Born David Jones in London on 8th January, 1947, David Bowie is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of popular music. Throughout a career lasting over fifty years, he transcended music, art and fashion. Constantly changing his image and musical style, he never stopped re-inventing himself.
pushing the limits
Bowie created music as theatre while pushing the limits of fashion and fame. Over the decades, his musical styles included folk, prog-rock, funk, German electronica, drum-and-bass dance music, rock and, finally, in his last album, Blackstar, jazz.
Bowie’s career began in 1969 with the hit “Space Oddity”, with the singer as Major Tom, the lost astronaut. He then began to attract serious public attention with the album Hunky Dory (1970), with one track, “Life on Mars?”, now considered to be a classic.
Ziggy Stardust
Bowie’s extraordinary originality shone on his next album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). The great tunes, combined with the singer’s other-worldly image and futuristic fashion sense, made him an instant pop icon. Thousands of fans started to copy his androgynous, glam rock look. However, his onstage persona as Ziggy Stardust (an intergalactic messenger) began to take over his life, and he started taking cocaine. Now a definite star, Bowie released his final album as Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, before moving to the US to make the LP Diamond Dogs, with its hit single “Rebel Rebel”. In 1975, he changed image and musical style completely with Young Americans, an album combining soul, funk and disco. Making his second and last US album, Station to Station, Bowie, now seriously addicted to cocaine, created a new persona, the ‘Thin White Duke’.
David Bowie’s Eyes by Alex Phillips
David Bowie has always impressed with his face makeup, inspired by that used in traditional Japanese Kabuki theatre. However, after his death in 2016, when many articles about, and images of, the musician appeared, people began to comment on Bowie’s actual eyes, which appeared to be different colours: the right blue, the left black. Differently coloured eyes is the result of a rare condition called ‘complete heterochromia’; however, Bowie actually suffered from another condition known as ‘anisocoria’, which is characterised by unequal pupil sizes. Bowie’s left pupil was permanently dilated, creating the illusion of a darker iris.
Anisocoria is often harmless, although it sometimes occurs because of an issue with the nervous system or, in the worst scenarios, it can be a sign of a brain tumour. In Bowie’s case, it was the result of a fight with a classmate allegedly over a girl. Fifteen-year-old Bowie was punched in his left eye and his rival’s fingernail scratched its surface, paralysing the muscles that contract the iris. Were this not to have happened, the natural colour of both Bowie’s eyes would be blue. However, Bowie, being Bowie, embraced this peculiarity as part of his persona, saying the injury gave him a kind of mystique. He even included a lyric in one of his last songs, Blackstar, that appeared to refer to it. It went: “At the centre of it all, your eyes, your eyes…”
West Berlin
He then moved to West Berlin in 1976, where he made his trilogy of influential electronic, experimental music albums, Low, Heroes and Lodger. In the 1980s, Bowie moved into mainstream pop, most notably with Let’s Dance (1983). The singer made groundbreaking videos for the newly-arrived MTV to accompany the album’s singles, bringing him worldwide popularity.
Sad Death
As the 1990s progressed, Bowie continued to produce music, but he never again reached the heights of the 1970s and 1980s. His death on 10th January, 2016 provoked sadness, even grief, from fans and musicians around the world. Bowie’s legacy centres on the albums of the first twenty years of his career, probably the most adventurous sequence of LPs in the history of popular music
Bowie on Film by Alex Phillips
David Bowie has starred in a bunch of brilliant and/or bizarre movies. In The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), directed by Nicolas Roeg, he plays an alien who comes to Earth to save his own planet from a climate crisis, but is then tempted by vice. Bowie won a Saturn Award for the role. In the disastrous Just a Gigolo (1978), Bowie plays a gigolo in a Berlin brothel run by a character played by Marlene Dietrich. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) is an excellent Japanese-British war film directed by Nagisa Ōshima that competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, while Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) was a wildly expensive fantasy movie with a screenplay by Terry Jones that unexpectedly flopped at the box office, but has since acquired cult status. Bowie has also played secondary roles or cameos in diverse movies, from The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Zoolander (2001) to The Prestige (2006), in which he plays genius Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla.
