Losing the stars who rocked my world

Deaths of Bowie and Eagles founder Frey puts me in nostalgic mood as I recollect how much has changed

It's an adage in the United Kingdom that when policemen start looking younger than you, it's time to check your pension arrangements.

Well, you are only as young as you feel, but this past few days three deaths in particular got me looking back over my career.

First of all, David Bowie, rock star, performer and chameleon, died days after his 69th birthday. Barely had we taken all that on board when one of the iconic actors of his generation, Alan Rickman, famous for his Harry Potter film role as Professor Severus Snape, died, also at 69.

Then came news that really rocked me - Glenn Frey, founder member of the Eagles, one of my favorite rock bands, died at - wait for it - 67.

All these people provided the visual and audio soundtrack to my youth - and later years - and whether I like it or not, it puts me into reflective mood. Just for the record, I'm a healthy, happy 68 (OK, almost 69) with no plans to go anywhere just yet.

So let's review that soundtrack.

I first heard the Eagles in 1973, when as a callow 26-year-old foreign correspondent I was making my first-ever visit to the United States, taking a break from covering the Vietnam War and flying to Washington on a Pan Am flight. The Eagles' Tequila Sunrise was playing on the 747's personal soundtrack, and I was hooked.

The world back then was radically different - China was a closed shop, the Soviet Union was locked in a Cold War with the US, and the UK was just getting used to the fact that it wasn't a colonial power any more.

The bits in pink on a world map were now members of the British Commonwealth, no longer the empire, although Hong Kong clung on as an archaic reminder of the past until China regained its rightful control in 1997.

I spent a brief holiday in Hong Kong as a break from Vietnam in 1972, and my, how things were different.

You could trek up to Lok Ma Chau in the New Territories and peer through high-powered binoculars at China - all you could see were stretches of rice fields and what seemed to me, a city boy, to be vast flocks of geese, herded by a solitary farmer in singlet, shorts and a conical straw hat.

What I was peering at then has become the vast metropolitan spread that is Shenzhen, all soaring glass and steel and four-lane highways, symptomatic of the new China.

When I got back to London in 1975, all the talk on the music scene was of a waif-like bloke from South London who had changed his name to David Bowie from David Jones, and in doing so changed the face of rock music forever.

As London headed for the Thatcher years, which began in 1979, Bowie enchanted everyone with his extraordinary makeup, bright-orange hair, outlandish stage suits and performances that blended music, art and mime.

Meanwhile, the Eagles played on, as the '80s merged into the '90s. I worked in Paris, got married and started a family.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and with it the Soviet Empire.

Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a man she could do business with, and an actor called Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

China, meanwhile, was stirring, slowly evolving from the '60s, '70s and '80s - you can date the new era from the foundation of this very newspaper in 1981, leading to the launch of our highly successful, and much-read, website in 1995, and later the launch of China Daily Europe five years ago.

And still the Eagles played on.

Bowie continued to mesmerize the world of music with his chameleon-like changes of persona - he started in the '70s as the exotic Ziggy Stardust, abruptly killed him off and became Aladdin Sane, both exotically dressed, then the Thin White Duke, before becoming, well, a regular dude.

I often, without realizing I'm doing it, hum snatches of Bowie's well-known songs, such as Starman, Jean Genie, as well as more regular fare from the Eagles.

I have to admit the Eagles' work features heavily on my in-car entertainment unit (actually, it's a CD player, but my daughters tell me that is so uncool, so now it's an in-car entertainment unit) because they wrote great road-trip music.

So forgive me this small moment of nostalgia. Music is a soundtrack against which we live our lives.

Now, in my late 60s, I am, as actor and socialite Noel Coward famously said, "happy if my friends last through luncheon".

The author is managing editor of China Daily Europe, based in London. Contact the writer at chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com