David Bowie

David Bowie an English singer, songwriter and actor (1947-2016), one of the most inventive and influential popular artists of the modern era. Across five decades he reinvented both his music and his public persona, setting the terms for glam rock, art rock and the theatrical possibilities of the pop star.

Early Life and Beginnings

David Robert Jones was born in 1947 in Brixton, south London, and grew up in the suburb of Bromley, where he developed an early fascination with music, art and the theatre of performance. He learned the saxophone and played in a succession of groups as a teenager, absorbing the rhythm and blues, jazz and Mod styles of the London scene.

His first single, the music-hall novelty Liza Jane, appeared in 1964 to little notice, and he spent several years working in mime, dance and experimental performance. He changed his name to avoid confusion with the singer Davy Jones of the Monkees, and in 1969 his song Space Oddity, released to coincide with the first Moon landing, gave him his first significant hit and announced a taste for the imagery of space.

His training in mime under Lindsay Kemp gave him a command of movement and stagecraft that would distinguish his live performances, and his interest in the visual arts shaped his approach to image and design. He married Angela Barnett in 1970, and the couple became central figures in the London counterculture. His early albums, including the folk-inflected Space Oddity and the rock of The Man Who Sold the World, showed an artist searching for a form equal to his ambition.

Personas and Creative Reinvention

Bowie's breakthrough came in 1972 with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, an album built around an alien rock messiah whose fall is chronicled in the songs. The Ziggy persona, with its costumes and theatrical concerts, made him the central figure of glam rock and established a method of self-invention he would repeat throughout his career.

He retired Ziggy in 1973 and moved through a series of identities: the dystopian Diamond Dogs, the soul-inflected Young Americans and the icy, electronic Station to Station, whose Thin White Duke persona he later disowned. The Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger, made with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti in the late 1970s, drew on European electronic and avant-garde music and became among his most admired work.

This continual reinvention was more than a marketing strategy; it was a deliberate artistic method that allowed him to test ideas about identity, performance and the constructed self. He also became a producer and collaborator, working with Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and other artists of the era. His ability to absorb new influences and discard old ones kept his music unpredictable for more than four decades.

Music, Films and Commercial Success

In the 1980s Bowie moved toward a polished and widely accessible sound, and the album Let's Dance of 1983 brought him his greatest commercial success and a series of global hits. He continued to experiment, forming the rock band Tin Machine and returning to solo work with a series of albums that moved between industrial, electronic and jazz-influenced styles.

He was also a compelling actor, appearing in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, in The Hunger, in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and as the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and he took the title role in a stage production of The Elephant Man. His use of music video and of visual style made him a pioneer of the medium, and his ability to work across forms reflected a restless artistic intelligence.

In the 1990s he formed the band Tin Machine and experimented with a harder rock sound, and later returned to solo work with albums such as Outside and Earthling that drew on industrial and electronic music. He married the model Iman in 1992 and settled into a period of relative domestic stability. Even in quieter years he continued to appear in films and on record, and he remained a figure of fascination to successive generations of musicians.

Style, Themes and Technique

Bowie's music resists a single description because it was continually remade, but certain themes recur: alienation, identity, the messiah and the outsider, and the promise and menace of technology. He wrote in character, adopting voices and perspectives that allowed him to examine ideas from a distance, and he collaborated with musicians of very different backgrounds, from the guitarists of his early bands to the avant-garde composer Philip Glass.

His baritone voice and his taste for unusual chord progressions and dramatic arrangements gave his songs a recognisable edge, and his lyrics drew on literature, science fiction and the occult. He was a voracious assembler of influences, and his willingness to discard a successful style was itself a defining artistic statement. He treated the pop career as a form of theatre to be written and rewritten.

He anticipated and exploited new technologies, from the music video to the internet, and he used collaboration as a way of renewing his work. His influence extended into fashion, design and the visual presentation of popular music, and many artists adopted from him the idea that a performer might inhabit a series of characters. He was, in a sense, the great modernist of the pop song.

Illness, Farewell and Legacy

After a period of relative quiet following a heart attack in 2004, Bowie returned unexpectedly in 2013 with the album The Next Day. On his sixty-ninth birthday in January 2016 he released Blackstar, a dense and experimental record that confronted mortality, and he died two days later of liver cancer. The timing gave the album the character of a deliberate farewell.

His death prompted an outpouring of tribute from across the arts, and his influence on subsequent musicians, fashion and visual culture has been immense. He had a asteroid named in his honour, an exhibition devoted to his life toured the world, and his songs remain in constant use. He is remembered as an artist who made reinvention itself a central creative principle.

Blackstar was widely interpreted as a work of farewell composed in full knowledge of its author's approaching death, and its reception deepened the sense of a career brought to a deliberate close. His catalogue has been reassessed as one of the most consistently inventive in popular music, and his songs continue to be covered and studied. He remains a model of the artist who refuses to be defined by a single moment.

See also

• Ziggy Stardust
• The Berlin Trilogy
• Blackstar (album)
• Glam rock