| Name | David Bowie |
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| Background | solo_singer |
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| Birth name | David Robert Jones |
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| Born | January 08, 1947Brixton, London, England |
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| Years active | 1964–present |
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| Occupation | Musician, actor, record producer, arranger, singer |
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| Voice type | Baritone |
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| Instrument | Vocals, guitar, saxophone, piano, keyboards, synthesizers, Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums, percussion |
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| Genre | Rock, Pop, glam rock, art rock, blue-eyed soul |
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| Associated acts | The Riot Squad, Tin Machine |
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| Label | Deram, RCA, Rykodisc, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Parlophone, Pye, Hanso |
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| Url | Official Website |
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David Bowie ( ; The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation 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 characterised 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 (and Super Creeps). He paired with Queen for the 1981 UK chart-topping single "Under Pressure", then reached a new 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.
Biographer David Buckley says of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure." In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 136 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded 9 Platinum album certifications, 11 Gold and 8 Silver, and in the United States, 5 Platinum and 7 Gold certifications. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.
History
1947–1962: Early years
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in
Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent, worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones, was a promotions officer for
Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and
Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in." 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. 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. Upon listening to "
Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God". Failing his
eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined
Bromley Technical High School.
It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford writes:
Bowie studied art, music and design, including layout and typsetting. 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 plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician. "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 Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.
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." 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. Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger. This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became 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". The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist. 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.
The studio sessions continued and resulted in 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 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". 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."
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 son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May. Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed red, 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 course of 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." Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman in turn would be awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.
Station to Stations January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-and-a-half-month 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 around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would continue 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 detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. 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. 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, directed by Nic Roeg. 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 title 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. 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. 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."
In the recent biography David Bowie - A Biography, written by Marc Spitz and released in 2009, Spitz reveals Bowie had many homosexual experiences in his teens (and cites a line the singer said in the 1976 interview for Playboy: "When I was 14, sex suddenly became all-important to me. It didn't really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs."), 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", influencing fashion and pop culture to a degree "second only to Madonna". In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded 9 Platinum, 11 Gold and 8 Silver albums, and in the United States, 5 Platinum and 7 Gold.
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)
See also
100 Greatest Britons
Best selling music artists
David Bowie filmography
Bowie Bonds
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
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 Myspace page
Official YouTube channel
Bowieart – paintings, printmakings, etc.
Charlie Rose interview (1998)
Category:1947 births
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Category:Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
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