David Bowie ( ; born
David Robert
Jones; 8 January 1947) 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, 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. 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 . 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,
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 and the 23rd best singer of all time.
1947–67: Early years
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London to
parents who were married in September 1947 shortly after his birth.
His mother Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent
worked as a cinema usherette and his father Hayward Stenton "John"
Jones was a promotions officer for
Barnardo's.
Bowie attended a school in Stockwell
until he was six years old, when his family moved
from Brixton to the suburb of Bromley
, Kent
, where he
attended Burnt Ash Junior School, Rangefield Road, Bromley which is
now known as Burnt Ash Primary School. Here he played for
the football team in 1957/58. He then went on to attend Bromley
Technical High School, now known as Ravenswood School For
Boys.
When Bowie was 15 years old, his friend,
George Underwood, wearing a ring
on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a
girl. Bowie was forced to stay out of school for eight months so
that doctors could conduct operations to repair his potentially
blinded eye. Doctors could not fully repair the damage, leaving his
pupil permanently
dilated. As a result of
the injury, Bowie has faulty
depth
perception. Bowie has stated that although he can see with his
injured eye, his colour vision was mostly lost and a brownish tone
is constantly present. Each iris has the same blue colour, but
since the pupil of the injured eye is wide open, the hue of that
eye is commonly mistaken to be
different. Despite the fight, Underwood and
Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to do the
artwork for Bowie's earlier albums.
Bowie's interest in music was sparked at the age of nine when his
father brought home a collection of American
45s, including
Fats
Domino,
Chuck Berry and, most
significantly,
Little Richard. Upon
listening to "
Tutti Frutti",
Bowie would later say, "I had heard God". His half-brother Terry
introduced him to
modern jazz and Bowie's
enthusiasm for players like
Charles
Mingus and
John Coltrane led his
mother to give him a plastic
saxophone for
Christmas in 1959. Graduating to a real instrument, he formed his
first band in 1962, the Konrads. He then played and sang in various
blues/beat groups, such as The King Bees,
The Manish Boys (cf. "
Mannish Boy"), The Lower Third and
The Riot Squad in the mid-1960s, releasing
his first record, the single "
Liza Jane",
with the King Bees in 1964. His early work shifted through the
blues and
Elvis-inspired
music while working with many British
pop
styles.
During the early 1960s, Bowie was performing either under his own
name or the stage name "Davie Jones", and briefly even as "Davy
Jones", creating confusion with
Davy
Jones of
The Monkees.
To avoid this, in 1966
he chose "Bowie" for his stage name, after the Alamo
hero Jim Bowie and his
famous Bowie knife. During this
time, he recorded singles for
Parlophone under the name of
The Manish Boys and Davy Jones and for
Pye under the name David Bowie (and The
Lower Third), all without success.
Bowie released his first album in 1967 for the
Decca Records offshoot
Deram, simply called
David Bowie. It was an amalgam of
pop,
psychedelia, and
music hall. Around the same time he issued a
novelty single, "
The Laughing
Gnome", which utilised sped-up
Chipmunk-style vocals. None of these releases
managed to chart, and he would not cut another record for two
years. His Deram material from the album and various singles was
later recycled in a multitude of compilations.
Influenced by the dramatic arts, he studied with
Lindsay Kemp—from
avant-garde theatre and
mime to
Commedia
dell'arte—and much of his work would involve the creation of
characters or personae to present to the world. During 1967, Bowie
sold his first song to another artist, "Oscar" (an early stage name
of actor-musician
Paul Nicholas).
Bowie wrote Oscar's third single, "Over the Wall We Go", which
satirised life in a British prison. In late 1968, his then-manager,
Kenneth Pitt, produced a half-hour promotional film called
Love You Till
Tuesday featuring Bowie performing a number of songs, but
it went unreleased until 1984.
1969–73: Psychedelic folk to glam rock
Bowie's first flirtation with fame came in 1969 with his single
"
Space Oddity," written the previous
year but recorded and released to coincide with the first moon
landing. This
ballad told the story of
Major Tom, an astronaut who becomes lost
in space, though it has also been interpreted as an
allegory for taking drugs. It became a Top 5 UK
hit. Bowie put the finishing touches to the track while living with
Mary Finnigan as her lodger.
Finnigan and Bowie joined forces with
Christina Ostrom and the late Barrie Jackson to run a Folk Club on
Sunday nights at The Three Tuns pub in
Beckenham
High Street, south London. This soon morphed
into the Beckenham Arts Lab and became extremely popular. In August
1969, The Arts Lab hosted a Free Festival in a local park, later
immortalised by Bowie in his song "
Memory of a Free Festival". In
1969 and 1970, "Space Oddity" was used by the BBC during both its
Apollo 11 moon landing coverage and its
coverage of
Apollo 13.
The corresponding album, his second, was released in November 1969
and originally titled
David Bowie, which caused some
confusion as both of Bowie's first and second albums were released
with that name in the UK. In the US the same album originally bore
the title
Man of Words, Man of Music to overcome that
confusion. In 1972, the album was re-released on both sides of the
Atlantic by
RCA Records as
Space Oddity, a title it has kept
until today.
In 1970, Bowie released his third album,
The Man Who Sold the
World, rejecting the
acoustic guitar sound of the previous
album and replacing it with the heavy
rock backing provided by
Mick Ronson, who would be a major collaborator
through to 1973. Much of the album resembles British
heavy metal music of the period, but the
album provided some unusual musical detours, such as the
title track's use of
Latin sounds and rhythms. The original UK
cover of the album showed Bowie in a dress, an early example of his
androgynous appearance. In the US, the
album was originally released in a cartoonish cover that did not
feature Bowie.
His next record,
Hunky Dory in
1971, saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space
Oddity", with light fare such as the droll "
Kooks". Elsewhere, the album explored more
serious themes on tracks such as "
Oh! You Pretty Things" (a song taken to UK
number twelve by
Herman's
Hermits'
Peter Noone in 1971), the
semi-autobiographical "
The Bewlay
Brothers", and the
Buddhist-influenced
"
Quicksand". Lyrically,
the young songwriter also paid unusually direct homage to his
influences with "
Song for Bob
Dylan", "
Andy
Warhol", and "
Queen Bitch", which
Bowie's somewhat cryptic liner notes indicate as a
Velvet Underground pastiche. As with the
single "
Changes",
Hunky Dory was not a big hit but it laid the groundwork
for the move that would shortly lift Bowie into the first rank of
stars, giving him four top-ten albums and eight top ten singles in
the UK in eighteen months between 1972 and 1973.
Bowie further explored his androgynous persona in June 1972 with
the seminal
concept album The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,
which presents a world destined to end in five years and tells the
story of the ultimate rock star, Ziggy Stardust. The album's sound
combined the
hard rock elements of
The
Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock of
Hunky Dory and the fast-paced
glam
rock pioneered by
Marc Bolan's
T. Rex.
Many of the album's songs have become rock classics, including
"
Ziggy Stardust," "
Moonage Daydream," "
Rock & Roll Suicide" and
"
Suffragette City."
The Ziggy Stardust character became the basis for Bowie's first
large-scale tour beginning in 1972, where he donned his famous
flaming red
mullet and wild
outfits, designed by
Kansai
Yamamoto. The tour featured a three-piece band representing
The Spiders from Mars: Ronson
on guitar,
Trevor Bolder on bass, and
Mick Woodmansey on drums.
This was
Bowie’s first tour to visit the US, making his first appearance on
22 September 1972 at Music Hall in Cleveland
, Ohio
. The
album made number five in the UK on the strength of the number ten
placing of the single "
Starman".
Their success made Bowie a star, and soon the six-month-old
Hunky Dory eclipsed
Ziggy Stardust, when it
peaked at number three on the UK chart. At the same time the
non-album single "
John,
I’m Only Dancing" (not released in the US until 1979) peaked at
UK number twelve, and "
All the Young Dudes", a song he
had given to, and produced for,
Mott the
Hoople, made UK number three.
Around the
same time Bowie began promoting and producing his rock and roll
heroes, two of whom he met at the popular New York hangout Max's Kansas
City
: former Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed, whose solo breakthrough Transformer was produced by Bowie
and Ronson; and Iggy Pop, whose band,
The Stooges, signed with Bowie's
management, MainMan Productions, 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.
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", 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."
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.
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.
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.
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. 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, 1976, Toronto
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.
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.
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. Matters came to a head
in London on 2 May 1976, in what became known as the 'Victoria
Station
incident', when Bowie arrived in an open-top
Mercedes convertible and apparently gave a Nazi salute to
the crowd that was captured on film and published in NME. Bowie claimed that the photographer
simply caught him in mid-wave, and later blamed his addictions and
the character of The Thin White Duke for his troubles at this
time.
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 dry out and rejuvenate 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, simply playing keyboard
and singing backing vocals. The group performed in the UK, Europe,
and the US from March to April 1977.
The brittle 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 surprise 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. The mood of these records fit the
zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by
the divided city that provided its inspiration.
The title track, a story of two lovers who met at the
Berlin
Wall
, is one of Bowie's most-covered songs.
In 1977, Bowie also appeared on the Granada music show
Marc, hosted by his friend and fellow glam pioneer
Marc Bolan of
T. Rex, with whom
he had regularly socialised 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 afterward. Bowie was one of many superstars who
attended the funeral.
Bowie performing in Oslo on 5 June
1978
For Christmas 1977, Bowie joined
Bing
Crosby, of whom he was an ardent admirer, at the ATV Television
Studio in Herts England to do "
Peace on Earth/Little Drummer
Boy", a version of "
Little
Drummer Boy" with a new lyric. 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. Five years later, the song would
prove a worldwide festive hit, charting in the UK at number three
on Christmas Day 1982. 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.
Bowie and his band 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 that saw Bowie narrating Sergei Prokofiev's
Peter and
the Wolf.
Lodger (1979) was the final
album in Bowie's so-called "
Berlin
Trilogy", or "triptych" as Bowie calls it. 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 mix of
New
Wave and
world music, which included
pieces such as "
African Night
Flight" and "
Yassassin". A number of
tracks were composed using the non-traditional Bowie/Eno
composition techniques: "Boys Keep Swinging" was developed with the
band members swapping their instruments while "Move On" contains
the chords for an early Bowie composition, "All The Young Dudes",
played backwards; the song "Red Money" took backing tracks from the
Iggy Pop/David Bowie composition "Sister Midnight" from Pop's album
The Idiot. This was Bowie's last album with Eno until
1. Outside in 1995.
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.
Scary Monsters
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.
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, and
Television's
Tom
Verlaine. 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 23
September 1980.
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 " 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 consequent
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.
Bowie performing in 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, contained hit singles "Day In, Day Out", "Time Will
Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie himself later described it
as "my
nadir" and "an awful album".
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. However, fans that saw the shows from
the Glass Spider Tour were treated to many of Bowie's classics and
rarities, in addition to the newer material.
In August 1988, Bowie portrayed
Pontius
Pilate in the
Martin Scorsese
film
The Last
Temptation of Christ.
1989–91: Tin Machine
In 1989, for the first time since the early 1970s, Bowie formed a
regular band,
Tin Machine, a
hard-rocking quartet, along with
Reeves
Gabrels,
Tony Sales, and
Hunt Sales. Tin Machine released two studio
albums and a live record. The band received mixed reviews and a
somewhat lukewarm reception from the public, but Tin Machine
heralded the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration between
Bowie and Gabrels.
David Bowie performing at Rock In
Chile Festival, 27 September 1990.
The original album,
Tin
Machine (1989), was a success, holding the number three
spot on the charts of the UK. Tin Machine launched its first world
tour, featuring a now unshaven David Bowie and additional guitarist
Eric Schermerhorn, that year. Despite the success of the Tin
Machine venture, Bowie was mildly frustrated that many of his ideas
were either rejected or changed by the band.
Bowie began the 1990s with a stadium tour, in which he played
mostly his biggest hits.
The Sound + Vision Tour (named
after the
Low single) was conceived and directed by
choreographer
Edouard Lock of the
Quebec contemporary dance troupe
La
La La Human Steps, with whom Bowie collaborated and performed
on stage and in his videos. Bowie vowed during the tour that he
would never play his early hits again.
Though he surprised no one when he later reneged on that promise
and also on the promise that his set in each country would be
focused on the favourite hits voted by phone poll in that
country — an idea quickly jettisoned when a campaign by the
British magazine
NME resulted in a
landslide in favour of
The
Laughing Gnome, it is true that his later tours generally
featured few of those hits, and when they appeared, they were often
radically reworked in their arrangement and delivery.
Bowie's negative press-image continued when the cover of Tin
Machine's second album became unusually controversial, due to the
presence of naked statues as its cover art.
After the less successful second album
Tin Machine II and the complete failure
of live album
Tin
Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby, Bowie tired of having to work
in a group setting where his creativity was limited, and finally
disbanded Tin Machine to work on his own.
1992–99: Electronica
In 1992 he performed his hits "Heroes" and "Under Pressure" (with
Annie Lennox) at the
Freddie Mercury Tribute
Concert. 1993 saw the release of the soul,
jazz and
hip-hop
influenced
Black Tie White
Noise, which reunited Bowie with
Let's Dance
producer
Nile Rodgers. The album hit
the number one spot on the UK charts with singles such as "Jump
They Say" (a top-10 hit) and "Miracle Goodnight".
Bowie explored new directions on
The Buddha of
Suburbia (1993), based on incidental music composed for a
TV series. 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.
The ambitious, quasi-
industrial
release
Outside (1995),
conceived as the first volume in a subsequently abandoned
non-linear narrative of art and murder, reunited him with
Brian Eno. The album introduced the characters of
one of Bowie's short stories, and achieved chart success in both
the UK and US. The album and its singles put Bowie back into the
mainstream of rock music. In September 1995, Bowie began the
Outside Tour with Gabrels returning as guitarist. In a
move that was equally lauded and ridiculed by Bowie fans and
critics, Bowie chose
Nine Inch Nails
as the tour partner;
Trent Reznor also
contributed a
remix of the
Outside
song "
The Hearts Filthy
Lesson" for its single release.
On 17 January 1996, Bowie was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
at the eleventh annual induction
ceremony.
Receiving some of the strongest critical response since
Let's
Dance was
Earthling
(1997), which incorporated experiments in British jungle and
drum 'n' bass and included a single
released over the Internet, called "Telling Lies"; other singles
included "
Little Wonder" and "
Dead Man Walking". There was a
corresponding world tour. Bowie's track in the Paul Verhoeven film
Showgirls, "
I'm Afraid of Americans" was remixed
by Trent Reznor for a single release. The video's heavy rotation
(also featuring Reznor) contributed to the song's 16-week stay in
the US
Billboard Hot 100.
1999 to the present: Neoclassicist Bowie
In 1998, David Bowie had reunited with
Tony Visconti to record a song for
The Rugrats Movie called
"(Safe in This) Sky Life". Although the track was edited out of the
final cut, and did not feature on the film's soundtrack album, the
reunion led to the pair pursuing a new collaborative effort. "(Safe
In This) Sky Life" was later re-recorded and released as a single
b-side in 2002 where it was retitled "Safe".Among their earliest
work together in this period, was a reworking of
Placebo's track "
Without You I'm
Nothing", from the album of the same name, in which Visconti
oversaw the additional production required when Bowie's harmonised
vocal was added to the original version for a strictly limited
edition single release.
In 1999 Bowie made the soundtrack for "
Omikron," a computer game. Bowie and
his wife,
Iman, made appearances as
characters in the game. That same year, re-recorded tracks from
Omikron and new music was released in the album
'hours...' featured "What's Really
Happening", with lyrics by Alex Grant, the winner of Bowie's "Cyber
Song Contest" Internet competition. This album was Bowie's exit
from heavy electronica, with an emphasis on more live
instruments.
Plans surfaced after the release of
'hours...' for an
album titled
Toy,
which would feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces
as well as three new songs. Sessions for the album commenced in
2000, but the album was never released, leaving a number of tracks,
some as yet unheard, on the editing floor. Bowie and Visconti
continued collaboration with the production of a new album of
completely original songs instead. The result of the sessions was
the 2002 album
Heathen,
which had a dark atmospheric sound, and was Bowie's biggest chart
success in recent years. 2002 also saw Bowie curate the annual
Meltdown festival in
London. Amongst the acts selected by Bowie to perform were
Phillip Glass,
Television and
The Polyphonic Spree.
Bowie himself played
a show at the Royal
Festival Hall
which notably included a rare performance of his
experimental opus Low in its
entirety.
In 2003, a report in the
Sunday
Express named Bowie as the second-richest entertainer in
the UK (behind Sir
Paul McCartney),
with an estimated fortune of £510 million. However, the 2005
Sunday Times Rich
List credited him with a little over £100 million.
In September 2003, Bowie released a new album,
Reality, and announced a
world tour. '
A Reality Tour' was the
best-selling tour of the following year.
However, it was cut
short after Bowie suffered chest pain while performing on stage at
the Hurricane
Festival
in Scheeßel
, Germany, on 25 June 2004. Originally
thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later
diagnosed as an acutely blocked
artery; an
emergency
angioplasty was performed at
St Georg Hospital in Hamburg by Dr Karl Heinz Kuck.
He was discharged in early July 2004 and continued to spend time
recovering. Bowie later admitted he had suffered a minor heart
attack, resulting from years of heavy smoking and touring. The tour
was cancelled for the time being, with hopes that he would go back
on tour by August, though this did not materialise. He recuperated
back in New York City.
In October 2004, Bowie released a live DVD of the tour, entitled
A Reality Tour of his
performances in Dublin on 22 and 23 November 2003, which included
songs spanning the full length of Bowie's career, although mostly
focusing on his more recent albums.
Still recuperating from his operation, Bowie worked off-stage and
relaxed from studio work for the first time in several years. In
2004, a duet of his classic song "
Changes" with
Butterfly Boucher appeared in
Shrek 2. The soundtrack for the film
The Life Aquatic
with Steve Zissou featured David Bowie songs performed in
Portuguese by cast member
Seu Jorge (who
adapted the lyrics to make them relevant to the film's story). Most
of the David Bowie songs featured in the film were originally from
David Bowie (debut album),
Space Oddity,
Hunky Dory,
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars and
Diamond Dogs. Bowie
commented, "Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs acoustically in
Portuguese I would never have heard this new level of beauty which
he has imbued them with".
Despite hopes for a comeback, in 2005, Bowie announced that he had
made no plans for any performances during the year. After a
relatively quiet year, Bowie recorded the vocals for the song "(She
Can) Do That", co-written by Brian Transeau, for the movie
Stealth. Rumours flew about
the possibility of a new album, but no announcements were
made.
David Bowie finally returned to the stage on 8 September 2005,
alongside
Arcade Fire, for the US
nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, his first gig since the
heart attack.
Bowie has shown interest in the Montreal
band since he was seen at one of their shows in New
York City nearly a year earlier. Bowie had requested the
band to perform at the show, and together they performed the Arcade
Fire's song "Wake Up" from their album
Funeral, as well as Bowie's own
"
Five Years" and "
Life on Mars?". He joined them again on 15
September 2005, singing "
Queen Bitch"
and "Wake Up" from Central Park's Summerstage as part of the CMJ
Music Marathon.
Bowie contributed back-up vocals for
TV
on the Radio's song "Province" from their album
Return to
Cookie Mountain. He made other occasional appearances, as in
his commercial with
Snoop Dogg for
XM Satellite Radio. He appeared
on Danish alt-rockers
Kashmir's 2005
release,
No Balance
Palace, sharing lead vocals with Kashmir singer
Kasper Eistrup on the song "The Cynic". The
album was produced by Tony Visconti, who also arranged the contact.
No Balance Palace also featured a spoken word performance
by Lou Reed, making it the second project involving both Bowie and
Reed in two years, since Reed's 2003
The Raven.
David Bowie at the 2009 Tribeca Film
Festival.
On 8 February 2006, David Bowie was awarded the
Grammy Lifetime Achievement
Award. In November, Bowie performed at the Black Ball in New
York for the Keep a Child Alive Foundation alongside his wife,
Iman, and
Alicia
Keys. He duetted with Keys on "Changes", and also performed
"Wild is the Wind" and "Fantastic Voyage".
For 2006,
Bowie once again announced a break from performance, but he made a
surprise guest appearance at David
Gilmour's 29 May 2006 concert at the Royal Albert
Hall
in London. He sang "
Arnold Layne" and "
Comfortably Numb", closing the concert. The
former performance was released, on 26 December 2006, as a
single.
In May
2007, it was announced that Bowie would curate the High Line
Festival in the abandoned railway park in New York called the
High
Line
where he would select various musicians and artists
to perform.
Bowie contributed backing vocals to two tracks - "Falling Down" and
"Fannin' Street" - on
Scarlett
Johansson's 2008 album of
Tom Waits
covers,
Anywhere I Lay My Head.
On 29 June 2008, Bowie released a new compilation entitled
iSELECT. This CD was a collection
of personal favourites compiled by Bowie himself and was available
exclusively as a free gift with the British
newspaper The
Mail On Sunday. The compilation is notable in that it only
contained one major hit single, "
Life on
Mars?", and concentrated on lesser-known album tracks.
A double-album of the 2003 A Reality Tour is due to be released in
January 2010.
Acting career
Bowie's first major film role in
The Man Who Fell to
Earth in 1976, earned acclaim. Bowie's character Thomas
Jerome Newton is an alien from a planet that is dying from a lack
of water. In
Just
a Gigolo (1979), an Anglo-German co-production directed by
David Hemmings, Bowie played the lead
role of a Prussian officer Paul von Pryzgodski returning from World
War I who is discovered by a Baroness (
Marlene Dietrich) and put into her Gigolo
Stable.
In the 1980s, Bowie continued with film roles and also starred in
the Broadway production of
The Elephant Man (1980–81). In
1982, he made a cameo appearance as himself in
Christiane F., focusing on a young girl's
drug addiction. Bowie also starred in
The
Hunger (1983), a revisionist
vampire movie with
Catherine Deneuve and
Susan Sarandon. In the film, Bowie and
Deneuve are vampire lovers, with her having made him a vampire
centuries ago. While she is truly ageless, he discovers to his
horror that although immortal, he can still age and rapidly becomes
a pathetic, monstrous husk as the film progresses. In
Nagisa Oshima's film
Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence (1983), 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 famous
musician,
Ryuichi Sakamoto, played
the camp commandant who begins to be undermined by Celliers'
bizarre behavior. Bowie had a cameo as The Shark in
Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy made by
some of the members of
Monty Python,
and a small part as Colin the
hit man in the
1985 film
Into the
Night. During this time Bowie was also asked to play the
villain
Max Zorin in the
James Bond film
A
View to a Kill (1985), but turned down the role, stating
that "I didn't want to spend five months watching my stunt double
fall off mountains."
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence impressed some critics. His
next major film project, the rock musical
Absolute Beginners (1986),
was both a critical and box office disappointment. The same year he
appeared in the
Jim Henson cult classic,
the dark fantasy
Labyrinth
(1986), playing Jareth, the king of the
goblins. Jareth is a powerful, mysterious creature
who has an antagonistic yet strangely flirtatious relationship with
Sarah (
Jennifer Connelly), the
film's teenage heroine. Appearing in heavy make-up and a mane-like
wig, Bowie sang a variety of new songs specially composed for the
film's soundtrack. Bowie also played a sympathetic
Pontius Pilate in
Martin Scorsese's
The Last Temptation of
Christ (1988). He was briefly considered for the role of
The Joker by
Tim Burton and
Sam Hamm
for 1989's
Batman. Hamm
recalls "David Bowie would be kind of neat because he's very funny
when he does sinister roles". The role ended up going to
Jack Nicholson.
Bowie
portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in the 1991 film
The Linguini
Incident, and played mysterious FBI
agent
Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk
with Me (1992). He took the small but pivotal role
of
Andy Warhol in
Basquiat, artist/director
Julian Schnabel's 1996
biopic of the artist
Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1998 Bowie
also co-starred in an Italian film called
Gunslinger's
Revenge (renamed from the original
Il Mio West).
However, it was not released in the United States until 2005. In it
he plays the most feared gunslinger in the region.
Before appearing in
The
Hunger, a TV horror serial based on the 1983 movie, Bowie
was invited by musician
Goldie to play the
aging gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's
Brighton Rock inspired movie,
Everybody Loves
Sunshine. He played the title role in the 2000 film,
Mr. Rice's Secret, in
which he played the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve year old.
In 2001, Bowie appeared as himself in the film
Zoolander, volunteering himself to be a
walkoff judge between
Ben Stiller's
character Zoolander, and
Owen Wilson's
character, Hansel.
In 2006, Bowie portrayed
Nikola Tesla
alongside
Christian Bale and
Hugh Jackman in
The Prestige, directed by
Christopher Nolan. It follows the bitter
competition between two magicians around the turn of the century.
Bowie has voice-acted in the animated movie
Arthur and the Minimoys (known
as
Arthur and the Invisibles in the US) as the powerful
villain
Maltazard. He also
appeared as himself in an episode of
Extras. Bowie (in the context of the
show) improvised and sang a song mocking the main character
Andy Millman, played by
Ricky Gervais. He also lent his voice to the
character "Lord Royal Highness" in the
SpongeBob SquarePants TV movie
"
SpongeBob's Atlantis
SquarePantis". His latest project is a supporting role as
Ogilvie in the new film,
August, directed by
Austin Chick (best known for writing and
directing the 2002 romantic drama
XX/XY), and starring
Josh Hartnett and
Rip
Torn (with whom he also worked on
The Man Who Fell to
Earth).
Family, home life and personal relationships
Bowie met his first wife
Angela Bowie
in 1969. According to Bowie, they were "fucking the same bloke".
Angie's sense of fashion and outrage has been credited as a
significant influence in Bowie's early career and rise to fame.
They
married on 19 March 1970 at Bromley Register Office in Beckenham
Lane, Kent, England
where she permanently took his adopted last name. Their only
son was born on 30 May 1971 and named
Zowie (Zowie later preferred to be known as
Joe/Joey, although now he has reverted to his legal birth name -
"Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones"). They separated after eight years of
marriage and divorced on 8 February 1980, in Switzerland. The
marriage has been cited as one of convenience for both.
Bowie
married his second wife, the Somali
-born
supermodel Iman Abdulmajid, in the
Saint James' Church in Florence
in 1992. The couple has a daughter,
Alexandria Zahra Jones (known as Lexi), born 15 August 2000, and
live in Manhattan and London.
Bowie
lived in Switzerland
between 1976 and 1998. He was based in a
large chalet in Blonay
until 1982
and then moved to an early twentieth-century residence called the
Château du Signal in Lausanne
, which was built by a Russian prince and decorated
with woodwork and ornate faience.
Sexual orientation
Bowie confirmed his
bisexuality in an
interview with
Melody Maker in
January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his
campaign for stardom as
Ziggy
Stardust. In a 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."
Bowie distanced himself from that in a 1983 interview with
Rolling Stone, saying his
earlier declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever
made". In 1993, he made the claim that he had always been a "closet
heterosexual", and that his interest in homosexual and bisexual
culture was more a product of the times and situation than his own
feelings. Bowie stated, "It wasn't something I was comfortable with
at all."
Bowie expressed a different view in a 2002 interview with
Blender; where he was
posed with this question: "You once said that saying you were
bisexual was 'the biggest mistake I ever made'. Do you still
believe that?" His response:
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.
Politics
In the 1970s, Bowie caused controversy for some politically radical
comments, saying that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader and that Adolf Hitler was 'the first super-star'. Such
comments were a major source of stated motivation behind the
leftist Rock
Against Racism group.
In
September 2007, he made a contribution of $10,000 to the NAACP for the Jena Six Legal
Defense Fund to help with legal bills of six black teenagers
arrested and charged with crimes related to their involvement in
the assault of a white teenager in Jena
.
Discography
Filmography
Awards
Bowie has previously declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire
in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003.
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
- Buckley, David, David Bowie: Complete Guide to His
Music, Omnibus, 2004.
- Sanford, Christopher, Bowie: Loving the Alien, Da Capo
Press, 1998.
- Seabrook, Thomas Jerome, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a
New Town, Jawbone Press, 2008.
- Thompson, Dave, Hallo Spaceboy: The Rebirth of David
Bowie, Ecw Press, 2006.
- 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, 33â…“: David Bowie's Low, Continuum,
2005.
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