In July 1978, Tracey Thorn was 15 and, to go by her diary, either drinking heavily (“We were all really smashed. I had about 11 Cinzanos!!”), or watching TV (“Watched The Goodies, Porridge, Are You Being Served, Mike Yarwood, TOTP”), or going to school, or being very, very bored.

Another Planet:?A Teenager in Suburbia
Tracey Thorn
(Canongate, 224 PP, £ £14.99)
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In July 1978, Tracey Thorn was 15 and, to go by her diary, either drinking heavily (“We were all really smashed. I had about 11 Cinzanos!!”), or watching TV (“Watched The Goodies, Porridge, Are You Being Served, Mike Yarwood, TOTP”), or going to school, or being very, very bored. But one day that July, she watched David Bowie being interviewed. He was gorgeous and brilliant onstage, she recalls, and she then listened to his album Heroes. “Something happens,” she writes, “you hear a voice telling you something, a little tiny spark is lit.”

Countless people emerged after Bowie’s death in 2016 to recall similar stories. He discomfited their parents, while convincing the next generation that it was okay to be different. Like Thorn, they loved how exotic he seemed. But his roots weren’t exotic at all. The space oddity was actually a creature of suburbia, the very place that Thorn decries so passionately in Another Planet.

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