From Bowie to Big Thief: The extraordinary life of Tucker Zimmerman

Tucker Zimmerman's acclaimed 2024 album Dance of Love is a collaboration with some fans who tracked him down in Belgium to record - American folk-rockers of the moment Big Thief.

It's Zimmerman's 15th album from a recording career that stretches back to a 1968 debut produced in London with producer Tony Visconti while another fan - David Bowie - waited in the corridor outside.

Bowie, says Visconti, considered Zimmerman to be on par with Bob Dylan, another 83-year-old proving age is no disability.

In 2003, speaking to Vanity Fair, Bowie named Ten Songs By Tucker Zimmerman one of his favourite albums, while also wondering what ever happened to him. Big Thief and 4AD have resolutely answered that question.

As a teen in San Francisco in the '50s, Zimmerman hung out with the Beat Generation, performing his first poems at the City Light Bookshop.

He stayed on for the Haight Ashbury hippie scene (almost joining the Grateful Dead) but then, dodging the Vietnam War draft, got a scholarship to study composition in Rome.

By the '70s Zimmerman was an early adopter of synthesisers, all the while avoiding the mainstream, living in a cottage in Belgium away from the industry.

Mark Amery of RNZ's Culture 101 caught up with Tucker Zimmerman there and spoke to him about his remarkable career and unexpected late fame.