The story of David Bowie

A boy from Brixton

David Robert Jones was born in Brixton, south London, on the eighth of January 1947. His mother Peggy had worked as a cinema waitress, and his father John was a promotions officer for the children's charity Barnardo's. In the early fifties the family moved out to the suburbs and settled near Bromley. Teachers noticed something unusual in the boy. At nine his dancing was called vividly artistic, and his poise astonishing for a child. That same year his father brought home a pile of American singles by Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. When David heard Tutti Frutti, he later said, he had heard God. Soon he was playing ukulele and tea chest bass, and doing Elvis moves for his local Cub Scout group, and one account said he looked like someone from another planet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The biggest influence at home was his half brother Terry Burns, ten years older. Terry opened a door to modern jazz, Buddhism, Beat poetry and the occult, and he took David to see the band Cream. But Terry had schizophrenia and seizures, and he moved back and forth between the family home and psychiatric wards. Mental illness ran through the wider family too. One aunt was institutionalised and another had a lobotomy, and writers have linked that history to the darker themes in Bowie's early songs. The jazz stuck. Hooked on Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, David asked for a saxophone, and in 1961 his mother bought him a Grafton saxophone. He took lessons from the baritone saxophonist Ronnie Ross, and the sax would turn up on his records for decades.[1] [2]

At Bromley Technical High School, the art teacher was Owen Frampton, whose son Peter, three years younger, would play Buddy Holly songs with David at lunchtime. It was there, in 1962, that David's best friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye. The fight was over a girl called Carol. Underwood says David had told him she'd chosen David instead, which turned out to be a fib, so he went over at break time and hit him. The damage was serious. After four months in hospital and several operations, David was left with poor depth perception and a pupil that stayed permanently wide open. That odd, mismatched gaze became one of the most famous faces in rock. The two boys made up quickly, and Underwood later painted artwork for Bowie's early albums.[1] [2]

David formed his first band, the Konrads, in 1962, when he was fifteen. They played rock and roll at youth clubs and weddings, with anywhere from four to eight members, George Underwood among them. When David left school the next year he told his parents he was going to be a pop star. His mother's answer was to find him a job as an electrician's mate. He soon lost patience with the Konrads, who were happy playing local gigs, and he moved on to a blues group called the King Bees. It was the start of a long, frustrating decade of trying, in which he would change bands, managers, labels and even his name before anything worked.[1] [2]

Davie Jones and the lean years

Even as a teenager he knew how to get attention. With his father's help he wrote to the businessman John Bloom, telling him that if Brian Epstein had the Beatles, Bloom needed the King Bees. Bloom passed the letter on, and the band got a manager, Leslie Conn. Their first single, Liza Jane, came out in 1964 credited to Davie Jones with the King Bees, and it went nowhere. David quickly jumped to another blues outfit, the Manish Boys. When the BBC asked them to cut their hair before a TV appearance, he went on the programme Tonight in November 1964 as the spokesman for a made up Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men. It was his first television interview.[1] [2] [3]

In 1965 he worked with the American producer Shel Talmy, the man behind early hits for the Kinks and the Who, and some of those sessions featured Jimmy Page on guitar and Nicky Hopkins on piano. None of the singles sold. There was another problem. Davy Jones of the Monkees was about to become world famous, and the name was already taken. So David picked a new surname from the American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the hunting knife named after him. The first record as David Bowie, Can't Help Thinking About Me, came out in January 1966 with his band the Lower Third. It flopped as well. His manager Ralph Horton steered him towards a solo career, and a new manager, Kenneth Pitt, took over after him.[1] [2]

On the Deram label Bowie released The Laughing Gnome in April 1967, a novelty song with a sped up squeaky voice playing the gnome. It failed to chart. His first album, simply called David Bowie, followed six weeks later, a mix of pop, psychedelia and old English music hall. He was openly copying the singer Anthony Newley, and Newley was not flattered. He reportedly destroyed the copy he was sent. The album sank, and it was two years before Bowie released anything else. One good thing came out of that period. In September 1967 he recorded with a young American producer named Tony Visconti, beginning a partnership that, with long gaps, lasted the rest of his life.[1] [2] [3]

Around this time Bowie studied dance and mime with Lindsay Kemp, who taught him how to use his body on stage. The two also became lovers. Kemp's world of theatre and masks gave Bowie the idea of performing as characters. He was also drawn to Buddhism, which Terry had introduced him to, and studied at Tibet House in London. He even thought about becoming a monk, until his teacher Chime Rinpoche told him he should follow music instead. Then there was the dancer Hermione Farthingale. They met on a BBC play in 1968, moved in together and formed a folk trio called Feathers. In early 1969 she left to work on a film in Norway, and the breakup hit him hard. Years later he admitted he had been unfaithful, and blamed himself.[1] [2] [3]

Major Tom and the man who sold the world

Heartbroken and stuck, Bowie wrote a song about an astronaut named Major Tom who drifts off into space. He had gone to see Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the famous Earthrise photograph from Apollo 8 was everywhere. At Mercury Records, the talent scout Calvin Mark Lee loved the song so much that he paid for a demo behind his own boss's back. Tony Visconti thought it was a gimmick, so the engineer Gus Dudgeon produced it instead. A young Rick Wakeman played Mellotron, and Bowie added a Stylophone, a cheap electronic toy sold to children, because Marc Bolan had suggested he find a use for it. The whole session cost five hundred pounds.[1] [2]

Space Oddity came out on the eleventh of July 1969, five days before Apollo 11 took off for the Moon. The BBC played it around its coverage, and Bowie later joked that nobody there could have been listening closely, since the astronaut in the song never comes home. At first the single barely sold. Then a Top of the Pops appearance in October pushed it to number five in Britain by November. It was his first hit, and his last for three years. In early August, just weeks after the single came out, his father John died. The song won him an Ivor Novello award, but the album it opened sold barely five thousand copies in its first months.[1] [2] [3]

Bowie was living in Beckenham by then, lodging with the journalist Mary Finnigan, and together with friends they ran a Sunday folk club at the Three Tuns pub that grew into the Beckenham Arts Lab. In 1969 he met an American student named Angela Barnett through Calvin Mark Lee. At Christmas he proposed by playing her his new song The Prettiest Star down the phone, and they married at Bromley Register Office on the nineteenth of March 1970. He also needed a real band. His drummer went looking for a guitarist in Hull and found Mick Ronson marking out a rugby pitch for the council parks department. With Visconti on bass, they played the Roundhouse in February 1970 as the Hype, dressed as comic book superheroes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Man Who Sold the World, released in late 1970, swapped folk for heavy rock, with songs about madness and delusion. By then Terry Burns had been confined to Cane Hill psychiatric hospital, and the asylum appears on the album's original cartoon cover. On the British cover Bowie lay on a couch in a long dress, and on a promotional trip to America in early 1971 he wore that dress to interviews. Behind the scenes, he fired his manager Kenneth Pitt and signed with the lawyer Tony Defries, a tough negotiator who got him out of his old contracts and into a deal with RCA. The split with Pitt led to years of litigation, and Bowie ended up paying him compensation.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirtieth of May 1971 Angie gave birth to a son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, and Bowie wrote the song Kooks for him. The album that followed, Hunky Dory, was a leap in songwriting. It included Changes and Life on Mars, which has a curious backstory. In 1968 Bowie had been hired to write English words for a French song, but his version was turned down, and Paul Anka turned the same tune into My Way for Frank Sinatra. Life on Mars was Bowie's cheeky answer. Rick Wakeman played the piano and Mick Ronson wrote the strings. Yet Hunky Dory sold poorly at first. Bowie's mind was already on something bigger, a character he had sketched out on his American trip.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust

On that 1971 American trip Bowie had watched two wild New York figures, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, and imagined a rock star who blended Iggy's persona with Reed's music. A girlfriend remembered him scribbling notes on a napkin about a crazy singer named Iggy or Ziggy. The result was Ziggy Stardust, an alien messiah rock star doomed by his own fame. The surname came from a cowboy singer called the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and other ingredients included the troubled English rocker Vince Taylor, Japanese kabuki theatre and the droogs of A Clockwork Orange. The hairdresser Suzi Fussey cut and dyed his hair flaming red. And on the twenty second of January 1972 Melody Maker printed an interview in which Bowie told Michael Watts that he was gay.[1] [2] [3]

The Ziggy stage show opened in February 1972 with the Spiders from Mars, Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass and Woody Woodmansey on drums. The album came out in June. Then, on the fifth of July, the band taped Starman for Top of the Pops, and it went out the next night. Bowie, in a bright jumpsuit, casually draped his arm around Ronson's shoulder, and a generation of British teenagers never forgot it. The single and the album shot up the charts, and the older Hunky Dory followed. Bowie was suddenly in demand as a producer too. He gave Mott the Hoople All the Young Dudes, co produced Lou Reed's Transformer with Ronson, and mixed Iggy Pop's Raw Power.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Ziggy tour crossed America and Japan, and the songs Bowie wrote on the road became Aladdin Sane, which he described as Ziggy goes to America. Released in 1973, it was his first number one album in Britain, with the famous lightning bolt painted across his face by the make up artist Pierre La Roche. Bowie now wore stage costumes by the Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, and shaved off his eyebrows. The tour also had a dark side that surfaced decades later. In 2015 a woman named Lori Mattix said that in Los Angeles in 1973, when she was about fourteen, she had sex with Bowie in his hotel suite. Her friend who was there has given a different account, but many writers now see the story as an example of rock stars exploiting underage fans.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Playing Ziggy night after night came at a price. Bowie later said the character would not leave him alone and that his whole personality was affected, to the point where he had real doubts about his sanity. The American shows were also losing money, and RCA refused to fund another big US tour. On the third of July 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, he told the crowd that this was not only the last show of the tour but the last show they would ever do. Jeff Beck had joined them for a medley earlier that night. Fans and newspapers assumed Bowie was quitting music. In fact he was only killing off Ziggy and breaking up the Spiders. The show was filmed by D A Pennebaker.[1] [2] [3]

Retirement did nothing to slow the records. By the end of 1973 six Bowie albums were on the British chart at the same time. Life on Mars reached number three, the old Laughing Gnome was reissued and embarrassingly climbed to number six, and Pin Ups, an album of covers of his favourite sixties songs, went to number one. Bowie was the best selling act in Britain that year. For Mick Ronson, though, the story of the Spiders was over. He launched a solo career and later became Ian Hunter's long time partner. The partnership that had defined glam rock was finished, and Bowie was already looking west.[1] [2] [3]

Cocaine, soul and the Thin White Duke

Bowie's next plan was a stage musical of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, but Orwell's widow Sonia refused him the rights. What survived became Diamond Dogs in 1974, with its dog headed cover and the single Rebel Rebel. He moved to New York, and the Diamond Dogs tour opened in Montreal in June 1974. It was the most extravagant rock show yet, with a model city skyline, a catwalk that lowered from the rafters and a cherry picker crane that lifted him above the crowd, and sometimes failed to bring him back down. That summer he became addicted to cocaine. A BBC documentary by Alan Yentob, Cracked Actor, caught him on tour in September looking frail and disconnected.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Halfway through the tour Bowie scrapped the set, stopped in Philadelphia and recorded soul music. He called the result plastic soul. Young Americans, released in 1975, puzzled many British fans but made him a star in America. The guitarist Carlos Alomar became a key collaborator. In January 1975, at Electric Lady studios in New York, Bowie jammed with John Lennon, and together with Alomar they wrote Fame, Bowie's first American number one. That November he appeared on Soul Train, only the second white artist to do so after Elton John. He was visibly drunk and later felt ashamed. He also split from Tony Defries in 1975, in a settlement that gave Defries a share of Bowie's earnings for years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1975 he moved to Los Angeles to star in Nicolas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell to Earth, playing a fragile alien named Thomas Jerome Newton. He hardly had to act. By his own later account he lived on peppers, milk and cocaine, stayed awake for days, and his weight dropped to around eighty pounds. He burned black candles, became obsessed with the occultist Aleister Crowley, and was terrified of Jimmy Page. He cut himself off from friends, including Keith Moon and John Lennon. In April 1975 he announced he was retiring from rock and roll. It lasted less than six months. Looking back, he called this period the darkest days of his life.[1] [2] [3]

The album he made in that fog, Station to Station, came out in January 1976, and he later said he remembered only flashes of recording it. It introduced his coldest character, the Thin White Duke, an immaculate aristocrat in a white shirt and black waistcoat who, in Bowie's words, was a nasty character indeed. Musically it bridged funk and soul with German electronic bands like Kraftwerk and Neu. The core band of Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis stayed with him for the rest of the decade. The title track was about the Stations of the Cross and the Kabbalah, not railway stations. It reached number three in America, his best showing there until 2013.[1] [2] [3]

The 1976 Isolar tour was a triumph on stage and a disaster in interviews. Speaking as the Duke, Bowie praised fascism and called Hitler one of the first rock stars. In March he and Iggy Pop were arrested for marijuana possession in Rochester, New York, though the charges were dropped. He was held by customs on the border between the Soviet Union and Poland over Nazi memorabilia. Then in May, arriving at London's Victoria Station in an open car, he waved to fans, and a photo in NME seemed to show a Nazi salute. He insisted he'd been caught mid wave. His comments, along with Eric Clapton's rant against immigrants, helped spark Rock Against Racism. Bowie retracted them in 1977, blaming drugs and madness.[1] [2] [3]

The Berlin years

To escape Los Angeles, Bowie and Angie moved to a chalet in Switzerland in 1976, where he cut back on cocaine and took up painting seriously. That summer he booked the Chateau d'Herouville, a studio in a French country house, to write and produce an album for his friend Iggy Pop, who was fighting a heroin addiction. That album, The Idiot, was a stepping stone to his own next record. Sessions for Low began at the chateau in September 1976 with Tony Visconti and the ambient pioneer Brian Eno. Visconti fed Dennis Davis's drums through a new pitch shifting gadget, the Eventide Harmonizer, and created a sound nobody had heard before. Meanwhile Bowie was also fighting a legal battle with his latest manager, Michael Lippman.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bowie, Iggy, Visconti and his assistant Coco Schwab then moved on to West Berlin, where Bowie and Iggy shared an apartment and tried to get clean away from the spotlight. They finished Low at Hansa, a studio a few hundred yards from the Berlin Wall. RCA hated the record, which mixed short song fragments with long wordless instrumentals, and held it back for three months. It came out in January 1977 and still reached number two in Britain, with the single Sound and Vision. Bowie did not promote it. Instead he toured as Iggy's keyboard player that spring, then produced Iggy's Lust for Life, with its famous song The Passenger.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The only album of the trilogy made entirely in Berlin was Heroes, recorded at Hansa in the summer of 1977, in a hall that had once been used as a ballroom by Gestapo officers. Robert Fripp joined on guitar. For the title song, Bowie sent everyone out and stared through the studio window. He saw Tony Visconti, then married to the singer Mary Hopkin, kissing the singer Antonia Maass by the Wall, and wrote about two lovers on either side of it. Bowie kept the secret for decades to protect his friend. He also cut versions in German and French. Surprisingly, Heroes only reached number twenty four in Britain, and it grew into one of his best loved songs later.[1] [2] [3]

That September he sang Heroes on Marc Bolan's television show, Marc. The two had been friends and rivals since the sixties, sharing a manager and a producer. At the end of the taping they tried a song together and Bolan slipped off the stage, to Bowie's visible amusement. On the sixteenth of September 1977, Bolan was killed in a car crash in Barnes, London. Bowie attended the funeral. Two days after the Marc taping, Bowie filmed a Christmas special with Bing Crosby, singing Peace on Earth over Little Drummer Boy. It was Crosby's last television Christmas special, and when RCA finally released the duet in 1982 it reached number three in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

In 1978 Bowie took the Berlin music on the road, playing seventy concerts in twelve countries to almost a million people. His biographer David Buckley says it was probably his first tour in five years without cocaine. He also narrated Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and made the film Just a Gigolo with Marlene Dietrich, which flopped. Lodger, in 1979, closed the trilogy, with Eno's Oblique Strategies cards pushing the band to swap instruments and play old songs backwards. At home, his marriage was over. Angie blamed Coco Schwab for coming between them. After months of court battles they divorced in Switzerland on the eighth of February 1980. Bowie got custody of Duncan, and Angie received five hundred thousand pounds and a ten year gagging clause.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The eighties superstar

Scary Monsters arrived in 1980 with Ashes to Ashes, which brought back Major Tom, now a junkie. Bowie was admitting his own past through the character. For the video he dressed as a Pierrot clown and recruited young regulars from London's Blitz club, including Steve Strange. At two hundred and fifty thousand pounds it was the most expensive music video ever made at the time, and the song went to number one. That summer Bowie played the deformed Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man on Broadway, with no make up at all. On the eighth of December 1980 John Lennon was shot dead in New York by Mark David Chapman. Bowie later said Chapman had a front row ticket to his play for the next night.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1981 Bowie dropped into Mountain Studios in Montreux, near his Swiss home, where Queen were working. They wrote and recorded Under Pressure in one marathon evening, though Brian May later admitted that Bowie and Freddie Mercury had a fierce battle over the mix. It was Bowie's third British number one. He then left RCA for EMI America in a deal reported at seventeen million dollars, and in September 1982 his settlement with Defries finally ran out. His film career took off as well. The director Nagisa Oshima saw him in The Elephant Man and cast him as a prisoner of war in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and he played a vampire opposite Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon in The Hunger.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For Let's Dance, Bowie went to Nile Rodgers of Chic. At Rodgers's home in Montreux he played the new songs on a twelve string acoustic guitar, and Rodgers turned them into dance records. They cut the album at the Power Station in New York in just seventeen days in December 1982. The lead guitar came from an unknown Texan Bowie had spotted at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Released in April 1983, Let's Dance became the biggest seller of his career, with the title track at number one and Modern Love and China Girl close behind. China Girl, co written with Iggy Pop years earlier, gave Iggy some welcome financial security. The Serious Moonlight tour that followed was a huge success.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bowie used his new fame to call out MTV in 1983, telling the presenter Mark Goodman on air that the channel was not playing enough Black artists. The follow up album, Tonight, in 1984 was weaker, though the short film Jazzin' for Blue Jean won him a Grammy. In July 1985 he played Live Aid at Wembley, and his cover of Dancing in the Street with Mick Jagger went to number one in Britain. In 1986 he played Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson's Labyrinth, a flop that became a cult classic. Behind the scenes there had been private tragedy. In 1985 his half brother Terry Burns, who had spent years in psychiatric care, took his own life. Bowie later said it took him years to be able to write about it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Never Let Me Down, in 1987, was an album Bowie himself later called his nadir. The Glass Spider tour that followed played eighty six shows under a giant illuminated spider, with his old schoolmate Peter Frampton on guitar. Critics called it overblown, though later shows by Madonna, Prince and U2 borrowed from it. On the sixth of June 1987 he played in front of the Reichstag in West Berlin, close to the Wall, a concert many later saw as a small push towards its fall. On the American leg, a Dallas woman named Wanda Nichols accused him of sexually assaulting her in a hotel. Bowie called the charge ridiculous and said what happened was consensual, and in November a Dallas grand jury declined to indict him.[1] [2] [3]

Tin Machine, Iman and the restless nineties

Stung by the critics, Bowie put his solo career on hold and formed a hard rock band, Tin Machine, with the guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the brothers Tony and Hunt Sales, sons of the comedian Soupy Sales. It was meant to be a democracy, with profits split four ways and nobody on a salary, though Bowie still dominated. The 1989 debut sold well enough but was dismissed by many as preachy. Bowie then took a break to play his old hits one last time on the 1990 Sound and Vision tour. The second Tin Machine album flopped in 1991, and its American label airbrushed the private parts off the ancient Greek statues on the cover. By 1992 the band was over, though Gabrels stayed at Bowie's side for the rest of the decade.[1] [2]

In October 1990 a hairdresser friend, Teddy Antolin, set Bowie up on a blind date in Los Angeles with the Somali born model Iman. Bowie said he was naming their children that very night. On the twentieth of April 1992 he performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley, singing Under Pressure with Annie Lennox and then kneeling to recite the Lord's Prayer. Four days later he and Iman married privately in Lausanne, with a church blessing in Florence that June. Duncan was his best man. They had planned to live in Los Angeles, but arrived on the day the 1992 riots broke out and settled in New York instead. After his marriage he also got back in touch with his mother, Peggy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Freddie Mercury tribute was one of the last big stages for Mick Ronson, who had already been diagnosed with liver cancer. He played on Heroes and All the Young Dudes with Bowie that night, and guested on Bowie's 1993 album Black Tie White Noise. Ronson died on the twenty ninth of April 1993, aged forty six. Black Tie White Noise reunited Bowie with Nile Rodgers and went to number one. Its single Jump They Say was loosely about Terry Burns, the first time, Bowie said, he had felt able to face it. Later that year he wrote music for the BBC series The Buddha of Suburbia. The album got almost no promotion and reached only number eighty seven, but critics now call it his lost great album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1995 Bowie reunited with Brian Eno for Outside, a dark concept album about art and murder, and he chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partners, which split his fans. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. On the seventh of January 1997 he threw himself a fiftieth birthday concert at Madison Square Garden with guests including Lou Reed, the Foo Fighters, Robert Smith and Sonic Youth. Then came Earthling, his drum and bass album, with a cover showing him from behind in a tattered Union Jack coat he designed with Alexander McQueen. The Trent Reznor remix of I'm Afraid of Americans kept the song on the American chart for sixteen weeks.[1] [2] [3]

Bowie was also a pioneer in business and technology. In 1997 he issued Bowie Bonds, selling ten years of royalties from his pre 1990 albums to the Prudential insurance company for fifty five million dollars, money he used to buy back songs owned by Tony Defries. In September 1998 he launched BowieNet, a full internet service provider. For about twenty dollars a month fans got dial up access, an email address ending in davidbowie.com, and chat rooms where Bowie sometimes turned up under the name Sailor. His 1996 single Telling Lies was one of the first songs released as a download, and his 1999 album Hours is credited as the first album available to download over the internet.[1] [2] [3]

The final act

His daughter Alexandria, known as Lexi, was born in New York on the fifteenth of August 2000. That year he played Glastonbury for the first time in almost thirty years, and turned down a CBE. He turned down a knighthood in 2003 as well, saying he did not know what such honours were for. After the attacks of September 2001 he opened the Concert for New York City with a quiet version of Simon and Garfunkel's America, and then Heroes. Reunited with Tony Visconti, he made Heathen in 2002 and Reality in 2003. The Reality tour that followed was seen by about seven hundred and twenty two thousand people and was the highest grossing tour of 2004.[1] [2] [3]

That tour ended badly. In Oslo on the eighteenth of June 2004, a fan threw a lollipop that hit him in the eye. A few days later he felt chest pains on stage, first thought to be a pinched nerve. It turned out to be a blocked coronary artery, and he had an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The rest of the tour was cancelled. After that Bowie largely stepped away. He made guest appearances with Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio and David Gilmour, and his last performance of his own music was at a New York charity gala with Alicia Keys in November 2006. Tony Visconti said later that Bowie stayed healthy on heart medication and even took up boxing lessons.[1] [2] [3]

For years the world assumed he had retired. Then, on his sixty sixth birthday, the eighth of January 2013, he released a new single without warning, Where Are We Now, a quiet song looking back on Berlin. The album The Next Day had been recorded in secret at the Magic Shop studio in New York, with everyone involved signing non disclosure agreements. It went to number one in Britain and number two in America, his highest ever position there. The same year the Victoria and Albert Museum opened David Bowie Is, which went on to tour the world. In 2014 he became the oldest ever Brit Award winner. Kate Moss collected it for him and read his message, Scotland stay with us.[1] [2] [3]

In mid 2014 Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer. He told almost no one outside his family and a few collaborators. Tony Visconti only found out in January 2015, when Bowie arrived at the studio straight from chemotherapy, with no hair and no eyebrows. For his new album he had hired a young jazz quartet led by the saxophonist Donny McCaslin, after seeing them at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village. Everyone signed confidentiality clauses. Bowie and Visconti were listening to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and wanted to avoid rock and roll. By mid 2015 he was in remission. But in November, while filming the video for Lazarus, he learned the cancer had spread and was terminal, and treatment was stopped.[1] [2] [3]

His musical Lazarus, a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, opened off Broadway on the seventh of December 2015. It was his last public appearance. The album Blackstar came out on the eighth of January 2016, his sixty ninth birthday. Two days later, on the tenth of January, David Bowie died at his home on Lafayette Street in New York. He had already written and demoed five new songs and was planning another album. Visconti called Blackstar his parting gift. A week before, Bowie had sent Brian Eno a funny email that ended by thanking him for their good times. As he wished, there was no funeral. He was cremated in New Jersey and his ashes were scattered in a Buddhist ceremony in Bali.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After Bowie

The news stunned the world, because almost nobody had known he was ill. Fans laid flowers at a mural of him in Brixton, outside his old Berlin apartment and outside his home in New York. The German Foreign Office thanked him for helping to bring down the Wall. His first wife Angie was a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother when producers told her. She told a fellow housemate that David was dead, and the housemate thought she meant another contestant, David Gest. Blackstar went to number one around the world, and it became his only number one album in America. It later won three Grammys and a Brit Award, and nineteen of his albums sat in the British top one hundred at once.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bowie's estate followed a long list of release plans he had left behind. Box sets gathered his albums era by era, and Toy, the album of remade sixties songs that his label had shelved in 2001, was finally released. In 2021 the estate signed with Warner Music, and in January 2022 it sold his songwriting catalogue to Warner Chappell for a price reported at more than two hundred and fifty million dollars. That year Brett Morgen's documentary Moonage Daydream, the first film about him approved by the estate, premiered at Cannes. An earlier biopic, Stardust, was made without his music, and his son Duncan spoke out against it. In September 2026 a collection of his 1965 recordings with Shel Talmy finally came out.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

During his lifetime Bowie sold more than one hundred million records. He had eleven number one albums in Britain, won six Grammys and four Brit Awards, and in 2022 was named the best selling vinyl artist of the twenty first century. In Aylesbury, where he had played many early shows, a statue called Earthly Messenger was unveiled in 2018, showing an older Bowie looking at his earlier selves, with a speaker that plays one of his songs every hour. A spider and an asteroid carry his name, and Belgian astronomers mapped a Bowie constellation shaped like the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt. In 2017 he appeared on a set of British postage stamps.[1] [2]

What made Bowie matter was change itself. Critics called him the chameleon of rock, and Billboard argued he influenced more genres than any other rock star, from glam and soul to electronic music and industrial rock. Through Ziggy and his other characters, he gave many young people permission to question gender and sexuality, even though he later said his 1972 announcement was a mistake and was never a campaigner. He was a painter, a collector of art, an actor and an early internet evangelist. The Guardian's Alexis Petridis wrote that by 1980 he was the most important and influential artist since the Beatles, and in 2022 Sky Arts ranked him the most influential artist in Britain of the previous fifty years.[1] [2]

The people around David Bowie

David Bowie and Angie Bowie. They met in 1969 and married in March 1970. He wrote The Prettiest Star for her, and she helped shape the Ziggy look. It was an open marriage, which she later called a marriage of convenience. Drugs, Los Angeles and her feud with Coco Schwab pulled them apart, and they divorced in 1980. Bowie won custody of Duncan, who later cut contact with his mother.[1] [2] [3]

David Bowie and Iman. A friend set them up on a blind date in Los Angeles in October 1990, and Bowie said he was naming their children that night. They married in 1992 and lived quietly in New York, walking the streets largely unnoticed. Their daughter Lexi was born in 2000. After his death Iman said she would never remarry, and refused to call him her late husband.[1] [2]

David Bowie and Iggy Pop. They met at Max's Kansas City in New York in 1971. Bowie mixed the Stooges' Raw Power, visited Iggy in rehab, and took him on tour in 1976. In Berlin they shared a flat and Bowie co wrote and produced The Idiot and Lust for Life. When Bowie turned China Girl into a hit in 1983, the royalties gave Iggy security. Iggy called him the light of his life.[1] [2] [3]

David Bowie and Lou Reed. Reed's music was half of the recipe for Ziggy. In 1972 Bowie and Mick Ronson produced Reed's breakthrough Transformer, home of Walk on the Wild Side. In 1979 they fell out during a late night meeting in London after Bowie reportedly told Reed to clean up his act, and Reed hit him. They made peace, and Reed played Bowie's fiftieth birthday show in 1997.[1] [2]

David Bowie and Mick Ronson. Ronson was a Hull council gardener when he joined Bowie in 1970. As guitarist and arranger of the Spiders from Mars he was the muscle behind Ziggy, and Bowie compared their duo to Mick and Keith. They parted in 1973 but reunited on stage in 1983 and 1992. Ronson died of liver cancer in 1993, and Bowie narrated a 2017 documentary about him.[1]

David Bowie and Tony Visconti. The American producer first worked with Bowie in 1967 and played bass in the Hype. He produced the Berlin albums, Scary Monsters, and, after a long gap, the late albums from Heathen to Blackstar. Bowie kept Visconti's affair secret for decades in the story of Heroes. Visconti was one of the few who knew about the cancer, and called Blackstar a parting gift.[1] [2] [3]

David Bowie and Brian Eno. Bowie admired Eno's ambient records and brought him in for Low, Heroes and Lodger, where Eno's Oblique Strategies cards shook up the sessions. They reunited for Outside in 1995. In later years they emailed constantly under invented names. A week before his death Bowie sent Eno a surreal, funny email thanking him for their good times.[1] [2]

David Bowie and Coco Schwab. Corinne Schwab was a receptionist at MainMan when Bowie hired her in 1973. She stayed as his assistant for forty three years. He called her his best friend and credited her with saving his life by helping him quit drugs in the seventies. Angie blamed her for breaking up the marriage. Bowie left her two million dollars in his will.[1]

David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Friends and rivals from the sixties underground, they shared a manager and a producer, Tony Visconti. Bolan played guitar on The Prettiest Star and suggested the Stylophone for Space Oddity. Bowie was the last guest on Bolan's TV show in September 1977, and days later Bolan died in a car crash. Bowie attended the funeral.[1] [2]

David Bowie and George Underwood. They met enrolling in the Cubs at nine. At fifteen Underwood punched Bowie in a row over a girl, leaving him with his famous dilated pupil. They stayed best friends, played in the Konrads and the King Bees together, and Underwood went on to paint artwork for Bowie's early albums and join him on the 1972 American tour.[1] [2]

David Bowie and Tony Defries. Defries took over from Kenneth Pitt in 1970, got Bowie out of old deals and signed him to RCA through his company MainMan, unusually securing ownership of the recordings. Bowie later resented the money split, fired him in 1975 and paid him a share of earnings until 1982. He used the Bowie Bonds money in 1997 to buy back songs Defries owned.[1] [2]

Rare facts about David Bowie

• As a teenager Bowie wrote to a washing machine tycoon asking him to manage his band, comparing it to Brian Epstein and the Beatles. With his father's help, Bowie wrote to the businessman John Bloom saying he needed the King Bees just as Epstein had the Beatles. Bloom replied with the number of Leslie Conn, who became their manager.[1]
• His first TV interview was as spokesman for a made up Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men. In November 1964 the BBC asked his band the Manish Boys to cut their hair. Davie Jones went on the programme Tonight to protest, speaking for a society that did not exist.[1]
• Anthony Newley, whose singing style Bowie copied on his first album, reportedly destroyed the copy he was sent. Bowie's 1967 debut leaned heavily on the music hall style of Anthony Newley. Newley was not pleased and is said to have destroyed the record.[1]
• The Laughing Gnome, a 1967 flop, became a top ten hit six years later. Deram's novelty single failed completely in 1967. Reissued in 1973 at the height of Bowie mania, it climbed to number six in Britain, much to the embarrassment of many fans.[1]
• Life on Mars began as Bowie's answer to My Way. In 1968 Bowie wrote English words for the French song Comme d'habitude, but they were rejected. Paul Anka turned it into My Way for Sinatra, and Bowie wrote Life on Mars as a parody.[1]
• The Stylophone on Space Oddity was a children's toy, added on Marc Bolan's suggestion. The pocket electronic instrument was mainly marketed to kids. Bowie used it to compose the tune and said Bolan told him to do something with it.[1]
• Space Oddity was the only Bowie song whose copyright he did not own. When astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded it on the International Space Station in 2013, the publisher granted a one year licence. The video came down in 2014 until a new deal was struck, despite Bowie wanting it free.[1]
• Gus Dudgeon was paid one hundred pounds for producing Space Oddity and later sued for royalties. In June 2002 Dudgeon launched a claim saying he never got his agreed two per cent. The suit stopped when he died in a car accident the following month.[1]
• Mick Ronson was marking out a rugby pitch for Hull council when Bowie's drummer came to recruit him. Ronson was working as a parks department gardener. He made his debut with Bowie on John Peel's BBC radio show on the fifth of February 1970.[1]
• Ziggy's red hair colour was a shop bought dye Bowie remembered as Schwarzkopf red. Hairdresser Suzi Fussey cut the style in January 1972 and stiffened it with an anti dandruff treatment so it would stand up. She later married Mick Ronson.[1] [2]
• By the end of 1973, six Bowie albums were on the British chart at the same time. Pin Ups brought the total to six, and Bowie was the best selling act in the UK that year, only months after retiring Ziggy on stage.[1]
• Bowie's cherry picker stunt on the 1974 tour sometimes left him stranded above the crowd. The Diamond Dogs show lifted him about forty feet over the front rows during Space Oddity. NPR notes it occasionally failed to bring him back down.[1]
• On Soul Train in 1975, Bowie was only the second white artist to perform, after Elton John. He mimed Fame and Golden Years but was visibly drunk and had not learned the new single. He later said he felt ashamed.[1]
• The Heroes studio at Hansa had once been a ballroom used by Gestapo officers. Hansa Studio 2 was a converted concert hall about five hundred yards from the Berlin Wall. Low was finished there and Heroes was recorded there entirely.[1]
• Kraftwerk name checked Bowie and Iggy Pop on Trans Europe Express. The 1977 title track was Kraftwerk's response to Bowie's Station to Station, a sign of how much the German and English artists were influencing each other.[1]
• For Lodger, band members swapped instruments and played an old Bowie song backwards. Eno's Oblique Strategies cards drove the sessions. Boys Keep Swinging used swapped instruments, and Move On used the chords of All the Young Dudes played in reverse.[1] [2]
• Philip Glass turned all three Berlin albums into symphonies. His first, fourth and twelfth symphonies, from 1992, 1997 and 2019, were based on Low, Heroes and Lodger. Glass praised Bowie's complex music disguised as simple songs.[1]
• The Ashes to Ashes video cost about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, then the most expensive ever made. Bowie's Pierrot costume was made by Natasha Korniloff, who had known him since his mime days with Lindsay Kemp in 1968.[1]
• Let's Dance, his biggest album, took only seventeen days to record. Bowie and Nile Rodgers cut it at the Power Station in New York in December 1982. Bowie recorded all his vocals in two days.[1]
• Nagisa Oshima cast Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence after seeing him on Broadway. The director watched Bowie play Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man, a role he did without any make up, and cast him as the prisoner of war Jack Celliers.[1] [2]
• Christopher Nolan personally persuaded Bowie to play Nikola Tesla in The Prestige. Nolan said Bowie was his only choice for the part and appealed to him directly after he first turned it down.[1]
• Tin Machine's American label airbrushed the genitals off ancient statues on their second album cover. The cover of Tin Machine II showed four nude Greek kouros statues. Victory Records called it obscene and altered the image for the US release.[1] [2]
• The Tin Machine rhythm section were the sons of the American TV comedian Soupy Sales. Tony and Hunt Sales had played behind Iggy Pop in 1977. Bowie ran into Tony at the Glass Spider wrap party and asked him to call his brother.[1]
• On BowieNet, fans could get an email address ending in davidbowie.com. The 1998 service cost about twenty dollars a month for dial up internet. Bowie sometimes chatted with fans under the name Sailor.[1]
• A song on Hours has words by a fan who won Bowie's internet songwriting contest. Alex Grant's lyrics became What's Really Happening, recorded while BowieNet users watched by webcam. Billboard later could not track Grant down.[1] [2]
• Bowie helped pull off an art world hoax about a painter who never existed. In 1998 he hosted a New York launch for a biography of Nat Tate, an invented abstract artist created by the novelist William Boyd. The name mixes the National Gallery and the Tate.[1]
• Bowie and Iman voiced characters in a 1999 video game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul. He also wrote its soundtrack with Reeves Gabrels, and some tracks were reworked for the album Hours. It was his only video game appearance.[1] [2]
• In 2004 a fan hit Bowie in the eye with a lollipop during a concert in Oslo. It happened on the eighteenth of June 2004, days before the chest pains that ended the Reality tour and led to emergency heart surgery.[1]
• Bowie's emails to Brian Eno were signed with invented names like Mr Showbiz and the Duke of Ear. Eno said the last one, sent a week before Bowie died, ended with thanks for their good times and was signed Dawn.[1]
• The black star on the Blackstar cover has five segments below it that spell out Bowie. The artwork was by Jonathan Barnbrook, and it hid Bowie's name in plain sight on a record released two days before he died.[1] [2]
• The Aylesbury statue of Bowie plays one of his songs every hour. Earthly Messenger, unveiled in 2018, used a face mask taken of Bowie during The Man Who Fell to Earth to create his likeness.[1]
• Belgian astronomers created a Bowie constellation shaped like the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt. In 2016 they grouped seven stars that were near Mars at the moment of his death. A spider and an asteroid are also named after him.[1]
• Before he was famous, Bowie recorded in 1965 with Jimmy Page and Nicky Hopkins on some sessions. Those Shel Talmy sessions, including ten unreleased songs, came out in September 2026 as The Shel Talmy Recordings.[1] [2]
• Bowie had the Serenity Prayer tattooed in Japanese on his calf. Although he said in 2005 he was almost an atheist, he explored faith throughout his work, and in 1992 knelt at Wembley to say the Lord's Prayer.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.