David Bowie
He never stayed in one face. A rock star from Mars, a pallid aristocrat, a recluse in a divided city: he shed each in turn and kept changing right up to his final album.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and colleagues ⏳🌊
- FamilyTerry Burns
The half-brother who introduced him to jazz and Beat literature; his illness and death cast a shadow over Bowie's songs, from “All the Madmen” to “Jump They Say.”
- ProducerTony Visconti
His longest-standing musical partner, at his side for nearly half a century, from The Man Who Sold the World to Blackstar.
- MemberMick Ronson
A guitarist and arranger from Hull who shaped the sound of the Ziggy era; he died of liver cancer in 1993.
- FriendshipIggy Pop
A fellow artist and lifelong friend who lived with him in West Berlin and made The Idiot and Lust for Life.
- ProducerBrian Eno
A collaborator who shared his working method of chance and experiment on the Berlin trilogy and 1. Outside.
- FamilyIman
His wife, whom he married in 1992 and who stayed with him in New York until his last day.
I. The boy from Bromley · 1947–1965
(Birth) He was born in January 1947 in Brixton, London. His real name was David Robert Jones. His father, Haywood Stenton Jones, was a publicity officer for the children's charity Barnardo's, and his mother, Margaret Mary Burns, known as Peggy, worked as a cinema usherette and a waitress. In 1953 the family moved to Bromley, a suburb southeast of London. Bowie later recalled more than once that his relationship with his mother had been cold. (Brother) His half-brother Terry Burns, ten years his senior, introduced him to modern jazz and to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. But Terry suffered from schizophrenia and spent long years in and out of hospitals. Several of his aunts on his mother's side had suffered from mental illness, and Bowie said he carried a lifelong fear that the illness might pass to him as well. That fear would later become a theme of his songs. (Saxophone) At Bromley Technical High School he studied under the art teacher Owen Frampton. Around the age of thirteen he got a plastic alto saxophone and took a few lessons from the jazz player Ronnie Ross, and he fell under the spell of records by Little Richard and Elvis Presley. In 1962, in a fight with his friend George Underwood over a girl, he was struck in the left eye; afterward the pupil stayed permanently dilated, making his two eyes look different in color. The two remained friends for life. (Bands) After leaving school he worked as an assistant at an advertising agency and drifted through bands such as the Konrads, the King Bees, the Manish Boys and the Lower Third. In 1964 he released his first single, “Liza Jane,” as Davie Jones with the King Bees, but it barely sold. It was a time when neither his name nor his music had yet been settled.
II. In search of a name · 1966–1971
(Name change) In September 1965 he changed his surname to Bowie so as not to be confused with Davy Jones (later of the Monkees), then known as a musical-theater actor. The name came from the American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife named after him. His manager Kenneth Pitt looked after him, and his first album, David Bowie, released on the Deram label in 1967, offered songs in the style of English music hall but drew little attention. Around this time he learned movement and stagecraft from the mime artist Lindsay Kemp. The theatrical instinct that would later have him change characters the way one changes masks first took root here. (Space) In July 1969, a few days before the launch of Apollo 11, “Space Oddity” came out. The story of an astronaut who loses contact with Earth after leaving for space climbed to number 5 on the UK chart. But the following month his father died of pneumonia. Bowie long missed the father who had lived to see his son's first success before he was gone. (Haddon Hall) He lived in Haddon Hall, a run-down mansion in the London suburb of Beckenham, and ran a neighborhood arts collective, the Arts Lab. In March 1970 he married the American-born Angela Barnett. That same year, with the producer Tony Visconti and the Hull-born guitarist Mick Ronson, he made The Man Who Sold the World, with its rough, heavy guitars. Over “All the Madmen,” set in a mental hospital, the shadow of his brother Terry fell darkly. (Son) In May 1971 his son was born; he would later work as the film director Duncan Jones. Bowie released Hunky Dory, which included “Kooks,” dedicated to his newborn son. The album, featuring “Changes” and “Life on Mars?”, also contained songs addressed to Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. With these solid, piano-centered songs he at last began to be recognized as a songwriter.
His first hit, won after 3 years of drifting since changing his name. The astronaut's solitude as his tether to Earth is severed seems to echo his own situation, losing his father that same year.
- Above the acoustic twelve-string guitar strumming of the opening, a thin, quavering electronic sound can be heard. It is a toy electronic instrument played by touching a pen to a metal plate (the Stylophone), and Bowie played it himself.
- The hazy, string-like background is the Mellotron (a keyboard instrument that plays back string sounds recorded on tape) of Rick Wakeman, later the keyboardist of Yes. Listen for the passage after the launch scene where the string arrangement swells.
- The song takes the form of a dialogue, passing back and forth between the voice of ground control and the voice of the astronaut. Follow how Bowie sings the two characters in different tones, and the story comes into focus.
- Rather than closing on a chorus, the song fades out as the repeating figures of guitar and strings drift farther and farther away. It sounds like the astronaut floating off into space.
The song from Hunky Dory that proved him as a songwriter. True to his roots as the son of a cinema usherette, he set it around the disappointment of a girl who sits in a movie theater trying to forget reality.
- Bowie had written English lyrics for a French song and lost out, and the same song later became Sinatra's “My Way.” He twisted its chord progression to write this song, and noted on the album sleeve that it was inspired by Frankie.
- The piano was played by Rick Wakeman, and the string arrangement was Mick Ronson's first. Listen to the part in the chorus where the strings wrap around the piano and soar.
- The vocal begins low in the verses, as if speaking, then leaps to high notes in the chorus. That gap creates the song's dramatic tension.
- In the final moment, as the strings die away, the sound of a telephone ringing in the studio was left in rather than erased. Turn up the volume and listen to the very end, and you will hear it.
III. Ziggy Stardust · 1972–1974
(Ziggy) In 1972 he became Ziggy Stardust, an androgynous rock star from Mars. He dyed his hair red and wore stage costumes by the Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, backed by Mick Ronson · Trevor Bolder · Mick Woodmansey, the band known as the Spiders from Mars. In a January interview that year with Melody Maker he caused a stir by saying he was gay, and afterward he spoke differently about his sexual orientation at different times. His stage act, crossing the boundaries of gender as if in a play, became the emblem of glam rock (early-1970s British rock that put glittering costumes, makeup and theatrical staging to the fore). (Broadcast) In July, singing “Starman” on the BBC's Top of the Pops, he draped his arm around Ronson's shoulder, a moment that gave British teenagers both a shock and a sense of liberation. In later years a number of musicians said they had started making music after seeing that broadcast. (Helping hand) He shared his success with his peers. With Ronson he produced Lou Reed's Transformer, wrote “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople as they were about to break up, and mixed Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power. It was also at this time that he called in Ronnie Ross, the saxophone teacher of his boyhood, to play the saxophone at the end of Reed's “Walk on the Wild Side.” (Retirement) On July 3, 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, he announced that this was his last show. Bolder and Woodmansey are said to have first heard the news onstage. It was not Bowie who withdrew, but Ziggy. He then set out to stage George Orwell's 1984, and when he could not obtain permission from the author's estate, he turned the idea into the dystopian concept album (an album in which several songs are linked by a single story or theme) Diamond Dogs. With Ronson gone, Bowie played lead guitar on the album himself.
An album tracing the rise and fall of an alien rock star who appears on an Earth facing its end. As the character he created merged with real stardom, he had to retire that character from the stage the following year.
- Bowie and Ken Scott co-produced it at Trident Studios in London's Soho. The first track, “Five Years,” opens with Woodmansey's drums alone, slowly growing louder.
- Mick Ronson used a Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall amp, and he is said to have pressed a sound-altering foot pedal (a wah-wah pedal) halfway down and left it fixed to get a nasal midrange tone. You can hear that tone in the solo on “Moonage Daydream.”
- In “Starman,” the song chosen for the video, the melody leaps up an octave at the start of the chorus. Many have remarked that it recalls “Over the Rainbow.” Between verse and chorus, short signals like Morse code cut in on piano and guitar.
- The album closes with “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide,” in which the star collapses onstage. It begins as a monologue on acoustic guitar, then the strings and band join in as it rushes toward a scream.
IV. Plastic soul · 1974–1976
(Philadelphia) During his 1974 American tour he fell for soul music. He himself called Young Americans, recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, plastic soul, a self-mocking term for artificial soul made by a white Englishman imitating Black music. During these sessions Bruce Springsteen visited the studio. Bowie had recognized him early, so early that he had already recorded his early song “Growin' Up.” The following January in New York he made “Fame” with John Lennon, and it became his first US number 1. (Contract) Around the same time he split with his manager Tony Defries over contract disputes. Under a 1975 settlement, Defries received a share of his record income until 1982. The experience led him later to take control of the rights to his own music. (Cocaine) After moving to Los Angeles in 1975, he sank deep into cocaine. He later said it was a time when he lived on milk and peppers, and that he barely remembered recording Station to Station. Biographers record that he was absorbed in books on the occult and black magic and plagued by delusions that someone was out to get him. The album's cold aristocratic character, the Thin White Duke, resembled that hollowed-out mind. That same year, in Nicolas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell to Earth, he played an alien who has lost his home planet. (Gaffe) In 1976 he drew fierce criticism for remarks in interviews that seemed to endorse fascism, and in May of that year a photograph taken at London's Victoria Station sparked controversy over whether it showed a Nazi salute. Bowie maintained that it had merely caught him mid-wave, and he apologized repeatedly for his remarks, calling them the ravings of a time when drugs had broken his mind. He needed to escape that city, and the self he had been in those years.
His first US number 1, made with John Lennon in New York. It carries a cynicism about how fame hollows people out, tinged with the weariness of the period when he was splitting from his manager.
- The guitar riff grew out of one Carlos Alomar had devised for Bowie's cover of “Footstompin'.” Short, choppy guitars cross and interlock from left and right.
- Dennis Davis played drums and Emir Ksasan bass. Feel the tension of the funk rhythm, played behind the beat as if dragging it along at an unhurried tempo.
- The voice repeating the title word in a high falsetto is Lennon's. It contrasts with Bowie's low, sardonic delivery.
- Near the end, the title word descends like a staircase from a very high note to a very low one. The effect comes from mechanically shifting the pitch of the recorded voice and stacking the results.
V. Berlin · 1976–1980
(Escape) In the autumn of 1976 he moved with Iggy Pop to an apartment in Schöneberg, West Berlin, in what was then West Germany (today's Germany). In the divided city he cycled between galleries and cabarets, struggling to free himself from drugs. German Expressionist painting and the German electronic music of Kraftwerk and Neu! held him in thrall. He co-created Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life, and played keyboards on Pop's tour. (Trilogy) Low, 'Heroes' and Lodger, made with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, are often called the Berlin Trilogy. Low, recorded mostly at the Château d'Hérouville in France, filled its first side with short, broken songs and its second with instrumentals for synthesizer (a keyboard instrument that creates sound from electrical signals). Visconti used a pitch-shifting device (the Harmonizer) to crush the drums down low. “Warszawa,” an ambient (music that fills a space like a backdrop) piece from the second side, became the first name of a band formed by young men in Manchester. That band would later become Joy Division. (The Wall) 'Heroes' was recorded at Hansa Studios, not far from the Berlin Wall. On the title track, which pictures lovers meeting beside the Wall, Robert Fripp's guitar feedback (the sound of an amp feeding back into the guitar and stretching on endlessly) wails at length. Born of a Cold War city, the song became his signature. (Taking stock) In 1980 he divorced Angela. That same year he closed the book on the 1970s with Scary Monsters, summoning back Major Tom, the astronaut of 11 years earlier, in “Ashes to Ashes” and recasting him as a man lost to drugs. On Broadway, in The Elephant Man, he won acclaim for playing the deformed John Merrick without makeup, through movement alone. In December, during the play's run, his friend John Lennon was shot dead in New York.
A song recorded at Hansa Studios beside the Berlin Wall. Having slipped into the divided city to escape drugs, he pictured lovers resolving to be heroes, if only for one day.
- Visconti placed one microphone in front of Bowie, one halfway across the room and one at the far end, rigging the distant mic to open only when the voice grew loud. It is thanks to this setup that, as the song goes on, the vocal takes in the echo of a large hall and turns into a howl.
- The guitar that stretches out from beginning to end is Robert Fripp's. Visconti recalled that they recorded it by marking the floor with tape to show where Fripp had to stand in front of the amp to get feedback on the note he wanted.
- The droning, quivering backdrop is a sound Eno made on a small briefcase-shaped synthesizer (the EMS Synthi AKS). This layer, entwined with the guitar, is easier to pick out on headphones.
- The album version runs over 6 minutes. The chords barely change; the sound simply keeps piling up. The single was edited down, and there are separate versions sung in German and French.
Summoning back the Major Tom of “Space Oddity” after 11 years, he turned the space hero into a man lost to drugs. It reads like a confession settling accounts with his 1970s self.
- The sound that swells and subsides like strings is Chuck Hammer's, layered many times over on a guitar synthesizer (a device that turns the vibration of guitar strings into synthesizer sounds).
- The piano is played by Roy Bittan of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. The song's charm lies in the mismatch of gloomy content laid over a bouncy, buoyant rhythm.
- The ending fades out on a short, repeating melody like a children's taunting chant. Bowie said the passage was inspired by a nursery rhyme.
- In the music video directed by David Mallet, Bowie wore a Pierrot costume and appeared alongside young regulars of London's Blitz Club. It is counted among the most expensive music videos made up to that time.
VI. Stadium pop star · 1981–1991
(Pressure) In 1981, at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, he met Queen and made “Under Pressure” almost entirely on the spot. Brian May recalled that Freddie Mercury and Bowie traded vocal melodies as if competing. After Lennon's death he cut back on public appearances and spent more and more of his days at his home in Switzerland. (Success) In 1983 he signed a deal with EMI reported at about $17 million and made Let's Dance with Nile Rodgers. Stevie Ray Vaughan, an unknown blues guitarist from Texas, played lead guitar. The album became the best-selling record of his life, and the Serious Moonlight Tour packed huge stadiums. In 1985 he took the stage at Live Aid. (The void) Yet of the albums that followed, Tonight and Never Let Me Down, Bowie himself would say it was a period when he lost his way chasing what the public wanted. In January 1985 his brother Terry slipped out of the hospital where he had been staying and took his own life on a railway line. To avoid the press frenzy, Bowie skipped the funeral and sent a wreath and a short note, for which he drew criticism. Memories of his brother would carry on into “Jump They Say” in 1993. (The band) In 1989 he formed Tin Machine with guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the Sales brothers, trying to return to being just one member of a band. On the 1990 Sound+Vision Tour he declared it would be the last time he sang his old hits.
The peak of his 1980s pop-star years, a time he later said he had lost his way. Walking back out before the public after losing Lennon, he found here his greatest commercial success.
- Nile Rodgers recalled that Bowie came in playing the song like a folk song on a 12-string acoustic guitar. At the Power Station studio in New York they rebuilt it as a dance track.
- The harmonies that climb in the intro, voices stacking up one step at a time, are said to be modeled on the build-up in the Beatles' “Twist and Shout.”
- The lead guitar in the instrumental break is Stevie Ray Vaughan. Pushing the strings up on a Fender Stratocaster to bend the notes (bending), he drives Texas blues into the heart of a sleek dance track.
- The album version, over 7 minutes long, has a midsection break where only horns and percussion remain. Try comparing it with the single version.
VII. The last star · 1992–2016
(Iman) In April 1992, at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at London's Wembley, he knelt on stage and recited the Lord's Prayer. That same month he married the Somali-born model Iman, and the couple settled in New York. Their daughter was born in 2000. (Experiment) In the 1990s he returned to experimentation. The 1993 Black Tie White Noise included “I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday” by former Smiths singer Morrissey, and reunited with Eno, he took 1. Outside on tour with Nine Inch Nails. On Earthling he drew in drum and bass (a British club music of very fast electronic drums and heavy bass). When Nirvana sang “The Man Who Sold the World” on MTV Unplugged, he was impressed, yet laughed that young fans thought it was a Nirvana song. His 50th-birthday concert in 1997 featured the Cure's Robert Smith, Sonic Youth and the Pixies' Frank Black, and on Heathen, made with Visconti again in 2002, he sang the Pixies' “Cactus.” (Heart) In June 2004 he felt chest pain on a festival stage in Scheeßel, Germany, and underwent an emergency procedure at a Hamburg hospital to clear a blocked artery. Afterward he withdrew from the stage for nearly 10 years and stayed close to his family. (Farewell) On his 66th birthday in January 2013 he returned without warning with “Where Are We Now?”, a look back at his Berlin years, and the album The Next Day. Diagnosed with liver cancer around 2014, he told only a few people and went on to make the musical Lazarus and his final album, Blackstar. The album came out on January 8, 2016, his 69th birthday, and two days later he died at his home in New York. Visconti called the album his parting gift.
His final album, made without revealing his illness and released on his 69th birthday. When he died two days later, the whole album was heard anew as a farewell he had written himself.
- It was played by the quartet of New York jazz saxophonist Donny McCaslin. The improvisational breath of jazz players, not a rock band, underlies the entire album.
- Visconti said they were influenced by listening to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly during the sessions. Listen to the two together for their shared urge to break down genre boundaries.
- The title track runs about 10 minutes, a two-part structure in which an ominous, incantatory opening collides with a warmly melodic middle section.
- In “Lazarus,” chosen for the video, Ben Monder's heavy, torn guitar chords and McCaslin's saxophone take turns crying out. The music video, showing Bowie lying in a sickbed, was released three days before he died.
Lesser-known stories
In November 1964, seventeen-year-old Davie Jones appeared on the BBC current-affairs program Tonight and, as head of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, decried the ridicule long-haired men had to endure. It was half a publicity stunt, but it was his first television interview. Because it predates his stardom it usually passes as a brief anecdote, yet his instinct for treating mass media as a stage is already visible. In 1998, as an editorial board member of the art magazine Modern Painters, he and the novelist William Boyd published a biography of Nat Tate, a fictional American painter. At the launch party in New York, some guests reportedly spoke as if they knew the painter who never existed, and the hoax was exposed by the press a few days later. Overshadowed by the music, it survives only as a footnote in the art world. He was a lifelong painter and collector of art. In 1997 he issued $55 million in bonds secured against future royalties from 25 albums recorded before 1990. Known as Bowie Bonds, the deal is still cited in finance as an early example of turning music rights into a financial product. He reportedly used the money to buy back rights still held by his former management. In 1998 he launched his own internet service, BowieNet. When he declared in a 1999 BBC interview that the internet would transform society utterly, the interviewer was skeptical. Taken at the time as an eccentric star's sideline, the exchange was later quoted again as prophecy.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Glam rock
(Meaning) Glam is short for the English word glamour, meaning splendor or allure. (In rock) A style of rock popular in Britain in the early 1970s, it put glittering costumes, heavy makeup, platform shoes and theatrical staging to the fore. It cared as much about the show as the music, and male singers often played with gender boundaries by dressing in feminine clothes. It is like dressing up for a school show as someone utterly unlike your everyday self and surprising your friends on stage. Bowie's Ziggy Stardust was its emblem. (Elsewhere) In fashion and photography, glam refers broadly to any glittering, glamorous style.
Plastic soul
(Meaning) Plastic means something artificially made; soul means the spirit, and also soul, a genre of African American music. Together: artificial soul. (In rock) Bowie's own term for his 1975 album Young Americans. It carries the self-mockery of a white English singer who earnestly imitated African American soul music while knowing it could never be the real thing. It is like eagerly copying the way a friend you admire talks, while knowing full well that you are copying. He laid even that awkwardness bare and made it his music's signature.
Concept album
(Meaning) Concept means an idea or plan. The term says the whole album is bound together by a single idea. (In rock) An album made not as a collection of separate songs but to flow as one story or theme. Listened to in order, the story unfolds like turning the chapters of a novel. Like a relay story in which classmates each write a paragraph in turn, every song becomes one piece of a larger tale. Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs are albums of this kind. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, concept often means a mood or theme, as in today's outfit concept.
Synthesizer
(Word origin) The English word synthesize means to combine several things into something new, that is, to put together. A synthesizer is a machine that puts sounds together. (In rock) An instrument that generates sound from electrical signals, usually fitted with a keyboard. Unlike a piano, which strikes strings, it uses electronic circuits to change a sound's pitch, color and vibration at will. The bleeps and bloops of video-game sound effects and arcade music are made the same way. The second side of Bowie's Low was filled with instrumentals made on synthesizers. (Elsewhere) In chemistry, synthesis (synthesis) means making a new substance by causing several substances to react.
Feedback
(Word origin) The English feed back means to feed something back, that is, to send what has come out back in again. (In rock) The phenomenon in which sound from an amplifier re-enters the guitar strings or microphone, so that the sound stretches out endlessly or howls. It began as an accident, but rock guitarists learned to control it on purpose and made it a means of expression. The shrill squeal you hear in an auditorium when a microphone is held too close to a speaker is feedback. On “'Heroes'”, Robert Fripp shifted where he stood to coax feedback on the notes he wanted. (Elsewhere) In everyday life, the comments a teacher or friend gives you about your work are called feedback.
Ambient
(Word origin) The English word ambient means surrounding, of the environment. (In rock) Music that fills a space like a backdrop, even when no one is listening closely. Its center is not a distinct melody or beat but a slowly shifting atmosphere of sound. Brian Eno gave it this name in the late 1970s. Think of the music that drifts quietly over a game's idle screen, or the soft sounds you put on while studying. The second side of Bowie's Low holds pieces in an ambient vein. (Elsewhere) In lighting and photography, ambient light means the surrounding light softly diffused throughout a room.
Drum and bass
(In rock) An electronic music born in British clubs in the 1990s. Drum sounds are chopped into small pieces and reassembled at great speed, with a heavy, deep bass laid underneath. The drums race frantically while the bass rolls along at its leisure, creating the strange sense of hearing fast and slow at once. Imagine a jump rope whirling without pause while the jumper bounces slowly. In 1997, on Earthling, Bowie blended this style with rock.