Obituary : David Bowie

Obituary : David Bowie

Rock superstar who had a profound impact on popular music and culture during 50 years of continuous artistic innovation 

To describe David Bowie as one of pop music’s most iconic and influential figures only begins to hint at his significance in the cultural firmament. With his constant shape-shifting, endless innovation and restless determination always to look forward rather than back, he was often described as a chameleon.
Yet he was more than that, for a chameleon changes in order to blend in with its surroundings. Bowie spent the greatest part of his career dictating trends and creating new, avant-garde landscapes in music, fashion and popular culture for others to follow. From the cosmic folk of Space Oddity, through the glam rock of Ziggy Stardust and the blue-eyed funk of Young Americans, to the electronic dance experimentation of Heroes and the synth-pop of Ashes to Ashes, his music changed the fabric of pop music and challenged his fans to keep pace with his ability to embrace new sounds.
When it was put to him that these frequently brilliant artistic metamorphoses were the work of a genius, he self-deprecatingly joked that it was “more a case of attention deficit disorder”, putting his creative ingenuity down to an inability to concentrate on one thing for any length of time.
In truth, the refusal to repeat himself was an aesthetic that he had set out in one of his earliest songs, Changes, in which the 24-year-old Bowie had sung:

“Turn and face the strange ch-ch-
changes, / Oh look out now you rock
and rollers / Pretty soon now you’re
gonna get older.”

Several years later he spoke of a desire to make music “so incredibly uncompromising” that he would have no fans left. In that, at least, he failed and perhaps his greatest achievement was that he not only managed to make cutting-edge art that was constantly evolving, but also succeeded in taking a mainstream audience with him. Over the course of his career, it was estimated that he sold almost 150 million albums.
His ambition, he once said, was to make pop music a “wider receiver” that could “incorporate ideas from other arts”. His success in this aim was evident in 2013, when the V&A museum in London curated an exhibition dedicated to his career containing more than 300 objects — spanning handwritten lyrics, stage costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos and set designs.
The breadth of his impact was evident in the list of those who paid tribute to his personal influence: his fellow musicians were joined by Tony Blair, David Cameron, JK Rowling, Whoopi Goldberg, the British astronaut Tim Peake and even the German Foreign Office, which thanked him for “helping to bring down the wall” and posted a link to his song Heroes.
Written while he was living and working in Berlin in the late 1970s, the lyric told of love across the brutality of the East-West divide:

“I can remember standing by the wall,
And the guns, shot above our heads
And we kissed, as though nothing
could fall / And the shame, was on the
other side.”

Among the most theatrical of all rock stars, he adopted a string of flamboyant alter egos including his most famous creation, Ziggy Stardust, named after a tailor’s shop and the Stardust Cowboy — and whom he described as “a cross between Nijinksy and Woolworths”.
Bowie’s first appearance as Ziggy on Top Of The Pops, dressed as an androgynous alien with orange hair and outrageous make-up, and with his arm draped around guitarist Mick Ronson, was the defining moment in the emergence of glam rock as a teenage fashion. It launched thousands of Ziggy-lookalikes on every high street.
With its self-referential rock’n’roll theme and blurring of fiction and reality, the accompanying album — Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars — has since been hailed as “the first postmodern pop record”.

When he announced the death of Ziggy from the stage at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, fans mourned as if it was a genuine bereavement. Bowie hosted a post-show retirement-party-cum-wake at the Café Royal, attended by Mick and Bianca Jagger, Paul and Linda McCartney, Lou Reed and Barbra Streisand. More sinister was the persona he adopted three years later when, taking a line from the title song of his Station To Station album, he became the Thin White Duke: a character who had a dangerous fascination with Nazism. Describing Adolf Hitler as “one of the first rock stars”, he opined that “Britain could benefit from a fascist leader” and argued that “people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership”.
In April 1976, he was detained by border police in eastern Europe and questioned about his possession of Nazi memorabilia. The following month, looking pale and emaciated due to the ravages of his cocaine addiction, he appeared to give a Nazi salute at Victoria Station from an open-topped Mercedes. Together with some equally unfortunate anti-immigrant comments by Eric Clapton, his pro-fascist remarks led other musicians and grass-roots activists to set up Rock Against Racism. Forced into a hasty retreat by the outcry, he blamed his comments on the cocaine that had left him “out of my mind, totally, completely crazed”.

By 1977, he was carefully insisting in interviews that he was totally “apolitical” and — apart from a cryptic message of opposition to Scottish independence at the time of the 2014 referendum — he eschewed, for the most part, further political comment throughout the rest of his career.
The look and character of the Thin White Duke had, in part, been borrowed from his first major film role, playing an alien in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. The diversity of his musical persona was matched by the versatility that he showed in his parallel screen career: prominent roles included playing a prisoner-of-war in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence; a goblin king in Labyrinth; Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ; an FBI agent in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me; and Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also spent a year in the title role of the Broadway production of The Elephant Man.
His shapeshifting as an artist was reflected, too, in the gender-bending of his personal life. There were a string of early girlfriends, including the dancer Hermione Farthingale, who was “the girl with the mousy hair” in Life On Mars, and Mary Finnegan, to whom he was first lodger and then lover. Finnegan organised a famous music festival in a Beckenham park in 1969 at which he played; it was later commemorated in his song Memory of a Free Festival.

In 1970, he married the 20-year-old Angie Barnett, a brash American who grew up in Cyprus and went to a Swiss finishing school. She claimed that, on their wedding day, they had enjoyed a three-in-a-bed romp; she gave birth a year later to Bowie’s son, whom they named Zowie, but is now known as the film director Duncan Jones. Bowie had by then already posed dressed as a woman on the cover of his album The Man Who Sold The World, and in 1972 — just as he was launching his androgynous Ziggy Stardust persona — he used a Melody Maker interview to announce that he was gay.
Some suspected it was a publicity stunt designed to shock prevailing moral prejudices, and he clouded the issue in later years by first confirming that he was bisexual and then issuing a quasi-denial in which he said he had always been “a closet heterosexual”. Finnigan also claimed that Bowie was more into women than men, and that “homosexuality with him was more opportunist and contrived”. Yet, according to Angie Bowie in her salacious 1993 memoir Backstage Passes — Life On The Wild Side With David Bowie, she and her husband operated a wildly promiscuous open marriage and swung both ways as “the best-known bisexual couple ever”. 
She reported that they had both enjoyed affairs with the singer Dana Gillespie and that she had once found Bowie in bed with Mick Jagger. She also claimed that he had seduced Bianca Jagger. “David made a virtual religion of slipping the Lance of Love into almost everyone around him,” she wrote. “He did a lot of cavorting but I was not going to be humiliated, so I made sure I did plenty of cavorting myself because that meant the playing field was levelled,” she said later. By the mid-1970s, the couple were starting to lead separate lives, both with dangerously out-of-control drug habits, while their son was largely brought up by nannies before being sent to board at Gordonstoun.

They divorced in 1980; she left the marriage with a £500,000 settlement and a ten-year gagging clause. She did not fight for custody and remained bitter towards her ex-husband, whom she accused of “poisoning” her son against her. Only days before Bowie’s death, she gave an interview in which she claimed that listening to his music made her “nauseous”.
Over the years he was equally uncomplimentary about his first wife, claiming that their relationship had been like “living with a blowtorch” and that she had “as much insight into the human condition as a walnut, and a self-interest that would make Narcissus green with envy”.
He married — more happily — the Somali-American model Iman Abdulmajid in 1992; his son acted as best man. Their daughter, Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, was born in 2000 and Bowie took pains to be a more dutiful father second time around. “I don’t want to start doing what I unfortunately did with my son, inasmuch as I spent an awful lot of time on tour when he was a young child. I really missed those years, and I know he did too.” Her birth also persuaded him to give up his 60-a-day smoking habit and take up meditation. He kept his main home in New York City but also owned properties in London and Sydney.

Always a master of controlling his image and manipulating his mystique, he grew increasingly private — even reclusive — in his mature years. He refused to give interviews or promote his records and abandoned the concert stage; his last tour took place in 2003 and his final performance came in 2006. There were occasional guest appearances on recordings by other artists and even rarer public sightings — he was seen as a proud father in 2009 at the premiere of Moon, his son’s debut as a film director. 

Rumours emerged of further health issues following surgery in 2004 for an acutely blocked coronary artery. He was said to be enjoying the simple pleasures of being with his family; watching box sets of his favourite TV shows, which reportedly included Downton Abbey; and reading the novels of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. The Times was his daily newspaper of choice. Most believed that he had retired from the fray for good, although his absence only seemed to enhance interest in him.
Out of the blue, in 2013, his website announced the imminent release of The Next Day — his first album in ten years. No explanation for why he had decided to return was offered. The record’s producer, Tony Visconti, described as Bowie’s “voice on Earth”, talked to the media on his behalf.
His surprise return generated something close to hysteria, with at least one front-page headline hailing “the comeback of the century”. Five-star reviews followed and the album went straight to No 1 — the first time Bowie had topped the charts in 20 years.

Three years later came another flurry of unannounced activity with an off-Broadway musical and another album, Blackstar. Released days before his death, the record included a song titled Lazarus, which Visconti — one of the few who knew that Bowie had received a diagnosis of cancer 18 months ago — described as his “parting gift” to the world.

The video for the song featured a blindfolded, fragile-looking Bowie laying in bed singing — “Look up here, I’m in heaven, I’ve got scars that can’t be seen”. It seemed that he was stage managing his career right up until his final departure. “His death was no different from his life — a work of art,” Visconti wrote on Facebook.

David Robert Jones was born in 1947 in Brixton, south London. The midwife present at his birth claimed to be a clairvoyant and allegedly observed: “This child has been on Earth before.” His father, John, had served with the 8th Army in north Africa during the Second World War; he had a penchant for the bottle and gambling, and ran a failed piano bar before taking an administrative job with the Dr Barnado’s children’s charity. His mother, Peggy, who had a son by a previous relationship, worked as a cinema usherette and had allegedly been a supporter of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in the 1930s. Whether she had any influence on her son’s later flirtation with fascism is not known. She did, however, reveal in a 1985 interview that, as a child, David had taken an unusual interest in her cosmetics bag, and at the age of three had daubed himself in eyeliner and face powder.

Mental illness ran in the family. Bowie’s half-brother, Terry Burns, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, from which he escaped in 1985 and lay on the tracks in the path of an oncoming train. Bowie did not attend the funeral but left a wreath and a card, saying: “You’ve seen more things than we could imagine but all these moments will be lost, like tears washed away by the rain.”

Themes of alienation were prominent in his songwriting, which he admitted was his form of therapy. “Most of my family have been to an analyst,” he said. “My parents went, my brothers and sisters went and my aunts and uncles and cousins. They ended up in a much worse state. I thought I’d write my problems out.”

When he was six, the family moved to the leafier suburb of Bromley, Kent, where he enjoyed a relatively comfortable lower middle-class upbringing. It provided the perfect paradigm of mundanity for his future escape. He failed his 11-plus and went to Bromley Technical High School, where he fell in love with the early rock’n’roll records of Little Richard and Elvis Presley.
Teaching himself to play the ukulele and tea-chest bass, he joined a skiffle group called George & The Dragons — led by George Underwood, who remained a lifelong friend despite punching Bowie in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Bowie needed a series of operations to save his sight, leaving him with a dilated pupil, which made it seem as though his eyes were different colours.

By the time he left school in 1963 with only O-level passes in art and woodwork to show for his education, he had added first guitar and piano to his repertoire — and then saxophone, after his half-brother had introduced him to the jazz records of John Coltrane. The standard R&B of his first bands, which included the Kon-Rads, the King Bees, the Mannish Boys and the Lower Third, offered little hint of what was to come. By 1966, he had gone solo and changed his name — after the American frontiersman who died at the Alamo and gave his name to the popular bowie knife.

Throwing himself into the bohemian world of London hippiedom, he took lessons in mime and dance from Lindsay Kemp at the London Dance Centre; flirted with Buddhism; developed an interest in aliens and UFOs; and set up an “Arts Lab” at the Three Tuns pub “deep in the heart of — God forbid — Beckenham”. After several false starts, including an early novelty single, The Laughing Gnome, on which he sounded uncannily like Anthony Newley, his first hit came in the summer of 1969 with Space Oddity, which was released to coincide with the first Apollo Moon landing. It was followed by the album Hunky Dory, with songs such as Life On Mars. Then came Ziggy Stardust — and nothing was ever the same again.

The next album was intended to be a concept album based on George Orwell’s 1984, a plan that was thwarted by the author’s estate, although several of the songs appeared on the chart- topping album Diamond Dogs; he also produced a concert album, David Live, but he was by now so strung out on drugs that he later suggested it should have been titled “David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory”.
After moving to America, there came another change of direction as he melodramatically announced that rock music was dead and embraced black dance music on Young Americans. The album included Fame, co-written with John Lennon; it gave Bowie his first US No 1.

While managers, middlemen and record companies grew rich on the back of his record sales, Bowie himself was close to bankruptcy despite his success. Like many of his contemporaries, he had signed contracts early in his career without reading them and a long legal battle ensued as he tried to rid himself of the leeches.
It provided a lesson that he never forgot. In later years his business affairs were managed carefully, and, in 1997, he became the first rock star to launch shares in his back catalogue with the “Bowie Bond”, which generated him £37.5 million. The Sunday Times Rich List in 2015 calculated his worth at £120 million.

To help kick a drug habit that by 1976 had grown “astronomic”, he left America to take up residence in tax-friendly Switzerland (another example of his newly-acquired financial acuity). The change of view unleashed a prolific period of creativity. Working with Brian Eno and recording in Berlin in a studio next to the infamous wall, he came up with a trilogy of dark, densely synthesized albums in Low, Heroes and Lodger. Ever the shapeshifter, he also collaborated with Bing Crosby on The Little Drummer Boy and narrated a version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

The 1980s brought more hits and changes of direction with Ashes to Ashes, Let’s Dance and a duet with Mick Jagger, Dancing In The Streets, before he took the surprising decision at the end of the decade to dissolve his solo career and form the band Tin Machine. Less surprisingly, he soon found group democracy painfully restrictive and by 1993 had resumed his solo career.
Subsequent projects included composing the soundtrack for the television adaptation of Buddha of Suburbia (written by his friend Hanif Kureishi), and an excursion into late 1990s dance, techno and drum’n’bass styles.

Bowie reportedly turned down an appointment to CBE and a knighthood. He said his main regret in life was that he had never written a book. Asked how he hoped to be remembered, he replied: “Nice trousers, I think I’m supposed to say. Or silly haircuts. Oh fuck, don’t do this to me.”

David Bowie, singer and actor, was born on January 8, 1947. He died of cancer on January 10, 2016, aged 69