David Bowie
Born in 1947, David began his musical career playing drums in a
dance band, wearing a bowtie and playing the Hokey Cokey.
Initially little more than an impersonator of early 60s novelty
pop singer Anthony Newley, Bowie wisely neutered his South London
barrow-boy twang in time to conquer the 70s.
As Davy Jones he fronted The Lower Third and released singles
like You've Got A Habit Of Leaving (produced by Shel
Talmy).
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 3 July
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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