David Bowie

David Bowie (1947- ), British singer and composer who combined rock and roll with an extravagant stage persona. Born David Jones in south London, he spent the latter half of the 1960s developing the relationship between music and fringe theatre. His first hit single, “Space Oddity” (1969), presented the character of Major Tom, an astronaut afraid of his imminent fame on Earth. Bowie followed this with a series of outrageous stage creations. The most popular of these was featured on the 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which depicted a rock star driven to destruction by the expectations of his audience. Bowie was also famous at this time for his androgynous dress.

He later turned his attention to American soul music, topping the American charts with the single “Fame” (1975), and the funk-inspired album Station to Station (1975), which included the single “Golden Years”, before travelling to Berlin to make a trilogy of influential electronic albums, beginning with “Low” in 1977. In 1980 he continued the story of Major Tom in the single “Ashes to Ashes”, and in 1983 released one of his most successful albums, Let’s Dance, of which the title track was also a million-selling single in Britain and the United States. Bowie has also been praised for his acting talents, most notably as the central alien character in the 1976 Nicholas Roeg film, The Man Who Fell to Earth; his other films include Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), directed by Nagisa Oshima, and Absolute Beginners (1986).

In 1989 he formed a relatively conventional band, Tin Machine, suggesting that his intense, image-changing period was over. Working as a solo artist again, he released the chart-topping Black Tie, White Noise in 1993, and in 1995 recorded the album Outside, which was produced by Brian Eno. In 1997 he further consolidated his solo career with the album Earthling, while Hours (1999) was the first major album to be launched on the Internet. In October 2002, shortly after the release of Heathen, Bowie resurrected his Ziggy Stardust persona for a one-off show at the Hammersmith Apollo, London—the same venue where Bowie had “killed off” his alter ego 30 years previously. Both Heathen and Reality (2003) received critical acclaim and in the autumn of 2003 Bowie embarked on a major world tour. A tour in 2004 was cut prematurely short when Bowie was diagnosed with an acutely blocked artery, and consequently underwent emergency heart surgery.