. He thought it was the greatest thing he had ever heard.

Grown up, what really made Briggs a Bowie fan was seeing him perform at Glastonbury 2000 and he loved the “Best of Bowie” double CD in 2002. By now he had decided that “Life on Mars?” was one of the best songs of all time. And so, in 2016 with middle age upon him, the fateful decision was made – James Briggs would become almost certainly the first human being in the cosmos to cycle a song lyric. And he would use chance encounters with people along the way to see if they liked Bowie and knew the song. Who knows, someone might even throw light on the meaning of those difficult-to-decipher lyrics in this beloved song.

The other half of Briggs’ relationship, Lucy, declined his offer to accompany him on a tandem. His workplace reluctantly agreed to let him go, then said no, then acquiesced again when he threatened to quit. Later they phoned him mid-trip and said he had to get back because they were busy, but he refused. He had reached Paris and decided to damn the consequences.

Briggs figured he had something in common with the young Bowie because the would-be rock star once had a job at a local butcher’s delivering sausages on a heavy iron bike, and the would-be escapist had been a cycling schoolboy doing a paper round. So he began his journey where Bowie had begun his, making a pilgrimage to 40 Stansfield Road in Brixton, London, a three-storey Victorian terrace where Bowie was born on January 8, 1947.

Nearby was a bike shop and Briggs went in to get equipped. He also visited another bygone Bowie family home, a two-up, two-down at 106 Canon Road, Bromley, and he paid homage at the Beckenham bandstand where Bowie wrote the lyrics to “Life on Mars?” at age 24.

And then Briggs and his bike, christened Iggy, flew to Ibiza, a place Bowie never visited but never mind, and after pitching his one-man tent at the La Playa Campsite his next move would be to take the ferry to the Spanish mainland for the first actual Bowie link, Barcelona.

Here he found the Mini Estadi, a venue on Bowie’s 1987 Glass Spider Tour, and the Estadio Olimpíco de Montjuic, included in 1990 on the Sound + Vision World Tour. The former venue was closed but he could enter the second, where Bowie had actually sung “Life on Mars?”.

Large hills primed Briggs for the Pyrenees mountains, and “Soon I was in the lowest gear possible, my legs spinning wildly like a hyperactive hamster on a wheel. For every fifteen revolutions my distance gained was roughly fifteen centimetres.” But onwards to a Bowie bonanza, Lyon, that had been included in tours in 1978, 1983, 1987, 1995, 1997 and 2003, and street artist Big Ben had gifted a mural on Rue Neyret.

To Switzerland, where Bowie lived on and off for 20 golden (tax-free) years, and home to the Montreux Casino, formerly Mountain Studios where “Lodger” and four or more subsequent albums were recorded, as well as “Under Pressure” with Queen. Briggs found his way to Bowie’s old home above the Sauvabelin Forest but of course it was private, a no-go.

On New Year’s Eve 1965 Bowie, aged 18, played his first ever foreign gig at Le Golf-Drouot, Paris, where Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf and the Rolling Stones had performed. Briggs found it was now a McDonald’s. Bowie went to the area’s nearby cabarets, and Le Chat Noir was still there. Now, it was time to move on to Hérouville village and its Chateau d’Hérouville, where Bowie recorded “Pin Ups” in 1973 and he and Iggy Pop made “The Idiot” and “Low” in 1976.

Posing as a BBC travel journalist, Briggs was shown around what was the world’s first residential studio, now-closed. For Bowie and Pop it had been an unofficial rehab clinic.

Bowie caught the Trans-Siberian Express east to Moscow in 1973, then took Iggy Pop there in 1976, so Briggs caught the three day/two night sleeper train from Paris. The Kremlin Palace hosted Bowie’s only live show in Russia, in 1996, and the city has a David B. Café dedicated to the main man. It had a scattering of portraits and coffee-table books but was indistinguished, though the owner gifted Briggs a DB puppet that did a star jump when its string was pulled.

Onwards by train via Warsaw – “Warszawa”! – to Berlin, a kind of Bowie central to which naughty boys he and Iggy Pop retreated in 1976 to recover from hangers-on, parties and drugs. For Briggs: their flat at 155 Hauptstrasse, the Wannsee lake to which they cycled, the Brücke Museum that held Bowie enraptured and Hansa Studios, birthplace of “Heroes”.

The Hansa guestbook reads “Good morning, could I interest you in a hoover? Bowie 1976.”

After a visit to Luc Ludolph Studio in The Netherlands where Bowie recorded “Diamond Dogs” in 1974, Briggs crossed the North Sea and pedalled on to Norfolk, ending his seven-week adventure. He’d taken life by the scruff of the neck, as you do, then been frozen, soaked, exhausted, lonely, inspired and “achieved liposuction without surgical procedure”.

His emotions had gone up and down, just like the hills and mountains he faced. On one hill: “With a last few grunting revolutions, I crested the brow, pausing to drench it with sweat… ”

This middle-aged man didn’t lose his marbles, rather he bravely faced up to a severe existential crisis, sang a song’s praises but didn’t find its meaning, so decided it was best just to call it a love song. He returned home to a loving smile, quit that damn job and went on to write a most entertaining book about it all, particularly so if you dig David Bowie. And to cap it all, in Norfolk he missed Rick Wakeman but thinks he met his cat (insiders will understand).

Be your own Starman, your own hero, and let’s dance, that might be the message.