 David Bowie
Shedding all previous incarnations, David
Bowie came to earth in 1970 ready to try something new. He had studied
mime and dance with the controversial Lindsay Kemp, co-founded the
arts performance venue the Beckenham Arts Lab in South East London,
and recorded Space Oddity. But all this was only an overture.
It took a long
time for the public to catch on to David Bowie. The media had sung his
praises for a number of years but it wasn't until the album Ziggy
Stardust came out in 1972 that Bowie's sales figures started to
reflect his reviews - his back catalogue also started to do brisk
business.
The follow-up
album, Aladdin Sane, appeared in April, and though unable to
match its predecessor, it got to Number One in the UK and the Top 10
in the US.
Dramatically, at
the height of his new found fame, on July 3 1973, on stage with the
Spiders From Mars at London's Hammersmith Odeon, David Bowie announced
"Not only is this the last show of the tour, but it's the last show
we'll ever do". Music papers held front pages, legions of teenagers
with recently dyed red hair went into shock, and the record company
rush-released Sorrow from the Pin-Ups LP.
 But
for Bowie himself, it was all part of a calculated decision . . . What
he was doing was setting the pattern for the next 20 years -
re-inventing his public persona as often as he felt it necessary to
keep his audience interested.
While any rock
star's change of image is good for a few column inches, Bowie had
worked out the career advantages of moving the goal posts so often and
so skillfully that he remained an enigma. His strategy kept everyone on
their toes; His audience had to keep guessing who he was; his
contemporaries could never out-Ziggy him, or beat him at his own game
because he would just re-write the rules and move on to Eurogloom or
blue-eyed soul, leaving the wannabes behind like dinosaurs.
Bowie was also geeing
himself up to stay at the cutting edge of his own career rather than
become a slave to it, cranking out the same old riffs as the law of
diminishing returns set in. It wasn't Bowie who had retired, it was
Ziggy. And anybody who had listened to the album would have known what
was happening. He came back almost immediately with Diamond Dogs,
an LP which embodied a maxim of the times, "nothing succeeds like
excess".
 In
1975, Bowie turned his hand to movies and began filming The Man Who
Fell To Earth. Meanwhile, as the emergent disco trend pushed the
pop/soul sound of Philadelphia towards the mainstream, Bowie latched
on to the trend with Young Americans, an album of white boy
soul.
Much of his next
album, Station To Station, maintained a disco-funk feel but at
the same time explored electronic music. From then to the end of the
decade, he collaborated with Brian Eno to produce a trilogy of
synthesizer-based albums; Low, Heroes and Lodger.
In September
1980, Bowie received rave reviews for his appearance on Broadway as
John Merrick, the Victorian sideshow freak known as The Elephant
Man. At the same time, his Scary Monsters album topped the
UK charts. The unsettling single Ashes To Ashes was his first
Number 1 UK single since Space Oddity (to which it was a kind
of belated sequel).
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