David Bowie

Biography

David Jones’s first single, “Liza Jane”, was released under the name Davie Jones and the King Bees and did not sell. Several more followed, and all of them failed.

He was born on 8 January 1947 in Brixton, London. His mother worked as a cinema waitress, and his father worked for the children’s charity Barnardo’s. At nine, his teachers called his dance improvisations “vividly artistic”, and when his father brought home a pile of American records, Bowie, by his own later account, “heard God” in Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”. His maternal half-brother Terry Burns introduced him to modern jazz, Buddhism and Beat poetry; at Christmas 1961 his mother gave him a saxophone. At Bromley Technical High School he studied art, music and design. At fifteen, his friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye in a fight over a girl. Four months in hospital and several operations did not restore the sight: he was left with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil, which made his eyes look different colours. He and Underwood stayed friends, and Underwood later drew the covers for his early albums.

In 1962 Bowie formed his first band, the Konrads, and then moved through the King Bees, the Manish Boys, the Lower Third and the Buzz. He took the name Bowie in 1966 so as not to be confused with Davy Jones of the Monkees: it came from James Bowie, a figure of the Texas Revolution, and the hunting knife named after him. In April 1967 came the novelty single “The Laughing Gnome”, with a speeded-up voice, and six weeks later his debut album, “David Bowie” (a mixture of pop, psychedelia and music hall). Neither charted, and for two years Bowie released nothing. In the same period he studied with the dancer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp and began working with the producer Tony Visconti. Their collaboration, with gaps, lasted to the end of his career.

“Space Oddity”, the story of an astronaut called Major Tom, was released on 11 July 1969, five days before the Apollo 11 launch. The single reached the British top five, but there were no hits for the next three years. In 1970 Bowie replaced his manager Kenneth Pitt with Tony Defries (the break ended in years of litigation and compensation paid to Pitt) and released “The Man Who Sold the World”; on the British cover he wore a dress. In 1971 came “Hunky Dory”, now on RCA. It was a commercial failure, although it contained “Life on Mars?” and “Kooks”, a song for his newborn son.

On 10 February 1972, at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, he first appeared on stage as Ziggy Stardust, an alien rock star, with a band called the Spiders from Mars. The costumes for the tour were designed by Kansai Yamamoto, and his hair was flame red. The album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” appeared in June; “Starman” entered the British top ten after a performance on Top of the Pops. He wrote “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople, co-produced Lou Reed’s “Transformer” with Mick Ronson, and worked on Iggy Pop’s “Raw Power”. “Aladdin Sane” (1973) was the first of his albums to top the British chart. Playing one role for years proved hard: Ziggy, Bowie said, “wouldn’t leave me alone for years” and made him doubt his sanity. On 3 July 1973, on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon, he announced that this was the last concert and disbanded the group.

In 1974 he moved to the United States. “Diamond Dogs” (with the character Halloween Jack) topped the British chart, and Alan Yentob filmed the North American tour for the documentary “Cracked Actor”. “Young Americans” (1975), which Bowie himself called “plastic soul”, at first alienated British fans but gave him his first American number one, “Fame”, written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar. In 1976 came “Station to Station”, with the persona of the Thin White Duke, and, on screen, “The Man Who Fell to Earth”, in which he played the alien Thomas Jerome Newton. The same year brought scandals: newspapers quoted his remark that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader, and a gesture from an open Mercedes at Victoria Station in London was taken by some papers as a Nazi salute. Bowie said the photographer had caught him in mid-wave; he later apologised and explained his behaviour at the time as the result of getting too far into character.

In the autumn of 1976 he went with Iggy Pop to West Berlin. With Eno and Visconti he made what became known as the Berlin Trilogy: “Low” and “Heroes” (both 1977) and “Lodger” (1979). RCA delayed the release of “Low” by three months, judging the album commercially unviable, but it reached number two on the British chart. The composer Philip Glass later built three symphonies on these recordings. Bowie called the trilogy a “triptych”.

He reached his commercial peak in 1983 with “Let’s Dance”, co-produced with Nile Rodgers: the title song went to number one in both countries, and the videos for “China Girl” and “Modern Love” were in heavy rotation on MTV. Before that came the number ones “Ashes to Ashes” (1980) and “Under Pressure” with Queen (1981), as well as the role of Joseph Merrick in “The Elephant Man” on Broadway. In 1986 he played Jareth, the Goblin King, in “Labyrinth” and wrote five songs for the film. He called the album “Never Let Me Down” (1987) “awful”. From 1989 to 1992 Bowie fronted the hard rock quartet Tin Machine.

In the 1990s he returned to solo work: “Black Tie White Noise” (1993) went to number one in Britain, “Outside” (1995) was made with Eno again, and “Earthling” (1997) is full of jungle and drum and bass. In 1996 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and that summer he gave his only concert in Russia, at the Kremlin Palace. The last time he performed his own songs on stage was in November 2006, at a charity evening in New York.

Then there were no recordings for ten years. On 8 January 2013, his sixty-sixth birthday, he released the single “Where Are We Now?” without warning, and the album “The Next Day” followed in March. “Blackstar” was recorded in secret, in New York in 2015; on 7 December the musical “Lazarus”, with his music, opened there, and it was his last public appearance. “Blackstar” was released on 8 January 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday. Bowie died two days later, on 10 January, in New York. The album became the first of his career to top the American chart.