In 2016, suffering deep career disillusionment and a hairline in furious retreat, I cycled a David Bowie lyric, ‘From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads,’ to find the meaning of mid-life, and Life on Mars? The following pictures are the story of this trip.

Ready to roll. Seven miles and one water bottle that rolled under the wheel of a London black cab later and I’m ready to face the biggest challenge of my life - how to dismantle my bike without launching pedals and spanners across the airport.

Oh, and the timeless video that started it all, directed by Mick Rock.

Off the plane into 36 degree heat. One faulty water bottle, 13 miles of motorways and one nervous dehydrated wreck later, I channel Bowie’s early bohemian phase and stumble into La Playa, Ibiza’s original hippy campsite.

After a few days pootling around trying to seek out some Bowie (and camping gas) I leave with neither, peddling the 13 miles back not via the motorway this time, but a whopping pine-flecked mini mountain range. After spluttering up one side, I learn that the bike is back-heavy, wobbling all the way down the other. Alas, I make it to the ferry, which is around £40 bike included and relax into the four hour journey.

Blue, blue electric blue, that’s the colour of the Balearic ocean.

1987. Bowie is in a mid-career funk as he goes mainstream. But he plays Spain and Barcelona with his Glass Spider Tour. It’s outlandish and ostentatious. There’s swings, telephones and he swipes angrily at wasps, seemingly. I fail to bribe my way into the stadium where he played and end up in the Camp Nou next door eating hot dogs.

Barcelona > Canyelles > Figueres

This was my first real day cycling. I thought it was a breeze, mostly because I had a tailwind sweeping me down NII and along the shimmering Costa Brava.

The cyclist’s lunch. Carbs, carbs and processed pink sludge masquerading as ham. I’m digging cherry tomatoes, though. So sweet and refreshing, even if I didn’t know how to label them properly at the supermarket and faced the wrath of the old ladies at the checkout.

Nothing says ‘sexy cycling bastard’ like a photo behind a petrol station where Lithuanian truckers are wee’ing in plain sight against trees.

Those ‘hills’ shaped like massive swines are in fact the Pyrenees mountains and I’m heading right for them.

Looks like I’d settled down for the night in a campsite where dogs are routinely stalked by giant fists. But the view and icy cold beer made up for it. As did the lovely couple, Joseph and Yolanda, who took pity and me sweat-stained face and fed me some tasty chicken noodles. Nice one, Spain.

Barcelona, Catalonia.

Bowie’s back in town. It’s 1990 and he’s playing at the (deep breath) Olympic Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys stadium for his Sound and Vision world tour.

On a bright Sunday morning I cycled up to where he’d played 26 years ago to see if I could have a nose around the stadium.

Who wore it better, left Dickhead or right dickhead? Busted sunnies meant a dry-eyed ride for the next 750 miles.

After a full Spanish breakfast I gain entry to the stadium where you can pay five euros to run on the Olympic racetrack. I race a tubby middle-age middle eastern man in loafers. He nearly beats me. 

Figueres, Catalonia.

Salvador Dali was one of Bowie’s inspirations. Indeed, the Life on Mars? were said to be like a cross between a Broadway musical and a Dali painting. So when I rolled into his hometown there were plenty of surrealistic treasures to uncover.

Figueres is a maze of atmospheric little streets like this where Tapas is served amidst scents of sizzling onion and garlic.

This is the Salvador Dali casa, a museum and his former home. Looks like where Humpty Dumpty’s family hung out.

The museum is a delight. A mix of paintings, sculptures, installations and the mind of a surrealistic genius. Dali is supposedly buried under the floor of the main theatre, but his body was due to be exhumed so it could be tested for DNA in an unresolved love-child case.

Quick snap before hitting the road again. Although it’s been photobombed by a man behind who appears to be taking a dump against the wall.

Southern France

After crossing from Spain over Le Perthus which is apparently one of the Pyrenees lowest mountain passes (obviously a lie) it was into France. Here the wind had decided to turn into an exceptional bastard and hit me from every angle possible. Cheeks were ruffled, chins were wobbled and wrong turns taken, but France began to unveil her beauty and her roadside prostitutes.

Wine country isn’t a bad place to get lost.

Hadn’t spoke to anyone for days until I chanced upon this group of Russian touring cyclists. We exchanged backslaps, high fives and I’m now friend’s with someone’s wife on Facebook.

I have to accept that this is now my home. It also acts as a clothes dryer, armchair, kitchenette and small fromagerie.

After a long few days struggling into headwinds, I skirt the coast around Le Cap D’Agde and wake up to this view.

“A good bike should have a good name” says friendly local Yolanda who kindly fed me super noodles last night. So meet Iggy. As in Iggy Pop. Bowie’s collaborator, conspirator, hell raiser, friend and now my emaciated buttock carrier.  

I pedal four hours north to Nîmes where it’s Feria time! Basically a harvest knees up where the French go hammer and tongs on booze and any brass instrument they can lay their hands on. There were pints of Pastis, nonplussed nuns, ten-foot techno speakers, an 80 year old Malaysian who loved Life on Mars and later, me curled up in the foetal position trying not to be sick in my tent. But there’s good news, Bowie played here...

But, yes, Bowie was here in Nîmes. On Bastille day in 2002, no less. He was in a buoyant, celebratory mood until the local mistral wind ruffled his perfectly coiffed hair. With a fausty-mouthed Feria hangover, I explored the deserted Arena of Nîmes seeing last night's bull tracks and, gasp, blood in the sand. That aside it's a stunning start to the day.

Like a Rhône-stone cowboy I tackle the river Rhône using the beautiful, meandering ViaRhona cycle route. It runs for over 1000km from Montpellier in the south of France all the way to Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There’s swarthy chateaus sat atop hills, dead snakes, donkeys, droopy sunflowers, sexy scenery and unsexy flies dashing into my exhausted face every few seconds.

80km north of Nimes is the mightily impressive Pont du Gard. There’s no Bowie, there’s umpteen million old fogies, zeppelin-sized clouds of flies and some moron with a shiny five head eating an apple very uglylyly.

My wild camping debut. This little pear orchard made a cosy spot for the night. Even if you do spend all night shitting it that a Breton farmer is going to poke a shotgun through your tent door.

A lightning bolt of inspiration. I spy a place called St Pierre La Roche on my map. Coincidentally, Pierre La Roche was Bowie’s make-up man who created the iconic Aladdin Sane lightning bolt and Bowie’s infamous shock of blue eyeliner in the Life on Mars? video. I destroyed my whimpering thighs following a 13km detour into the Ardeche mountains to see if he was there. The answer, was he bollocks.

La Roche created the famous ‘shocking blue’ eyeliner from Bowie’s famous Life on Mars? video.

On the off chance that some clue lay at the top of a mountain to the song’s meaning, I decided that a 13km uphill cycle would be manageable on a handful of cherry tomatoes and two slices of ham.

The French threw up a road block to try and stop me. My whimpering thighs seemed intent on doing the same about 9kms up, but…

I made it…

…and was rewarded with a lovely bench, a loud meow from a cat and the rapid onset of lactic acid in my legs.

Limping into Valence, France with a belly full of baguette and a wonky knee, I noticed this dainty bandstand.

David Bowie wrote Life on Mars? whilst sat on the steps of one in Beckenham, just outside London. “This song was so easy. Being young was easy…I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Nice.” Nice indeed.

Another night wild camping, another night shitting it as twigs slowly snap around the tent all through the night.

France is big, the weather is hot and I discover I’m not invincible. After eating a questionable block of cheese and mixing that with eight hours of sunny riding, questionable noises emerge from my stomach, followed by a series of unquestionably violent toilet incidents.

The next day I can barely ride, I slump in front of a church, my knee is in severe pain and I get attacked by wasps. Fortunately two lovely French campsite owners come to my rescue and feed me tea and half the tinned goods in France. .

Country number three - Switzerland 🇨🇭 Rolling into Geneva first impressions are it’s clean, rich and full of lads wearing v-neck jumpers. As for Bowie, the genius bugger lived here for twenty years.

Not only did he get into the ski’ing lifestyle he also bought a rather sensible Volvo car.

Took a beautiful little ride from Geneva around Lake Geneva, or Le Lac. Highway 1 runs all the way around so you can feel the breeze of all the super cars as they hammer past. There are nice little roads that dip in and out of villages and pretty orchards along the way.

My old schoolmate Lee joins the band as we roll along Lake Geneva’s pretty banks. We dodge Ferraris and stop for a sandwich - which costs a tenner. We stop for a beer - which is also a tenner. Basically tenners are worthless pieces of god damn junk here.

We burn our thighs firing up Swiss mountains looking for Bowie’s many houses in the area. We ask a man, we ask a dentist, we ask a dog - nobody knows where they are. Finally, we find the Blonay cuckoo clock house he shared with first wife Angie. She loved it, but Bowie wasn’t impressed, “It wasn’t his scene at all” she commented in her autobiography.

How to wear a wig and play air guitar badly.

A little bit of Bowie rebellion as we steal the fruits of our labour.

After a lot of too’ing and fro’ing (and swearing) we finally located his thirteen-bedroom whopper in the Sauvabelin Forest. He lived her with son Zowie (Duncan Jones) and reportedly used it as a storage for his archive - costumes, guitars and mementoes. We had to bunk up on a fence to see in as the entire outside was crowded with tangles of thick foliage, but there were turrets, a birdbath and, of course, the garden Bowie would’ve strolled in all those years ago.

Lee had bought this wig in a fancy dress shop after asking for a Bowie wig. The man behind the counter pulled out a ‘punk’ wig, then simply crossed the name out with a felt tip and wrote Bowie instead. The real master of reinvention!

Bowie created a whole glut of albums in his twenty years in Switzerland. He hung out with Charlie Chaplin, jammed with Nile Rodgers and perhaps most famously recorded ‘Under Pressure’ with Queen. You know, the song with the bum, bum, bum, ba, da, bum bassline, Freddie Mercury BE-BA-DAY’ing and Bowie stealing in at the end to send us all into a frothy-pop frenzy. We went to Mountain Studios in Montreux to learn how it was recorded in a haze of squabbles, cocaine and wine. Then did the same (we didn’t, we ate €15 euro ice cream) 

Just outside Queen’s Mountain Studios is a statue of Freddie Mercury. People from all around the world patiently queue to look like a big goof in front of him. Well we did anyway.

Inside the studio is a mixing desk where you can mess around with the sound levels on different Queen songs.

It’s Friday I’m in love. Well, Bowie and Iman were. They married in Lausanne’s Place de la Palud (above) in a civil ceremony. With a bit of sweet talk and a swaggering pack of bullshit I wheedled my way inside. If you like green velvet and civic buildings you’re in for a TREAT...