Keyboardist worked on nine David Bowie studio albums.
David Bowie knew the date of his death since the late 1970s, according to keyboardist Mike Garson, who played regularly with him and worked on nine of Bowie's studio albums. The legendary musician died on January 10, 2016 , after an 18-month battle with liver cancer. He was 69 years old.
The story will appear in a new edition of the keyboardist's biography, Bowie's Piano Man: The Life Of Mike Garson , to be published in May by Backbeat Books. Garson recounts that after meeting with a medium in the late 1970s, Bowie was convinced he wouldn't live past 69 or 70.
“ [The medium] told him the exact date he would die. I know a lot of these guys are crazy, but this one was real. David knew this and didn't doubt him for a second. He told me about the encounter, said he had accepted this fact and that he would plan his future based on it. He had 30, 40 years to think about what he still wanted to do,” he recalled in an interview with Billboard.
Previously, Garson had told the story to Francis Whately, director of the documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years , but in a different version, in which Bowie had dreamed that he would die at age 69. “It was very relaxed the way Mike talked about it ,” Whately said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “They talked about it again after 20 years and David said he still remembered that dream.”
