A 1969 single about an astronaut drifting away from his capsule, released days before the first Moon landing (1969)
'Space Oddity' — a 1975 reissue gave him his first UK number one single.
Popular music · Rock
David Bowie
1947–2016 · British
Glam rock, art rock, plastic soul; the Berlin trilogy
Born David Robert Jones in Brixton, Bowie spent the 1970s reinventing himself faster than his audience could follow: the doomed spaceman, the alien rock messiah Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, the Berlin experimentalist working with Brian Eno. He made rock theatrical and made reinvention itself an art form. He died of liver cancer on 10 January 2016, two days after releasing a final album on his 69th birthday.
How to spot them
- ▸Permanently different-looking eyes — anisocoria caused by a punch from schoolfriend George Underwood, not heterochromia
- ▸He changed his surname from Jones to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees
- ▸Guitarist Mick Ronson and the Spiders from Mars; later Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp, Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughan
- ▸Producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno; the Berlin trilogy of 1977–79 and its instrumental second sides
- ▸Personae: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, the Blind Prophet of Blackstar
Songs & albums
A 1972 concept album about an androgynous alien rock star sent to save a dying Earth (1972)
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars; the cover was shot in Heddon Street, London.
A 1973 sleeve of a face bisected by a red and blue lightning flash, a teardrop pooled in the collarbone (1973)
Aladdin Sane, photographed by Brian Duffy — often called the Mona Lisa of pop.
A 1977 Berlin song about two lovers by the Wall who can be kings and queens for one day (1977)
'"Heroes"' — the quotation marks are part of the title; Robert Fripp played the feedback guitar and Tony Visconti produced.
A 1977 album whose first side is fragmentary pop songs and whose second is wordless ambient instrumentals (1977)
Low, made with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti; Philip Glass later turned it into a symphony.
A 1980 single and video revisiting the astronaut of eleven years earlier, now a junkie (1980)
'Ashes to Ashes' — a UK number one, with a Pierrot costume and a bulldozer on a black beach.
A 1983 album produced by Nile Rodgers, with a young Texan blues guitarist on the title track (1983)
Let's Dance, featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan; his biggest commercial success.
A 1981 duet with a British rock band, driven by a bass line that was later sampled for a Vanilla Ice hit (1981)
'Under Pressure', with Queen — a UK number one; Vanilla Ice's 'Ice Ice Baby' used the riff without initial credit.
Quick-fire facts
- •Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 by David Byrne; Madonna accepted on his behalf
- •He died on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of Blackstar, which was conceived as a parting gift
- •He acted on screen as the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), as the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986) and as Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006)
- •His mime training was with Lindsay Kemp; he played the title role in The Elephant Man on Broadway in 1980
- •In 1997 he issued 'Bowie bonds', asset-backed securities against future royalties from his back catalogue
- •Between 1988 and 1992 he sank his identity into the band Tin Machine, with guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the brothers Hunt and Tony Sales
- •Blackstar won five Grammy Awards in 2017, his first competitive Grammys for music
- •He refused a CBE in 2000 and a knighthood in 2003
- •A Malaysian huntsman spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, was named after him in 2008
- •'"Heroes"' is quoted in full on a plaque at the Reichstag; the German Foreign Office thanked him on his death for helping bring down the Wall
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — David Bowie — Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee page
- Nicholas Pegg — The Complete David Bowie