his spells unblemished

I'D BEEN CHASING TRICKY FOR a number of weeks, diving down into the low bars of Bristol. "He don't live here no more," I'd be told. "He went to America". I wasn't going to buy that. He'd been spied by the Magpie girl only last Thursday, slipping in and out of the shadows down by the quay, drawing black lines on his own posters drenched in salty-sea splash, grinning synergy and singing swatches of malodorous song.

The dark wisps of rumor trailed him like tow-ropes and now I was reeling him in. I didn't know what to expect. The phantom was known to move as a group of one. Never took prisoners. You'd never catch him snorting vodka at the bar. You'd never catch him period, I'd been told. A shaman who'd never slept with the Others, he was still pure, his spells unblemished. "Maxinquaye," he would intone, his eyes rolled back into his head, the beads of sweat, jewel-like, rushing upwards over his skin, an eerie light, green and mouldy, circling his feet.

From You Don't Wanna Be Painting Your Face Like That by David Bowie in 

Q magazine 1995

pic: here