Jehnny Beth covered David Bowie’s ‘Dollar Days’ at an event at the British Library to mark the 10th anniversary of his death – watch below.
The former Savages frontwoman was one of a number of Bowie fans, friends and collaborators to have been a part of ‘David Bowie In Time’, an all-day event at the London venue yesterday (January 17).
As part of the concert that closed out the day, Beth played two tracks from Bowie’s final album ‘Blackstar’, which was released two days before Bowie died after a private 18-month cancer battle in January 2016.
She played piano and was joined by Donny McCaslin, whose jazz band defined the sonic aesthetic of ‘Blackstar’, for renditions of ‘Dollar Days’ and ‘Girl Loves Me’. Watch footage of the former here:
Also performing on the day were Blixa Bargeld, the Berlin music legend who was frontman of Einstürzende Neubauten and a founding member of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, while legendary Bowie producer Tony Visconti was on hand for an in-conversation session.
Writing on Instagram about the show, Beth later said: “The whole day felt like a dream. I hadn’t played piano in front of people for nearly 10 years so it goes without saying that I was nervous, but also incredibly happy. What a way to start 2026!”
She also shared some words that she wrote about ‘Blackstar’, which you can see in full in the post below. She concluded: “There is a certain point in art, as in life, at which the real and the imagined, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, life and death, cease to be seen as contradictory. It is this exact point that I suddenly saw in ‘Blackstar’. He was speaking to us from beyond. That journey that awaits us all, it seemed that he had taken it for us and had made it his task to sing about. It’s only natural for a man who had turned living into a creative lifestyle, to turn death into a work of art.”
“An image came to mind: that of him singing from behind a glass/or a mirror. Orpheus, the Divine Comedy, Ophelia, Twin Peaks…’Blackstar’ stands in a tradition of masterpieces forged exactly at that point of fracture between two worlds: where a living consciousness navigates post-life architecture. Mirrors become portals. Language becomes coded, gestures become rituals. Time collapses. The precise second before disappearance: Still breathing, already gone… Death, not an ending — just another room?”
In 2020, Beth told NME about how her debut solo album ‘To Love Is To Live’ was heavily influenced by Bowie and the shock of his death. “That night I was in L.A., I opened my phone at 3am, saw that [Bowie] was dead and couldn’t sleep so I listened to his music all night,” she said. “I was obviously really sad, but also very conscious of the fact that death is part of life. One day I’m gonna be gone, so in my core I felt that there was something that I hadn’t done yet – and that was this record.
“It took me a while to come to that, but the night that Bowie died was certainly the start of the path to this record.”
Tributes have been paid far and wide to Bowie on the anniversary of his death, including his widow Iman, who has a new ‘Blackstar’ tattoo, and a range of bands who played Bowie covers, including The Libertines, Anna Calvi and The Molotovs.
