David Bowie arrived in Dublin yesterday, fresh from Saturday's hugely successful NetAid concert. He was one of several major rock music figures behind the event.
NetAid - organised by the United Nations Development Programme and Internet networking company Cisco Systems - was watched or heard by millions on television, radio and on a website.
Organisers said 60 countries aired the concert on TV and 132 nations on radio - a record. Mr Douglas Graham, a partner with consulting firm KPMG, who helped set up the website, said it was the largest webcast so far, surpassing the previous mark of 12,500 simultaneous viewers via the Internet but not hitting the system's 125,000 capacity.
Bowie, now a multi-millionaire following his Stock Exchange float a couple of years ago, flew into Dublin on a scheduled Aer Lingus flight. The main reason for his visit was to play a concert for Witness, a music initiative by Guinness. The concert took place last night at HQ, with support from Placebo and Mercury Prize winner Talvin Singh.
Looking unspeakably healthy for a man who has just turned 50, Bowie - now sporting long hair, yet another stylistic change for a person regularly described in the press as a chameleon - spoke at a press conference about his passionate involvement with the Internet and his love of the work of Irish painter Jack Yeats.
"My main interest these days is the Internet," he told one journalist. David Bowie is the first major rock artist to have made a new album (. . . hours) available on the Internet prior to being sold in record stores. "I'm quite sure if I were a teenager I would not have much time for anything else. It's such a Pandora's box and addictive device that I'm sure I'd be absolutely glued to it. I'd be a hacker, probably." Bowie is a major presence on the Internet. His site (BowieNet) utilises some of the most cutting edge technology seen on the Internet. "I go on my site and do clean-ups every morning. I make sure it's running - that's not an addiction, but rather taking care of business. I want it to be the most cutting edge artist site there is."
For over 25 years, Bowie has been the rock star that other acts have virtually built a career on.
His records of the 1970s are arguably his best, but his latest record sees a stylistic, if reflective return to that period. Asked about his artistic influences, and how they affect his own album covers, he replied that Jack Yeats had been an important figure.
"I have a beautiful painting of Yeats. There is something about his life and death motifs in his work that are not dissimilar to aspects of my own. Just to have that work around me influences me tremendously." Will the Internet replace retail stores, asked another journalist. "Of course it will. Once transport of goods to the home is sorted out."
