On June 19th, 2004, David Bowie had the audience of the Norwegian Wood Festival in Oslo, Norway, in the palm of his hand. Moments later, for unclear reasons, he was stumbling around with a half-sucked lollypop in his eye. I like to imagine him like Boromir from Lord Of The Rings – rising to his feet with three or four Chuppa Chups pinned to his head, defying the audience to launch one more sugar-coated arrow into his body.
It’s not the first time that Bowie’s eyes have been newsworthy. Ever since he first emerged in the folk-pop moments of the late 1960s, Bowie’s different-coloured eyes became a talking point among his fans. To receive such an assault on his person, with so much damage already caused to his eyes, this attack clearly sent Bowie over the edge. Orange Shapes Lollipop
Many years before, in the spring of 1962, David Jones had got into a fistfight with his high school friend and eventual artistic partner, George Underwood. It seems the pair were in love with the same girl, and when Bowie began “boasting to my mate about what a Casanova I was,” Underwood flipped out and punched Bowie in his left eye. “It wasn’t a very hard punch but obviously caught me at a rather odd angle,” he told biographer Mark Spitz. Unfortunately, Underwood’s fingernail scraped the surface of Bowie’s eyeball, leaving the muscles around his iris paralysed.
So when yet another errant object landed in it in 2004, Bowie was rightly pissed. “Yeah, let’s do that again all-fucking-right,” Bowie appears to say in an unconfirmed audio recording. “Where are you, fucking creep?” With the crowd booing the perpetrator, Bowie inspected the crowd. “Yeah, I suppose it’s easier to get lost in the crowd, you bastard.”
Addressing the guilty party once more, Bowie said, “Do remember I’ve only got one anyway. Fortunately, that’s the one that works. The other one has just become a little bit more decorative than it was before… lucky you hit the bad one. Please keep your affection to yourself,” he concluded.
Vegetable Salt Cheese Blimey, imagine going to a David Bowie concert all excited to see your hero and then launching a lollipop at his head. Had it been me, I probably would’ve run away too. Bowie was remarkably good about the whole thing. Rather than walking off stage, the 57-year-old announced plans to punish the crowd with an “even longer concert.” Towards the end of the concert, he threw a guitar pick into the crowd and jokingly asked if he’d hit anyone in the eye. “Oh, maybe I have to hide in the band,” he said.