Fans gather around the world to remember David Bowie

David Bowie was a space-age star with a global impact.

As news spread of his death, fans gathered and left flowers Monday outside his New York apartment building, at the nondescript Berlin apartment block where he once lived and near a mural in the London neighbourhood where he was born.

There were candles at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and tears at a museum in The Netherlands where an exhibition is examining Bowie’s legacy in music, fashion and design. Few rock musicians have had a wider or deeper influence.

Some of the fans were young, many were middle-aged — and almost all remembered the impact Bowie had had on them as teenagers, helping them to feel less like outsiders, less alone.

Rosie Lowery, 21, came to the Bowie mural in London’s Brixton with the red-and-blue slash of Aladdin Sane painted on her face.

Her 59-year-old father Roland Lowery remembered Bowie in the 1970s singing the track “Sorrow,” which begins: “With your long blond hair and your eyes of blue…” Lowery said: “When I was 15 or 16 I had long blond hair and eyes of blue, and I thought he was singing about me.”

Bowie’s gift was to convince millions of people around the world that he was singing about them, too.

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