🇬🇧 David Bowie

Biography

On June 6, 1972, a twenty-four-year-old Brixton-born musician named David Robert Jones — performing under the name David Bowie, inhabiting a character he had named Ziggy Stardust — appeared on the BBC television programme Top of the Pops to perform "Starman," draped his arm around his guitarist Mick Ronson's shoulders in a gesture that was, for British television in 1972, practically avant-garde, and stared directly into the camera. The performance reached approximately fifteen million viewers. Within a week, the Ziggy Stardust album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was on its way to becoming one of the defining cultural documents of the decade. Bowie had been professionally active for seven years, had released five albums to modest commercial response, and had just redefined what a pop music career was allowed to be.

David Robert Jones was born January 8, 1947, in Brixton, South London, the son of Haywood Jones, a promotions officer for a children's charity, and Peggy Burns, a cinema usherette. He grew up in Bromley, Kent — suburban, orderly, respectable — and was from early childhood oriented toward the arts in a way that his environment did not particularly support. His half-brother Terry Burns introduced him to jazz and contemporary literature. By thirteen he was learning saxophone; by fifteen he had formed his first band, the Kon-rads, and was performing at local venues and youth clubs.

The years between his first band and his breakthrough were long and instructive. He released his debut album David Bowie in 1967, a collection of music-hall-influenced songs that attracted critical polite attention and almost no commercial interest. He recorded a string of singles that failed to chart. He studied mime with the Lindsay Kemp company, which would later prove formative for his stage presence. He released Space Oddity in 1969 — a song about an astronaut losing contact with ground control, timed to coincide with the moon landing — and it reached number five on the UK Singles Chart. Then he made two more albums that, again, attracted critical interest without generating significant commercial momentum.

Ziggy Stardust, in 1972, changed everything. The album was not a commercial accident. Bowie had spent three years developing the concept — an alien rock star who arrives on a dying Earth, becomes a messiah figure, and is destroyed by excess — and had worked with producer Ken Scott and his backing band the Spiders from Mars to create a sound that was simultaneously hard rock, theatrical, and radio-friendly. The character of Ziggy gave him permission to do things that a singer named David Jones from Bromley could not do: wear makeup, adopt androgynous styling, blur the line between performer and character. British youth seized on it immediately. The album spawned "Suffragette City," "Starman," and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," each of which was a complete, self-contained theatrical event.

What distinguished the subsequent decade was the refusal to repeat. He killed Ziggy Stardust onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973 — announced it to the audience mid-performance — and moved on. Aladdin Sane (1973), Diamond Dogs (1974), Young Americans (1975), Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), Heroes (1977), Lodger (1979) — each record was a different artist. Young Americans was a Philadelphia soul album recorded at Sigma Sound Studios with backing from Luther Vandross. Station to Station was a cocaine-influenced meditation on mythology and European art. Low and Heroes, recorded in Berlin with Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti, drew on Krautrock and electronic music to produce two of the most influential records in the history of post-punk and new wave. He was not following trends. He was generating them.

The 1980s brought Let's Dance (1983) and its enormous commercial success; the 1990s brought a series of experimental albums that critics respected more than they sold; the 2000s brought Reality (2003) and a final decade of quieter activity. His last album, Blackstar, was released on his sixty-ninth birthday, January 8, 2016. It reached number one in the United Kingdom and the United States. Two days later, on January 10, he died of liver cancer at his home in New York City. He had known he was dying when he made it. Blackstar — its cover art, its lyrical themes, its production choices — was conceived as a farewell, and it is, by the reckoning of most who have written about it, one of the finest things he ever did. He had been making music for fifty-seven years and had not yet run out of ideas.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective