"Occasionally he'd just pick up a guitar and start singing. I started thinking, okay this is a bit weird," says playwright Enda Walsh, about struggling not to get star-struck by David Bowie when they worked together on the musical Lazarus.
“That was the only time that I allowed myself indulge for about two minutes, in the oddity of being opposite David Bowie singing Life on Mars. That’s pretty hilarious,” he told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.
Walsh was on his yearly trip to Taos in New Mexico with his wife, the fashion journalist Jo Ellison, and their daughter Ada, when he got the call to stop off in New York on his way back to London, because Bowie wanted to meet him to discuss a project.
“When I met him, he was such an adorable man,” he recalled. “He gave me a big hug and said, ‘god, you’ve been in my head for three weeks’. He had read everything I wrote and he knew my work, so we sat down and he interviewed me for about an hour and a half.”
Bowie was not ill at this stage but by the time the musical opened, he was a dying man. Walsh saw him that opening night and said he knew it would be the last time they would meet.
“I heard from him Christmas day. He texted me and said ‘Happy Christmas, I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch but I’m not too good.’”
Walsh was back home in Dublin in recent weeks to oversee the run of his play Arlington at the Abbey, his first production on the theatre's main stage. It was followed by Ballyturk, which has just finished its run and his next stage production will be his second opera.
By his teens Walsh knew he was destined to be a writer, having become "intoxicated by language" while at school, where his teacher, the author Roddy Doyle, encouraged his students to read the works of the Beat generation writers and held a hotly contested weekly writing competition.
“That was quite unusual in retrospect. All these boys in Kilbarack bumming smokes off each other during breaks, talking about Hunter S. Thompson, or whoever it was. Even back then, by about 15 or 16, I had that thing that I was going to be a writer,” he said.
Also on the podcast, the playwright spoke about falling in love with Cork and its language in his twenties, overcoming his OCD, his view of Ireland from abroad, and the utter sadness of Brexit.
To listen to the full conversation between Enda Walsh and Róisín Ingle, go to iTunes, irishtimes.com/podcasts, or your preferred podcast app.
