By David Bowie was an enthusiast of many, many things over the course of his life. At various times he was massively into the saxophone, Aleister Crowley, being a dial-up internet service provider, PlayStation 1 games, and gnomes.
To that list you can add Peaky Blinders, of which he was apparently such a huge fan later on in his life that he struck up a friendship with Cillian Murphy. Murphy cemented his friendship with the Bowie by sending him a gift from the set.
"We were friends and I sent him the cap from the first series as a Christmas present," Murphy told BirminghamLive recently. "He was a very sweet man and a genuine fan of Peaky Blinders, and I was a huge, huge David Bowie fan."
"He was very private and probably wouldn’t like all this fuss," Murphy added. "It's sad, isn’t it?"
Steven Knight added that Bowie "sent a photo of himself with razor blades in his cap" to Murphy when it turned up.
"We all grew up with David Bowie and he’s a hero," said Knight. "It's a major thing that someone like that was a fan of the show. He said he wanted his music to be part of it, but at the time I didn’t know it was his dying wish."
'Dying wish' might be a bit of an overstatement, but we'll let that go. Bowie's 'Lazarus', from his final album Blackstar, did make an appearance in the third season of Peaky Blinders.
One particularly well-connected fan even reckons that Blackstar got its name from Peaky Blinders. Paul Kinder wrote on Bowiewonderworld.com that Bowie had asked him if he'd been watching Peaky Blinders, and decided to give it a whirl. Then, in the fifth episode of the first series he saw Thomas Shelby draw a black star in his diary, explaining that: "Black star day is the day we take out Billy Kimber and his men. No one knows this."
"I am 100 per cent certain this where David got the Blackstar name from, and then developed it," Kinder wrote. "Also, some of the lyrics in the middle section of the song 'Blackstar' tie in."
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