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 skilfully 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".
Diamond Dogs is often cited as the beginning of Bowie's
cocaine psychosis period, but in fact, it was recorded before he
started giving Hitler salutes at railway stations and aggravating
Eastern European customs officers with the books on Goebbels he
carried in his rucksack.
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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