When the legendary rock icon David Bowie left this planet on January 10th 2016, an event honouring his amazing body of work had just finished in Dublin the night before. The inaugural Dublin Bowie Festival – celebrating its tenth edition from Feb 26th to March 2nd – was a two day event set in the Grand Social on Liffey St Lower and featured live sets from local tribute act Rebel Rebel and very special Festival Guest Gerry Leonard, a Clontarf man who after various local musical incarnations – Spies, Above The Thunderclouds and Hinterland – ended up living in New York and became David Bowie’s guitarist, musical director and (a rare honour in the Bowie canon) co-writer.
On the second night of the Festival Gerry performed material from his solo ambient project Spooky Ghost along with some Bowie classics and fielded questions from the packed house during a Q&A, including one that asked him about Bowie’s ill health rumours. Leonard had not seen Bowie in a while but remarked that when he did see him last he was in good spirits. When the world woke up the following day to the tragic news Leonard was sought out by every news channel in Ireland.
Do you remember how you felt on that Monday morning Gerry?
I do. It’s imprinted in my memory. It was so strange. We had such a good weekend, it was the first Bowie festival. There was such excitement. David had brought out the Blackstar record, and everybody was on a high, we had a great night. We pulled down the shutters at 2am in the Grand Social and at 8am the next morning I get a phone call from one of the radio stations that I’d been doing some interviews with over the weekend. And the girl was like, Mr. Leonard, I suppose you’ve heard the news, any comment? I was like, what news? What comment? And she said, Well, David Bowie passed away. I was like, what? I couldn’t I literally couldn’t believe it. And I said to her, look, look, I’m sorry. I’m gonna have to call you back. I’m gonna have to call you back.
I was in this little hotel room by myself, and I turned on the TV and I went on the internet, I just couldn’t believe it. I remember going out. I went around to get a coffee at the little place around the corner, and I walked in, it was early morning, just myself, and Blackstar was playing on the radio. It was the soundtrack of that whole day of walking around in a kind of stupor in Dublin.
A lot of people wanted to talk to me, but at the same time, I felt like I didn’t really know what to say. Because you’re trying to process what just happened, it was really, really shocking. There’s a phrase that Laurie Anderson has in one of her songs, and “it’s the day my father died. I felt like the whole library had burned down” and I think I felt that when David passed, I felt like a whole library had had broken down all of this accumulated knowledge and the way he could move through art at this point in his life with so much reference and so much intelligence and that was gone now, that nobody was carrying that anymore.
If you could see Bowie again what would you say?
I always felt a little bit formal around David. I always felt this kind of respect, carefully choosing my words with him, just because I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself. I had this formal thing with him, even though we broke that down, we had a lot of laughs and we did a lot of work together. I always felt like I approached it too formally and I would just take that away straight away, and I would just give him a hug, and I would just get straight down to being a friend, because in the end, he really was friendly to me, and he really was open to me.
But, sometimes you can’t really believe that that’s happening. I mean, you’ve got David Bowie in front of you, you’re just a little bit awestruck. I would make more use of the time because you always think you’re going to have that extra bit of time, and you don’t.
Going back to the start of your relationship, is it an Urban Myth that Bowie came to see you at a New York coffee shop gig and startled heckling you? If so, how did you cope with that?
It was definitely a little bit surreal. But admittedly it wasn’t just like he walked in cold and started yelling right up – that would have been a shock, for sure – but I’d done three or four sessions for the Toy record with him at that point, we had hung out a little bit. He had said to Mark Plati (Bowie’s producer/guitarist) “Can Gerry rock?” And Mark said, “Well, come see him tomorrow night. He’s playing a set at the little coffee house nearby.”
Mark called me and told me Bowie was coming to the show, which freaked me out, but come showtime, the fact that he was heckling me, it actually did the opposite. It really broke the ice, it took all the static out of the air, and then it felt like, oh yeah, there’s David. We’re having fun. Just play your gig. Don’t be the deer in the headlights. I think it was deliberate on his part. He loves to get in on the joke, cos I was messing around in between songs, goofing around. And he was just responding to that.
On Bowie’s it-came out-of-nowhere album The Next Day, you had the honour of co-writing two songs on the album. That’s a very rare thing in the Bowie firmament.
Yeah, this is another example where I felt like he really did accept me as a friend. He was up in our area (Woodstock, upstate New York) and I know he was up with his family because his daughter did summer school up there. I invited him to our house and he said “Do you have a drum machine”, you know, typical David. He just wanted to come over and work. He didn’t want to come over and just go for a walk. And so he came over to my house, a little surreal, but it happened. And he came back three times, and we wrote three songs over that couple of weeks in August, and two of them ended up on the record. It’s an amazing story, an amazing gift. I’m very proud of those things. That he came here and spent time with my family and we wrote those songs. It was a thrill, absolutely.
You were musical director/guitarist on the Reality tour in 2004 which came to an abrupt end when David had a heart attack on stage.
Yeah, it was in Prague. He left the stage after four songs, walked past me and off the stage. And I was like, that’s not supposed to happen, I knew that show inside and out. And the poor guy was having really bad chest pains, it was a traumatic night. We cancelled a bunch of shows but we stuck around for a few weeks thinking maybe he’s just pulled a muscle when he was training and we’ll be back to play all these festivals we were going to do that summer. But that was it.
It was such a shame, because he was really at the top of his game there. He was really into it. We had 64 songs and the repertoire kept growing. We could turn on a dime. He could turn around in the middle of the set and just say, let’s play blah blah. It really felt like the band were an extension of him, and we had all these great versions of all these great songs. It was bad luck.
If you were to name one song that stuck out as a live favourite what would it be?
Well, there’s, there’s a bunch of them, he had so many iconic rock songs, but I’ll tell you playing Heroes with David in a giant festival stadium, and you’re looking out and the place is just lit up and there’s such a positive message in that song. It’s a beautiful song, such an anthemic song. The band is cranking and I’m playing this Ebow (an electronic device that uses a pickup in an inductive string driver feedback circuit to vibrate strings, producing a long, sustaining sound reminiscent of using a bow on strings) and you’re just looking out over the crowd, and David’s got his foot up on the monitor, and he’s giving it all that “we can be heroes”.
That’s a classic moment for sure. There was all of these other moments in the set that were really sublime and really artistic or really rocked, like Hello Space Boy, or Ziggy, but Heroes had this kind of communion with the audience. I’ve seen him do it in a thunder and lightning storm on Jones Beach Island in New York, where the lightning is cracking all around and the rain is lashing down, and he’s singing, “we could be heroes”. The crowd is absolutely drenched but totally with him, it’s pretty special.
While that was the end of your live performance with Bowie the subsequent years since his death have seen you take up a mantle as Musical Director of a project that teams up iconic Bowie band members Gail Ann Dorsey, Mike Garson, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell and your good self with the RTE Concert Orchestra and guest vocalists such as Shobsy, Duke Special, Dana masters and Soda Blonde lead singer Faye O’Rourke. What’s the biggest challenge here?
I think the hardest part of it is, there is no time for rehearsal. You prepare, you prepare, you prepare, and then when you’re there, you’re just kind of running. You’re running everything down. There’s no real time at that point. You’ve got to have made all the right decisions along the line. So there’s a ton of preparation, a lot of emails, a lot of back and forth, a lot of people to line up, and then there’s very little time.
I mean it’s a beautiful thing when it starts to blossom with the orchestra on the stage, but you have to find the sweet spot where you can kind of rock with these songs, because David’s songs do have that backbone, that rock and roll. Then you’ve also got to respect the audience and the orchestra in terms of their role, so you don’t overshadow them with a loud electric guitar. It’s a huge concentration. I know that after the rehearsal or the show, I’m just ready to just collapse.
For this year’s Dublin Bowie Festival you’re going to revisit the same venue that you played for the Reality Tour DVD.
I’m really looking forward to that. We did the Reality DVD in what was called the Point Depot. Then it was the O2, now it’s the 3Arena. I like to call it the point 023!
The Songs Of David Bowie with The RTE Concert Orchestra & The Bowie Alumni is at the 3Arena on Sunday March 2nd. Tickets from singularartists.ie
Dublin Bowie Festival celebrates its tenth edition from Wednesday February 26th to Sunday March 2nd at a variety of venues throughout Dublin.
Check out Five of The Best Things To Do At Dublin Bowie Festival 2025 here.
