David Bowie

David Bowie
Bowie during the Heathen Tour in 2002.
Background information
Birth name	David Robert Jones
Born	8 January 1947 (1947-01-08) (age 64) Brixton, London, England
Genres	Rock, glam rock, pop rock, art rock, blue-eyed soul, psychedelic rock, protopunk
Occupations	Musician, actor, record producer, arranger
Instruments	Guitar, saxophone, piano, keyboards, synthesizers, Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums, percussion
Years active	1964 –present
Labels	Deram, RCA, Rykodisc, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Parlophone, Pye, Hanso
Associated acts	The Riot Squad, Tin Machine
Website	Official Website

David Bowie (pronounced /ˈboʊ.iː/ BOH-ee;^[1] born David Robert Jones,^[2] 8 January 1947^[1]) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. Active in five decades of popular music and frequently reinventing his music and image, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He has been cited as an influence by many musicians and is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth of his work.

Although he released an album (David Bowie) and several singles earlier, David Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in the autumn of 1969, when the song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era as the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona epitomised a career often marked by musical innovation, reinvention and striking visual presentation.

In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame", co-written with John Lennon,^[3] and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer identified as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees.^[4] He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album Low (1977) — the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" and its parent album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). He paired with Queen for the 1981 UK chart-topping single "Under Pressure", but reached a commercial peak in 1983 with the album Let's Dance, which yielded the hit singles "Let's Dance", "China Girl", and "Modern Love". Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was Reality (2003), which was supported by the 2003–2004 Reality Tour.

In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie ranked 29. Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 136 million albums,^[5] and ranks among the ten best-selling acts in UK pop history. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time^[6] and the 23rd best singer of all time.^[7]

History

1947–61: Early years

David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London on 8 January 1947.^[8][9] His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent,^[10] worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones, was a promotions officer for Barnardo's.^[11] The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London suburbs of Brixton and Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that in a world still feeling the effects of post-war depression, "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in."^[12] Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.^[13]

The family moved in 1953 to another nearby suburb, Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His singing voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability.^[14] At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child.^[14] The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard.^[15][16] Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God".^[17] Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that."^[16] By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as  “mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet.”^[16] After Terry Burns, Bowie's half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician.^[18] Failing his eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined Bromley Technical High School.^[19]

1962–68: The Kon-rads to the Riot Squad

In a collegiate environment, under the tutelage of Owen Frampton, Bowie studied languages, science, art and design. Frampton, meanwhile, endeavoured to persuade his son Peter—Bowie's fellow student—to seek a career in music with him.^[20] Bowie received a serious injury when his friend George Underwood, wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. He was forced to stay out of school for eight months so that doctors could conduct operations to repair his potentially blinded eye.^[21][22] The damage could not be fully repaired, leaving him with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil (the latter producing Bowie's appearance of having different coloured eyes, though each iris has the same blue colour).^[22] Despite the fight, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.^[23]

Graduating from his plastic saxophone to a real instrument during 1962, Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Kon-rads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them.^[24] When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop idol. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his band-mates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Kon-rads and formed another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million."^[25] Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.

Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul—"I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall.^[25] "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by the Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the King Bees.^[26] His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, the Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, "Do Anything You Say". While with the Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included a Bowie number and Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.

Dissatisfied with his presentation as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which anyway invited confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees, Bowie assumed his pseudonym, naming himself after the soldier Jim Bowie and the knife he popularised.^[27] His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, David Bowie, an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years.

Bowie's fascination with the bizarre was fuelled when he met dancer Lindsay Kemp: "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus."^[28] Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artist but to be more of himself on the outside ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that his is on the inside."^[28] Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to Commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie-penned "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie composition, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year.^[29] After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a trio with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson, and they began to give concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime. The venture was short-lived.^[30]

1969–73: Psychedelic folk to glam rock

In the continuing absence of commercial success, Bowie was forced to seek personal income from sundry sources. After appearing in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, he was rejected for another by Kit Kat.^[31] Intended as a vehicle to promote the singer, a 30-minute film featuring performances from his repertoire, Love You till Tuesday, was made. Though it went unreleased until 1984, the sessions for its January 1969 shooting gave rise to an unexpected benefit when Bowie, late in the proceedings, told the producers, "That film of yours—I've got a new song for it." He proceeded to demo the composition that was to provide his commercial breakthrough. "Space Oddity" was released later in the year to coincide with the first moon landing.^[31] Shortly after completion of the film, Bowie and Farthingale broke up, and Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.^[32] Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street.^[32] This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, becoming extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival".^[33] "Space Oddity" was released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, becoming a UK top five hit. Bowie's second album, Space Oddity, followed in November; originally issued in the UK as David Bowie, it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled Man of Words/Man of Music.

Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They would marry within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence.^[34] Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie now began to sense a lack: "a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally".^[35] The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist.^[35] A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. After a brief and disastrous manifestation as the Hype, the group reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist.^[35] Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style; matters came to a head when Bowie, enraged, accused, "You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey.^[36] Not long after, in a move that would result in years of litigation, at the conclusion of which Bowie would be forced to pay Pitt compensation, the singer fired his manager, replacing him with Tony Defries.^[36] The studio sessions continued; their end product was Bowie's third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970). Characterised by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by Space Oddity.To promote it in the United States, Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later would depict the singer wearing a dress: taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics, including Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacali"—and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to "kiss my ass".^[37][38] During the tour Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that would eventually find form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol".^[37] A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars."^[37]

David Bowie during the Ziggy and the Spiders Tour

Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones was born on 30 May. His parents chose "his kooky name"—he would be known as Zowie for the next 12 years—after the Greek word zoe (life).^[39] Immediately following her recovery from the cracked pelvis she sustained giving birth, Angela left for Italy with a friend. She would look back on the period as "the beginning of the end", though the couple would not divorce until 1980: "I'd gained a son, but lost a husband."^[39] For Bowie, too, in Ronson's estimation, "mentally, the divorce began that summer."^[39]

Hunky Dory (1971) found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles, by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as "Kooks", a song written for his newborn son.^[40] Elsewhere, it explored more serious themes, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch", a Velvet Underground pastiche.^[41] It was not a significant commercial success at the time.

Donning a wild outfit created by Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, Bowie, his hair dyed red, launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth on 10 February 1972.^[42] The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the course of the next six months.^[42] The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), combining the hard rock elements of The Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock and pop of Hunky Dory, was released in June. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July Top of the Pops performance of the song. The album, which would remain in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old Hunky Dory. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing", and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, became UK hits. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued, taking in the United States and Japan.

Bowie and Ronson produced Reed's solo breakthrough Transformer, and Iggy Pop's recently resurrected band, The Stooges, signed with Bowie's management, MainMan Artistes LTD, to record their third album, Raw Power. Though he was not present for the tracking of the album, Bowie later performed its much-debated mix.^[43] Bowie sang back-up vocals on both Reed's Transformer, and Iggy's The Idiot.

The Spiders From Mars came together again on Aladdin Sane, released in April 1973 and his first number one album in the UK. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America",^[44] all the new songs were written on ship, bus or trains during the first leg of his US Ziggy Stardust tour. The album's cover, featuring Bowie shirtless with Ziggy hair and a red, black, and blue lightning bolt across his face, has been described as being as "startling as rock covers ever got."^[45] Aladdin Sane included the UK number two hit "The Jean Genie", the UK number three hit "Drive-In Saturday", and a rendition of The Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together". Mike Garson joined Bowie to play piano on this album, and his solo on the title track has been cited as one of the album's highlights.^[45][46]

Bowie's later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, as well as a few earlier tracks like "Changes" and "The Width of a Circle", were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar.^[47] Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. His announcement—"Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it's the last show that we'll ever do. Thank you."—was preserved in a live recording of the show, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker and belatedly released under the title Ziggy Stardust - The Motion Picture in 1983 after many years circulating as an audio bootleg.^[48]

Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, was released in October 1973, spawning a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.^[49] By this time, Bowie had broken up the Spiders from Mars and was attempting to move on from his Ziggy persona. Bowie's own back catalogue was now highly sought: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in 1972 along with the second David Bowie album (Space Oddity). Hunky Dory's "Life on Mars?" was released as a single in 1973 and made number three in the UK, the same year Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", hit number six.

1974–76: Soul, R&B, and the Thin White Duke

Bowie performing during the 1974 Diamond Dogs Tour

1974 saw the release of another ambitious album, Diamond Dogs, with a spoken word introduction and a multi-part song suite ("Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)"). Diamond Dogs was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music. Bowie also made plans to develop a Diamond Dogs movie, but didn't get very far. Bowie had originally planned on writing a musical to 1984, but his interest waned after encountering difficulties in licensing the novel. He used some of the songs he had written for the project on Diamond Dogs. The album—and an NBC television special, The 1980 Floor Show, broadcast at around the same time—demonstrated Bowie headed toward the genre of soul/funk music, the track "1984" being a prime example. The album spawned the hits "Rebel Rebel" (UK number five) and "Diamond Dogs" (UK number twenty-one), and itself went to number one in the UK, making him the best-selling act of that country for the second year in a row. In the US, Bowie achieved his first major commercial success as the album went to number five.

To follow on the release of the album, Bowie launched a massive Diamond Dogs tour in North America from June to December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production broke with contemporary standard practice for rock concerts by featuring no encores. It was filmed by Alan Yentob for the documentary Cracked Actor. The documentary seemed to confirm the rumours of his cocaine abuse, featuring a pasty and emaciated Bowie nervously sniffing in the backseat of a car and claiming that there was a fly in his milk. Bowie commented that the resulting live album, David Live, ought to have been called "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory," presumably in reference to his addled and frenetic psychological state during this period. Nevertheless the album solidified his status as a superstar, going number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in a cover of "Knock on Wood". After the opening leg of the tour, Bowie mostly jettisoned the elaborate sets. Then, when the tour resumed after a summer break in Philadelphia for recording new material, the Diamond Dogs sound no longer seemed apt. Bowie cancelled seven dates and made changes to the band, which returned to the road in October as the Philly Dogs tour.

For Ziggy Stardust fans who had not discerned the soul and funk strains already apparent in Bowie's recent work, the "new" sound was considered a sudden and jolting step. 1975's Young Americans was Bowie's definitive exploration of Philly soul—though he himself referred to the sound ironically as "plastic soul." It contained his first number one hit in the US, "Fame", co-written with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon (who also contributed backing vocals). It was based on a riff Alomar had developed while covering The Flares' 1961 doo-wop classic "Foot Stompin'", which Bowie's band had taken to playing live during the Philly Dogs period. One of the backing vocalists on the album is a young Luther Vandross, who also co-wrote some of the material for Young Americans. The song "Win" featured a hypnotic guitar riff later taken by Beck for the track/live staple "Debra" off his Midnite Vultures album. Despite Bowie's unashamed recognition of the shallowness of his "plastic soul," he did earn the bona fide distinction of being one of the few white artists to be invited to appear on the popular "Soul Train". Another violently paranoid appearance on ABC's The Dick Cavett Show (1974 5 December) seemed to confirm rumours of Bowie's heavy cocaine use at this time.^[50] Young Americans was the album that cemented Bowie's stardom in the US; though only peaking there at number nine, as opposed to the number five placing of Diamond Dogs, the album stayed on the charts almost twice as long. At the same time, the album achieved number two in the UK while a re-issue of his old single "Space Oddity" became his first number one hit in the UK, only a few months after "Fame" had achieved the same in the US. Around this time, Bowie performed with Cher on her second variety tv program, The Cher Show doing a medley of his songs and popular hits, as well as a version of his song Fame.

Bowie at the O'Keefe center, Toronto 1976

Station to Station (1976) featured a darker version of this soul persona, called "The Thin White Duke". Visually the figure was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the character Bowie portrayed in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Station to Station was a transitional album, prefiguring the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases, while further developing the funk and soul music of Young Americans. By this time, Bowie had become heavily dependent on drugs, particularly cocaine; many critics have attributed the chopped rhythms and emotional detachment of the record to the influence of the drug, to which Bowie claimed to have been introduced in America. Bowie refused to relinquish control of a satellite, booked for a worldwide broadcast of a live appearance preceding the release of Station to Station, at the request of the Spanish Government, who wished to put out a live feed regarding the death of Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco. His sanity—by his own later admission—became twisted from cocaine: he overdosed several times during the year. Additionally, Bowie was withering physically after having lost an alarming amount of weight.

Nonetheless, there was another large tour, the Isolar - 1976 Tour, which featured a starkly lit set and highlighted new songs such as the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would remain a stable unit through the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but also mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and detained by customs in Eastern Europe for possessing Nazi paraphernalia.^[51] Matters came to a head in London on 2 May 1976, in what became known as the 'Victoria Station incident', when Bowie, arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in NME. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave,^[52] and later blamed his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke for his troubles at this time.^[53]

1976–79: The Berlin era

Bowie's interest in the growing German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with his friend Iggy Pop, he co-produced three more of his own classic albums with Tony Visconti, while aiding Pop with his career. With Bowie as a co-writer and musician, Pop completed his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Bowie joined Pop's touring band in the spring of 1977, playing keyboards and singing backing vocals. The group performed in the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April.^[54]

The fragile sound of Station to Station proved a precursor to Low, the first of three albums that became known as the "Berlin Trilogy". Partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, Bowie journeyed to Neunkirchen near Cologne to meet the famed German producer Conny Plank. The album provided him with a number three hit in the UK when the BBC picked up the first single, "Sound and Vision", as its 'coming attractions' theme music. The album was produced in 1976 and released in early 1977.

Much of the band were present for the first five days only, after which Eno, Alomar and Gardiner remained to play overdubs. By the time Bowie wrote and recorded the lyrics, everybody but Visconti and studio engineers had departed. The next record, "Heroes", was similar in sound to Low, though slightly more accessible, adding Robert Fripp on guitar. The mood of these records emulated the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city that provided its inspiration. The title track, a story of two lovers who rendezvous at the Berlin Wall, is one of Bowie's most covered songs.^[55]

Bowie performing in Oslo on 5 June 1978

In 1977, Bowie also appeared on the Granada music show Marc, hosted by his good friend and fellow glam pioneer Marc Bolan of T. Rex, with whom he had a close friendship, and jammed before either achieved fame. He turned out to be the show's final guest, as Bolan was killed in a car crash shortly thereafter.^[56] Bowie was one of many superstars who attended the funeral.^[57]

For Christmas 1977, Bowie joined Bing Crosby, of whom he was an ardent admirer, at the ATV Television Studio in Hertfordshire, England to do "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse.^[58] The resultant video in a Christmas seasonal setting was actually recorded during a late summer heatwave with the air conditioning breaking down. The two singers had originally met on Crosby's Christmas television special two years earlier (on the recommendation of Crosby's children—he had not heard of Bowie) and performed the song. One month after the record was completed, Crosby died.^[59] Five years later, the song would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.^[60] Bowie later remarked jokingly that he was afraid of being a guest artist, because "everyone I was going on with was kicking it", referring to Bolan and Crosby.^[61]

Bowie and his new band, which featured Carlos Alomar, Simon House and Sean Mayes, embarked on an extensive world tour in 1978, including his first concerts in Australia and New Zealand, which featured music from both Low and Heroes. A live album from the tour was released as Stage the same year. Songs from both Low and Heroes were later converted to symphonies by minimalist composer Phillip Glass. 1978 was also the year in which Bowie narrated Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Lodger (1979) was the final album in Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy", or "triptych" as Bowie has called it.^[62] It featured the singles "Boys Keep Swinging", "DJ" and "Look Back in Anger"; and unlike the two previous LPs, did not contain any instrumentals. The style was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, which included pieces such as "African Night Flight" and "Yassassin, which combines Western and Hejaz scales. A number of tracks were composed using Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" was developed with the band members swapping their instruments, "Move On" contains the chords for an early Bowie composition, "All the Young Dudes" was played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from the Iggy Pop/David Bowie composition, "Sister Midnight".^[63] This was Bowie's last album with Eno until 1. Outside, in 1995.

David and Angela Bowie initiated divorce proceedings in Switzerland in late 1979; after months of court battles, the marriage was ended on 8 February 1980.^[64]

1980–89: From superstar to megastar

In 1980, Bowie's style retrogressed, integrating the lessons learnt on Low, Heroes, and Lodger while expanding upon them with chart success.^[65] Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) included the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer, and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The imagery Bowie used in the song's music video gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement and, with many of the followers of this phase being devotees, Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the video, renowned as being one of the most innovative of all time.^[66]

While Scary Monsters utilised principles that Bowie had learned in the Berlin era, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically, reflecting the transformation Bowie had gone through during his time in Germany and Europe. By 1980 Bowie had divorced his wife Angie, stopped the drug use of the "Thin White Duke" era, and radically changed his concept of the way music should be written. The album had a hard rock edge that included conspicuous guitar contributions from King Crimson's Robert Fripp, The Who's Pete Townshend, Chuck Hammer, who at that time was working with Lou Reed, and Television's Tom Verlaine.^[65] As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway starring in The Elephant Man on 24 September 1980.^[67]

In 1981, Queen released "Under Pressure", co-written and performed with Bowie. The song was a hit and became Bowie's third UK number one single. In the same year Bowie made a cameo appearance in the German movie Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the real-life story of a 13 year-old girl in Berlin who becomes addicted to heroin and ends up prostituting herself. Bowie is credited with "special cooperation" in the credits and his music features prominently in the movie. The soundtrack was released in 1982 and contained a version of "Heroes" sung partially in German that had previously been included on the German pressing of its parent album. The same year Bowie appeared in the BBC's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal. Coinciding with transmission of the film, a five-track EP of songs from the play was released as David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal, recorded at Hansa by the Wall the previous September. It would mark Bowie’s final new release on RCA, as 1983 saw him change record labels from RCA to EMI America. In April 1982, Bowie released "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" with Giorgio Moroder, for director Paul Schrader's film Cat People.

David Bowie on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Bowie scored his first truly commercial blockbuster with Let's Dance in 1983, a slick dance album co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers. The title track went to number one in the United States and United Kingdom. The album also featured the singles "Modern Love" and "China Girl", the latter causing something of a stir due to its suggestive promotional video. "China Girl" was a remake of a song which Bowie co-wrote several years earlier with Iggy Pop, who recorded it for The Idiot. In an interview by Kurt Loder, Bowie revealed that the motivation for recording "China Girl" was to help out his friend Iggy Pop financially, contributing to Bowie's history of support for musicians he admired. Let's Dance was also notable as a stepping stone for the career of the late Texan guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who played on the album and was to have supported Bowie on the subsequent Serious Moonlight Tour. Vaughan, however, never joined the tour after various disputes with Bowie. Vaughan was replaced by the Bowie tour veteran Earl Slick. Frank and George Simms from The Simms Brothers Band appeared as backing vocalists for the tour.

Bowie's next album was originally planned to be a live album recorded on the Serious Moonlight Tour, but EMI demanded another studio album instead. The resulting album, 1984's Tonight, was also dance-oriented, featuring collaborations with Tina Turner and Iggy Pop, as well as various covers, including one of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic Top Ten hit "Blue Jean" whose complete video — the 21-minute short film "Jazzin' for Blue Jean" – reflected Bowie's long-standing interest in combining music with drama. This video would win Bowie his only Grammy to date, for Best Short Form Music Video. It also featured "Loving the Alien", a remix of which was a minor hit in 1985. The album also has a pair of dance rewrites of "Neighborhood Threat" and "Tonight", old songs Bowie wrote with Iggy Pop which had originally appeared on Lust for Life.

In 1985, Bowie performed several of his greatest hits at Wembley for Live Aid. At the end of his set, which comprised "Rebel Rebel", "TVC 15", "Modern Love" and 'Heroes', he introduced a film of the Ethiopian famine, for which the event was raising funds, which was set to the song "Drive" by The Cars. At the event, the video to a fundraising single was premièred – Bowie performing a duet with Mick Jagger on a version of "Dancing in the Street", which quickly went to number one on release. In the same year Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group on the song "This Is Not America", which was featured in the film The Falcon and the Snowman. This song was the centrepiece of the album, a collaboration intended to underline the espionage thriller's central themes of alienation and disaffection.

Performing during the critically maligned Glass Spider Tour, 1987

In 1986, Bowie contributed several songs to as well as acted in the film Absolute Beginners. The movie was not well reviewed but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also took a role in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, as Jareth, the Goblin King who steals the baby brother of a girl named Sarah (played by Jennifer Connelly), in order to turn him into a goblin. Bowie wrote five songs for the film, the script of which was partially written by Monty Python's Terry Jones.

Bowie's final solo album of the 80s was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his two earlier albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. The album, which peaked at number six in the UK, yielded the hit singles "Day-In, Day-Out", "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as "my nadir" and "an awful album".^[68]

Bowie decided to tour again in 1987, supporting the Never Let Me Down album. The Glass Spider Tour was preceded by nine promotional press shows before the 86-concert tour actually started on 30 May 1987. In addition to the actual band, that included Peter Frampton on lead guitar, five dancers appeared on stage for almost the entire duration of each concert. Taped pieces of dialogue were also performed by Bowie and the dancers in the middle of songs, creating an overtly theatrical effect. Several visual gimmicks were also recreated from Bowie's earlier tours. Critics of the tour described it as overproduced and claimed it pandered to then-current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.^[69]

In August 1988, Bowie portrayed Pontius Pilate in the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ.^[67]

1989–91: Tin Machine

Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, known by Bowie since the late 1970s for their contribution, on drums and bass respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust For Life.^[70]

Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making.^[71] The band's album debut, Tin Machine (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book."^[72] EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production".^[73] The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK.^[72] Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member.^[74] A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label.^[75] Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band.^[76] Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.^[77]

In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992.^[78] Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. Tin Machine II's arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of the four nude band members in statuesque pose, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless.^[79] Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.^[80]

1992–99: Electronica

Bowie performing in Finland in 1997.

In April 1992 Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert following the Queen frontman's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's part for the number one duet Bowie's 1981 collaboration with Queen had produced.^[81] 1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say".^[82]

Bowie explored new directions on The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in Black Tie White Noise, and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.^[83]

The ambitious, quasi-industrial Outside (1995), conceived as the first volume in a subsequently abandoned non-linear narrative of art and murder, reunited Bowie with Brian Eno. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles.^[84] In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.^[85] Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.^[86]

Earthling (1997), incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US Billboard Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997.^[87]

Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for The Rugrats Movie. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'".^[88] The reunion led to a new collaborative effort. Among their earliest work together in this period was a reworking of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", in which Visconti oversaw the additional production required when Bowie's harmonised vocal was added to the original version for a limited-edition single release.^[89]

1999–present: Neoclassicist Bowie

Bowie (left) on-stage with Sterling Campbell during the Heathen Tour in 2002.

Bowie created the soundtrack for Omikron, a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album 'Hours...' featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant.^[90] Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica.^[91] Sessions for the planned album Toy, intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions would be the 2002 album Heathen.^[92] Alexandria Zahra Jones, Bowie and Iman's daughter, was born on 15 August.^[93]

In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the 11 September attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes".^[94]

2002 saw the release of Heathen, and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual Meltdown festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Phillip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's Low era.^[95]

Reality (2003) followed, and then a world tour. Covering Europe, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, 'A Reality Tour', with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other tour in 2004. It was not without problems. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.^[96]

Recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie worked off-stage and relaxed from studio work for the first time in several years. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 comedy film Shrek 2.^[97] During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written by Brian Transeau, for the movie Stealth.^[98] He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon.^[99] He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album Return to Cookie Mountain,^[100] made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio,^[101] and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album No Balance Palace.^[102] He then announced a break from performance for 2006.^[103]

Bowie in 2009 with his son Duncan Jones at the premiere of Jones' directorial debut Moon.

Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006.^[104] Despite his announcement of a break for the year, he made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released.^[105] He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive.^[106]

Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event,^[107] and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head.^[108]

On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 mooon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix.^[109]

A Reality Tour, a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.^[110]

Acting career

The beginnings of Bowie's acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise (later made into the 1970 TV movie The Looking Glass Murders).^[111] In the black and white short film The Image (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him.^[112] The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel The Virgin Soldiers saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra.^[112] In 1976 he earned acclaim for his first major film role, portraying Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien from a dying planet, in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Just a Gigolo (1979), an Anglo-German co-production directed by David Hemmings, saw Bowie in the lead role as Prussian officer Paul von Pryzgodski, who, returning from World War I, is discovered by a Baroness (Marlene Dietrich) and put into her Gigolo Stable.

Bowie took the lead role in the Broadway theatre production The Elephant Man, earning high praise for an expressive performance. He played the part 157 times between 1980 and 1981.^[113] Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a 1981 biographical film focusing on a young girl's drug addiction in West Berlin, featured Bowie in a cameo appearance as himself at a concert in Germany. Its soundtrack album, Christiane F. (1981), featured much material from his Berlin Trilogy albums.^[114] Bowie starred in The Hunger (1983), a revisionist vampire movie, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, based on Laurens van der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Another musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto, played the camp commandant who begins to be undermined by Celliers' bizarre behaviour. Bowie had a cameo in Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film Into the Night. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).^[115]

Absolute Beginners (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy Labyrinth found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins.^[116] Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in The Linguini Incident (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in the Italian film Il Mio West (1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region.^[117][118] He played the aging gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of The Hunger. In Mr. Rice's Secret (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in Zoolander.

Bowie portrayed Nikola Tesla alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige (2006), Christopher Nolan's film of Christopher Priest's epistolary novel following the bitter competition between two magicians in the early 20th century. He voice-acted in the animated movie Arthur and the Invisibles as the powerful villain Maltazard, and lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis TV movie. In the 2008 film August,^[119] directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in 1976 for The Man Who Fell to Earth.^[120]

Sexual orientation

Biographer David Buckley writes, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality."^[121] Bowie declared himself bisexual in an interview with Melody Maker in January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust.^[47] In a September 1976 interview with Playboy, Bowie said: "It's true — I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me."^[122]

In a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made",^[123] and in 1993 he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture was more a product of the times and situation than his own feelings: "It wasn't something I was comfortable with at all."^[124]

Asked in 2002 by Blender whether he still believed his public declaration was the biggest mistake he ever made, he replied:

Interesting. [Long pause] I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners or be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that bisexuality became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.^[125]

Buckley's view of the period is that Bowie, "a taboo-breaker and a dabbler ... mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock",^[126] and that "it is probably true that Bowie was never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual ... he did, from time to time, experiment, even if only out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'."^[127] Biographer Christopher Sandford says that according to Mary Finnigan, with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969, the singer and his first wife Angie "lived in a fantasy world [...] and they created their bisexual fantasy."^[128] Sandford tells how, during the marriage, Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' [...] Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter. That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women."^[128]

Musicianship

A man of many voices, Bowie, from the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, has employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced not only by rock and rollers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley but also by the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theatre singer/songwriter and actor Anthony Newley, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his debut album, David Bowie (1967)—to the disgust both of his relatives, one of whom dismissed it as "muck", and of Newley himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher.^[129][130]

Musicologist James Perone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in his commercial breakthrough single, "Space Oddity", and later in the song "Heroes", to dramatic effect; Perone notes that "in the lowest part of his vocal register [...] his voice has an almost crooner-like richness."^[131]

Voice instructor Jo Thompson describe's Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive".^[132] Schinder and Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect."^[133] Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, the singer's chamaeleon-like nature is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them [...] His voice changes dramatically from section to section."^[134]

Bowie plays many instruments, among them electric, acoustic, and twelve-string guitar, alto, tenor and baritone saxophone, keyboards including piano, synthesizers and Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums, and percussion.^[135][136]

Legacy

Bowie's innovative songs and stagecraft brought a new paradigm to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie, according to music historians Schinder and Schwartz, has joint responsibility with Marc Bolan for creating the genre.^[137] At the same time, he inspired those who would carry the punk rock movement later in the decade—historiographer Michael Campbell calls him "one of punk's seminal influences"—and simultaneously explored other new directions himself, which would in time influence other acts: biographer David Buckley writes that "At a time when punk rock was noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance, Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation."^[138][139] Musicologist James Perone credits him with having "brought sophistication to rock music", and critical reviews frequently acknowledge the intellectual depth of his work and influence.^{[137][140][141]}

Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.^[86] Through perpetual reinvention, he has seen his influence continue to broaden and extend: music reviewer Brad Filicky writes that over the decades, "Bowie has become known as a musical chameleon, changing and dictating trends as much as he has altered his style to fit", and that as a result, he has influenced fashion and pop culture to a degree "second only to Madonna".^[142]

Biographer Thomas Forget writes, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie."^[143]

Discography

• David Bowie (1967)
• Space Oddity (1969)
• The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
• Hunky Dory (1971)
• The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
• Aladdin Sane (1973)
• Pin Ups (1973)
• Diamond Dogs (1974)
• Young Americans (1975)
• Station to Station (1976)
• Low (1977)
• "Heroes" (1977)
• Lodger (1979)
• Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)
• Let's Dance (1983)
• Tonight (1984)
• Never Let Me Down (1987)
• Black Tie White Noise (1993)
• The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)
• Outside (1995)
• Earthling (1997)
• 'Hours...' (1999)
• Heathen (2002)
• Reality (2003)

Filmography

Awards

In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.^[144] He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year.^[145] He declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003.^[146]

See also

• 100 Greatest Britons
• Best selling music artists
• List of artists who reached number one on the Hot 100 (US)
• List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart
• List of David Bowie tours
• List of number-one hits (United States)
• List of Number 1 Dance Hits (United States)
• List of people who have declined a British honour
• Low Symphony and Heroes Symphony

Notes

References

• Buckley, David (2000) [First published 1999]. Strange Fascination — David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin. ISBN 075350457X. 
• Buckley, David (2004). David Bowie: The Complete Guide To His Music. Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-1844494231. 
• Buckley, David (2005) [First published 1999]. Strange Fascination — David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin. ISBN 978 0 7535 1002 5. 
• Campbell, Michael (2008). Popular Music in America: And The Beat Goes On. Schirmer. ISBN 978-0495505303. 
• Carr, Roy; Murray, Charles Shaar (1981). Bowie: An Illustrated Record. New York: Avon. ISBN 0380779668. 
• Pegg, Nicholas (2004) [First published 2000]. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn. ISBN 1903111730. 
• Perone, James E. (2007). The Words and Music of David Bowie. Praeger. ISBN 978-0275992453. 
• Sandford, Christopher (1997) [First published 1996]. Bowie: Loving the Alien. Time Warner. ISBN 0 7515 1924 3. 
• Schinder, Scott; Schwartz, Andy (2007). Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends Who Changed Music Forever. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0313338458. 
• Thompson, Dave (2006). Hallo Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David Bowie. Ecw Press. ISBN 978-1550227338. 

Further reading

• Seabrook, Thomas Jerome, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town, Jawbone Press, 2008.
• Spitz, Marc, Bowie: A Biography, Crown Publishers, 2009.
• Tremlett, George, David Bowie: Living on the Brink, Carroll and Graf, 1997.
• Waldrep, Shelton, "Phenomenology of Performance," The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
• Welch, Chris, David Bowie: We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song, Da Capo Press, 1999.
• Wilcken, Hugo, 33⅓: David Bowie's Low, Continuum, 2005.

External links

• Official David Bowie website
• Official David Bowie Myspace Page
• Official David Bowie YouTube Channel
• Bowie Art Work – Paintings, Printmakings, etc.
• David Bowie at the Internet Movie Database
• David Bowie at Allmusic
• David Bowie at Allmovie
• David Bowie at Last.fm
• Charlie Rose interview (1998)
• David Bowie Time Discography Timeline

David Bowie Discography · Awards and nominations · Filmography · Tours Studio albums David Bowie · Space Oddity · The Man Who Sold the World · Hunky Dory · The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars · Aladdin Sane · Pin Ups · Diamond Dogs · Young Americans · Station to Station · Low · "Heroes" · Lodger · Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) · Let's Dance · Tonight · Never Let Me Down · Black Tie White Noise · Outside · Earthling · 'Hours...' · Heathen · Reality With Tin Machine Tin Machine · Tin Machine II Live albums David Live · Stage · Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture · Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby · Santa Monica '72 · LiveAndWell.com · Live Santa Monica '72 · Glass Spider Live · VH1 Storytellers · A Reality Tour Soundtracks Christiane F. · Love You till Tuesday · Labyrinth · The Buddha of Suburbia EPs Baal · Earthling in the City · Live EP (Live at Fashion Rocks) Compilations The World of David Bowie · Images 1966–1967 · Changesonebowie · The Best of Bowie · Changestwobowie · Rare · Golden Years · Fame and Fashion · Sound + Vision · Changesbowie · Early On (1964–1966) · The Singles Collection · RarestOneBowie · The Deram Anthology 1966–1968 · The Best of David Bowie 1969/1974 · The Best of David Bowie 1974/1979 · Bowie at the Beeb · All Saints · Best of Bowie · The Collection · The Platinum Collection · The Best of David Bowie 1980/1987 · Bowie Box Set (Outside, Earthling, Hours, Heathen, Reality- 10CD) · iSelect Concert videos Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars · Serious Moonlight · Glass Spider · A Reality Tour · VH1 Storytellers Promotional films and compilations Love You till Tuesday · Bowie – The Video Collection · Black Tie White Noise · Best of Bowie Tours Ziggy Stardust Tour · Diamond Dogs Tour · Isolar · Isolar II · Serious Moonlight Tour · Glass Spider Tour · Tin Machine Tour · Sound and Vision Tour · It's My Life Tour · Outside Tour · Outside Summer Festivals Tour · Earthling Tour · The Hours... Tour · Mini Tour · Heathen Tour · A Reality Tour Related artists The Spiders from Mars · Tin Machine · Tony Visconti · Brian Eno · Mick Ronson · Mick Woodmansey · Trevor Bolder · Iggy Pop · Mike Garson · Reeves Gabrels · Earl Slick · Carlos Alomar · George Murray · Dennis Davis · Arnold Corns · Lou Reed Related articles Major Tom · The Thin White Duke · "Bowie" · Sovereign · Omikron: The Nomad Soul Book:David Bowie / Part 2: Singles and songs · Category:David Bowie