Excerpt from Rolling Stone article on Jake Shears, Scissor Sisters:
After we said our final goodbye from the stage, I trod up the stairs back to the dressing room where Chris took my arm and said, "David Bowie watched the show."
"What?" All the bustle of the room quickly tuned out, and all I could hear was the ringing in my ears.
"He was up in the balcony." "Which side?"
"Your left."
I suddenly started babbling. "Is he still here? Why didn't anybody say anything? How come no one told me? The show was fucking ter- rible! I was fucking terrible. . . ." I paced in a circle, feeling my throat closing up, trying to hold back tears. I stopped and pulled it together, put on a clean shirt, and prepared myself to meet him. He never came backstage. He was gone.
Growing up, no matter what I was doing—whether it was theater, tap dancing, or writing horror stories—his sounds and visions guided my way. And now he had seen my shitty show and left. I was incon- solable. They say never meet your idols. I guess the only thing worse than meeting your idols is not meeting them. The whole thing made me feel like a fraud.
Later that month, I received a somewhat cryptic email:
Hi. I came to your show a few weeks ago. It sounded very good from where I was sitting. db
I froze. What was this? As if I didn't know he'd been there? From where he was sitting? As opposed to where everyone else was sitting? This just exacerbated my pain. Why did he even bother to write me an email at all? The black type on white just read to me as: "Dear Jake, though you may think yourself a rock star, you will never be me. David Bowie."
My response took about three weeks to compose. I made sure that even if it was a little longer, at three sentences, I kept it equally terse:
Dear David Bowie,
You mean more to me than any artist on earth. My favorite song you've ever written is "Fantastic Voyage." Thank you so much for coming to my show, but I really hope at this point that we never cross paths. There's not a lot in this world I keep sacred, but I would rather you just stay imaginary.
Sincerely, Jake Shears
Now I realize that it was my insecurities that made me prickle. I felt like I didn't deserve to be so close to what I knew to be greatness. David Bowie, the man who gave me the idea and inspiration to per- form in the first place, sent me a note to just tell me he liked my show, and I couldn't just see that for what it was. I wish I'd just replied with a simple "Thank you."
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