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David Bowie
David Robert Jones, known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter
and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, becoming acclaimed by critics
and other musicians for his innovative work. His career was marked by reinvention
and visual presentation, his music and stagecraft significantly influencing popular music.
During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million albums worldwide,
made him one of the world's best-selling music artists. In the UK,
he was awarded nine platinum album certifications, eleven gold and eight silver,
releasing eleven number-one albums. In the US, he received five platinum
and seven gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
Born in Brixton, South London, Bowie developed an interest in music as a child,
eventually studying art, music
and design before embarking on a professional career as a musician in 1963. "Space Oddity"
became his first top-five entry on the UK Singles Chart after its release in July 1969.
After a period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era
with his flamboyant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The character was spearheaded
by the success of his single "Starman" and album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
and the Spiders from Mars, which won him widespread popularity. In 1975,
Bowie's style shifted radically towards a sound he characterised as "plastic soul",
initially alienating many of his UK devotees,
but garnering him his first major US crossover success with the number-one single "Fame"
and the album Young Americans. In 1976, Bowie starred in the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth,
directed by Nicolas Roeg, and released Station to Station. The following year,
he further confounded musical expectations with the electronic-inflected album Low,
the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno that would come to be known as the
"Berlin Trilogy". "Heroes" and Lodger followed; each album reached the UK top five
and received lasting critical praise. After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s,
Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes", its parent album Scary Monsters
and Super Creeps, and "Under Pressure", a 1981 collaboration with Queen.
He then reached his commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance, with its title track topping both UK
and US charts. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles,
including industrial and jungle. He also continued acting;
his roles included Major Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,
the Goblin King Jareth in Labyrinth, Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ,
and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, among other film and television appearances and cameos.
He stopped concert touring after 2004, and his last live performance was
at a charity event in 2006. In 2013, Bowie returned from a decade-long recording hiatus
with the release of The Next Day.
He remained musically active until he died of liver cancer two days after the release of his final
album, Blackstar.
Early life
David Robert Jones was born on 8 January 1947, in Brixton, South London, England. His mother,
Margaret Mary "Peggy", was born in Kent, and had Irish ancestry; she worked as a waitress.
His father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones, from Yorkshire, was a promotions officer
for the children's charity Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road,
near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell.
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. In 1953,
Bowie moved with his family to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later,
he started attending Burnt Ash Junior School. His voice was considered "adequate"
by the school choir, and he demonstrated above-average abilities in playing the recorder.
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. The same year,
his interest in music was further stimulated
when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including the Teenagers,
the Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Upon listening to Little Richard's song
"Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God".
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."
By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukulele and tea-chest bass, 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." After taking his eleven-plus exam
at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie went to Bromley Technical High School.
It was an unusual technical school,
as biographer Christopher Sandford wrote: Bowie studied art, music and design, including layout
and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz,
his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother
to give him a Grafton saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician.
Bowie received a serious injury at school in 1962
when his friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl.
After a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation,
his doctors determined that the damage could not be fully repaired and Bowie was left
with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil,
which gave a false impression of a change in the iris' colour. Despite their altercation, Underwood
and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork
for Bowie's early albums.
1962–1967: Early career to debut album
 [^]  In 1962 Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll
at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four
and eight members, Underwood among them. When Bowie left the technical school the following year,
he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star.
His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated
by his bandmates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined 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."
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. Their cover of Bobby Bland's
"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 Lower Third. 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 the Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt,
introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager. Dissatisfied
with his stage name as Davy Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion
with Davy Jones of the Monkees,
Bowie renamed himself after the 19th-century American pioneer James Bowie
and the knife he had popularised. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome",
using speeded-up thus high-pitched 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 was his last release for two years.
1968–1971: Space Oddity to Hunky Dory
Bowie met dancer Lindsay Kemp in 1967 and enrolled in his dance class
at the London Dance Centre. He commented in 1972 that meeting Kemp was when his interest in image
"really blossomed". "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."
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. In January 1968, Kemp choreographed a dance scene
for a BBC play The Pistol Shot in the Theatre 625 series, and used Bowie with a dancer,
Hermione Farthingale; the pair began dating, and moved into a London flat together.
Playing acoustic guitar, Farthingale formed a group with Bowie and guitarist John Hutchinson;
between September 1968 and early 1969 the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk,
Merseybeat, poetry and mime. Bowie and Farthingale broke up in early 1969 when she went to Norway
to take part in a film, Song of Norway; this affected him, and several songs, such as "Letter
to Hermione" and "Life on Mars?" reference her, and for the video accompanying
"Where Are We Now?" he wore a T-shirt with the words "m/s Song of Norway".
They were last together in January 1969 for the filming of Love You till Tuesday,
a 30-minute film that was not released until 1984: intended as a promotional vehicle,
it featured performances from Bowie's repertoire, including "Space Oddity",
which had not been released when the film was made. After the break-up with Farthingale,
Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.
During this period he appeared in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, and was rejected for another
by Kit Kat. In February and March 1969, he undertook a short tour
with Marc Bolan's duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, as third on the bill, performing a mime act.
On 11 July 1969, "Space Oddity" was released five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch,
and reached the top five in the UK. 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. Influenced by the Arts Lab movement,
this developed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular.
The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, the subject of his song
"Memory of a Free Festival". Bowie's second album 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;
it was reissued internationally in 1972 by RCA Records as Space Oddity.
Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality,
its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock,
the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.
Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They married within a year.
Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching,
leaving manager Ken Pitt with limited influence which he found frustrating.
Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie began to sense a lacking:
"a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally".
The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was
at the time acting as his session guitarist. 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. Known as the Hype, the bandmates created characters
for themselves and wore elaborate costumes that prefigured the glam style of the Spiders
from Mars. After a disastrous opening gig at the London Roundhouse, they reverted
to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist. 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 an enraged Bowie accused the drummer of the disturbance, exclaiming
"You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey.
Not long after, the singer fired his manager and replaced him with Tony Defries.
This resulted in years of litigation that concluded with Bowie having to pay Pitt compensation.
The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, The Man Who Sold the World,
which contained references to schizophrenia, paranoia and delusion. 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 US,
Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour across America 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 depicted the singer wearing a dress:
taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics,
including Rolling Stones John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing,
almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall" – 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". During the tour,
Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him
to develop a concept that eventually found 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".
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". The "Stardust" surname was a tribute to the
"Legendary Stardust Cowboy", whose record he was given during the tour. Bowie would later cover
"I Took a Trip on a Gemini Space Ship" on 2002's Heathen. Hunky Dory 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 son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May. Elsewhere,
the album explored more serious subjects, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage
to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch",
a Velvet Underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time.
1972–1974: Ziggy Stardust
 [^]  Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed reddish-brown,
Bowie 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. The show was hugely popular,
catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the next six months and creating, as described
by Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer
and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." The Rise
and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,
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 remained in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the 6-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, were successful in the UK.
The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States. Bowie contributed backing vocals
to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough Transformer, co-producing the album with Mick Ronson.
His own Aladdin Sane topped the UK chart, his first number-one album. Described by Bowie as
"Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the US
during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album.
Aladdin Sane spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".
Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music.
"Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy
to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role
over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later,
the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone
for years. That was when it all started to go sour. My whole personality was affected.
It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity." His later Ziggy shows,
which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane,
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. 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. Footage from the final show was released the same year
for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. After breaking up the Spiders from Mars,
Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona.
His back catalogue was now highly sought after: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in
1972 along with Space Oddity. "Life on Mars?", from Hunky Dory, was released in June 1973
and peaked at No. 3 on the UK Singles Chart. Entering the same chart in September,
Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", reached No. 6. Pin Ups,
a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK No.
3 hit in his version of the McCoys's "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 concurrently on the UK chart to six.
1974–1976: "Plastic soul" and the Thin White Duke
 [^]  Bowie moved to the US in 1974,
initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. Diamond Dogs,
parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk,
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. The album went to number one in the UK,
spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and No. 5 in the US. To promote it,
Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June
and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced
with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob.
The resulting documentary, Cracked Actor, featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided
with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction,
producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems.
He later commented that the accompanying live album, David Live, ought to have been titled
"David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory".
David Live nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at No. 2 in the UK
and No. 8 in the US. It also spawned a UK No. 10 hit in Bowie's cover of Eddie Floyd's
"Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material,
the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.
 [^]  The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was Young Americans.
Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way
or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now." The album's sound,
which the singer identified as "plastic soul",
constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees.
Young Americans yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon,
who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon called Bowie's work "great,
but it's just rock'n'roll with lipstick on".
Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists
to appear on the US variety show Soul Train, Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years",
his November single, which was originally offered to Elvis Presley, who declined it.
Young Americans was a commercial success in both the US and the UK,
and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity"
became Bowie's first number-one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame"
achieved the same in the US. Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie,
in the words of Sandford, "for all his record sales, existed essentially on loose change."
In 1975, in a move echoing Ken Pitt's acrimonious dismissal five years earlier,
Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched,
as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered"
in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street,
where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door." Michael Lippman,
Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager;
Lippman in turn was awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.
 [^]  Station to Station introduced a new Bowie persona, "The Thin White Duke" of its title-track.
Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton,
the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth the same year.
Developing the funk and soul of Young Americans, Station
to Stations synthesizer-heavy arrangements prefigured the krautrock-influenced music of his next
releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public
when Russell Harty interviewed the singer
for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour.
Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence,
the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was announced. Bowie was asked
to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed.
This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing lengthy conversation
with Harty, Bowie was incoherent and looked "disconnected".
His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times
during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.
Bowie's positive comments about Adolf Hitler,
and Eric Clapton's about immigration restrictions in 1976, led
to the establishment of Rock Against Racism. Station
to Stations January 1976 release was followed in February
by a 3½-month-long concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set,
the Isolar – 1976 Tour highlighted songs from the album, including 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 to produce this album
and tour—rhythm guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray,
and drummer Dennis Davis—continued as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s.
The tour was highly successful, but mired in political controversy.
Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader",
and was detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia.
 [^]  Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident".
Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, Bowie 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.
He later blamed his pro-fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions
and the character of the Thin White Duke. "I was out of my mind, totally crazed.
The main thing I was functioning on was mythology. that whole thing about Hitler
and Rightism. I'd discovered King Arthur". According to playwright Alan Franks,
writing later in The Times, "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences
with hard drugs." Bowie's cocaine addiction, which had caused these controversies, had much to do
with his time living in Los Angeles, a city which alienated him hugely. Discussing his flirtations
with fascism in a 1980 interview with NME, Bowie explained that Los Angeles was
"where it had all happened. The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the Earth.
To be anything to do with rock and roll and go and live in Los Angeles is, I think, just heading
for disaster. It really is."
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