Bowie Style

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At manager Ken Pitt’s flat, London. 1967. Bowie renn 

embers: “At th is time I was wondering whether I WAnted 

to be a serious, mime or whether I should carry on with 

music. That’s an incredible top.” Pitt: “It was an Arabic 

bolero from Palestine, and belonged to my mother.”

Amsterdam, 1977. “I think I have a certain vocabulary 

that, however much I change stylistically, there is a real 

core of imagery. I don’t see any abrupt changes in what 

I’ve done.”

Only One Paper Left. New York, 1997, wearing Paul 

Smith: “I like to dress well, but it’s not something on which 

I felt my reputation should be built,” says Bowie.

An impeccably groomed Mod and a Millennium 

Man technophile. A riot of sexual confusion and 

a tanned, uncomplicated symbol of Eighties 

wealth. 

For four decades, David Bowie has been 

rock music’s most conspicuous mannequin and 

creator of fabulous fads and fashions – and 

outlived them all. 

Bowie’s formative years were spent chasing 

trends, often adding idiosyncratic touches to 

elevate himself above the crowd. Hitting a 

creative peak between 1972 and 1976, he 

transcended street style by reinventing himself 

into a one-man spectacular, a cultural whirlwind 

whose series of alter-egos – Ziggy Stardust, 

Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke – were 

lapped up by his flamboyant and dedicated 

flock with unflinching devotion. 

To his critics, who saw only costume-changes 

and grand theatrical gestures, Bowie was a 

clothes-horse who’d fast-tracked to stardom on 

a tide of hype. 

The sneers came thick and fast: Mock Rock, 

Glitter Rock, Shock Rock, Camp Rock, even 

Fag Rock, each invoked with a resigned shake 

of the head. Bowie was an arriviste, an invented 

star with the airs and whims of a pampered 

mistress in the hat department at Harrods.

Yes, Bowie’s project was about style and 

presentation, egos and whims. But beneath the 

shiny exteriors, those seemingly empty 

gestures, that lust to be looked at, was a brilliant 

new rock aesthetic – with David Bowie as its 

ideologue and showpiece. His playful mix-andmatch 

style wasn’t applied only to the costumes. 

Irreverence and pastiche also informed his 

music. He’d take the simple flash of Fifties 

rock’n’roll, the artful primitivism of little-known 

American warp-merchants The Velvet 

Underground and Iggy Pop, and give them a 

singer-songwriterly sheen. His concept of ‘The 

Star’, which he’d discuss with Warholian 

ingenuity, came gift-wrapped in fiction and 

artifice.

David Bowie revolutionised how rock looked. 

But he also changed how we looked at stars, 

and how we listened to music. Prior to his 

spectacular arrival in 1972, rock aspired to 

impress musicologists and literary types. 

Bowie’s most enduring influence was to drag 

rock music back to where the fiercest debates 

centred on authorship, sexual identity and the 

blurring of high and low art, debates that were 

later united under the postmodern banner. Far 

from smothering rock with foundation cream 

and elaborate stage sets, Bowie liberated the 

form, prompting a whole new set of debates 

and extending its limits. 

Bowie’s “style” has always amounted to more 

than clothes, hair and cosmetics. Style, for 

Bowie, is inextricable from art. It is the books he 

reads, the paintings he buys, the films he 

watches. It’s also bound up in the way he sees 

himself and how he lives his life. It is less a flight 

from reality than an entire way of life; that’s what 

makes him so fascinating. Anyone can adopt a 

series of guises in the name of art and build a 

stadium career out of it. In fact, many do. But

ultimately, Bowie is less about trappings and 

more about confronting the traps that seek to 

limit human potential. That quest has taken him 

from Beckenham to Babylon, from playful 

melodramas to the brink of insanity and death. 

The point of this book is not to repeat the 

details of Bowie’s musical career, which have 

been documented many times (though rarely 

with the thoroughness and insight of Peter and 

Leni Gillman’s Alias David Bowie, published in 

1986), but to explore his various stylistic guises 

in the context of their musical and cultural 

backdrops. 

BowieStyle provides the signposts to every 

transformation, looks at the influences and the 

icons that helped shape them, and the debates 

and the controversies that each inevitably 

provoked.

As the vampirish 18th century aristocrat, John 

Blaylock, in The Hunger, Luton, 1982.

SHAPING UP 

As early as 1962, Bowie was behaving pseudonymously, 

styling himself Dave Jay during his year with supper-club 

combo The Kon-rads. The name was inspired by Peter Jay and 

The Jaywalkers, who, according to Bowie, were only one of two 

British bands “that knew anything about saxophones.”

David Jones at 18 months, at his parents’ home in Brixton. 

David Bowie’s earliest ventures into style conform 

closely to a textbook reading of post-war 

subcultural fashions. As David Jones, he 

developed a youthful passion for rock’n’roll, 

matured into jazz, then saw a role for himself in the 

burgeoning rhythm and blues movement. He grew 

his hair, blossomed into a Mod peacock then, 

having rechristened himself David Bowie, adopted 

the pose of a sophisticated Europhile. 

Unfortunately, there was little demand for such a 

creature in 1967, when hippie fashions dominated. 

Hopelessly wrong footed, David licked his wounds 

for several months before coming on as Bob 

Dylan-style folkie, albeit prettier and with an eye for 

a gimmick. That was the David Bowie the world first 

glimpsed in 1969 when ‘Space Oddity’, a faintly 

macabre interpretation of space travel, gave him 

his first taste of success.

1.1 

The Buddha Of Suburbia 

Suburbia spawned the British Rhythm & Blues 

boom. Punk rock’s greatest outrages were created 

there. And so, too, was David Bowie. Suburbia, a 

social space favoured by those ostriches of 

humankind who demanded a peaceful haven away 

from the grit and grime of urban life, is muchmaligned. 

But its simple ways and suffocating 

properness have proved time and again to be a 

valuable creative aid. Nothing arouses imaginations 

more, it seems, than the comfort zone marked out by 

net curtains and leafy cul-de-sacs. 

David Bowie was often profoundly embarrassed 

by his years spent in the comfort zone; it just wasn’t 

his style. Biographies usually describe him as “the 

boy from Brixton”, an altogether different social 

setting and one that suggests excitement, danger 

and streetwise urban glamour. Not that the young 

David Jones ever saw much of that: his family had 

quit south London by the time he was six, opting for 

a two-up, two-down in Bromley, Kent. That’s where 

David grew up before the allure of central London 

drew him away. 

St. Matthews Drive, Bromley, scene of Bowie’s Buddha Of 

Suburbia video shoot. He gave the shrubbery on the right a 

damned good kicking. 

Years later, in 1993, Bowie recalled the mental

landscapes of his youth with a cool, but hardly 

affectionate score for The Buddha Of Suburbia, a 

four-part television adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 

1990 novel. The project was tailor-made for him. 

Kureishi was a Bowie enthusiast who’d also plotted 

his escape while attending Bromley Tech; Bowie 

could hardly have failed to recognise himself in the 

title, even if the book’s pop-seeker was based on a 

comtemporary of Kureishi’s, punk star Billy Idol.

The boy David. By 1953 the Jones family had swapped 

Brixton for Bromley - “the crummy bit,” Bowie recalled. 

It could be said that David’s first infant outfit, a 

nappy, later influenced the Sumo wrestler’s truss he 

wore on stage in 1973, but the building-blocks that 

helped shape his life, and the way he presented 

himself, had little to do with clothes. A likeable 

schoolboy and a popular Cub, with a keener interest 

than most for playing Cowboys and Indians, David 

was introduced to life beyond the comfort zone by 

his half-brother Terry. Terry, who was several years 

older, was a jazz enthuasiast with Beatnik ways. 

Often absent, his influence was primarily symbolic: 

he became David’s first idol whose wayward ways 

inevitably nourished his sibling’s later nonconformity. 

With Billy Idol, 1990. “It’s a sort of an amalgam of Billy, and 

Hanif’s impressions of what I probably was like. The silver suit, I 

think, was definitely me.” - Bowie’s thoughts on the Charlie Hero 

character in the BBC adaptation of The Buddha Of Suburbia. 

An outsider by virtue of his status as Peggy Jones’ 

son from a previous relationship, Terry continued to 

exercise a strange hold on David’s imagination until 

his suicide in 1985. After he fell ill during the mid- 

Sixties and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, an 

illness that seemed to run in the family, Bowie was 

frightened yet fascinated. From the split personas of 

the Seventies to individual songs (one, ‘All The 

Madmen’, famously proclaimed that asylum inmates 

were “all as sane as me”), insanity became an 

enduring theme in Bowie’s work. 

David Jones’ fantasy life was further fuelled by 

America, a Technicolor funhouse stuffed with

gadgets and dream-factories, and rock’n’roll, which 

introduced a strange-looking, and even strangersounding, 

cast of miscreants into his life. He was 

nine in 1956, when rock’n’roll swept through Britain, 

but already old enough to plump for two of its most 

visually striking stars – mean’n’moody Elvis Presley 

and flamboyant Little Richard. Stars fascinated 

David. His father gave him an autograph book and 

took him backstage to meet Tommy Steele. David 

became hooked on fame. 

Aladdin nappies in Glasgow, 1973.

May 1964. Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Tommy Steele.

BOWIECHANGESPOP 

Bowie: “I was always accused of being cold and unfeeling. 

It was because I was intimidated about touching people.” 

“Sometimes I don’t feel like a person at all, I’m 

just a collection of other people’s ideas.” You 

wouldn’t have heard Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, or 

Pete Townshend talking like that, but in June 1972, 

as Ziggymania was transforming him into the most 

discussed performer in pop, David Bowie was 

turning the concept of The Star on its head. It 

seemed as much about manufacture and 

manipulation as it was music. 

As the year began, Bowie had playfully predicted 

his own stardom, and then let his alter-ego, Ziggy 

Stardust, do all the hard work for him. 

The media gleefully dubbed him “The first rock 

star of the Seventies” knowing full well that the 

phrase had been concocted by Bowie’s manager. 

For 18 months, Bowie/Ziggy played the part of the

Superstar to the hilt. Only favoured journalists and 

photographers were given access to him; tours of 

Britain, America and Japan were conducted in a 

manner usually reserved for royalty; a phalanx of 

burly bodyguards surrounded Bowie at all times, 

while the attendant entourage travelled everywhere 

in limos. A mantra, “Mr. Bowie does not like to be 

touched,” was recited as if safe passage to a blissful 

afterlife depended on it. In emphasising the 

manufacture of stardom – using fictitious aliases, 

hype, and revelling in Hollywood-like plasticity – 

Bowie both uncovered and exploited the pop 

fantasy. The art was in the deconstruction; the 

outcome, as Bowie had always intended, was the 

real thing. What he couldn’t have predicted was the 

scale of his success; how, like the legends of Garbo 

or Valentino, the more remote and ‘false’ he 

became, the more his popularity grew. No one had 

reckoned with the repressed desire for old-style 

stars – glamorous, larger-than-life and endowed with 

unfathomable mystery. 

David Bowie wasn’t the first manufactured 

Superstar, but he was the first to make the ‘creation’ 

an integral part of his enterprise. By using the device 

of an alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, his bid for fame was 

both a quest and a goal. It is this distancing 

technique that lies at the heart of Bowie’s 

achievement. Pre-Ziggy rock artists (with the 

possible exception of Bob Dylan) were essentially 

one-dimensional men whose talents were measured 

according to the rules of poetic or musical 

competence. Bowie widened the rules to include 

visual elements, then bent them completely out of 

shape with a ‘knowingness and nothingness’ clause 

that dragged artifice into art. It was the end of 

innocence.

Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, detached idols from 

cinema’s silent age. 

Lest we make the same mistakes as our less 

enlightened predecessors, the Bowie effect also 

impacted on musical style. The seeds of a potential 

crisis had already been sown by Marc Bolan, whose 

tinsel take on Fifties rock’n’roll had enraged 

progressive purists who suspected it was merely 

nostalgia via the back-door. As Melody Maker’s 

Roy Hollingworth commented in April 1972: “Is it your 

turn to tell the younger generation that they don’t 

know what real music is?” he asked readers. 

“The jacket was a French import made of nylon, though it 

had a leather look. He called this outfit his ‘James Dean plastic 

look’ and posed with that attitude: Ziggy Stardust, movie star, 

sighted in Hollywood, exposed for your pleasure.” - 

photographer Mick Rock. 

Bolan’s revival of the three-minute, three-chord 

song form indeed flouted rock’s two-decade 

advance. But was it so bad? Hadn’t the rush to 

become a respectable art form based on the 

archetypes of literature and classical music 

prompted a seepage of double-LPs where 

preposterous morality plays, often inspired by

Tolkien, would be played out to the sound of frenzied 

muso sparring. 

The “singing boutique” in action. 

Against this background, Bowie’s fleet-footed 

contrivance of an alternative rock canon – which 

included American sleazoid trashmongers Iggy Pop 

and The Velvet Underground, and Midlands 

miscreants Mott The Hoople – inevitably offended 

critical sensibilities. Like Bowie’s ersatz star pose, 

the effects weren’t really felt until punk. 

When Bowie made his grand entrée in 1972 with 

Ziggy Stardust, he played a cat-and-mouse game 

with one of rock’s central referents – identity.

As Ziggy became Aladdin Sane, and Bowie a 

“grasshopper” for whom role-play was a more gainful 

pursuit than the spurious notion of ‘finding himself’, 

the very foundations of rock shuddered. Bowie 

declared he was gay, played the part of an 

androgyne from alien parts and forced audiences to 

confront their sexuality. The certainties came 

tumbling down. His concerts became multi-media 

extravaganzas incorporating mime, theatre and film. 

His songs, deceptively simple but skilfully 

administered, may even have been pastiches. David 

Bowie could be artfully highbrow or shamefully crass, 

a Romantic visionary or a postmodern bricoleur 

before such a thing was ever contemplated. One 

thing was definite: during 1972 and 1973 he altered 

the look, the sound and the meaning of rock’n’roll. 

For this achievement alone, he secured a vital place 

in history.

Bowie dressed in a quilted black plastic body suit, designed 

by Kansai Yamamoto, who commented: “Bowie has an unusual 

face. He’s neither a man nor a woman. There this aura of 

fantasy that surrounds him. He has flair.”

David’s father Haywood Stenton ‘John’ Jones, worked for 

children’s charity Dr. Barnado’s Homes. Bowie would 

occasionally sing for the orphans in the Sixties.

When you’re a boy, they dress you up in uniform. Bromley 

Tech’ was “the posh bit. I was a working class laddie going to 

school with nobs.”

A semi-autobiographical scene from Merry Christmas, Mr 

Lawrence, in 1982. 

John Jones was a firm, conventional man whose 

chief influence on his son was his lower middle class 

reserve. Years later, Bowie recalled his father’s “iron 

discipline” and the wartime mentality that scarred his 

parents’ generation. In a 1968 interview in The 

Times, he complained: “We feel our parents’ 

generation has lost control, given up, they’re scared 

of the future… I feel it’s basically their fault that things 

are so bad.” The innocence and happiness of 

childhood is something Bowie revisited several 

times during his early adult life. There was nothing 

ambivalent about a line like “I wish I was a child 

again / I wish I felt secure again”, which he sang in 

1966. His first L P, released the following year, was 

virtually a lament to a vanquished childhood: “There 

Is A Happy Land,” he insisted, where “adults aren’t 

allowed”. 

Puberty broke the spell of universal brotherhood 

and encouraged competition and, in turn, personal 

development. At Bromley Technical High School 

(1958-63), the teenage David liked art and chased 

girls. More than that, the lanky schoolboy developed 

a compulsive need to stand out from the crowd, and 

test the bounds of popular taste. These two school 

photographs reveal the transformation. On the left, in 

1959, the pre-teen David, with his regulation haircut 

and smart uniform, looks every inch the model pupil. 

For the second (below), taken in 1962, his body is 

angled provocatively, his head crowned by a bizarre, 

space-age quiff, a thick blond streak added for 

dramatic effect. He’d become the classic teenage 

rebel, all attitude and self-consciousness.

Almost Grown. “He was always into a thousand things. 

David always wanted to be different, though in those days he 

was just one of the lads.” - life-long friend George Underwood.

”I didn’t mind a sense of elegance and style as a child, but I 

liked it when things were a bit off. A bit sort of fish-and-chips 

shop.”

I’M YOUR FAN 

Bowie celebrated his 50th birthday with an allstar bash at 

Madison Square Garden, New York, 1997.

On 9 January 1997, Bowie celebrated his 50th 

birthday (a day late) in front of a 20, 000-strong 

audience at New York’s Madison Square Garden. 

There was no Spiders From Mars revival. No Iggy 

Pop or Mick Jagger or Tina Turner. Instead, Bowie 

surrounded himself with some of his sharper friends, 

like Sonic Youth, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy 

Corgan, Foo Fighters, ex-Pixie Frank Black and The 

Cure’s Robert “What do I do with this lipstick?” 

Smith. The only other old boy was Lou Reed. 

Sometimes, though, it suits the young pretenders to 

seek Bowie out…

Suede 

Twenty years later, the “I’m Gay… but then again 

maybe I’m not” strategy was revived by Suede’s 

Brett Anderson. It won Suede a few extra magazine 

covers, and secured the insatiable Anderson an 

audience with Bowie for an NME ‘summit meeting’ 

and cover. 

Nine Inch Nails 

Trent Reznor’s pretty hateful noise machine hitched 

a ride on the US leg of Bowie’s Outsidetour which, 

by no coincidence, featured the NIN-influenced ‘Hallo 

Spaceboy’. Reznor has remixed a couple of Bowie 

songs, ‘The Hearts Filthy Lesson’ and ‘I’m Afraid Of 

Americans’, and has taken to working with several of 

Bowie’s backing musicians. 

Morrissey 

Glam aficionado Morrissey shared a stage with 

Bowie in 1991 for a version of Marc Bolan’s 

‘Cosmic Dancer’, and coaxed Mick Ronson back to 

produce his 1992 album, Your Arsenal , which 

included the Bowie-esque ‘I Know It’s Gonna 

Happen Someday’, complete with ‘Rock’n’Roll

Suicide’-style coda. “David Bowie doing Morrissey 

doing David Bowie” was too good to miss, said 

Bowie, who promptly re-recorded the track for Black 

Tie White Noise. 

Nirvana 

David Bowie’s reputation received an unexpected 

boost when Kurt Cobain’s group of grunge stalwarts 

gave a sterling performance of ‘The Man Who Sold 

The World’ for an MTV Unplugged TV special in 

1993. 

Just a few months later, Cobain had, in his 

mother’s words, joined “that stupid club”, a real-life 

“rock’n’roll suicide”. Five years, that’s all he got. 

Placebo 

Panda-eyed Brian Molko has studied Bowie’s 

strategies closely. And he’s been generously 

rewarded with a studio collaboration, ‘Without You 

I’m Nothing’, plenty of namechecks, and a joint 

appearance with David Bowie on the 1999 Brit 

Awards show.

A rare publicity shot of The Kon-rads, circa 1963. “We wore 

gold corduroy jackets, I remember, and brown mohair trousers 

and green, brown and white ties, I think, and white shirts. 

Strange colouration.” 

By 1962, the Teddy Boy look already belonged to 

the previous decade, but stray remnants of the style - 

narrow tie, drainpipe trousers - could still earn 

reputations for 15-year-old boys. Already, styles 

were being mixed, and David’s winklepicker shoes 

and button-down shirts, both recent imports from 

Italy, were evidence of the emerging Modernist look, 

a sophisticated, aspirational style that contrasted 

with the Teds’ aggressive working-class stance. 

Bowie later enthused about the new breed to 

journalist Timothy White: “These weren’t the anorak 

Mods (who) turned up on scooters… They wore very 

expensive suits; very, very dapper. And make-up 

was an important part of it; lipstick, blush, 

eyeshadow, and out-and-out pancake powder… It 

was very dandified.” 

Chic, modern and highly individualistic, the Mod 

ethic proved instantly seductive to aspiring 

peacocks like David Jones and his mate, George 

Underwood. But their competitiveness sometimes 

strayed beyond fashion and music. An argument 

over a girl called Deirdre in 1962 ended when 

George walloped David in the eye, leaving him with

an indelible characteristic that even surpassed his 

left-handedness for marking him out as ‘different’ - a 

permanently dilated pupil in his left eye that leaves 

the impression that one eye is much darker than the 

other. 

The King Bees, 1964. George Underwood is on the far left. 

David claimed the other members were “some guys from 

Brixton I met in a barber’s shop”

The dilated pupil in Bowie’s left eye, the apparent legacy of 

a punch-up with pal George Underwood, may, some suggest, 

have actually been caused by an accident with a toy propeller.

INFLUENCES & HEROES: HOOKED 

TO THE SILVER SCREEN 

Influences and heroes play an enormous part in 

Bowie’s life and work. 

A born enthusiast, who can’t help but share his 

passion for little-known writers or new musical fads, 

Bowie virtually invented off-the-peg cultural capital 

single-handedly. Commodity fetishism? Perhaps. 

An empty display? Well, he does have a fast 

turnover rate, but that’s more likely a reflection of 

his thirst for new ideas. 

Films and film idols have provided Bowie with an 

endless source of material. He’s nicked a few titles 

for his songs, a few images for his album covers. 

He’s even made one or two memorable 

contributions to the silver screen himself. 

A Clockwork Orange 

Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’s novel 

proved so disturbing that the director withdrew it 

from cinemas just a year after its release in 1971. 

Promoted as “the adventures of a young man whose 

principal interests are rape, ultraviolence and 

Beethoven”, the movie was plagiarised by Bowie for 

its look, its ‘nadsat’ (street slang), and its theme

music, Wendy Carlos’s Moog take on Beethoven’s 

‘Ode To Joy’, which was used to herald the Spiders’ 

arrival on stage during 1972 and ‘73. The piece 

reappeared as intro music for Bowie’s 1990 Sound 

+ Vision tour. 

Un Chien Andalou 

Dead donkeys rest inside pianos. A woman, 

dressed in masculine-style attire, pokes at a 

severed hand. A cyclist inexplicably falls off his bike. 

Anonymous breasts are fondled. But before all this, 

a woman’s eye is opened and neatly slit with a razor. 

The film is Un Chien Andalou, a masterpiece of 

avant-garde cinema concocted by surrealist 

mischief-makers Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. 

Apart from the time Roxy Music supported him at the 

Rainbow, this 17-minute short – projected before his 

1976 Station To Station shows – is the best support 

act Bowie’s ever had. And, perhaps, the inspiration 

for that memorable “throwing darts in lovers’ eyes” 

quip. 

Metropolis 

Fritz Lang’s 1926 masterpiece of German 

Expressionist cinema, a futuristic study in glorious 

art deco, was brought to Bowie’s attention by 

Amanda Lear. After viewing the film, early in 1974, 

he devoured everything he could find on Lang and 

related subjects. Several years later, Bowie was 

poised to bid for the film rights, until producer 

Giorgio Moroder beat him to it. Metropolis, and 

another Expressionist classic, The Cabinet Of 

Doctor Caligari, provided the inspiration for the stark 

imagery of the 1976 stage shows.

Bowie playing the alien in Nic Roeg’s 1976 film, The Man 

Who Fell To Earth.

Bunuel and Dali’s surrealist short, Un Chien Andalou, with 

its controversial eye slitting shot, provided a shocking support 

act for Bowie’s 1976 tour. 

‘Wild Is The Wind’ 

Bowie revived the title song of this 1957 George 

Cukor melodrama, starring Anna Magnani and 

Anthony Quinn, for Station To Station. However, he 

probably came to it via Nina Simone’s Sixties 

recording of the song, which he has cited as his 

favourite ever recording.

2001: A Space Odyssey 

Stanley Kubrick transformed an Arthur C Clarke 

story into a mesmerising cinematic acid trip in 1968. 

The denouement – a spaceman drifts into oblivion – 

was a clear inspiration for Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, 

which also owed some of its success to the space 

race that ended on July 20, 1969 when Neil 

Armstrong became the first man on the moon. 

‘Beauty And The Beast’ 

Jean Cocteau’s magical interpretation of the fairy 

story was filmed in 1945 as La Belle Et La Bete 

(below). Bowie recorded his version for 1977’s 

“Heroes”. 

Richard Burton plays ‘Angry Young Man’ Jimmy Porter in 

the 1959 movie, Look Back In Anger. Mary Ure, left, and Claire 

Bloom, right, co-star. 

‘Starman’ 

That chorus sound familiar? “It was actually meant to 

be a male version of ‘Over The Rainbow’, 

“confessed the man once described as a “Judy

Garland for the rock generation”. The song was 

made popular by Garland in the 1939 evergreen, 

The Wizard Of Oz (below). 

‘Look Back In Anger’ 

This John Osborne play, a key Angry Young Man 

text, was filmed by Tony Richardson in 1959 and 

popularised the idea of the solitary male raging 

against his sorry lot. 

Lodger 

Roman Polanski’s 1976 movie, The Tenant, was a 

morbid study in paranoia and insanity, and a likely, 

though rarely acknowledged, source for the 

Lodgeralbum title. 

‘Dead Man Walking’ 

Sean Penn directed and co-starred with Susan 

Sarandon in this Oscar-winning true story from the 

mid-Nineties. 

‘Seven Years In Tibet’ 

Heinrich Harrer’s account of an ex-Nazi on the run 

from the Allies, who journeys to the mountains of 

Tibet where he befriends the Dalai Lama, provided 

an ideal launching-pad for a Bowie song.

1.2 

It’s A Mod, Mod World 

Wearing Chelsea boots and three-button suit with double 

back vent: “I didn’t really like the Teddy clothes too much. I liked 

Italian stuff. I liked the box jackets and the mohair. You could get

some of that locally in Bromley, but not very good. You’d have to 

go right up to Shepherd’s Bush or the East End.” 

Between 1963 and 1966, London became the 

style capital of the world. Galvanised by the 

resounding thud of the Beatles-inspired beat boom, 

Britain’s first post-war generation cast off the 

National Service mindset in favour of a riot of selfexpression. 

Carnaby Street was awash with 

boutiques, scooters roared down busy city streets 

and the state of the nation debate centred on the 

length of young men’s hair. 

David Jones, already on intimate terms with his 

bedroom mirror, was perfectly poised to join the 

cultural revolution. He was obsessed by stardom, 

taste and style which, in true Mod fashion, would 

change with the weather. His attention to such 

matters gave him his first taste of media controversy 

when, in November 1964, he was invited onto a 

television show to defend the right of young men to 

grow their hair. His first concern, though, was carving 

a niche for himself on the music scene. 

Unfortunately, it was the era for groups, so David 

was forced to throw in his lot with other musicians. It 

was a frustrating period for him, with success 

proving more elusive than he might have imagined. 

“I didn’t like riding scooters,” admitted Bowie. Though that

didn’t stop him having this one customised for promotional 

purposes years after the Mod boom. 

A newly peroxided Davie Jones with The King Bees 

performing ‘Liza Jane’ on BBC2’s The Beat Room, June 1964.

Portrait of a young man as an art buff. In satin trousers at 

manager Ralph Horton’s flat in 1966.

PAINTER MAN 

I Am A World Champion, 1977, (below). “In neither music 

nor art, have I a real style, craft or technique. I just plummet 

through, on either a wave of euphoria or mind-splintering 

dejection.” 

During the early Seventies, David Bowie 

transformed rock by applying contemporary art 

concepts to a medium that lived in the shadow of 

19th century Romanticism. He compared himself to 

a Rosetti painting, name-dropped Andy Warhol to 

anyone who’d listen, and sought to elevate rock 

performance to the status of high art. Bowie even 

patronised Belgian artist Guy Peelaert, who was 

commissioned to paint the cover of the 1974 LP, 

Diamond Dogs. 

Bowie was an aesthete, for sure, but a practising 

fine artist? Not according to this quip made during a 

1973 interview: “When I was an art student I used to 

paint but when I decided I was no good at painting, I 

set myself to writing, to say the things I’d wanted to 

say through painting.” Times have changed; today, 

Bowie is as embroiled in fine art as he is in rock. 

He’s not only a patron, but a publisher, a critic and, 

most importantly, an exhibiting artist. 

His interest in painting was aroused by a school 

art teacher. Owen Frampton’s art classes 

encouraged freedom of expression, and David 

flourished under his master’s direction, obtaining a

are O-level pass in the subject. His artistic flair was 

also felt at home where he painted cave-like images 

on the walls of his bedroom. 

With 1976’s Head Of J.O., his portrait of Iggy Pop, Los 

Angeles, 1990 (below). In the early Nineties, Bowie renamed his 

song publishing company Tintoretto Music, after the Italian 

Renaissance painter. 

Frampton, whose guitar-playing son Peter was 

also destined for a musical career, helped David 

find his first job as a trainee graphic artist in a West 

End advertising agency. He lasted six months. 

Making teas and performing menial tasks killed off 

his enthusiam. Pop stardom, which would give him 

control and fame, proved far more appealing. When 

that failed, and he was taken under the wing of a new 

manager, Ken Pitt. Bowie’s enthusiasm for art was 

reawakened by Pitt’s enthusiasm for Aubrey 

Beardsley and the late Victorians. 

Paul McCartney’s Bowie Spewing, 1990 (right). David: 

“When you are an artist you can turn your hand to anything, in 

any style. Once you have the tools then all the artforms are the 

same in the end.” 

But the great revelation came when he discovered

Andy Warhol. Warhol worked with the shiny surfaces 

of consumer society, like soup cans and tins of 

Coke. But he also magnified modern horrors, like 

the electric chair, car crashes, the media’s desire to 

see grief. Even more intriguing was Warhol’s 

persona, as blank as a plain canvas. It was possibly 

his greatest work of all.

Fulham, 1995, with samples of his work (clockwise from 

left): Little Stranger, Metal Hearth And The Black Coat, 1993; 

The Crowd Pleasers, 1978; The Remember II, 1995; Ancestor, 

1995.

Portrait of the artist in four parts. 1996 Self Portraits, 

available from www.bowieart.com.

Walter Gramattè’s 1921 canvas, Selbstbildnis in Hiddensoe, 

was the partial inspiration for Bowie’s “Heroes” album sleeve. 

The more Bowie read about modern art, the more he 

realised that rock was still in the dark ages. Picasso 

and Dali had confounded audiences with sudden 

changes in style and flagrant self-promotion 

decades ago. Art had proved powerful enough to 

withstand the anti-art strategies of the Dadaists and 

Surrealists, whose visual time-bombs had 

threatened to make art irrelevant. All these issues 

thrilled Bowie, and helped shape the intellectual 

backdrop to his work in the early Seventies. Bowie 

always doodled – Radio 1 producer Jeff Griffin 

remembers him sketching a Ziggy-inspired The 

Entertainer Who Is Shot On Stage during a 1972 

recording session. But it was while filming The Man 

Who Fell To Earth in 1975, when Bowie had time on 

his hands and a barren, New Mexico sagebrush 

desert to contemplate, that he began sketching in 

earnest. By the time of his 1976 tour, he carried a 

sketch-book everywhere. his thirst for art had 

become all-consuming. He continued to paint, buried 

himself in text-books and artists’ monographs, 

began investing in little-known contemporary works, 

and was a frequent visitor to the Brucke Museum Of 

Expressionist Art in West Berlin. Two paintings in 

the Brücke collection inspired album sleeves: Erich 

Heckel’s Roquairol provided the model for Iggy 

Pop’s engaging pose on his Bowie-assisted 1977 

album, The Idiot ; while the similarly-angular poise of 

Gramatté’s self-portrait was adopted by Bowie for 

his “Heroes” album. A third, Otto Mueller’s intense, 

eerily prescient Lovers Between Garden Walls (this 

was Berlin, remember), was an inspiration for the

title track. Bowie’s art aspirations – and connections 

– became more fully realised during the Nineties. 

In 1993, he joined the board of the quarterly 

magazine Modern Painters ; where he’s contributed 

articles and reviews on various subjects, including 

Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons (with 

Bowie, above), African art and a 12, 000 word piece 

on Balthus. He’s courted the BritArt generation, 

particularly Damien Hirst, (above) with whom he 

collaborated on some ‘spin art’ (right). He is also a 

director of 21, a publishing company specialising in 

fine art books. Titles so far include artist/critic 

Matthew Collings’ Blimey! and William Boyd’s 

biography of fictitious artist Nat Tate. 

Bowie first exhibited a whole series of artworks in 

1994 when We Saw A Minotaur was included as 

part of Little Pieces From Big Stars, a fund-raising 

collection of celebrity art. In April 1995, The Gallery In 

Cork Street mounted his first one-man show, New

Afro/Pagan And Work 1975-1995, a retrospective 

that included Expressionist-influenced figurative 

work, sculptures and computer-generated wallpaper 

designs. The majority of the collection was sold (one 

piece fetched a respectable £17, 500), prompting a 

second show in Basle, Switzerland the following 

year. Since then, Bowie has become increasingly 

enthralled by computer-generated images, which he 

now sells via his BowieArt website. 

With Balthus at the latter’s chalet in Rossiniere, 

Switzerland, June 1994. 

With Damien Hirst at Cork Street, London, April 1995. 

For all the talk of media cross-pollinisation, critics 

have found Bowie’s fine art aspirations difficult to 

take. Statements like “I’m a mid-art populist and 

postmodernist Buddhist who is casually surfing his 

way through the chaos of the late 20th century” are 

probably not the best way to mollify his detractors. 

According to his agent Kate Chertavian, these 

suspicions are misplaced: “I think his credibility 

grows with each year and each successful project 

that he does.” She maintains that his work will

endure, “partly because he is one of the first to cross 

mediums like this successfully.” 

Damien Hirst and David Bowie… beautiful, hello, spaceboy 

painting, 1995.

Bowie recently revamped The Crowd Pleasers as a unique 

postcard piece for a Royal College of Art exhibition where the 

identity of the artist is only revealed on the reverse after 

purchase. Price? Just £35 

“I wouldn’t have my hair cut for the Prime Minister, let alone 

the BBC,” declared defiant Davie in March 1965. With him is TV 

producer Barry Langford, who reignited the long-hair debate to 

publicise his new BBC2 show, Gadzooks! 

Before venturing into the cultish world of R&B, and

the dandified universe of the Mod, David cut his 

musical teeth with a local covers band, The Konrads. 

Early publicity shots show the group smartly 

turned out in matching suits and ties, the kind of 

budget sophisticate look favoured by the pre-pop 

dance combos. David, strikingly blond and with an 

immaculate DA (duck’s arse) hairstyle, was the 

band’s frontman and visual focus, despite being the 

most inexperienced member. 

By early 1963, he was sporting a fashionable 

Beatle cut, encouraging the band to consider their 

presentation (apparently he suggested they wear 

zoot suits or Wild West outfits) and writing his own 

songs. Clearly, he had outgrown the passé and 

formula-ridden Kon-rads. Instead, he began raiding 

Carnaby Street dustbins for expensive Italian castoffs, 

and threw his lot in with the hard-edged music 

emerging from the London clubs. 

Rhythm & Blues (R&B), a bi-product of the jazz 

scene, was the biggest musical undercurrent in 

1963, and a dominant commercial force over the 

next two years thanks to the success of groups like 

The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Yardbirds and 

Them. More than a musical style, R&B was a 

mission; its followers were zealots, usually 

disaffected young men who envied the success of 

The Beatles and the Mersey groups, but regarded 

them with suspicion. 

In adopting the music, attitude and argot of the 

American black man, the white suburban blue boys 

occupied the cultural high ground. Beatle-mania was 

loveable, moptoppish and ubiquitous. R&B was its 

surly, shabbier cousin, who preferred to be on the 

outside looking in. 

For the next year or so, David Jones invested in a 

pair of casual trousers and waistcoat and immersed 

himself in R&B. Less concerned with debates about 

purism and ‘authenticity’ (he favoured the newer 

jazz/soul flavours over the founding fathers from 

Chicago and the Mississippi Delta), he fronted a 

succession of bands (Dave’s Reds & Blues, The 

Hooker Brothers) looking every inch the Brian Jones 

(Rolling Stones) or Keith Relf (Yardbirds) wannabe.

The Mannish Boys in Maidstone’s Mote Park, 1964: “It’s all 

criminals round there. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been 

beaten up. This big herbert just knocked me on the pavement, 

and proceeded to kick the shit out of me. I haven’t got many 

good memories of Maidstone.” 

After a couple of false starts, David joined The 

King Bees, whose lone 1964 single, ‘Liza Jane’, got 

lost amid the great R&B goldrush. The experience 

did allow him to indulge his passion for fashion, 

though, and as king of The King Bees, ‘Davie’ 

augmented the standard waistcoat and high-collared 

shirt look with a bizarre pair of calf-length suede 

boots. The dandification didn’t stop there: he wore 

several rings, a brightly-coloured cravat and sported 

a layered haircut that virtually doubled the size of his 

head. 

Within months, this gnome-like apparition had 

been replaced by the full ‘Keith Relf’. The long blond 

bob was far more flattering to his chiselled features, 

framing his classic face in the manner of a Swinging 

Sixties ‘dolly bird’. It was a look that would have 

tested the patience of every hairdresser, and 

aroused the wrath of the spotty beer boys on every 

street corner. 

Now vocalist with The Manish Boys, David had 

been ‘made’ President of the International League 

For The Preservation Of Animal Filament, later the 

Society For The Prevention of Cruelty To Long- 

Haired Men, a publicity scam arranged by his agent. 

It got his name in the papers, complaining that 

“anyone who has the courage to wear his hair down 

to his shoulders has to go through hell”, and on 

television, where he told Tonight presenter Cliff 

Michelmore: “For the last two years, we’ve had

comments like ‘darling’ and ‘Can I carry your 

handbag?’ thrown at us and I think it has to stop. 

In one 1964 interview, David insisted, “I would 

sooner achieve the status as a Manish Boy that Mick 

Jagger enjoys as a Rolling Stone than end up a 

small-name solo singer.” With his next group, The 

Lower Third, he had it both ways, adding his name 

as the prefix. Impatient and still desperately chasing 

success, he modelled the group on The Who, 

hitching mid-Sixties Carnaby Street Mod imagery to 

a more metropolitan take on R&B. The group’s first 

single, ‘You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving’, was a clear 

appropriation of The Who’s sound; they’d even 

roped in Who producer Shel Talmy for the session. 

As David’s pop modernist styles grew ever more 

flamboyant, his hipster strides, chisel-toed shoes 

and highly-cultivated (and lacquered)

Safely inside the BBC Television Centre, prior to performing 

“I Pity The Fool” with The Mannish Boys. Organist Bob Solly: 

“We all wanted to sing. We only let him join because (agent) Les 

Conn gave us the impression the person coming down was the 

black American blues singer, Davy Jones!”

INFLUENCES & HEROES: ALL THE 

OLD DUDES 

Mime artist Lindsay Kemp’s stage shows get ever more 

elaborate, but the thong remains the same.

Elvis Presley 

“I saw a cousin of mine dance when I was very 

young. She was dancing to Elvis’s ‘Hound Dog’ and I 

had never seen her get up and be moved so much 

by anything. It really impressed me, the power of 

music.” The 12-year-old David Jones told a schoolteacher 

that he intended to become “the British 

Elvis” – with whom he shared the same birthday, 8 

January. 

Terry Burns 

David’s elder half brother was handsome, imageconscious 

and, unlike his younger sibling, always at 

odds with the Jones family. He introduced David to 

beat books, jazz and philosophy, but his descent into 

schizophrenia, which became an enduring motif in 

Bowie’s work (most notably on ‘All The Madmen’ 

and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’), ended in his suicide in 

1985, inspiring another song, ‘Jump They Say’. “I 

saw so little of him and I think I unconsciously 

exaggerated his importance for me,” David said in 

1993. “I invented this hero-worship to discharge my 

guilt and failure, and to set myself free from my own 

hang-ups.” In the card that accompanied his funeral 

bouquet, Bowie wrote “You’ve seen more things than 

we could imagine…”

Lindsay Kemp 

Ken Pitt introduced Bowie to bourgeois art forms. In 

1967-68, maverick dancer Lindsay Kemp, who’d 

trained under mime master Marcel Marceau, invited 

Bowie into a more relaxed world that revolved 

around the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. There, 

Bowie learned about make-up, bodily control and 

flamboyant characters, the likes of whom he’d not 

come across in pop circles. “Wonderful, incredible,” 

said Bowie years later. “The whole thing was so 

excessively French, with Left Bank existentialism, 

reading Genet and listening to R&B. The perfect 

Bohemian life.” 

Anthony Newley 

One decidedly strange interlude during Bowie’s long 

march to discovering his ‘true’ voice was the 

appropriation of the mannered Mockney style of oldschool 

showbiz star Anthony Newley. His 1967 debut 

album might just as well have been titled Bowie 

Sings Tony. “Yes, we have another Tony Newley 

here alright,” quipped a New Musical Express 

reviewer.

Jacques Brel 

Bowie discovered Belgian chanson singer Jacques 

Brel in 1967 via a tribute record put together by Mort 

Schuman. Brel’s ‘My Death’ was a regular fixture in 

Bowie’s set between 1969 and 1973, by which time 

it was fully integrated into the Ziggy schema. Another 

Brel song, ‘Port Of Amsterdam’, was released as a 

B-side in 1973; meanwhile, Ziggy’s famous “You’re 

not alone” denouement was also Brel-inspired. 

Scott Walker 

The errant Walker Brothers frontman, who broke up 

the band and embarked on a genuinely enigmatic 

solo career, proved to Bowie that taking musical 

risks didn’t necessarily mean following the latest 

underground fad. Walker covered Brel songs, 

littered his lyrics with cultured and cinematic 

references and, David admitted in 1993, dated one 

of Bowie’s early girlfriends. Black Tie White Noise 

includes a version of Scott’s ‘Nite Flights’, from an 

LP inspired by Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. 

Mick Jagger

Bowie has always had sneaking admiration for the 

Rolling Stones frontman, a master of disguises 

whose ability to move with the times provides the 

template for rock’n’roll longevity. Jagger’s white Mr. 

Fish frock, elegantly worn at the Stones’ Hyde Park 

show in 1969, pre-empted Bowie’s “man’s dress”. 

(David attended the open-air gig where he heard 

‘Space Oddity’ previewed over the PA). Mick’s 

brilliant, persona-skipping character in Performance 

(1968), anticipated the role-playing riddles of Ziggy 

et al. 

Jagger in Hyde Park, 1969. “David has a much deeper 

essence than Mick. Bowie is an absolute deflector of 

whatever’s fashionable.” - Performance director, Nicolas Roeg. 

Tony Visconti recalls Bolan’s brief (below) contribution to 

‘London Bye Ta Ta’: “Just before David sings, “I loved her, I

loved her,” there’s a very high, whining guitar - that’s Marc.” 

Ray Davies 

The influence of the Kinks’ frontman, especially his 

well-observed vignettes of London life, cannot be 

underestimated. Bowie ended Pin Ups with a 

poignant version of Davies’ ‘Where Have All The 

Good Times Gone’, and also acknowledged The 

Kinks’ ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ on a 1996 tour. 

Syd Barrett 

Beautiful, terrifyingly gifted and blessed with the 

bittersweet curse of tragedy, Pink Floyd’s original 

songwriter might have been dismissive about 

Bowie’s ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ single (“I don’t think 

my toes were tapping at all”) in a magazine review, 

but his sharp fall from grace no doubt provided 

valuable source material for Ziggy Stardust. Barrett’s 

lyrics drew on mysticism, space travel, social 

observation and an unhealthy dose of childish 

whimsy, mirrored those of the late Sixties Bowie. 

David covered Barrett’s 1967 Pink Floyd hit, “See 

Emily Play”, on Pin Ups in 1973.

Buddha 

Bowie’s interest in this Eastern philosophy has been 

dismissed as little more than a fad by Angie Bowie 

and Ken Pitt, but references continue to find their 

way into his work. Buddhism’s most enduring legacy 

on Bowie may have impacted on a subconscious 

level. Reincarnation, the exchange of one identity for 

another, is a Buddhist belief. By tearing his mortal 

self apart at regular intervals, it could be said that 

Bowie was merely accelerating the process. 

Marc Bolan 

Bowie wasn’t the only ex-Mod wannabe from an 

unfashionable corner of London to alter the course of 

British rock during the early Seventies. 

His companion and sometime rival was T. Rex

mainman Marc Bolan, whose revivalist rock’n’roll 

riffs, flamboyant, look-at-me costumes and 

extravagant persona, provided a template for David 

to meddle with. Between 1968 and 1970, they 

shared producer, Tony Visconti, but ‘officially’ 

collaborated on record in just one day when Marc 

played guitar on Bowie’s ‘The Prettiest Star’ and 

‘London Bye Ta Ta’. After a period of intense rivalry, 

the pair were briefly reunited for an appearance on 

Bolan’s TV show in 1977, before Marc was killed in 

a car crash a week later. Bowie has occasionally 

performed Bolan’s work, duetting with Morrissey on 

‘Cosmic Dancer’ and in 1999 with Placebo for ‘20th 

Century Boy’. 

The Lower Third in Manchester Square, August 1965. 

Warwick Square, 1966. “I prefer to observe London from 

the outside, and to write about it.”

“There were some good tailors. The one I used to go to was 

the same one that Marc Bolan used to go to, a fairly well-known 

one in Shepherd’s Bush. I remember I saved up and got one suit 

made there. 

“I didn’t really have a hangout for clothes. I didn’t wear 

much that was fashionable, actually. I was quite happy with 

things like Fred Perrys and a pair of slacks.” 

bouffant just one step ahead of the adventurous 

pack, he became increasingly frustrated by failure. 

The Lower Third gave way to The Buzz in 1966, but 

with no appreciable change in fortunes, David 

sacked them before the year was out citing financial 

difficulties. The nearest he got to stardom was going 

to gigs in his manager’s Mark 10 Jaguar. 

But help was at hand. In September 1965, David’s 

then manager Ralph Horton was discussing his 

client with Ken Pitt, who’d been instrumental in the 

success of Manfred Mann a year or two earlier. Pitt 

advised him that with several David Jones’s already 

struggling to find a foothold in the business, including 

one young Mancunian soon to find fame with The 

Monkees, Horton’s charge ought to consider a name

change. He’d briefly called himself Dave Jay during 

The Kon-rads days, but for this do-or-die change, he 

instead delved back to his schoolboy fascination for 

the Wild West and came up with a name derived 

from a popular hunting knife used by Jim Bowie, a 

hero at the battle of the Alamo. From now on, he 

would be known as David Bowie. 

Rehearsals for Ready Steady Go! with The Buzz, March 

1966. The jacket was part of a “beautiful suit that I had made at 

Burtons. A tweed job, double-breasted with an Edwardian feel to 

it,” Bowie recalls.

With the male answer to the Dusty Springfield beehive up 

top, the artist formerly known as Jones looks to possible solo 

success. Some claim the change was also inspired by a 

mysterious uncle already blessed with the Bowie name.

MICK ROCK 

Bowie, pictured with photographer Mick Rock, in July 1973: 

“David has developed a true sense of his own mystique. He 

makes a fascinating study.” 

Mick Rock’s photographs chronicled the crucial 

months during 1972 and ‘73, when Ziggy Stardust 

and Aladdin Sane exploded onto the world stage. 

He was the only cameraman allowed inside the 

Bowie camp on a regular basis during this era. 

“The visual thing is what established him, the 

outrageousness of the costumes. My famous picture 

of him biting Mick Ronson’s guitar, which they ran as 

a full page ad in Melody Maker, got seen all over the 

place so that helped a lot. When I first met David, in 

February 1972 during the early stages of Ziggy 

Stardust, his image was very different from what it 

became at the end when it was super-sophisticated. 

He’d just got the hairdo done. It was more blond 

then, more his own colour, but it wasn’t long before it 

became the red that we know and love.

“He loves novelty, and will incorporate any new clothes or 

movements or attitudes into the detail of his repetoire on or off 

stage.” 

“Clearly he caught the zeitgeist in some interesting 

way. David is super bright but he’s also extremely 

intuitive about people and ideas. By the summer, 

after Ziggy had taken off, he was already producing 

Lou Reed and Mott The Hoople and he was hustling 

Iggy around. He became influential very quickly, not 

just in rock’n’roll terms but in the wider culture. I don’t 

think you could say he planned it all; he was like a 

force of nature. David is a very positive thinker, and 

always has been, even in his darkest hours. 

“Something happened to him around the time I met 

him and it galvanised everyone around him, me 

included. I art directed the Pin Ups album and put 

together the promo films for ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, 

‘Life On Mars?’, ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘The Jean 

Genie’. I was a bit of a Josef Goebbels at the time! 

David had a very empathetic way that made him 

inspire others. I mean, people still talk about 

Transformer and Raw Power and All The Young 

Dudes as being the most significant albums in the 

careers of those three acts. David was the 

centrifugal force that drove this magic moment in 

time.

“It was all done on a shoestring with smoke and 

mirrors. They rarely spent much money on it, not in 

the early days. The illusion was of this massive star, 

looking and acting like a star, and suddenly he 

became that. Marc Bolan was cute and big and got 

there first, but he didn’t have the range and power 

that David had, or his intellect. David had great 

music and great visual appeal; he was ridiculously 

glamorous. Eventually, I think it started to exceed his 

wildest dreams. He sang about being a star before 

he was one; that’s all over the Ziggy Stardust album. 

Before that, no one was interested, especially in 

England. That’s why the Hunky Dory deal was done 

in America. 

“The photo sessions were all very different. I got 

some great performance shots because he always 

looked so fantastic. I actually wasn’t very good at live 

pictures because I’d not done much of that before 

David, but it was through him that I got good. There 

was so much stylised behaviour in his performance 

that he was great to shoot. It was like watching a 

kaleidoscope; he just kept changing on stage. 

“Taking the pictures happened very fast. There 

was very little planning; it was all action, all about 

interchange and interplay, a fast-paced intuitive 

thing. The control of the look was not contrived. It 

simply amounted to not letting photographers in so 

that they wanted to come in even more! I think he 

was the first to play that one, and I became part of 

the game. I was the exclusive photographer because 

no one else was really interested at the time. Then all 

that changed and it became, ‘Only Mick Rock can 

shoot him’. And that worked very well. 

“I had no warning for that fellatio shot, which I took 

at Oxford Town Hall in June 1972 (right). I was at the 

front of the stage, and when I moved to side, David 

suddenly did it. I remember him coming off stage 

and saying, ‘Did you get it, did you get it?’ I didn’t 

know if it was planned or spontaneous, but he was 

always looking for a move that would break through. 

That one really did! 

“I developed the shots the next morning, and took 

them round to the GEM office. David and Tony

picked out the shot they liked best and rushed it off 

to the printers. They both knew it was a master 

image. They bought a page in Melody Maker and 

ran it like a fan advert. Looking back, it’s a bit like 

Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar or Pete Townshend 

smashing his up. David might regard that photo as 

being one of the key images of his career. It certainly 

made a dramatic and controversial statement. 

“Bowie is the first pop musician to wed the sensibility of 

film with that of rock ‘n’ roll image manipulation, the selfconscious 

presentation of self, is so much part of his nature.” 

“Androgyny was in the air and David was 

undoubtedly the finest manifestation of that. It was an 

innate part of his personality. If truth be told, David is 

very much a boy – I know a lot of girls he had sex 

with! But he would play up like English schoolboys 

do, groping and romping in the playground. You 

don’t get that in America; it’s very English. He 

developed that, and it became part of him. 

“He loved the camera when that wasn’t the ethic of 

the time. David would give you what you wanted, he 

was always up for it. I was able to work off that, but I 

wasn’t allowed to photo Marc Bolan ‘cos he and 

David weren’t talking at the time. Marc wanted me to 

do stuff for him and wanted to stick his finger up to 

David! When they were younger, they were close for 

a long time, then something went wrong. When 

David got big, he then felt generous towards Marc. 

“He’s always up to something, even today. He 

never sits still; he’s got an enormous amount of 

energy. He’s still in control of his image, but also now 

his destiny. He used to be very passive about the 

business side, but now he gets very involved. Once

he’d sign anything without reading it, but he’s learnt 

from his mistakes.”

Going Down I, with Mick Ronson, a seminal moment in rock 

history. “I’m very into shock tactics. I want to stretch people and 

get a reaction. I don’t think there’s any point in doing anything 

artistically unless it astounds,” Bowie announced.

1.3 

Renaissancemanbowie 

In paisley. “Aah, this is sweet. It was taken in around ‘67. I 

was 20. I look very young, very fresh -faced. There’s a bit of a 

psychedelic shirt going on as well.”

In 1967, Bowie put the youthful experiments with 

jazz, R&B and the Mod scene behind him. He placed 

himself under the tutelage of manager Ken Pitt, 

broadened his artistic horizons paying scant 

attention to contemporary trends and began to forge 

a new individualism. Their relationship, lovingly 

chronicled in Pitt’s book, The Pitt Report, was, in the 

singer’s estimation, “Pygmalion-like, to a certain 

extent”. Bowie came to Pitt a battle-scarred young 

man, knocked back by three years of professional 

failure. He left a pop star, secure enough in his own 

abilities that he could step out of the limelight until 

the conditions for a more enduring success looked 

more favourable. It was, he said later, his 

“apprenticeship period”. 

Posterity has not always been kind to Pitt’s role. 

Many feel he was out of his depth in the rapidly 

changing market, where muscular managers like 

Peter Grant (Led Zeppelin) and Allen Klein (The 

Beatles, The Rolling Stones) kept their noses out of 

their clients’ creative affairs, concentrating instead 

on the aggressive pursuit of money, security and 

more money. Bowie’s ex-wife Angie dismisses Pitt’s 

desire to mould Bowie into a “Judy Garland for the 

rock generation”, forgetting that during the early 

Seventies Bowie became almost exactly that. Under 

Pitt, Bowie affected an exaggerated Cockney voice 

as if he aspired to become the Tommy Steele or 

Anthony Newley of the Love Generation. Perhaps so, 

but Pitt’s encouragement and dedication to the idea 

of creating an intellectually adept, multi-skilled pop 

star provided the basis for Bowie’s future success. 

Bowie’s thirst for intellectual nourishment wasn’t 

wholly created by Pitt, though. His aspirations 

beyond fashion and pop fame were evident as early 

as February 1966 when Melody Maker printed ‘A 

Message To London From Dave’: “I want to act. I’d 

like to do character parts. I think it takes a lot to 

become somebody else; it takes some doing… As 

far as I’m concerned, the whole idea of Western life 

– that’s the life we live now – is wrong. These are

hard concepts to put into song, though.” A 

contemporary press release echoes the change in 

visual terms: “Gone are the outlandish clothes, the 

long hair, and the wild appearance and instead we 

find a quiet talented vocalist and songwriter in David 

Bowie.” 

When Pitt first clasped eyes on Bowie, after a 

Marquee Club performance in April 1966, the effect 

was immediate: “His burgeoning charisma was 

undeniable but I was particularly struck by the artistry 

with which he used his body, as if it were an 

accompanying instrument, essential to the singer 

and the song.” He also recognised Bowie’s innate 

intellect and wanted to nurture it.

In June 1967, as his debut LP was issued, Bowie 

announced, “I’d like to write a musical. And really the ultimate 

would be to have one or two of my songs become standards, 

and used by artistes like Frank Sinatra.”

GAY GAMES 

This European CD of Sixties recordings, with an alternative 

slate grey dress shot from The Man Who Sold The World photo 

sessions, appeared in 1995. 

In April 1971, the Daily Mirror ran a piece on the 

cover of Bowie’s latest album, The Man Who Sold 

The World. The singer was pictured in repose on a 

chaise longue that had been draped in blue velvet. 

He was wearing what he called his “man’s dress”. 

Countering the paper’s barely-concealed prurience, 

Bowie insisted that he was “not queer and all sorts of 

things… my sexual life is normal”.

Going Down II: Ronno comes under erotic attack during 

‘Cracked Actor’, Earl’s Court, May 1973. 

Months later, in his most famous interview ever, 

Bowie told Melody Maker ’s Michael Watts: “I’m gay 

and I always have been, even when I was David 

Jones.” Over the next few years, matters of his 

sexual orientation were flirted with but left open to 

interpretation. But in 1976, Bowie confessed all to 

Playboy magazine, revealing a deep-seated 

bisexuality: “It didn’t really matter who or what it was 

with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it 

was some very pretty boy in class in some school or

other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed 

upstairs.” After 1979, the one-time “King Of Camp 

Rock” remained remarkably elusive on the subject, 

though in recent years he’s often referred to himself 

as a “closet heterosexual”. 

Liverpool, June 1973, in Pelican shoes with palm tree motif. 

“Oh, it was fab. The best show ever.” - Holly Johnson. 

Bowie’s “I’m Gay” declaration in January 1972 

was the master-stroke that secured his career. “Best 

thing I ever said, I suppose,” he later confessed. But 

there were reservations: NME ’s Charles Shaar 

Murray lamented the fact that “it took a spate of 

calculatedly outrageous acts to bring him any 

reasonable degree of mass recognition”. Of course 

it was a shameless act of hype, and all the more 

bizarre considering his family man status – he was 

married with a small son – and keen appetite for 

groupies, most of whom were hot-blooded women. 

Nevertheless, in a rock world where homosexuality 

was barely acknowledged, his comments broke one 

of the last taboos. “As soon as your article came 

out,” Bowie told Watts months later, “people rang up 

and said, ‘Don’t buy the paper. You know what 

you’ve gone and done? You’ve just ruined yourself.’ 

They said, ‘You told him you were bisexual.’ I said, I 

know, he asked me! Nobody is going to be offended 

by that; everybody knows that most people are 

bisexual.” Unfortunately, despite the proliferation of 

unisex hairdressers and boutiques, they didn’t. 

There was an inevitable backlash. Readers wrote 

in expressing their fears for what might become a 

new genre (“Fag-Rock”, suggested one), and 

speculated whether they might yet see Elvis in drag.

Music Scene took a pot-shot at what it called “The 

Powder-Puff Bandwagon”; noted US critic Lester 

Bangs unleashed reams of bile about “faggot rock”; 

Newsday ’s Robert Christgau questioned whether 

“songs about Andy Warhol written by an English fairy 

(were) enough for American audiences”. Disc asked 

‘Why Bowie Is Feeling Butch’. Sound s couldn’t 

resist a few playful innuendos, claiming that Bowie’s 

Rainbow show “didn’t quite come off”, and quoting 

Elton John saying he thought Bowie had “blown it”. 

After Melody Maker made Ziggy Stardust the best 

album of 1972, one reader complained that the 

paper was “now fawning at and licking the boots 

(covered in silver glitter of course), of a drag artist… 

If this is the best album of the year in your coveted 

opinion, then what are we to expect as your 1973 

choice – Shirley Temple’s Greatest Hits ? God help 

rock.” 

Camp David. At Santa Monica, October 1972. Michael Watts: 

“David’s present image is to come on like a swishy queen, a 

gorgeously effeminate boy. He’s as camp as a row of tents with 

his limp hand and trolling vocabulary.” 

Sections of the gay press were also suspicious of 

Bowie’s freak show bisexuality, though the emerging 

lesbian and gay movement generally welcomed the 

fact that the issue was at least on the agenda. 

Writing in July 1972, Gay News ’ Peter Holmes was 

hopeful: “David Bowie is probably the best rock 

musician in Britain now. One day, he’ll become as 

popular as he deserves to be. And that’ll give gay

ock a potent spokesman.” A year later, the same 

magazine anticipated Bowie’s Earl’s Court show 

with a cover story that claimed: “17, 000 of us will be 

there!” 

The publicity served Bowie well. He fanned the 

debate by adopting an increasingly androgynous 

look, and showing a keen interest in costume and 

theatre. But the pop news story of 1972 was 

encapsulated in a single photograph: Mick Rock’s 

shot of Bowie on his knees and ‘fellating’ Mick 

Ronson’s guitar was quickly distributed and has 

since become the defining image of Glam Rock. 

Fans who scoured 

Edinburgh, May 1973. Twenty years later he recalled his 

Melody Maker interview: “I had been bisexual for many years 

before I made that statement but it was perceived like it was a 

great gimmick. I found out I wasn’t truly a bisexual but I loved 

the flirtation with it, I enjoyed the excitement of being involved in 

an area that had had been perceived as a social taboo. That 

excited me a lot.”

In the grounds of Haddon Hall, Bowie’s choice of outdoor 

wear is less than appropriate. 

Bowie’s lyrics for further clues discovered plenty of 

references to an uncertain sexuality, some dating 

back to his 1967 LP. In Spain, one Bowie album 

was titled El Ray Del Gay Power. 

Bowie’s arrival certainly broadened the palette of 

role-models for a generation of pop fans, and many 

prominent gay celebrities have since described the

liberating effect Bowie had in unlocking their true 

sexuality. Ultimately, though, Bowie’s personal 

sexual ambivalence might better be understood in 

the wider context of his work. It has more to do with 

the aesthetics of camp than being gay. “Camp sees 

everything in quotation marks,” wrote Susan Sontag. 

“It is the fullest extension, in sensibility, of the 

metaphor of life as theatre.” And, as Sontag states in 

her ‘Notes On Camp’ essay: “The androgyne is 

certainly one of the great images of Camp 

sensibility.” 

In 1993, Bowie reflected: “I don’t think I did anything that my 

contemporaries didn’t; it was just that I was the only one who 

talked about it. In the Sixties anyone who had a sense of style 

seemed to be gay. I wanted to identify with that.”

Pierrot In Turquoise at London’s Mercury Theatre, March 

1968. The show’s designer Natasha Kornilof recalls: “Silk 

organza! That big ruff was pink and maroon and I wound it twice 

around his neck, this amazing collar. He’s a good clothes 

hanger.” 

To that end, he installed Bowie into his Manchester 

Street flat, a tasteful bachelor-pad filled with classic 

literature and paintings. Pitt’s social circle was 

markedly different to anything David had known. 

Laddish colleagues and eager girl fans were 

replaced by showbiz impresarios and restaurateurs, 

record company bosses and theatrical agents. 

Bowie was encouraged to consider a theatrical 

career, to which end Pitt accompanied him to 

several top London productions, including Lionel 

Bart’s Oliver! and Aladdin, starring Cliff Richard. 

And he was exposed to the European chanson 

tradition, via the work of Jacques Brel, who’d also 

been picked up on by renegade Walker Brother 

Scott Walker. When he wasn’t dressed up for his 

mime performances with Lindsay Kemp, or in 

squaddie uniform for a minuscule film role in The 

Virgin Soldiers, Bowie often resembled a young 

Walker during these years – smart but hip, serious 

and often dressed in dark clothes. 

Threepenny Pierrot. “It was an important transitional 

period. Mime doesn’t need words.” 

Pitt’s wide-angled view on pop artistry, coupled with 

the flourishing arts scene that took off in the wake of 

the 1967 hippie revolution, encouraged Bowie to 

look beyond songwriting. That was just as well 

because Pitt had been unable to secure him a new

deal after Bowie’s 1967 LP flopped. Instead, David 

busied himself at Lindsay Kemp’s mime classes, 

playing the role of Cloud in Kemp’s Pierrot In 

Turquoise during a short national tour. He wrote 

plays and discussed film projects with budding 

directors. Early in 1969, Pitt financed a 30-minute 

film, Love You Till Tuesday, ostensibly to parade 

his multi-skilled client. Just one thing was missing: a 

new song. David came up with ‘Space Oddity’. 

Released, but not written, to coincide with the 

Moon landing, ‘Space Oddity’ didn’t take off untill 

late in the year, just weeks after the death of David’s 

father. Both events hastened Pitt’s demise. Since 

1967, the world had changed immeasurably, and in 

ways that Pitt, a gentleman aesthete with a passion 

for late Victorian fin de siecle culture and a mistrust 

of the TV generation, could never quite accept. 

(When Bowie adopted a shaggy, Bob Dylan-style 

perm, in anticipation of his raised public profile, the 

disappointed Pitt saw only “a failed Afro”.) Success 

meant that Bowie now had as much to lose as to 

gain; his apprenticeship was over. 

In spring 1970, Bowie cast his old ‘mentor’ aside, 

and put himself in the hands of new manager Tony 

DeFries and his wife and greatest cheerleader 

Angie. No longer duty-bound to maintain a 

peaceable status quo with a father-figure, Bowie 

embraced the contemporary spirit with a vengeance: 

sex, drugs, flamboyance, indecency, everything, in 

fact, that would have offended Pitt’s more traditional 

sensibilities. 

October, 1968, Ken Pitt: “He was going to Elstree to do what 

little bit he had to do for The Virgin Soldiers (Bowie appears 

briefly behind the bar during a fight scene). I thought we could

exploit the situation. I had to get some pictures of him in the 

uniform, so I asked him to smuggle it home one day. I took this 

shot at his flat in Clareville Grove.” 

“This was taken the night before having his hair shorn for 

the role.”

Ken Pitt: “Now you see the genesis of Ziggy Stardust. He’d 

been taking lessons with Lindsay Kemp. I had no idea what he 

was going to do. He ran down from his bedroom and made me 

promise not to look. He adored it. Just look at that hand, it’s the 

full Shirley Bassey.”

STARMAN: FIRST BITE 

“Arts labs should be for everybody - not just the so-called 

turned-on minority… we need energy from all directions, heads 

and skinheads alike.” 

Success finally came Bowie’s way when ‘Space 

Oddity’, a memorable slice of cosmic folk whimsy, 

broke into the British Top 5 in November 1969. The 

record had been released in July to coincide with the 

imminent Moon landing, but topical songs – and their 

singers – rarely enjoy a long shelf-life. Ken Pitt 

believed it was merely the first of many giant steps, 

but to most observers David Bowie had “one-hit 

wonder” written all over his classically proportioned 

features. 

The July 1969 moon landing provided topical, and hardly 

unexpected, publicity for ‘Space Oddity’, though it would be 

several months before the single charted.

Bowie seized his moment. He attended music 

industry showcases on the continent, endorsed a 

“pocket electronic organ” called the Stylophone, 

oiled the publicity machine with interviews and 

photo-shoots, and promoted the record on tour. 

Fame had always been Bowie’s goal, and he took 

his role as a late Sixties Starman seriously. He 

acquired a curly perm, a nod in the direction of 

hippie fashion, but one which was also being 

adopted by mainstream groups like Marmalade and 

The Herd. The 1969 pop audience would have found 

it difficult to discern any difference between David 

Bowie and the next hopeful in loose-fitting silk shirt 

and hipster trousers. 

The downside of his newfound fame was that 

‘Space Oddity’ threatened to overwhelm him. In a 

live review titled “Up-To-Date Minstrel”, in December 

1969, The Observer’s Tony Palmer wrote: “I realised 

that Major Tom had stolen his creator’s thunder, that 

in the public’s mind he was the star of the show, not 

David Bowie.” To the star-in-waiting, to be eclipsed 

by one of his own creations was a great blow. When 

it happened again, in 1972, he made sure that no 

one was left in any doubt who the star was.

“Ah, the Stylophone! Marc Bolan gave me that one. He said, 

‘You like this kind of stuff, do something with it’. I put it on 

‘Space Oddity’, so it served me well. It was just a little signal 

responding to electrodes. Sounded atrocious. The idea here 

was that if I did a promotion, then they’d give me a whole bunch 

of them.” 

Bowie had drifted aimlessly in a pop market that 

refused to take him seriously. The rock scene 

preferred groups. When Anne Nightingale 

suggested early in 1970 that he could become a big 

romantic star like Scott Walker, David replied: “I 

don’t relish the idea of that kind of stardom very 

much”. His good looks and natural charm made him 

an obvious successor to the ‘Face Of 68’ Peter 

Frampton, and winning ‘Best Newcomer’ and 

‘Brightest Hope’ (below right, with Cliff Richard) in 

music paper polls at the end of the year suggested 

great things.

At the Beckenham Free Festival. “With ‘Space Oddity’, I 

went out in front of these gum-chewing skinheads. As soon as I 

appeared, looking a bit like Bob Dylan with this curly hair and 

denims, I was whistled at and booed. At one point I had 

cigarettes thrown at me.” 

Bowie chose a different path. In spring 1970, in a 

piece titled ‘A New Star Shoots Upwards’, he told 

Disc magazine’s Penny Valentine that his “own 

ambitions come before any career as such”. He’d 

already flirted with the guise of the hippie singersongwriter 

the previous summer, organising a series 

of ‘happenings’ at the Beckenham Arts Lab and an 

open-air festival. Now he was turning his back on 

stardom. It was a belated sop to the counterculture, 

but Bowie wasn’t convinced by the gurus of antimaterialism, 

telling Music Now! magazine how much 

he liked money and how he despised those 

“hypocritical” groups who espoused the new creed 

but chased success all the same. Like some 

character in the French Revolution, Bowie seemed 

to have kept his 

Bowie listed his loves in December 1969, which included,

“Zany clothes - especially my space suit, which is of genuine 

space material and is warm in winter, cool in summer.” 

In his putty-coloured “special event suit”, at the Cafe Royal, 

Valentine’s Day 1970. “Wasn’t particularly pleased to meet Cliff. 

I was never a great fan of his.” For an album in 1993, Cliff would 

record the ‘Space Oddity’ countdown on Hank Marvin’s cover of 

the song.

‘Hole In The Ground’ is a little-known track which didn’t 

make it on to Bowie’s eponymously-titled 1969 L P.

1.4 

Dame Meditation 

The kitchen at Haddon Hall, 1970. “Tea? Yes, I’d like that.” 

Bowie, not the most domesticated of creatures, at least seems 

to know how to handle the pot. 

It says much for Bowie’s chameleon-like 

tendencies that in 1967 Chelsea News was able to 

report that: “David is contented with contentment: he 

is a happy loving person with a gentle nature which 

reigns supreme over all agitation. He is the only 

person whom I have met who brings nursery rhymes 

and fairy stories to the foreground of my mind.” In 

theory, he fitted perfectly the hippie stereotype, but 

with a bourgeois Svengali and a well-developed 

individuality that required no psychedelic 

enhancement, Bowie initially spurned the new 

underground.

Bowie’s continuing interest in Buddhism reveals itself in 

songs like ‘Seven Years In Tibet’. 

In rejecting the Eastern-inspired and brightly 

coloured rock fashions of flower power, Bowie fell 

out of sync with the prevailing trends. Unlike Marc 

Bolan, who revelled in the exotic splendour of hippie 

elegance, Bowie found it difficult to reject his 

ingrained, upwardly mobile Mod sensibility for a look 

that ultimately amounted to a perversely anti-fashion, 

anti-materialist statement. Anyway, he thought, it 

won’t last. 

‘Little Wonder’, Bowie’s self-deprecating 1997 single, made 

a great play on his flirtations with Buddhism thirty years before. 

Even in 1967, hippie culture and David Bowie 

weren’t complete enemies. His modest interest in 

Buddhism went into overdrive after The Beatles’ 

venture to India, and though both Ken Pitt and Angie 

Bowie have since downplayed his commitment, 

contemporary records (‘Silly Boy Blue’, ‘Karma 

Man’) and interviews are peppered with references.

Bowie once told journalist George Tremlett that he 

slept upright in a wooden box, ate two small meals a 

day and observed lengthy periods of silence, none of 

which Tremlett believed for a moment. But Bowie 

and his producer Tony Visconti did join the Tibet 

Society and briefly studied under a London-based 

Tibetan monk, Chime Rimpoche. 

With little-known band The Riot Squad in April 1967. “I

inflicted my taste for the theatrical upon them. This was the first 

band I was in where make-up and interesting trousers were as 

important as the music. I wanted them to be the English 

Mothers Of Invention. The guy who did these photos was Gerald 

Fearnley, whose brother, Dek, played bass in The Buzz with 

me.”

THE VOYEUR OF UTTER 

DESTRUCTION 

Bowie is fascinated by ancient mythological creatures. His 

1995 artwork, The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction As Beauty 

(below) depicts the Minotaur. Twenty-five years before that it 

was Cyclops, which, as Tony Visconti recalls, “was the working 

title for ‘The Supermen’. David said, “I’m gonna write a song 

about these big guys with one eye in the middle of their head. 

They’re like supermen.” 

“Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can 

do.” It’s a gorgeous hook, but that memorable line 

from ‘Space Oddity’ also betrays the pessimistic 

philosophies that have largely informed Bowie’s 

world view. Today, without the crutch of a medicine 

cabinet and a retinue of imposing aides, David 

Bowie is the consummate gentleman. Even in the

dark days of the mid-Seventies, he couldn’t help but 

break into a chummy exterior. He tends to keep it 

well hidden these days, but beneath the conviviality 

and the masks lies a tangle of notions and theories 

that amount to a complete fascination for personal 

breakdown and social catastrophe. 

“I thought I’d write my problems out,” Bowie once 

said, thereby acknowledging the common bond 

between creativity and despair. His awareness of a 

family tendency towards mental illness was one of 

many factors that could have contributed to a 

disposition keenly attuned to the politics of fear and 

disaster. He wasn’t alone: even the early Sixties’ 

folk/protest boom, spearhearded by Joan Baez and 

Bob Dylan, was a response to the doomsday 

scenario of nuclear war. One of Bowie’s first lyrics, 

according to an ex-Kon-rad colleague, was based 

on a news story about an air-crash (‘I Never 

Dreamed’); another, ‘Tired Of My Life’, included the 

line, “Put a bullet in my brain / And I make all the 

papers”, a neat foretaste of ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’. 

“I really believe that Bob Dylan (with Joan Baez, right) and 

others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a 

voice at last.” - Bowie ‘69 

As he entered adulthood, these feelings intensified. 

‘Please Mr Gravedigger’, a macabre tale about a 

child murderer, and ‘We Are Hungry Men’, which 

visualised an overpopulated world on the cusp of a 

catastrophe, were released during the year of love 

and peace. In fact, the melancholy man’s reluctance 

to use psychedelic drugs is probably entwined in all 

this, fearing that this might stir demons that would be 

better left untroubled. It was confusing enough being

a bystander with a fractured sense of identity without 

bringing acid into the equation. 

Discussing the fate of the counter-culture in 1974 

with Charles Shaar Murray, Bowie said, “I could 

never take all that seriously, because as you know, 

I’m an awful fatalist. I knew that nothing would 

happen… I’m pessimistic about new things, new 

projects, new ideas, as far as society’s concerned. I 

think it’s all over, personally. I think the end of the 

world happened ten years ago. This is it.” This 

wasn’t revisionism, either. One of Angie’s first 

impresssions of David in 1969 was that “the 

paranoid vision and the language of life’s darkness 

were second nature to him”. 

Bowie with Angie at Victoria Station, 1973.

The late Sixties quest for alternative world views 

elevated the work of two iconoclasts, diabolist 

Aleister Crowley and philosopher Friedrich 

Nietzsche. Crowley, an Edwardian sinner who 

courted outrage and answered to the name of “The 

Great Beast”, was a leading occultist who sought to 

liberate the subconscious mind through a mix of 

Magick and Oriental wisdom. Two neat soundbites 

resounded through the hippie hovels: “Do what thou 

wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, and “Every man 

and every woman is a star”. Those who looked a 

little harder found another: “Nothing is true; 

everything is permitted”. 

In recent years Bowie has played down the Aleister Crowley 

influence. “I’m always very suspicious of anybody who says 

they’re into Crowley (left). ‘Quicksand’? That’s before I tried 

reading him, when I had his biography in my raincoat so the title 

showed. That was reading on the tube.” 

Bowie admired Crowley’s work. “I’m closer to the 

Golden Dawn / Immersed in Crowley’s uniform”, he 

admitted on 1971’s ‘Quicksand’. Unfortunately, the 

tirade of self-doubt that followed suggested that 

Bowie wasn’t ready to do what he wilt just yet. By 

1975, though, fear had got the better of him. 

Allegedly, jars of urine lined his refrigerator in a bid 

to ward off evil spirits. White Stains, an obscure 

Crowley text, was namechecked on the album that 

followed, Station To Station. 

Bowie also tipped his bipperty-boppity hat to 

Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German thinker 

who famously declared that God was dead and 

advanced the cause of personal destiny. A 1970 

song, ‘The Supermen’, was titled after Nietzsche’s

most famous – and controversial – concept. 

Nietzsche’s footsoldiers, Supermen were escapees 

from what the philosopher called “slave morality”, 

who rejected the ‘truth’ of the prevailing moral order. 

The idea, which subsequently got twisted into Nazi 

ideology, was more about intellectual elitism; when 

Bowie sang “You gotta make way for the Homo 

Superior” on ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ in 1971, it was 

part Nietzschean recognition part wish-fulfilment. 

David Bowie and Lou Reed find each other again. Their gritty 

lyrical realism provided a notable contrast to the dewy-eyed 

romanticism of the Seventies prog-rock bards. 

Bowie was attracted to Crowley and Nietzsche 

because he sought the truth, however disturbing it

might be. In another song, ‘Width Of A Circle’, Bowie 

sang: “I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a 

tree / And I looked and frowned ‘cos the monster 

was me”. But Bowie, who’d begun to liken himself to 

a “photostat machine”, saw his personal 

disintegration as a mirror to the world around him. 

“People like Lou (Reed) and I are probably 

predicting the end of an era and I mean that 

catastrophically,” he said in 1972. “Anysociety that 

allows people like Lou and I to become rampant is 

pretty well lost.” 

The Rise And Fall element in Ziggy Stardust 

echoed doomed projects of social engineering like 

the Roman Empire or the Third Reich. Bowie 

became neurotic, insisting he wouldn’t travel by 

plane or stay in a hotel room above the eighth floor. 

He also insisted he had “a strange… psychosomatic 

death-wish thing”. Only after the murder of John 

Lennon in December 1980 did he appear to 

exorcise that particular line of self-emancipation, and 

adopt a more positive outlook. 

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche cast long shadows 

over the 20th century - and Bowie’s work.

Let Me Sleep Beside You. A bewigged David with Hermione 

on Hampstead Heath for the ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ film shoot, 

January 1969. The steel-grey suit (from Just Men by Nikki) was 

trimmed with electric blue braid, though when it turned up at 

auction in 1994, the braiding had been removed below the lapel. 

“That was because we’d had the jacket re-cut for him to wear 

at the Malta Song Festival in July of ‘69,” Ken Pitt explains. The 

suit, together with the accompanying white ruffled dress shirt 

(by Bob Fletcher) fetched £2, 000 at Christie’s.

A paint-splattered Ziggy doing some touching up to the high 

moulded ceilings at Haddon Hall. 

“Is that a rugby shirt? This was Beckenham Arts Lab. Very 

little happened at these ‘happenings’. That’s quite a perm I’ve 

got there. Not my greatest hairstyle.” 

Having nailed his mast to that of a cultured 

Eurocentric, only to discover that the peasants 

wanted to let it all hang out at American-style loveins, 

Bowie entered the months of acid-inspired 

abandon with some reservation. Joining Lindsay 

Kemp’s mime troupe owed little to the new-fangled 

hippie arts scene, although forming a mixed-media 

trio named Feathers, with girlfriend Hermione 

Farthingale and old pal John ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, was 

certainly a very 1968 thing to do. By early ‘69 the

experiment was over, and Bowie, by now “a 

combination of penniless art student and hardcore 

hippie” according to new girlfriend Angela Barnett, 

hitched a ride on the new singer-songwriter boom. 

He hoped to open a folk club in central London; 

instead, he was forced to settle for a back room in 

the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street, a 

short walk from his parents’ home. 

The short-lived trio, Bowie, Farthingale and Hutchinson, in 

1968. “I had absolutely no belief in Feathers at all,” says Ken 

Pitt. 

Nominally styled an ‘Arts Lab’, the weekly event was 

essentially a showcase for Bowie, the intimate 

atmosphere giving him the opportunity to develop a 

rapport with the audience. He really began to dig it, 

as this uncharacteristic quote to underground freaks 

he e t International Times con firms: “I feel 

compassion as a source of energy; the individual is 

less important than the source of energy of which he 

is part.” 

With Dylanesque harmonica holder, obscuring bass-playing 

producer, Tony Visconti.

A rare colour shot of Growth’s Summer Festival and Free 

Concert at Beckenham Recreation Ground, August 1969. Songs 

played included Biff Rose’s ‘Buzz The Fuzz’ and Cream’s ‘I Feel 

Free’. 

This idyllic interlude climaxed in the Growth 

Festival, held in a Beckenham park on August 16, 

1969, and immortalised on Bowie’s ‘Memory Of A 

Free Festival’. “We claimed the very source of joy 

ran through / It didn’t, but it seemed that way,” was 

his clear-eyed assessment of the event. Two years 

later, Bowie played the song at the Glastonbury 

Festival as dawn rose – but he’d never write another 

one like it again.

The Beckenham house husband with mop, but no bucket, at 

the front entrance to his new home. In the basement was the 

so-called Haddon Hall rehearsal studio, which, as Tony Visconti 

recalls, was really just “a wine cellar. It was a very small room, 

there was no real studio there.” 

With girlfriend Angie as a protective buffer, Bowie 

confidently entered the spirit of collectivism in 

October 1969 when the pair moved into a ground 

floor flat in Beckenham. To the postman, it was plain 

old Flat 7, 42 Southend Rd., but to Angie, David and 

the many long and short-stay visitors they 

entertained there during the next three years, it was 

grandiosely referred to as Haddon Hall. With its 

stained glass windows, moulded ceilings, minstrel’s 

gallery, tiled fireplaces, ornate lamps, Regency bed, 

velvet curtains and Oriental rugs it was the perfect 

post-Sgt. Pepper crash-pad, an oasis of cheaply 

purchased Victoriana and bric-a-brac. 

The collision of a liberated, hippie-inspired way of 

life and a setting created out of bourgeois cast-offs 

was a Bohemian paradise. The Jones’ family home 

was a short walk away, but culturally the distance 

was now immeasurable.

At the BBC’s Paris Cinema Studios, February 1970: “We’d 

heard that David Bowie was supposed to be androgynous and 

everything, but then he came out with long hair, folky clothes, 

and sat on a stool and played folk songs. We were so 

disappointed with him. We looked over and said, ‘Just look at 

that folky old hippy’.” - Wayne County.

SHALL WE DANCE? 

Despite a solo career that has seen more highs than most 

of his long-term contemporaries, Bowie has been involved in 

some dubious duets.

Mick Jagger 

The spectacle of these two giants attempting to torch 

their reputations in just under four minutes of 1985’s 

‘Dancing In The Street’ wasn’t the ideal incentive to 

donate money to alleviate the crisis in Ethiopia. 

Never allowing them near a studio together again 

seemed like a much better idea… 

Placebo 

With no album to promote, Bowie still managed to 

wing an appearance at the 1999 Brit Awards show 

by teaming up with Placebo for a version of T. Rex’s 

‘20th Century Boy’. They collaborated again at a 

New York show weeks later. 

Bing Crosby 

The absurdity of sharing a homely stage set with 

ancient crooner Bing Crosby for a medley of ‘Peace 

On Earth’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’ almost prompted 

Bowie to crack on screen. A month later, Bing went 

Bong at the climax of a game of golf, and the 

collaboration, recorded to celebrate Christmas 

1977, took five years to appear on record.

Marc Bolan 

The only public appearance of the two Glam Rock 

luminaries took place on the final episode of Bolan’s 

daytime TV show, Marc. Even then, the 

collaboration, ‘Sitting Next To You’ was hampered 

when filming overran and the plugs were pulled – but 

not before Bolan had toppled off the stage. It was a 

shambolic end to a competitive but mostly 

affectionate relationship, because days later, in the 

early hours of September 16, 1977, Bolan was killed 

in a car crash in Barnes, West London. 

Cher 

Bowie duetted with Cher on a ‘Young Americans’ 

medley, which took in seven standards along the 

way, and a version of ‘Can You Hear Me’ on her US 

TV show in 1975.

John Lennon 

They never shared a stage together, but Bowie’s 

1974 studio session with Lennon – one of only a 

handful of people who could inspire awe in Bowie – 

was his most fruitful all-star collaboration. After 

visiting the reclusive ex-Beatle at his Dakota 

apartment in New York (where producer Tony 

Visconti remembers Bowie being so nervous that he 

sat in a corner doodling), the pair collaborated on a 

version of Lennon’s ‘Across The Universe’ and 

worked on a new song, ‘Fame’. Not long afterwards 

Bowie admitted that John had also offered plenty of 

helpful advice concerning his business problems 

with Tony DeFries. 

Marianne Faithfull 

Bowie invited Marianne Faithfull to guest on The 

1980 Floor Show, filmed for American TV at 

London’s Marquee Club in October 1973. A 

potential rock’n’roll suicide who’d already survived

one attempt to take her own life, Marianne was still 

obviously fragile. As the pair fumbled their way 

through Sonny & Cher’s 1965 hit, ‘I Got You Babe’, 

her backless nun’s costume prompted a few raised 

eyebrows from the backing musicians. According to 

Angie Bowie, David saw a whole lot more after the 

show. “He wanted to get in her pants. She’d been 

Mick’s (page 54), so he had to have her as well.” 

Queen 

The Eighties began in earnest for David when he 

teamed up with Queen in 1981 for the soft-metal 

anthem, ‘Under Pressure’. The bassline provided the 

hook, the vocal sparrings the talking-point. The 

record was a great success at home, but the most 

enduring aspect of the collaboration was Freddie 

Mercury’s (above, backstage with Bowie at Live Aid) 

suggestion that Bowie might be happier at EMI than 

he had been at RCA. When Bowie performed at the 

Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, in April 1992, he 

was sufficiently moved by the occasion to drop to his 

knees and recite The Lord’s Prayer.

Tin a Turner 

Bowie was regularly seen with the effervescent soul 

star during the Eighties, but mercifully their recorded 

output was restricted to just one song, the 1984 

reggae-lite single ‘Tonight’. The following year, he 

joined her on stage in Birmingham for a medley of 

two versions of ‘Let’s Dance’ – Chris Montez’s 1962 

hit, and Bowie’s 1983 original. They also duetted on 

a revamped ‘Modern Love’ for a Pepsi TV ad in 

1987 (below). 

Bono 

The Eighties were responsible for many miracle 

makeovers, one of the most surprising being the 

transformation of U2 from third rate new wave band 

to stadium-fillers. Front-man Bono, who shared a 

Cleveland, Ohio stage with Bowie in 1990 for a 

version of Them’s R&B classic ‘Gloria’, has since 

cleverly engineered a series of Bowielike 

reinventions that enabled his band to successfully 

negotiate the ebb and flow of musical change during 

the Nineties.

Pet Shop Boys 

If the album version of 1995’s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ was 

a pulverising piece of NIN-esque noise, then the 

single mix was an almost entirely re-recorded 

Eurodisco classic, featuring, at David’s invitation, 

the acclaimed synth-pop duo. It became Bowie’s 

biggest global hit of the Nineties, even going all the 

way to the top in Latvia.

1.5 

The Man Who Bought The Dress 

Inside the grand Haddon Hall, 1970. Peter Noone’s Top Of 

The Pops performance of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ in 1971, with 

David on piano, has been wiped by the BBC. Sadly, Bowie’s 

stomp through ‘The Jean Genie’ the following year suffered the 

same fate. 

Between the mild-mannered faux-hippie pop star 

of ‘Space Oddity’ and the full-on androgyne of Ziggy 

Stardust, there was… that dress. Liz Hurley’s little 

black number had nothing on Bowie’s fetching Mr. 

Fish outfit – nothing apart from a few thousand acres 

of newsprint, that is. 

For someone who thrived on symbols and change, 

the beginning of a new decade must have carried a 

near-spiritual significance. Tradition weighed “like a 

nightmare on the brains of the living”, wrote 19th 

century longhair Karl Marx; now, as 1970 began, 

Bowie saw the new decade as an opportunity to 

level the playing-field. Somebody up there liked him,

ecause weeks later, The Beatles split. Then The 

Rolling Stones announced they were emigrating. In 

an instant, pop’s driving-seat was looking pretty 

vacant. Any takers for a man in a dress? 

Bowie had proved himself with ‘Space Oddity’. 

With a lucrative new publishing deal, secured by 

Tony DeFries, he began to feel like a real 

songwriter. With new guitarist, Mick Ronson, he had 

the right musical foil. And with Angie, whom he 

married in March 1970, and DeFries, he had all the 

emotional and business support he needed. It was 

an ambitious young crew with plenty of rock biz 

savvy. “We were all there for the purpose of making 

David Bowie a star,” remembers producer Tony 

Visconti. 

Bowie has always been fond of fish, even wearing two for 

this 1995 photo session. “The look was based on a piece by the 

Viennese artist, Rudolph Schwartzkogler,” Bowie reveals.

Long tresses and long dresses. “One day we will live next 

door to you and your lawn will die,” was The Riot Squad’s oftrepeated 

threat. But by April 1971, Bowie preferred to use his 

own back garden to model this Mr. Fish silk velour “man’s 

dress”. In 1999, ex-Dexy’s singer, Kevin Rowland, pulled a 

similar stunt, with considerably less success.

ANDY WARHOL 

On meeting Warhol: “It was fascinating. He has absolutely 

nothing to say at all, absolutely nothing. And he has this white, 

pudding face. He looks slightly out of this world, really 

inhuman.” 

David Bowie has switched allegiances more 

times than even he probably cares to remember, but 

the single most enduring influence on his life and 

work, and the one that provides the key to his 

Seventies work, is pasty-faced Pop Art icon Andy 

Warhol. In 1973, at the height of Bowie’s infatuation, 

he said: “I think that Warhol will… be regarded as 

just as important as Michaelangelo was to the art of 

his period.” Time has not dimmed that view. In the 

mid-Nineties, at the opening of an exhibition of his 

own paintings, he repeated the claim: “Andy Warhol 

was one of the most influential and important artists 

of the second half of this century. His ability was to 

confuse art enough that the boundaries started 

coming down so there was no division between high 

and low art.”

Most Sixties and early Seventies rock musicians 

viewed themselves and their work through the prism 

of the literary Romantics, if at all. Idealists intoxicated 

on the pungent air of individual genius, they were 

maestros blessed with a peculiar gift. Despite being 

a gifted individual and a maestro of the peculiar, 

Andy Warhol subverted and shattered this rarefied 

world. OK, so blurring the boundaries between 

commerce and fine art was hardly news to the gods 

of rock. But debunking the role of the ‘artist’ by 

depersonalising himself and getting others to do his 

work for him (in the studio he dubbed ‘The Factory’)? 

Why would he want to do that? Because, ultimately, 

nothing was truly original, or even particularly 

important; even humans were empty vessels at the 

mercy of what was being fed to them. “Why don’t you 

tell me the words and I can just repeat them… I’m so 

empty that I can’t think of anything,” he told one 

interrogator. In presenting himself as artifice, as an 

absent presence, as a charlatan and, perhaps, a 

master man-ipulator, Warhol became the most 

discussed artist of his generation. 

Bowie first encountered Warhol’s work via Ken 

Pitt, who met the artist in New York in November 

1966 with a view to promoting his rock band 

protégés, The Velvet Underground, in Britain. 

Nothing came of the venture, but Pitt did return with 

an acetate of their first album, which he gave to 

David. A club-jazz version of ‘Waiting For The Man’, 

and a steal from ‘Venus In Furs’ in Bowie’s ‘Little 

Toy Soldier’ (both recorded with The Riot Squad) 

soon followed. 

“Mr Bowie was painstakingly got up to look like Andy, with

his straw wig on sideways so that he looked like a stork’s nest 

on a chimney.” -Quentin Crisp 

1971’s Hunky Dory revealed the depth of Bowie’s 

interest. ‘Queen Bitch’ was a brilliant take on VUstyle 

street-sleaze; ‘Andy Warhol’ was an 

affectionate tribute to the artist that revealed Bowie’s 

passion for Warholian artifice: “Dress my friends up 

just for show / See them as they really are”. While in 

New York in 1971 on a promotional visit, he dropped 

in at the Factory and gave an impromptu 

performance of the song. Warhol obviously wasn’t 

amused and walked out, only to return to utter a few 

kind words about Bowie’s yellow Anello & Davide 

shoes as he photographed them. 

Another Warholian trick that Bowie successfully 

aped was making himself the centre of a creative, 

circus-like whirlwind. Projects like The Hype and 

Arnold Corns failed to get off the ground, partly 

because Bowie had yet to constitute any central 

point of focus, but between 1972 and 1973, he 

championed Mott The Hoople, Iggy Pop and Lou 

Reed with great success. Bowie and his new model 

army was the biggest self-help group since Brian 

Epstein floated his roster of Merseyside talents on 

the back of The Beatles. Even Bowie’s entourage - 

which included Warhol acolytes Tony Zanetta and 

Cherry Vanilla - became worthy of note. 

Since Warhol’s death in 1987, Bowie has paid 

tribute to him in song (“Andy, where’s my 15 

minutes?” on ‘I Can’t Read’) and even portrayed 

Warhol on screen (Basquiat, right), his performance 

acclaimed by both Lou Reed and Warhol film 

director Paul Morrissey.

Showing off designer footwear, 1971. “These clothes were 

very London at the time. Everyone was wearing these camp 

little underground things. The shoes were canary yellow. And I 

expect the jacket is fuchsia. Like the enamel butterfly.”

I Think It’s Gonna Rain Again. 

Instead of capitalising on ‘Space Oddity’ with an 

identikit follow-up, Bowie’s game-plan was to 

conduct musical warfare on several fronts. He began 

writing songs at the piano, in a manner not dissimilar 

to Paul McCartney, with a view to getting other stars 

to record them.

Trouser rehearsal for The Man Who Sold The World cover. 

He adopted a pop Svengali role, surrounding 

himself with nonentities to whom he’d promise fame 

– or at least the opportunity to record one of his 

songs. He pursued his solo career with the 

enthusiasm of a newly liberated refugee: he tried his 

hand at hard rock (The Man Who Sold The World), 

Velvet Underground pastiches (‘Queen Bitch’) and 

singer-songwriter material (‘Life On Mars?’, ‘Oh! You 

Pretty Things’). But first came the Hype, a maligned, 

misunderstood and ephemeral venture that 

anticipated both the ballsy playfulness and the 

sartorial intemperance of Glam Rock. David Bowie 

had decided to rock. 

Hype: the very word was like a stentorian profanity in 

the vibey lingo of rockspeak. Hype was a curse on 

the scene, cheaply-purchased praise that masked a 

woeful lack of authenticity. “I suppose you could say 

that I chose Hype deliberately with tongue in cheek,” 

Bowie said later. The quartet, which included Mick

Ronson and Tony Visconti within its ranks, played its 

most infamous show in February 1970 at London’s 

notorious hippie hangout the Roundhouse. Each 

musician dressed in character. Bowie, in lurex tights, 

silver cape, scarves and pirate boots, was 

Rainbowman, flanked by Ronson’s Gangsterman (in 

gold lame suit and fedora), Tony Visconti’s 

Superman-inspired Hypeman and John Cambridge 

as Cowboyman. “Marc Bolan was the only person 

that clapped,” Bowie subsequently claimed. But the 

event marked a watershed: “Theatre was for me 

after that”. And bona fide rock music. 

Fronting The Hype at the Roundhouse, 1970. The guitar 

conceals Bowie’s knickers over his tights, Superman style: 

“Very spacey, there was a lot of lurex-y material in it. It was all 

jeans and long hair at that time, and we got booed all the way 

through the show. It was great!” 

Bowie’s first rock album was The Man Who 

Sold The World. The cover, though, was pure 

theatre. He had come, he explained to Rolling 

Stone ’s John Mendelsohn, “to tart rock up. I don’t 

want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up on 

stage – I want to take them on stage with me.” But 

first he tried it out at Haddon Hall. He knew exactly 

what he wanted. As the photographer fiddled with his 

tripod, Bowie nestled his thin, languid frame into a 

chaise longue. His blond hair was long and peek-a-

oo style like Veronica Lake’s. More spectacular 

still, he was wearing what he described as his 

“man’s dress”. A salmon-pink silk number, it was 

one of two he’d bought from Mr. Fish at a 

knockdown £50 apiece, though in truth it was 

originally intended as a medieval-style gown. 

The Man Who Sold The World original UK cover, Bowie’s 

parody of a painting by pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel 

Rosetti. “I’m not sure if I was really trying to be provocative, it 

was more like a hangover from the Sixties. It was certainly 

more provocative when I wore the dress in America. The album 

wasn’t released with this original artwork in America.” 

The new image attracted the inevitable titters from 

the tabloids, but the hype-wary British rock press 

regarded Bowie’s literal interpretation of unisex 

fashion as just plain silly. In America, where it was 

reported that he “would prefer to be regarded as a 

latter-day Garbo”, and was “almost disconcertingly 

reminiscent of Lauren Bacall”, they took him far more 

seriously. Perhaps the eye-shadow and shoulderbag, 

which he’d added for his trip there, clinched it.

Brian Ward’s equally potent cover for the LP’s re-release in 

1972. 

Bowie was now moving toward a different type of 

stardom, one that owed more to Andy Warhol’s 

ironic and corrupted take on Hollywood than to the 

homilies of rock manners. “Pantomime Rock” it may 

well have been, but Bowie clearly understood the 

genuine need for a different kind of idol. Haughtily 

claiming that “Music is the Pierrot and I, the 

performer, am the message,” he rejected rock’s 

infatuation with technique and technology in favour of 

a personality-driven approach with one crucial 

difference – an all-knowing detachment. 

In Bowie’s hands, stardom wasn’t merely a reward 

for artistic endeavour; it was inextricably part of the 

creative process, as crucial as chord changes and 

concert schedules. This was ingenious and 

revelatory. He wrote songs about Dylan and Warhol; 

he namedropped Lennon and Crowley. 

He wasn’t a star, but he was already learning to 

feed off their glamour.

Lauren Bacall 

Veronica Lake.

Sphinx, 1971. On the threshold of becoming the eighth 

wonder of the world, Bowie inexplicably adopts an Egyptian 

look.

I FELT LIKE AN ACTOR 

As the anarchic poet Herbert Beerbolm Baal for the BBC’s 

Play For Today, screened in 1982. 

Bowie, Clark and Roeg on the set of The Man Who Fell To 

Earth in 1975. 

In recent years, Bowie has played down his 

thespian pursuits: “The acting is purely decorative. 

It’s not something I seriously entertain as an 

ambition.” He didn’t always see it that way. Back in 

the late Sixties, when he was having little luck as a 

singer, he attended auditions and accepted walkon 

parts in TV plays – even an advert for ice-cream 

whenever he could. By 1973, having exhausted his 

Ziggy/Aladdin role, he insisted that he’d tired of 

rock’n’roll and was entertaining a movie career. 

When it came, in the form of an alien in The Man 

Who Fell To Earth, director Nic Roeg told him, “Be

yourself!” 

Keeping his head, on the set of Merry Christmas Mr 

Lawrence, with director Nagisa Oshima (above left) in 1982. 

Bowie: “I’ve never had such an exhilarating experience working 

on a movie. I’d do a nudie film for him at the drop of a hat.” 

Since then, Bowie has actively pursued a movie 

career, sometimes appearing in two of three films in 

a year. There have been one or two noteworthy 

performances – his portrayal of Major Jack Celliers, 

a Japanese prisoner-of-war, was convincing – but 

his finest and most taxing role was as John Merrick, 

the title part in the 1980 Broadway stage production 

of The Elephant Man. His involvement in too many 

unexceptional projects has no doubt sapped his 

enthusiasm for the medium; his only noteworthy role 

in recent years was playing Andy Warhol in 

Basquiat. But despite his professed lack of interest, 

he still makes more movies than albums.

As Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, 

Bowie passes up the offer to scrub Candy Clark’s back. He’s 

found something more interesting to look at. 

With Christopher Walken at New York’s Basquiat premiere 

in 1996. Bowie had turned down a villanous role in the 1985 

James Bond film, A View To A Kill, so it went to Walken.

As Prussian officer, Paul von Przygodsky in 1978’s Just A 

Gigolo. “Listen, you were disappoined, and you weren’t even in 

it. Imagine how we felt. It was my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled 

into one.”

CLASSIC CREATIONS

Designed by Freddi Burretti, David models a chocolatebrown 

suit with four-button double-breasted bum-freezer 

jacket, and 28-inch baggy trousers complete with two inches of 

turn-up, cut to be worn over platform boots. 

During the Sixties, David Bowie moved with the 

fast-changing subcultural tide. He’d shown signs of 

rebellion during 1967, when he failed to be 

convinced by the Love Generation, but by the end

of the decade he’d succumbed to the freak 

fraternity. The Seventies would be different. Buoyed 

by self-belief, and protected by a series of theatrical 

masks and Warhol-inspired strategies, he spent 

the decade reinventing himself according to his 

own whims and fancies, a one-man style warfare 

which altered the visual meaning – and impact – of 

rock and pop forever.

2.1 

Ziggy Stardust 

The creation of Ziggy Stardust was, wrote 

Bowie’s ex-wife Angie in Backstage Passes, “the 

first emphatic act in a great liberation”. The focal 

point was Bowie’s ‘cockade orange’, the feather-cut 

from hell (or maybe Mars) that was conceived at 

Haddon Hall by Susie Fussey, a stylist from a local 

hairdresser’s salon in Beckenham High Street, and 

held in place with a few generous squirts of a 

popular anti-dandruff treatment called Guard. 

Angie described the Ziggy barnet as “the single 

most reverberant fashion statement of the 

Seventies” and for once her unquenchable thirst for 

exaggeration was justified. “He looked just as 

ambivalently enticing as he had with his long blond 

hippie hair,” Angie maintained, “but this new, 

streamlined red puffball upped the ante. Now he 

looked stronger and wilder; just as fuckable, but a lot 

stranger and, well, more sluttish.” 

Years later, Bowie acknowledged that Ziggy’s 

wardrobe – which he once described as “a cross 

between Nijinsky and Woolworth’s” – had been a 

steal from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. 

“The jumpsuits in that I thought were just wonderful, 

and I liked the malicious, malevolent, vicious quality

of those four guys, although aspects of violence 

themselves didn’t turn me on particularly. I wanted to 

put another spin on that, so I… picked out all these 

very florid, bright, quilted kind of materials, and so 

that took the edge off the violent look of those suits, 

but still retained that terrorist, we’re ready for action 

kind of look. And the wrestling boots… I changed the 

colour, made ‘em greens and blues and things like 

that… It all fitted in perfectly with what I was trying to 

do, create this fake world, or this world that hadn’t 

happened yet.” 

Brian Ward’s original monochrome shot for the Ziggy 

Stardust back cover; Ward’s photography studio was behind 

the phone box. And if The Clash’s Joe Strummer is to be 

believed, “the best thing Bowie ever did was ‘Get Off The Phone 

Henry’.” To Be Played At Maximum Volume, as the legend used 

to say.

Ziggy Stardust began life as a concept album about 

a character who descends from space to front what 

Bowie later described “feasibly the last band on 

earth”. Because he’d been writing songs at an 

alarming rate, the idea inevitably became diluted by 

the time The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And 

The Spiders From Mars was readied for release in 

June 1972. Nevertheless, the album provided a 

perfect springboard for Bowie to combine his quest 

for fame with his artistic needs. The results were 

hugely significant. Ziggy reopened lines to an 

alternative musical tradition (Velvet Underground, 

Iggy Pop); legitimised rock’s ability to comment on 

itself (right down to the “Just who is Ziggy?” debate, 

prompted by RCA’s famous “David Bowie Is Ziggy 

Stardust” campaign); took rock theatre into new 

dimensions; and blew open the related issues of 

gender and identity politics. Obviously, rock could 

never be the same again.

Lucky numbers. Ziggy plays guitar in Newcastle, January 

1973. “Most people are scared of colour. Their lives are built up 

in shades of grey. It doesn’t matter how straight the style is, 

make it brightly coloured material and everyone starts acting 

weird.”

“I wanted to take the hardness and violence of those 

Clockwork Orange outfits - the trousers tucked into big boots 

and the codpiece things - and soften them up by using the most 

ridiculous fabrics. It was a Dada thing - this extreme 

ultraviolence in Liberty fabrics.”

STARMAN: SECOND BITE 

Black shoes, white sox, October 1972. Bowie had seen the 

hairstyle in Harpers & Queen. “It was October 1971, the first 

report on the Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto in England. 

He was using a Kabuki lion’s wig on his models which was

illiant red. It was the most dynamic colour, so we tried to get 

mine as near as possible. I got Mick Ronson’s ex-wife to cut my 

hair off short and dye it Schwarzkopf red. I got it to stand up 

with lots of blow-drying and this dreadful early lacquer.” 

The one-hit wonderkid from 1969 was, by 1973, 

barely recognisable. Back then, people recognised 

his song but not the face. Now, with his lavatorybrush 

hair, pallid complexion, and risqué costumes 

revealing pole-like limbs, you couldn’t miss him. 

Prior to Glam Rock, rock musicians found the issue 

of stardom faintly embarrassing. Bowie, by building 

the concept into Ziggy Stardust, was able to join the 

new breed of ‘Superstars’ while simultaneously 

managing to transcend stardom’s most sordid 

associations by merely ‘playing’ at the role. Bowie 

wasn’t the first star of the Seventies because Marc 

Bolan got there first. Neither was he the most 

popular because Rod Stewart and Elton John sold 

more records than him. But he was by far the most 

intriguing, simply because he made stardom even 

more fantasy-inducing and ambiguous than it 

already was. As Starlust, Fred and Judy Vermorel’s 

collection of fan-fantasies, confirms, David Bowie 

was the best aid to masturbation since the Kinsey 

Report.

Stardom, as John Lennon was fond of saying, was a 

form of madness. A decade’s worth of Beatlemania 

left him nursing a fractured identity that prompted a 

retreat into primal therapy, and proclaiming that he 

didn’t believe “in Beatles”. Bowie fed off this 

debased take on stardom, also explored in the 1970 

film Performance, starring Mick Jagger, claiming 

that he needed its distracting qualities: “Being 

famous helps put off the problems of discovering 

myself,” he said.

Conversation Piece. Bowie performing ‘Hang On To 

Yourself’ on the Aladdin Sane tour in 1973. 

Bowie was the baby-boomer who boomeranged a 

generation’s hopes back into their faces. His Ziggystyle 

take on stardom was empty, fleeting and came 

gift-wrapped in a death-wish. It was Syd Barrett 

sacrificing himself to acid, turning his back on fame 

and taking the slow train to the psychiatric ward. It 

was Iggy Pop lacerating himself on stage. It was 

Vince Taylor announcing that he was Jesus Christ 

and being carted off to a rest home. It was Brian 

Jones and Jim Morrison getting fat and meeting 

watery ends. It was Jimi Hendrix choking on his own 

vomit. That was the kind of stardom into which David 

Bowie daringly dipped his gaily-painted toe. 

Sharing a joke about the fate of The Spiders with Lou Reed 

and Mick Jagger at the Cafe Royale ‘retirement’ party, July 3, 

1973. Bowie had described Jagger as “incredibly sexy and very 

virile.” 

When he wasn’t telling friends he’d rather stay out of 

the sun in case he would melt, Bowie was enjoying 

the conventional trappings of stardom. He hung out 

with Mick Jagger, was on firstname terms with all the 

top maitre d’s, and became a regular customer on

the QE2. But a punishing work schedule of non-stop 

touring, with recording sessions, TV appearances 

and interviews fitted in whenever possible, inspired 

Bowie to construct Aladdin Sane, a son-of-Ziggy, 

based on his recent experiences. Replacing one 

mask with another enabled Bowie to exorcise what 

Ziggy had become – or so he thought. It wasn’t 

enough. On July 3, 1973, in another melodramatic 

masterstroke, he announced his ‘retirement’ in front 

of an unsuspecting audience. He came to disarm 

stardom, but it would end up virtually destroying him. 

At BBC Television Centre’s Studio 8, July 5, 1972: The Top 

Of The Pops performance of ‘Starman’ is without doubt the one 

key defining moment in postBeatles rock history.

“The sax was my first instrument, but I’ve played guitar for 

years. What I do fills out the sound, and it’s a great prop of 

course.” 

Strategically, Ziggy was a masterstroke. If Bowie 

was too coy to take a protean leap from the 

underground into pop’s mainstream, as his rival 

Marc Bolan had done, why not get someone else to 

do it for him. That’s the idea that began to form in

Bowie’s mind during 1971 and the early months of 

1972, as rock’n’roll revivalism in the star-shaped 

form of Glam Rock emerged to fill the void left by 

The Beatles. Rejoicing in this new spirit of 

playfulness and musical economy were big 

personalities with oodles of well-honed talent – Elton 

John, Rod Stewart and Gary Glitter had, like Bowie 

and Bolan, been on the margins for years. 

Outsmarting them all, Bowie – as Ziggy – emerged 

during the summer of 1972 amid a rash of 

contradictions. Rock or pop? Gay or straight? Freak 

or fraud? Saviour or destroyer? No one knew for 

sure, but they couldn’t stop talking about him. 

The Rainbow, 1972. Elton John: “I’ve been following him 

since ‘Space Oddity’. And I’ve followed him from all those 

albums that didn’t sell, like The Man Who Sold The World and 

things like that. Above all, apart from all the glamorous rubbish,

the music’s there. Ziggy Stardust is a classic album.” 

When the Ziggy Stardust tour was officially launched 

– with little fanfare – at the Toby Jug in Tolworth, 

Surrey, in February 1972, David Bowie was simply 

promoting his latest album, Hunky Dory, and 

previewing songs from his forthcoming record. By 

the time his virtual non-stop concert schedule 

reached the Royal Festival Hall, London, in July, to 

mark Ziggy’s release, he greeted his audience with 

the words: “Hello, I’m Ziggy Stardust and these are 

The Spiders From Mars”. 

“I like to keep my band well-dressed. Actually I’m a bit 

worried about the way the band have fallen into it all so easily. 

They were into hard blues, but now they enjoy the costume bit.”

As Bowie and his Ziggy doppelganger reaped 

greater success, the aloofness that critic Ray 

Coleman had picked up on at the Festival Hall, had 

intensified. The shows became more theatrical, with 

a dance troupe, images projected onto the stage, 

moveable scaffolding, even the piped sound of 

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, lifted from the 

soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange. “A Bowie 

concert is your old Busby Berkeley production… this 

was perhaps the most consciously theatrical rock 

show ever staged,” wrote Charles Shaar Murray, not 

entirely positively. David Bowie had become the 

Star of ‘72, but there was already distinct unease 

with what he was up to. 

“The first couple of months were not easy. The people did 

find it very hard, until we had a musical breakthrough. The

actual look and everything, I mean, it was ‘Aw, a bunch of 

poofters’. Which was kind of fun.” 

“There was one time when I saw him being made up for a 

Russell Harty show, and I remember looking at his reflection in 

the mirror and thinking, ‘This is the most beautiful man I’ve ever 

seen’. I don’t remember him being camp at any time but he was 

beautiful. It comes from the bone structure I think. It was beauty 

as opposed to handsomeness.” -Ziggy producer, Ken Scott. 

There was similar disquiet on a personal level. 

Asked in 1974 whether he believed Ziggy was “a 

monster”, Bowie replied, “Oh, he certainly was…

When I first wrote it was just an experiment. It was an 

exercise for me and he really grew sort of out of 

proportion, I suppose, got much bigger than I thought 

Ziggy was going to be… Ziggy just overshadowed 

everything.” Years later, Bowie admitted that Ziggy 

prompted “real problems, because I enjoyed the 

character so much and it was so much easier for me 

to live within that character that, along with the help of 

some chemical substances at the time, it became 

easier and easier for me to blur the lines between 

reality and the blessed creature that I’d created, my 

doppelganger… The doppelganger and myself were 

starting to become one and the same person. And 

then you start on this trail of chaotic psychological 

destruction.” 

“I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. 

They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my 

characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.” 

Knowingly passing himself off as another 

character, and announcing that artifice was at the 

heart of his game, wasn’t merely a triumph of rock 

aesthetics; it was crucial to Bowie’s career. Angie 

Bowie: “It’s somewhat trite, but it’s true: by creating 

Ziggy to go out and front for him, David never had to 

act like himself in public if he didn’t want to, which in 

turn meant that he could pursue art and applause 

without having to deal with his lack of self-esteem, as

the shrinks put it, or more accurately, his frigid selfloathing.”

THE ZIGGY ENIGMA 

Bowie’s most enigmatic creation, who rose from 

anonymity to revered idol status only to throw it all 

away, was a dashing exercise of wish-fulfilment that 

said much about his own aspirations and thirst for 

melodrama. Bowie-as-Ziggy soon mutated into 

pop’s most pampered laboratory animal, but he 

could never have made it without a litle help from 

his friends… 

Iggy Pop 

Prefix Iggy’s name with the oddest letter in the 

alphabet. Simple, wasn’t it? (Bowie has since 

claimed, unconvincingly, that ‘Ziggys’ was the name 

of a tailor’s shop he glimpsed from a train). 

According to the MainMan Vice-President Leee 

Black Childers, Bowie was infatuated with Iggy 

because he “wanted to tap into the rock’n’roll reality 

that Iggy lived – and that David Bowie could never 

live because he was a wimpy little South London art 

student and Iggy was a Detroit trash bag”. Bowie 

returned the favour by overseeing three classic Iggy 

albums, Raw Power (1973), The Idiot and Lust For 

Life (both 1977). The pair, who were virtually 

inseparable during 1976 and 1977, have worked 

together intermittently ever since.

Vince Taylor 

“Vince Taylor really became one of the building 

blocks of the Ziggy character. I just thought he was 

too good to be true; he was of another world, he was 

something else, and he was definitely part of the 

blueprint of thus strange character that came from 

somewhere.” During the Nineties, Bowie has been

keen to stress the importance of this little-known 

rock’n’roller to his Ziggy project. 

Taylor, alias plain Brian Holden from California via 

Middlesex, found few takers for his second-wave 

rock’n’roll in London, so he fled to France where he 

was hailed as the new Elvis. Bowie met him in 

London in 1966, by which time Taylor was, Bowie 

recalled, “right out of his tree; this guy was bonkers, 

absolutely the genuine article. I can’t remember if he 

said he was an alien or the Son of God, but he might 

have been a bit of both.” 

Taylor returned to France, but a 1967 tour ended 

in catastrophe. “At his last performance,” Bowie told 

Paul Du Noyer, “he dismissed the band, then went 

on stage dressed in white robes as Jesus Christ and 

said, ‘I am the Resurrection, I am Jesus Christ.’ They 

nearly lynched him.” A bona fide leper Messiah, 

indeed. Vince Taylor died in Switzerland in 1991.

There was little contact between Glam rivals Bowie and 

Bolan (left) during the Ziggy period. However, a few years back 

David revealed that he is in possession of tapes featuring some 

top-secret demo recordings he made with Marc in Los Angeles 

in the mid-Seventies. 

Marc Bolan 

Bowie was at once fascinated and consumed with 

envy when his pal and rival Marc Bolan made a 

virtually overnight transformation from hippie

throwback to the first idol of Glam Rock. Bolan, who 

spouted poetry, wore make-up and sported Medusalike 

hair, was a strange kind of pop star; cue Ziggy 

Stardust, the ultimate rock’n’roll oddity. Bolan’s 

influence didn’t stop there. Ziggy acolytes “Weird 

and Gilly” sound like characters plucked from an old 

Bolan poem. And suspicions that the TRex man 

inspired ‘Lady Stardust’ were confirmed when his 

face was projected onto a screen during a 

performance of the song at the Rainbow in August 

1972. 

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy 

One evening, a little-known country and western 

singer was invited on to the popular American 

comedy show, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. The 

audience thought him hilarious; the singer, the selfstyled 

Legendary Stardust Cowboy, wasn’t so 

amused and reportedly fled the stage in tears. His 

music was, Bowie fondly recalled, “the most 

anarchic, nihilistic stuff you’ve ever heard in your life”, 

and as early as 1972 he was openly acknowledging 

Ziggy’s debt to the Legendary One. 

Jimi Hendrix 

Jimi “played it left-hand”, was infamously “well-hung” 

and, when he wore his Oriental headscarf, sported a 

“screwed-down hairdo / Like some cat from Japan”. 

Hendrix was rock’s gifted, if reluctant superstar 

whose three years of fame and narcotic obliteration 

came to an abrupt end in September 1970. He was 

“loaded”, certainly, but “boy could he play guitar”. 

There were just too many obvious references in the 

title track (let’s put “snow-white tan” down to artistic 

licence) for Ziggy to have been anyone else.

Other theories… 

Both Alice Cooper and Todd Rundgren fronted 

Sixties bands called The Nazz, which again could be 

a reference to the Nazarin, alias Jesus Christ… 

Before he turned his back on stardom claiming he’d 

seen the light after a particularly potent acid trip, 

Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green had taken to wearing 

robes like the man from Galilee or, perhaps, a “leper 

Messiah”. Another counterculture idol with the whiff 

of Rise and Fall about him was longtime Bowie 

favourite Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. The potentially 

tragic nature of pop stardom was the subject of a cult 

movie, Privilege, starring Sixties heart-throb Paul 

Jones and released in 1967. That same year, pop 

mythologist Nik Cohn published I Am Still The 

Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, a fictional tale 

concerning the rise and fall of a pulp hero. “Violence 

and glamour and speed, splendour and vulgarity, 

danger and gesture and style – these were the 

things that he valued, nothing else.” And, yes, Bowie 

read the book… Whether he saw the cult voyeur 

movie Peeping Tom is not known, but the similarity 

between the very first scene and the cover of the 

Ziggy Stardust album is uncanny.

The Nazz, Todd Rundgren’s band.

2.2 

Aladdin Sane 

“I think what I do and the way I dress is me pandering to my 

own eccentricities and imagination. It’s continual fantasy. 

Nowadays there is really no difference between my personal life 

and everything I do on stage.” 

Ziggy Stardust had been Bowie’s Glam Rock 

space cadet infused with an impudent dash of A 

Clockwork Orange. Aladdin Sane was Ziggy writ 

larger, and even more incomprehensible. The key 

motif was a lightning flash uncannily similar to the 

international symbol for danger. Everything that 

Ziggy threatened to become manifested itself in 

Aladdin Sane. It was a creation that very nearly 

overwhelmed its creator.

The Aladdin Sane lightning bolt was Bowie’s most 

recognisable insignia in the Seventies. “I came up with the flash 

thing. But the teardop was (photographer) Brian Duffy’s. He put 

that on afterward. I thought it was rather sweet.” Twenty years 

later, when Bowie saw what Jones Bloom had painted on to this 

Q cover, he described it as “cheeky”. 

Bowie later described Aladdin Sane as “Ziggy 

goes to America. I’d said all I could say about Ziggy 

but I created this bloody thing, now how do I get out 

of it.” America was, in Bowie’s eyes, “this alternative 

world that I’d been talking about. It had all the 

violence and all the strangeness and the bizarreness 

and it was really happening. It was like real life. It 

wasn’t just in my songs.” Unlike Ziggy, which had 

been created in Bowie’s imagination, Aladdin Sane 

was about the reality of stardom. 

My Death: “I saw him do it in ‘73. I was so impressionable 

then that he could have done a Rolf Harris song and I’d have 

thought it was mega.” - Echo And The Bunnymen’s Ian 

McCulloch. 

The studious, Warhol-like detachment which Bowie 

had applied to Ziggy Stardust barely got a look-in 

during the Aladdin Sane era, which seemed to take 

hold during the three-month US tour towards the end 

of 1972. When Bowie made a fleeting national

appearance on the Russell Harty Plus TV show, 

early in 1973, it was as if the “leper Messiah” had 

finally landed. The singer who, not 18 months earlier, 

had disappointed several of Andy Warhol’s friends 

for resembling a “folky old hippie” now epitomised 

everything that ran counter to popular, and even 

unpopular, taste. “My next role will be a person called 

Aladdin Sane,” he said. No one was in any doubt 

that he was already playing the part. 

In many ways, this was Bowie’s most perfect 

creation – the moment when Frankenstein’s monster 

finally walked. But the parallels with the visionary 

scientist were all too clear: at 110 lbs, Bowie was 

painfully thin and corpse-like, and wore the look of 

someone in the grip of forces that were about to 

destroy him. One of the songs he performed on the 

show was Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’; it sounded like 

a funeral dirge. His favourite reading at the time was 

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land.

‘Drive In Saturday’ was also performed on the same TV 

show. The song, Bowie recalls, had been “written for Mott The 

Hoople. But they decided the time had come for them to write 

their own single, so it was given back to me. I was so annoyed, 

that one night in Florida I got very drunk and shaved my 

eyebrows off!”

YOU WILL BE QUEEN 

Kim Novak celebrated her 45th birthday with co-star Bowie 

on the set of Just A Gigolo in February 1978. 

The ‘Miracle Goodnight’ video-shoot, Los Angeles, February 

1993. 

Rumours of David Bowie’s bisexuality did 

wonders for his heterosexual health. “I’ve had all

these girls try to get me over to the other side again, 

‘C’mon, David, it isn’t all that bad, I’ll show you’,” he 

said later. Sex was never just a gimmick for Bowie. 

His work is littered with innuendo and graphic sexual 

references, and his narcissistic and voyeuristic 

tendencies are well documented. After discovering 

sex at 14, he recalled that, “My first thought was, well, 

if I ever get sent to prison, I’ll know how to keep 

happy.” 

For many years, particularly during the Seventies, 

Bowie consumed groupies with the enthusiasm of a 

Viagra-chomping rabbit. But a keen appetite for 

carnal pleasures hasn’t prevented him from enjoying 

– and in one or two cases enduring – several 

meaningful, long-term relationships. 

At London’s Cafe Royale for a Just A Gigolo press call, with 

co-star Sydne Rome, Valentine’s Day 1979. 

In 1976, when Bowie was probably at his most 

cynical, he was asked about love. “Never have been 

in love, to speak of. I was in love once, maybe, and it 

was an awful experience. It rotted me, drained me, 

and it was a disease… Being in love is something 

that breeds brute anger and jealousy, everything but 

love, it seems.” His comments suggested a deep 

psychological need to protect himself from emotional 

pain – rejecting ‘love’ offered the same kind of 

protection that Warholian strategies conferred on his 

public life.

Clowning about at the Alacazar Club in Paris with Coco 

Schwab, May 1976. 

The object of Bowie’s invective was Hermione 

Farthingale: tall, beautiful, artistic and a classic 

English rose of middle class stock (and with a name 

to die for). The pair met late in 1967 while both 

attended Lindsay Kemp’s mime and dance classes. 

They appeared briefly together for a scene in a 

BBC-TV drama, The Pistol Shot, and by spring 

1968 had fallen in love. In August, Bowie moved out 

of Ken Pitt’s central London flat to share an attic 

bedsit with Hermione in Kensington. 

Bowie wrote ‘Even A Fool Learns To Love’ when he was 

with Hermione Farthingale. Ken Pitt: “She was very much a 

muse. A delightful girl, and the complete antithesis of Angie, but 

I don’t think they were at all matched. I was later told that she 

left after another man reappeared in her life.” 

Temporarily ditching plans for a solo career, he 

formed Feathers, a folksy, mixed-media trio with 

Hermione, who danced, sang occasionally and 

provided a fine foil for Bowie and the guitar-playing

John Hutchinson. The threesome appeared in Love 

You Till Tuesday, a 30-minute promotional film shot 

early in 1969. But days after it was completed, 

Hermione ended the relationship, apparently at the 

behest of her parents, who thought she deserved 

better than a struggling pop singer. 

Ken Pitt remembers Bowie returning to his flat 

“bruised and insecure”. Deeply traumatised might 

have been more accurate, for years later, Bowie was 

still affected by the loss: “We had a perfect love, so 

perfect that it burned out in two years. We were too 

close, thought alike and spent all the time in a room 

sitting on the corner of the bed.” The last phrase 

reprised a line from ‘An Occasional Dream’, one of 

two songs on Bowie’s 1969 album which dealt with 

the episode. ‘Letter To Hermione’ was more 

revealing: “I tear my soul to ease the pain,” sang 

Bowie, but by 1970, hurt had turned to bitterness: 

“She took my head / Smashed it up / Left my young 

blood rising,” so “I grabbed her golden hair / And 

threw her to the ground.” The title, ‘She Shook Me 

Cold’, said it all. Some insist that Hermione has 

reappeared as “the girl with the mousey hair” in ‘Life 

On Mars?’, or even as Ziggy Stardust. More certain 

is that Bowie never allowed himself to give so much 

to another partner, at least not for many years. 

1969’s ‘The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ was apparently 

written for Mary Finnegan’s son, Richard. 

With his good looks and lively mind, Bowie has had 

no shortage of women admirers, including more than 

his fair share of posh girls seeking a bit of rock’n’roll 

excitement. An early encounter with wealth and taste 

came via Dana Gillespie, a 14-year-old drama

student with a passion for gorgeous and creative 

R&B singers. Already well on the way to achieving 

her famous 44-26-37 figure, Dana picked out her 

favourite Manish Boy one 1964 evening at the 

Marquee Club and smuggled him home for a night of 

passion. The pair quickly became soul-mates, 

meeting at coffee-houses and, later, in Dana’s own 

flat, though with her eyes on Bob Dylan and his on 

making it, the relationship cooled. Dana remained a 

long-term fixture in Bowie’s life, helping him to pick 

up the pieces after Hermione’s departure and again 

during the mid-Seventies, when he was going 

through a particularly traumatic spell. 

Bowie originally wrote Hunky Dory ’s ‘Andy Warhol’ for 

Dana Gillespie to sing. 

Between Dana and Hermione came Natasha

Kornilof, a costume and set designer who was 

Lindsay Kemp’s chief competitor for Bowie’s 

affections during the winter of 1967-68. The affair 

was conducted between bouts of painting scenery 

backdrops, but petered out after Kemp “scratched” 

his wrists and she downed too many sleeping pills 

one night. Kornilof later designed Bowie’s costumes 

for his 1978 world tour but her most memorable 

creation was the 1980 Pierrot outfit for ‘Ashes To 

Ashes’. 

After a brief fling with journalist Mary Finnigan, 

who gave Bowie a spare room in her Beckenham 

flat, listened eagerly to his thoughts on Buddhism, 

and helped him set up the Beckenham Arts Lab, 

Bowie found his perfect mate – a 19-year-old 

business studies student and American motormouth 

Mary Angela Barnett. She nursed and cultivated his 

ego, demanding little more than the opportunity to 

parade her star-in-waiting like a prize kitten. Angie’s 

support was crucial: she hassled record companies, 

agents and journalists; encouraged her shy English 

boy to get out a bit and mingle with the rock crowd; 

and provided the magic ring of confidence he 

needed. 

Bowie’s mother Peggy gets in on the act at his marriage to 

Angie. Bowie: “Second biggest mistake of my life marrying that 

woman. Looks like Hello! magazine were at this one too!” 

The couple met on 9 April 1969; within a year, 

they’d married. Some whispered it was merely a 

ruse so that David could obtain the Green Card that

would enable him to live and work in America. Not 

that there was much chance of that happening when 

the pair stepped out of Bromley Registry Office on 

20 March 1970 as man and wife. Bowie was 

struggling to capitalise on the success of ‘Space 

Oddity’, was in the process of ditching his manager 

and showed little inclination to perform live or even to 

write new material. 

With Bianca Jagger leaving Paris nightspot Chez Castel, 

June 1977. 

By 1973, all that had changed. Dave’n’Angie had 

become a mutant version of those old-school 

sophisticates Mick’n’Bianca, guaranteed to create 

headlines wherever they went, but both had already 

outlived each other’s usefulness. Monogamy had

never been central to their relationship, but now living 

in Chelsea, in the heart of rock star territory, the 

favours came thicker and faster. While Angie was 

out on huge shopping sprees, or trying to get her 

modelling career off the ground, David entertained a 

stream of women in their exclusive residence in 

Oakley Street. When one, a startling black teenager 

from Chicago named Ava Cherry, moved in (initially 

at Angie’s request), the strain was too much and Ava 

was packed off to a nearby flat. 

Backstage at Rona Barrett’s Good Morning America TV 

show with Angie, 1975

With Iman at LAX Airport, Los Angeles, 1992.

Ava Cherry, the funk-soul sister. 

While Angie became increasingly irrelevant, Ava 

was fresh, fun – and different. “He was fascinated by 

black people,” she told the Gillmans. “Black girls, any 

girls he would sleep with when I was with him were 

black.” That’s when he wasn’t enjoying brief liaisons 

with Salvador Dali’s muse Amanda Lear, Marianne 

Faithfull or, later in the decade, Berlin tranny Romy 

Haag. Bowie found further exotic thrills in the 

company of two older women, Oona Chaplin and 

Elizabeth Taylor, but by the mid-Seventies, the 

dominant woman in his life was his assistant ‘Coco’. 

MainMan’s gloriously shambolic organisational 

structure gave Coco, alias Corrine Schwab, a former 

assistant to UK concert promoter Peter Bowyer, the 

opportunity to rise from secretary in the London 

office to David’s personal assistant during the ‘74 

US tour. Stepping into the vacuum created by the 

stand-off between Bowie and Tony DeFries, her 

composure and cultured manner was exactly what 

Bowie needed during this strained period of his life. 

But her ascent to the top, which was complete by the 

late Seventies, won her enemies. Some insisted the 

iron curtain she wrapped around her charge was a 

way of disarming rivals. Others suggested that Coco 

was another Bowie creation, a surrogate mother 

who did his dirty work for him – and took the flak for 

it, so that David’s genial reputation remained

untarnished. Rumours that the pair were to marry 

were rife during the mid-Eighties, but unfounded; 

Coco remains Bowie’s loyal and trusted advisor. 

Not sure if you’re a boy or a girl. Amanda Lear’s escorts 

during the Seventies numbered several well known rock stars 

Love Is Strange. With Romy Haag at the Alcazar Club in

Paris, May 1976. 

Dalliances with Jee Ling, the Chinese actress who 

enjoyed a tender moment with Bowie during the 

‘China Girl’ video, Marie Helvin, Susan Sarandon 

and Latin dancer Melissa Hurley (who was engaged 

to Bowie for over two years) during the Eighties 

seemed inconsequential by comparison. 

With Coco Schwab in the Royal Box at Live Aid, 1985. 

Social Kind Of Girl. Partying with Susan Sarandon in New 

York, 1983. 

Bowie looked destined to live his days out as a 

playboy divorcee until one night in October 1990, 

when he was introduced to a 34-year-old Somalian 

model, Iman Abdul Majid, at a Los Angeles dinner 

party arranged by his hairdresser Teddy Antolin. 

It was, he said later, love at first sight. 

Independent, beautiful, financially secure and “not the 

usual sort of bubblehead that I’d known in the past”. 

Iman aroused Bowie’s dormant desire for genuine 

romantic involvement, and he wooed her with cruises 

in the Adriatic and trips to Japan, where they

cemented their relationship with his’n’hers tattoos. 

On their first anniversary David proposed on the 

banks of the river Seine, backed up by “the Sinatra 

thing” ‘April In Paris’. The couple were married in a 

civil ceremony in Switzerland in April 1992, and 

repeated the event for the benefit of their friends and 

Hello! magazine in Florence, Italy, in June. Bowie, 

dressed in a suit he co-designed with Thierry 

Mugler, wrote the incidental music. He now claims to 

be a changed man: “There was a time when I 

couldn’t look at a woman without evaluating her on a 

sexual basis. It’s wonderful that it doesn’t happen 

anymore. Turning 50 helped. My libido has started 

shrinking!” So far, so good. 

With Melissa Hurley in 1989. She’d been a dancer on 

Bowie’s Glass Spider tour.

With Iman at London’s Cork Street, 1995. Their first child 

together is due in August 2000.

In 1999, David was asked if he could recall what the writing 

on the Japanese cloak said. His reply? “It may well have said, 

‘Get your potatoes here’.”

No outfit was out of bounds to Bowie, even maternity wear. 

“Nobody understood the European way of dressing and 

adopting the asexual, androgynous everyman pose. People all 

went screaming, “He’s got make-up on and he’s wearing stuff 

that looks like dresses.” 

By this time, The Sweet, Gary Glitter, Rod Stewart 

and even The Rolling Stones had discovered the 

joys of dressing-up, but Bowie’s rapid-fire 

makeovers left them all standing. It wasn’t unusual for 

him to make up to six costume changes a night 

during the first half of 1973. Now heavily influenced 

by the dramatic make-up, role-play and costumes of 

Japanese Kabuki theatre, he’d commissioned a 

complete new wardrobe from the Japanese 

designer Kansai Yamamoto, the centrepiece being 

his magnificent ‘Spring Rain’ costume, which he 

whipped off to reveal a range of undergarments that 

included a sumo wrestler’s truss, blue-and-red

striped leotards and micro-bikinis. His hair, now 

almost unnaturally angular, had grown longer and 

was set off by a round, Pierre Laroche-designed 

reflector on his forehead. (Laroche also styled the 

Aladdin Sane LP cover.) 

Bowie finally met Kansai Yamamoto when he toured Japan 

in April 1973. “He presented me with virtually an entire 

wardrobe because he knew I was wearing copies of his stuff 

and he realised Ziggy was becoming very popular. It was the 

first real connection between a designer and a rock star.”

“This was the first Japanese costume that I got. Originally 

worn by a woodland creature, that’s why it has funny little 

animals on it.”

CIGGY POP 

Bowie has managed to kick cocaine, booze 

binges and groupies. He’s even had his notoriously 

crooked teeth fixed. But despite dipping into Allen 

Carr’s The Easy Way To Stop Smoking, listening to 

self-help tapes, acupuncture and hypnotherapy, his 

love/hate relationship with cigarettes continues 

unabated. “Filling your mouth with cement helps 

immeasurably,” is his most recent, resigned 

statement on the likelihood of him packing it in. 

Like many of his generation, Bowie associated 

the cigarette with Hollywood glamour (Dietrich,

Bogart, Sinatra, right and below), intellectual 

freedom (Sartre, Kerouac), and bad boys (the spiv). 

The fact that his father smoked heavily failed to 

diminish its stylish appeal. “I was still very gawky and 

awkward and wanting to find my attitude. Cigarettes 

sort of supplied it quite easily.”

Starting with the occasional Weights cigarette 

nicked from his dad, the thrill-seeking David Jones 

soon graduated to Dominos, purchased in twos from 

a local newsagent. While working for an advertising 

agency in central London, he followed the example 

of several illustrators there and began to experiment 

with a variety of exotic, invariably foreign brands. 

Settling on Gitanes, a pungent and strong French 

smoke, he soon acquired a hefty habit that, during its 

mid-Seventies peak, saw him get through up to four 

packets per day. Fags found their way into his songs 

(“Time takes a cigarette / Puts it in your mouth”), 

became a vital accessory in publicity shots, a 

theatrical device on stage (he always used a match 

to light up) and an integral part of his iconography. 

Bowie switched brands during the early Eighties. 

“I can’t think of a time that I didn’t think about death,” 

he told Pulp frontman, Jarvis Cocker but by 

swapping the strong taste of Gitanes for mediumstrength 

Marlboro reds, he was making a mild 

concession to health concerns. By 1988, he’d

switched again, to Marlboro Lights. 

Proof that fags weren’t good for David’s health came 

in November 1991 when a pack of Marlboro tossed 

on stage by a female fan at the Brixton Academy 

caught him in the eye. Nevertheless, he gamely puffs 

on: today, Bowie enjoys his first cigarette of the day 

with a coffee after breakfast, and hits the pillow each 

night with the satisfaction of having devoured 

another 39 or so during the course of the day. 

Ciggy and Iggy: the only time they ever shared the vocals on 

stage, New York’s China Club, December 1985.

No less than three packs of Marlboros in evidence, at a Lulu 

playback at the Chteau d’Herouvillé, near Paris, July 1973. 

Expectations for the Aladdin Sane album, issued 

in April 1973, proved impossible to live up to. Bowie 

was the most talked-about rock star in the world, but 

the record was mildly denounced as hurried and 

inconsistent – exactly the qualities that have since

made it more durable than its predecessor. 

Interspersed between the raids on vintage rock’n’ roll 

(‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Panic In Detroit’, a version of the 

Rolling Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’) 

were nods to the German theatre song tradition 

(‘Time’), the avantgarde (‘Aladdin Sane’) and 

galvanised New York rock (‘Cracked Actor’). 

At a show in New York in February 1973, Bowie 

made his entrance via a descending cage lit by a 

single spotlight and with revolving mirrored globes 

on either side. What followed was a typically 

controlled performance with Bowie returning in sixinch 

heels for a finale of ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’. But he 

hadn’t reckoned on a fan leaping onto the stage and 

planting a kiss on his cheek. Bowie fainted, fell to the 

ground and was hastily carried off, leaving the 

audience wondering whether it had just witnessed 

the death of Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane. Or even 

David Bowie. 

Performing ‘Love Me Do’ with guest guitarist Jeff Beck at 

London’s Hammersmith Odeon, July 3, 1973. 

Whoever he was, he lived on, at least until that night 

in July 1973 when Bowie retired Ziggy/Aladdin and 

quite possibly himself. Ulterior motives lurked behind 

the ‘instant’ decision to quit as Bowie later admitted: 

“I knew it was the end of the Spiders. I knew that I’d

done as much as I could in the context of that band.” 

Days after the show, he justified his decision: “That’s 

what Ziggy did and so I had to do it too… I was in 

that particular frame of mind, that I was Ziggy and 

this had to be done. I had to finish the band… Vince 

Taylor had done the same thing. He just stopped and 

then they carted him away. It was part of a pattern, a 

self-fulfilling prophesy.” Retirement didn’t necessarily 

mean being “carted away”: in 1965, after his Flowers 

exhibition in Paris, Andy Warhol announced his 

retirement from painting to concentrate on films – 

and never looked back. 

Bowie wore this Freddi Burretti-designed suit, the jacket of 

intricately patterned worsted, with ruby velvet trim and cream 

lining, on the Russell Harty Plus show in January 1973. It was 

sold at Christie’s auctioneers in 1998 for £2, 600.

Watch That Man. At New York’s Radio City Music Hall, 

Valentine’s Day 1973.

London, May 1973, backstage at Peter Cook and Dudley 

Moore’s Behind The Fridge. Bowie was accompanied by Tony 

Visconti, the first time they’d seen each other in three years: 

“The David that I knew had mousy brown hair, and he walks into 

the kitchen with spiky orange hair, no eyebrows and a metallic 

suit. Our nanny dropped my son’s bottle on the floor when she 

saw him!” The ‘Life On Mars?’ video shoot.

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS 

A man of wealth and taste. “I do tend to regard money as 

the oil to get other things going. I feel more comfortable with it 

like that.”

For the first half of his career, David Bowie 

regarded business matters as something that other 

people did. As a teenage hopeful, he was too busy 

waiting for his picture to appear in the papers to 

read the small print in his contracts. Besides, as he 

wasn’t earning much, 50% of nothing hardly 

mattered. 

When the cash began to roll in during the early 

Seventies, Bowie was living the life of a pampered 

superstar and profligacy prevailed. One day, late in 

1974, he woke up in his hotel room and realised the 

party he’d been subsidising for the past three years 

was over. But the hangover, in terms of legal battles 

and financial follies, had several years yet to run. In 

the midst of his 1976 Station To Station tour, he 

announced to Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth 

that he was broke, an exaggeration perhaps but then 

David was never one to let the whole truth get in the 

way of a spectacular quote. 

Chicago, October 1972. Tony Defries once said of Bowie: 

“He always looks like a refugee unless he’s been properly 

dressed and put together for the day.” 

By the early Eighties, Bowie had extricated himself 

from most of his obligations to MainMan and began 

to invest in art and antiques. In 1997 he raised 

further capital by selling the sound and publishing 

rights to his catalogue via a bond scheme. This 

enabled him to buy out DeFries completely; Bowie 

now controls his master-tapes outright. He has 

houses in several corners of the world and a wife

with her own bank account. David Bowie won’t get 

fooled again. 

Bowie’s first proper manager was Leslie Conn, an 

associate of Dick James who spectacularly failed to 

interest The Beatles’ publisher in either Marc Feld 

(later Bolan) or David Jones. But he did manage to 

get David a deal with Decca/Vocalion, a spot on 

Juke Box Jury, and help fabricate the great hair 

debate. But after Parlophone delayed the release of 

Davy Jones and the Lower Third’s ‘You’ve Got A 

Habit Of Leaving’ in 1965, the partnership was 

amicably dissolved. 

The King Of Stamford Hill: Les Conn was seen at the launch 

of Bowie’s Cork Street art show, at the artist’s special invitation. 

“To be a star, you must act like one, regardless of 

expense,” declared Tony DeFries. “DeFries was a disaster. He

managed himself very well,” adds his predecessor Ken Pitt. 

Next came Ralph Horton, who chauffeured Bowie 

to shows in a Jaguar, gave him a place to stay and 

recommended various image changes. Within a 

year, the baillifs came knocking and Horton lost 

David to a publicist friend who recommend that the 

singer make a go of it as a soloist. He was Ken Pitt, 

a key influence in Bowie’s life who invited his 

protégé to share his split-level bachelor-pad and 

nurtured a cultural revolution. (Bowie later described 

his stay chez Pitt as “one of the most stimulating 

periods of my life”.) 

The arrival of Angie, and then Tony DeFries, both 

of whom were more attuned to the increasingly hardnosed 

rock industry, signalled Pitt’s downfall, which 

ended messily after a showdown in May 1970. (“Ken 

is a very nice man,” Bowie said later, “but that’s not 

enough in this business.”) DeFries was one of a new 

breed of legal trainees who eschewed formal 

qualifications in favour of busking it in the lucrative 

rock and pop market. 

“I still recieve a special Christmas gift from David every 

year,” says Ken Pitt. 

A fine talker, DeFries was a firm believer in the Col. 

Tom Parker school of pop management: butter up 

the client, always brandish a big cigar and don’t pull 

any punches. He promised David Bowie everything 

he wanted – fame, money and complete artistic 

control. As good as his word, he quickly secured a 

£5, 000 publishing deal, which instantly unlocked

Bowie’s flagging creativity. Ignoring the pleas of 

David’s record company, DeFries took him off to 

New York where he inked a lucrative new deal with 

RCA Records. Within a year, he’d tied up the 

master-tapes of Bowie’s music with his company, 

MainMan, and had begun to liken himself to MGM 

movie magnate Louis B. Mayer. 

Like all empires, MainMan cracked under the 

weight of its own success. If excess and decadence 

was the nature of Bowie’s game, MainMan more 

than did its best to match it. By late 1974, with a 

queue of debtors at the door, DeFries embarked 

upon his final, magnificent folly – Fame, a Broadway 

stage musical loosely based on the life of Marilyn 

Monroe. It lasted one night and lost £250, 000. It was 

the final straw for Bowie, who struck a secret deal 

with his record company and then began the lengthy 

process of disengaging himself from MainMan. The 

settlement was painful: David was compelled to split 

the earnings of his early Seventies records in 

perpetuity and, even more galling, MainMan was 

entitled to a 16% share of Bowie’s gross earnings 

until September 1982. It was a huge sacrifice, but he 

had little alternative. 

Bowie’s attempt to exercise greater vigilance over 

his business affairs foundered barely a year into his 

partnership with Michael Lippman, who’d 

engineered the split from DeFries. Los Angeles 

lawyer Stanley Diamond helped him pick up the 

pieces, advising him to move to Switzerland, and lay 

some secure financial foundations. Bowie, too, 

began to dabble in fiscal matters, and by the early 

Eighties he had set up several companies and 

helped negotiate a lucrative five-album deal with 

EMI. He’d settled with his ex-wife Angie and now 

stipulated loyalty clauses when recruiting new 

musicians. By the mid-Eighties, Bowie was probably 

worth £30 million; his two world tours during the 

decade earned him another £50 million or so. 

Current estimates put his wealth into the £200 

million-plus bracket.

Talking ‘bout Monroe at London’s National Portrait Gallery, 

March 1995. “I’m managing myself now simply because I’ve got 

fed up with the managers I’ve known.”

2.3 

Soul Survivor 

At the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam, 1974, with Angie and son 

Zowie Duncan Haywood Jones, born 1971. Bowie: “I had 

conjunctivitis, so I made the most of it and dressed like a pirate.

Just stopped short of the parrot.” 

It would have been impossible for David Bowie 

to have surpassed the Zeitgeist-defining impact of 

his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane creations, but 

as he proved with his next moves, he hadn’t lost the 

ability to shock. Only those familiar with his 

ceaseless thirst for change could have predicted the 

suddenness with which he ditched the last remnants 

of Ziggy and ushered in a new era characterised by 

sharp suits, a conventional haircut and sensible 

shoes. It was a radical transformation, and one that 

finally enabled him to crack America. Sizeable 

pockets of Bowie Boys kept the faith in Britain, fans 

whose influence would rebound several years later 

with the New Romantic movement. 

Bowie plays Ziggy just one more time. Performing ‘Dodo’ on 

NBC’s Midnight Special TV show, October 1973. 

But first there was some unfinished Ziggy business. 

A lapse in inspiration, coupled with legal wrangles 

over a song publishing contract with Chrysalis Music, 

resulted in Bowie’s nostalgic trip back to Swinging 

London for Pin Ups, an affectionate if unsatisfying 

collection of cover versions. The move certainly took

the heat out of Bowiemania, and with the news that 

Mick Ronson had left at the end of the sessions, 

Bowie’s rock’n’roll suicide seemed to be unfolding 

nicely. 

It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll. “An outfit is an entire life experience. 

An outfit is much more than just something to wear. It’s about 

who you are, it’s a badge and it becomes a symbol.” 

Only now, it wasn’t rock’n’roll; it was, shrieked 

Bowie, “Genocide!”. Having squashed his Spiders, 

Bowie slid further into his own dark fantasies. He 

attempted to buy the rights to George Orwell’s 1984, 

a nightmarish portrait of totalitarianism, for a stage 

musical, but the author’s widow blocked the move. 

He struck up a friendship with Beat novelist and guntoting 

misanthrope William Burroughs. And he was 

enjoying the dubious benefits of cocaine. Bowie was 

indeed floating in a most peculiar way, and the 

changes were now coming faster than ever. 

Pin Ups in Paris, July 1973. Vogue magazine commissioned

a shot of Twiggy and Ziggy, by fashion snapper Justin de 

Villeneuve, who recalls: “Bowie would have been the first man 

ever on the cover. He loved the idea. When Bowie saw the 

finished picture he asked if he could use it for his album. I 

owned the picture, so I decided to let him have it. Vogue didn’t 

talk to me for years after, they were very angry.” 

With Diamond Dogs, his “glam apocalypse” album 

released in 1974, Ziggy (at least what looked like a 

beastified version of him on the cover) was rescued 

from mid-Sixties London and dumped in the vaguely 

futuristic Hunger City, a bleak urban landscape 

overrun by sinister urchins and lethal canines. As the 

record unfolded, the scenario transformed into one 

of post-apocalyptic desolation. Bowie allowed his 

dystopian dreams to run wild, a manifestation of a 

lifelong fascination with power and death. “This 

album is more me than anything I’ve done

previously,” Bowie insisted. He wasn’t joking. 

Mad Dogs And Englishmen. In this breathtaking photograph 

by Terry O’ Neill, Bowie dons a Spanish hat. 

The accompanying Diamond Dogs show was taken 

to America, land of love and hate, and the main 

inspiration for Bowie’s panoramic visions of social 

breakdown. Any question that Ziggy came too was 

soon banished by the sight of Bowie in a neatlypressed 

Yves St Laurent suit and smart, layered hair 

with a hitherto unfashionable side-parting. The sight 

of this latter-day crooner (Lester Bangs described 

him as “Johnny Ray on cocaine singing about 1984”) 

performing what was virtually a one-man show to 

stardust-encrusted audiences chanting “We want 

Ziggy!” was awesome enough, but even that was 

outflanked by what was regarded at the time as the 

most spectacular rock show ever staged – though 

not everyone agreed that it had much to do with rock.

Dog Man Star

“To this day he was the most extreme. Bowie got away with 

wearing things that looked stupid on others. In this period he 

really did look like an alien, like no one else.” - Adam Ant.

INFLUENCES & HEROES: FANTASTIC 

VOYAGE 

The Doors 

Sometimes the most telling influences are rarely 

revealed. Jim Morrison’s apocalyptic rock theatre, 

which swept America during the late Sixties, was 

literate, cinematic, manipulative, steeped in the 

politics of insanity and conclusive proof that artistic 

pretensions and rock music could co-exist – and 

become successful. Bowie ad-libbed The Doors’ 

‘Hello, I Love You’ during ‘Aladdin Sane’ on a 1996 

festival tour. 

Friedrich Nietzsche 

Nietzschean elitism (and attendant misanthropy) was 

an underlying force throughout Bowie’s work in the 

Seventies. “I’ve always thought the only thing to do 

was to try and go through life as Superman, right 

from the word go. I felt far too insignificant as just 

another person,” insisted Super-Bowie. 

Kenneth Anger 

Bowie devoured Anger’s scandalous Hollywood 

Babylon book, and spent some time with the 

notorious Crowley devotee during the mid- 

Seventies. Rumours that Bowie wrote ‘Look Back In 

Anger’ for Ken are apparently untrue.

Aleister Crowley 

The so-called Wickedest Man In The World (above) 

has provided the inspiration for several Bowie 

songs, including ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Station To 

Station’. 

Pork 

Bowie got his first taste of the Andy Warhol circus in 

summer 1971 when Pork, inspired by New York’s 

Theatre Of The Ridiculous, enjoyed a six-week 

season at London’s Roundhouse. Based on 

conversations taped by Warhol on his ever-present 

recorder, the production consisted of a variety of 

Warhol ‘Superstars’ either talking about, or indulging 

in, masturbation, abortion, drug-taking and other 

taboo subjects. The inevitable media-induced 

controversy followed, forcing the promoters to put up 

a notice outside that stated: “This play has explicit 

sexual content and ‘offensive’ language – if you are

likely to be disturbed, please do not attend.” Bowie 

loved it and attended the show on several 

occasions, ingratiating himself with the Warhol incrowd. 

Japan 

From the magnificent role-play of the ancient Kabuki 

theatre to the nation’s obsession with trash culture, 

the contradictions inherent in Japanese culture has 

provided Bowie with an endless source of 

fascination. On occasion, this influence has found its 

way into his music, notably on ‘Moss Garden’ 

(“Heroes”), ‘It’s No Game No.1’ (Scary 

Monsters),’Crystal Japan’ and, most recently, 

‘Brilliant Adventure’ (‘hours…’). 

Berlin 

Berlin is the city of Expressionist cinema, of 

Cabaret-style decadence, of Brecht and Weill’s 

radical theatre songs, of the Nazi state, of the old 

East/West divide, of “Heroes”. It was David Bowie’s 

favourite European city – until the Wall came 

tumbling down. 

Over The Wall We Go. “The whole reason for going to Berlin 

was because it was so low-key. It was the kind of place where 

you walk around and really are left alone and not stopped by 

people.”

Nazism 

The power of a modern media star is far greater 

than a dictator like Hitler could have ever imagined. 

Few stars with a modicum of intelligence could 

escape pondering the power relations inherent in 

stardom, and it’s fair to say that Bowie went in feet 

first during the mid-Seventies. Motivated by deep 

cultural pessimism, his fascination with Hitler’s Third 

Reich was both morbid and playful. Bowie was 

certainly no fascist, but some of his comments (and 

that unfortunate ‘wave’ at Victoria Station in 1976) 

were irresponsible. 

Kraftwerk 

Bowie’s switch from slick, US-inspired plastic soul to 

the electro sound experiments of the second side of 

Low was largely inspired by the work of Kraftwerk. 

Before the sessions began, Bowie had asked Tony 

Visconti to familiarise himself with the work of the 

German pioneers. 

Teutonic techno pioneers Kraftwerk.

Berlin’s Lutzower Lampe transvestite club, 1976. The three 

in-house performers with Bowie are (from left) Viola Scotty 

(who later commited suicide), Daisy and Karmeen. The lady in 

red is artist Clare Shenstone, a close friend of David’s to this 

day.

David Bowie circa 1974 is not rock anymore. He can only be 

described as an entertainer who looks further ahead than any 

other in rock and whose far reaching imagination has created a 

combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several 

years ahead of its time” - Chris Charlesworth, Melody Maker, 

1974.

Tony Visconti remembers: “I was there the night when the 

cherry-picker got stuck during ‘Space Oddity’, and David had to 

crawl back down the pole. The fans were trying to grab his 

bottom and his clothes, and he made it look like it was part of 

the act!” 

Bowie had tried grand-scale rock theatre at the 

Rainbow shows in August 1972, but usually the 

theatricality of his shows relied on his costume 

changes. The Diamond Dogs tour was different. 

With little expense spared, Bowie employed 

Broadway lighting man Jules Fisher and designer 

Mark Ravitz to transform the stage into Hunger City, 

with instructions that it should draw on expressionist 

films like Metropolis and The Cabinet Of Dr 

Caligari, with a bit of Albert Speer (the architect of 

the Third Reich) thrown in. Watchtowers, alleys, 

bridges, beams, a boxing-ring, a giant hand, even a 

70-foot hydraulic arm which raised Bowie high

above the audience, were cradled by two giant 

skyscrapers on either side of the stage. Three trucks 

were required to transport the set around the country. 

“Tony Basil taught him things like ‘Don’t ever waste a 

movement. If you have to put your microphone down, do it with a 

flourish. If you have to walk from one side of the stage to the 

other, do it with great dramatic gestures. Throw your head back 

before you put your first step out’.” - Tony Visconti. 

With a choreographer, Toni Basil, and a classically 

trained Musical Director, Michael Kamen, it was as if 

Broadway had sneaked up on rock’n’roll and stole 

its heart. It was a slick and genuinely awe-inspiring 

spectacle, though the night when the hydraulic arm 

played up, leaving Bowie suspended in mid-air for 

half-a-dozen songs, provided amusing relief for the 

increasingly embittered session men forced to 

perform in the shadows for minimal wages. 

The black music influence that had been 

detectable on parts of Diamond Dogs, most notably 

on the superfunk-charged ‘1984’ and the soul ballad, 

‘Rock’n’Roll With Me’, intoxicated Bowie during his 

latest American visit. With Ava Cherry his regular 

companion, he saw James Brown at the Apollo, The 

Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden and began to 

frequent the new disco clubs. When, during a break 

in the tour, Bowie wanted to record again, Ava came 

up with the Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. 

This was the home of the Philly Sound, created by 

Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, whose artists 

included the O Jays, Billy Paul, Harold Melvin and 

The Bluenotes and The Three Degrees.

“Ever since I started working with Carlos Alomar in 1974, 

I’ve found writing within the context of American soul and R&B 

the most exciting way of writing for me.” Rhythm maestro 

Alomar went on to be Musical Director for a further four Bowie 

tours, and the pair were reunited in 1995 on the Outside tour 

(above) on which Bowie wears a Todd Oldham shirt. 

The skeletal Live cover: David Bowie Is Alive And Well And 

Living Only In Theory

Never mind the quality, feel the width. In almost any 

situation, Bowie has always been able to hold his own.

Slinky Vagabond. For his new ‘soul tour’ in late 1974, Bowie 

went Puerto Rican-style, with box jackets, pegged trousers and 

a thigh chain the order of the day. 

With the producers’ MFSB house band on 

another engagement, Bowie hired some of the best 

black session players around and began to lay the 

basis of his most radical musical transformation yet. 

The resulting Young Americans album was, he said, 

his “Plastic soul” take on the sounds of young black 

America.

The Mask. Performing ‘Aladdin Sane’ in West Virginia, June 

1974. 

The strangest man in rock’n’roll had, by a mixture 

of design and good fortune, sanitised the sound of 

its black cities for a white-bread audience. It was 

shamelessly opportunist and pleasantly perverse, a 

genuine gamble presented as a fait accompli. 

Bowie even started selling records in the States, and 

in spring 1975, ‘Fame’ (which at least was 

thematically consistent if nothing else) gave him his 

first No. 1 single. 

With John & Yoko, and some not so young Americans 

(Simon and Garfunkel, Roberta Flack) at the Grammy Awards, 

New York, March 1975. 

This quickfire style makeover also affected the tour. 

The set that had dominated the early dates was 

abandoned. The band was reshuffled with guitarist 

Carlos Alomar, drummer Dennis Davis and backing 

singer Luther Vandross drafted in to reflect the new

direction. Now, Bowie and his band performed on a 

bare stage against a simple white backdrop. Back 

home, the reaction was muted, though Bowie’s 

foppish new ‘wedge’ haircut with orange tint and 

blond streaks, helped inspire the new Soul Boy 

culture. Not all these enthusiasts followed his next 

move, but they provided a vital link between the 

Northern Soul scene and the emerging disco culture. 

And the man in the outsized zoot suit? “Alive and 

well and living in theory,” he reckoned with the 

benefit of hindsight.

The wedge cut -Phil Oakey was intrigued.

LIKE A ROLLING CLONE 

“In my early stuff I made it through on sheer pretension. I 

consider myself responsible for a whole new school of 

pretensions.” 

Bowie’s success, and his enduring appeal, has 

been an inspiration to many artists in search of an 

old idea. Some of these Bowie clones were wellintentioned, 

many plain daft, but they tend to 

disprove the theory that all blokes look wonderful in 

make-up.

Bauhaus 

Oh dear. Punk met Glam and spawned a Goth 

monster, and they rarely came more hackneyed than 

Bauhaus, fronted by pouting Pete Murphy. Still, the 

band achieved something Bowie’s not done – taken 

‘Ziggy Stardust’ into the UK singles chart. Well, it 

was 1982.

Jobriath 

“I can do better than that!” Record company mogul 

David Geffen threw half a million quid at Hair star 

Bruce Campbell (above), changed his name to the 

spookily alien Jobriath, spent another million hyping 

the ‘American Bowie’ with a spectacular campaign 

(no interviews, no decent songs), then watched 

helplessly as the rise and fall of Jobriath stalled at 

the bargain-bin. 

Bob Dylan 

Judas! Even Bob Dylan, that sacred cow of pre- 

Glam authenticity, slapped on the pancake and 

began referring to himself as “Jokerman”. 

Mick Jagger 

The head Stone was paranoid that his new Chelsea 

neighbour might pinch some of his ideas. Of course, 

this rhinestone jumpsuit and eyeliner look, worn 

during the Stones’ 1973 tour, owed nothing to Bowie 

at all.

Japan 

David Batt enjoyed the “crashing out with Sylvian” 

line in ‘Drive-In Saturday’ so much that he nabbed a 

new surname from it. David Sylvian then formed 

Japan just so people might refer to him as “some cat 

from Japan” (from ‘Ziggy Stardust’). Japan generally 

steered clear of Bowie’s music thereafter, but if the 

look was Young Americans, the attitude was pure 

The Man Who Fell To Earth. 

Gary Numan 

A hero, just for one day. 

Sweet 

These brickies-in-satin outdid the Artful One just 

once, when ‘Blockbuster’, a spoiler that used the

same riff as ‘The Jean Genie’, went one better than 

Bowie’s hit reaching No.1 early in 1973.

Not many people needed Leo Sayer (above). Bowie: “We 

were very miffed that people who had obviously never seen 

Metropolis and had never heard of Christopher Isherwood were 

actually becoming glam rockers.” 

Babylon Zoo 

Like Bowie’s first hit, the Bab Zoo’s 1996 single 

‘Spaceman’ was a ‘once heard, never forgotten’ 

record. Unlike Bowie, they’ve yet to experience a 

rebirth. 

Leo Sayer 

Before tosh like ‘When I Need You’, Leo Sayer was 

a warm-up act for Roxy Music who dressed in a 

Pierrot costume, waved his hands in a manner that 

suggested his straitjacket was undone, and told 

interviewers that the true meaning of a clown was 

“the sadness behind”. He soon left the clown 

costume behind, but unfortunately the sadness 

remained.

They’ll never clone ya! “I find it ironic when I look at a band 

like Sigue Sigue Sputnik (above), where it’s so outré, so 

absolutely in the Ziggy court. All this time later, it still raises its 

brightly coloured head.” 

Sigue Sigue Sputnik 

The Sputniks had a winning formula. The image was 

circa ‘73 Bowie mangled through punk and cybermovies. 

The scam, screw EMI for loadsa-money, 

was The Sex Pistols all over again. And the 

outcome? A genuine case of from ashes to ashes.

Psychedelic Furs 

Richard Butler thought he was the real Eighties 

David Bowie. But nobody else did (though Bowie 

was apparently impressed). 

Stardust 

This golden turkey, which went into production shortly 

after Ziggy’s retirement in 1973, chronicled the rise 

and Its star has risen considerably since the release 

of Todd Haynes’ revisionist Glam movie, Velvet 

Goldmine.

2.4 

Thin White Duke 

“I was in no state to be responsible. I was the least 

responsible person that I can imagine at that time.” 

Bowie’s costumes may have become more 

sober as the decade progressed, but controversy 

was rarely far away. On May 2, 1976, he returned 

home for the first time in nearly two years, arriving at 

London’s Victoria Station in a specially chartered 

train from Dover. It was a stage-managed, meet-thefans 

kind of occasion, designed to publicise his 

forthcoming six-night stint at London’s Empire Pool. 

Alighting the train, David stepped into an open-top 

Mercedes and remained upright while technicians 

fiddled with a faulty PA system.

Bowie gets ready to ‘wave’ to the faithful. Gary Numan was 

there: “I didn’t see anyone walking around saying, ‘What a 

wanker, he did a Nazi salute’. No one. People just thought he 

was waving at them, and I’m sure he was.” 

Gone was the baggy, American-style formalwear 

favoured by New York clubgoers and provincial Soul 

Boys. Instead, as he’d declared at the start of his 

latest album, Station To Station, he’d returned as 

the Thin White Duke – a faintly archaic, austere and 

avowedly European character dressed in a black 

shirt and tight, functional jeans. His slicked-back 

hair, streaked with blond, appeared to have 

prematurely aged him. He then ‘waved’ to his fans. 

Thirty years earlier, the gesture, which would almost 

certainly have been described as a Nazi salute. Was 

pop’s master of propaganda now overstepping the 

mark in allowing his private obsessions to become a 

public nuisance?

Rehearsing his ‘wave’ on Soul Train, November 1975. “I 

didn’t give a Nazi salute. I don’t think I’d have done anything as 

daft as that. They were waiting for me to do something like a 

Nazi salute and a wave did it for them.”

Fashion! Turn to the right. Bowie: “The right wing politics 

thing was just bullshit, something I said off the cuff.”

I Am A Laser. “The Station To Station tour wasn’t very 

theatrical. It was a bunch of lights, but we didn’t do anything. I 

walked around rather haughtily.”

Bowie tried out different outfits early on in the tour. Here he 

models jackboots and a Russian cap. “I’m closer to 

communism than fascism - that at least has some saving 

graces. Besides, I’m half-Jewish,” he claimed at the time. 

The 1976 shows were stark and Expressionistic; 

beams of white light cast dark shadows and created 

an air of malevolence. Bowie’s usual stage-wear – 

crisp white shirt, black waistcoat and tapered 

trousers – was his most functional yet but 

disarmingly effective, though his detached star 

persona seemed more pronounced than ever. The 

props had gone, but Bowie now insisted that less is 

more. “It’s more theatrical than Diamond Dogs ever 

was,” he said. “(But) it’s by suggestion rather than 

over-propping. It relies on modern, 20th century 

concepts of lighting and I think it comes over as very 

theatrical… It doesn’t look like a theatrical

presentation, but it certainly is.” 

Even his music had cooled. On Station To 

Station, Bowie had ditched the slick Stateside 

sounds of Young Americans for a more sober, 

continental style inspired by electric Krautrock 

rhythms (‘TVC15’) and the Euro-ballad tradition 

(‘Word On A Wing’). And the Thin White Duke was 

“throwing darts in lovers’ eyes”. Poisonous ones. 

Bowie wasn’t a fascist or a racist. He was a cultural 

pessimist with a wicked streak of misanthropy that, if 

anything, had been reinforced by his rock star 

experiences. Elitism was built into the star/fan 

equation; audiences could be manipulated with 

consummate ease. But neither stars, nor the media 

that provides the link between them and their 

audiences, could ever admit as much. And, besides, 

Bowie was feeling bored and truculent. “The rock 

business has become so established, and so much 

like a society, that I have revolted against it. That’s 

what wasn’t liked – that I won’t take it seriously, and 

I’ll break its rules, and I won’t listen to it, and I won’t 

take much notice of it. It doesn’t worry me.” He 

returned to his Nietzsche and Crowley texts, built up 

a tidy library on all aspects of the Third Reich… and 

began to talk.

“All my reading in that particular time were people like 

Ishmael Regarde, Waite and Mavers and Manley. It was an 

intense period of trying to relate myself to this search for some 

true spirit. And I thought I was gonna find it through reading all 

this material.” 

The Duke’s “Berlinesque performer” clothing was also 

inspired by someone closer to home: guitarist Ronnie Wood, 

who had sported a similar look in The Faces, even down to the 

box of Gitanes peeking out of his (white) waistcoat pocket.

BOWIEPHILES 

Cameras In Brooklyn. 

How Lucky You Are. Fans who ‘asked for an autograph’ are 

rewarded for their perseverence.

Decked out like a Christmas tree. 

Audiences who dressed like their idols were a 

rare breed before Ziggy Stardust. The odd Elvis or 

Jagger lookalike might have lurked in the shadows, 

but fans usually showed their appreciation in the 

time-honoured fashion of pinning posters on 

bedroom walls or waving hastily-scrawled placards. 

Bowie, via Ziggy’s comic-book look, inspired a rash 

of lookalikes, many of whom (the ‘Bowie Boys’) 

mimicked his each and every stylistic change 

throughout the Seventies. It’s worth noting that 

enthusiasm for Glass Spider suits or Black Tie 

White Noise chic during the past two decades has 

been muted. 

The Bowie cult was remarkable in that it constituted 

an entire subculture centred on a single personality. 

When Cracked Actor director Alan Yentob asked a 

fan if he was “into the Bowie universe”, the response

(“He’s the centre: I was drawn to it”) was uttered in 

the manner of a religious doctrine. There was a mild 

moral panic when, in 1973, the more daring Bowie 

Boys (and Girls) began turning up at school sporting 

Ziggy-styled mullets. Like smoking, long hair and 

pen-knives, David Bowie had become every head 

teacher’s nightmare. 

“I’ve never seen such a strange gathering of people,” 

wrote one Melody Maker reporter of a Ziggy-era 

Bowie crowd. “For a start there were many people 

who resembled Christmas trees on legs. There was 

much glitter, and several men dressed as ladies.” 

Following Bowie fashions was never quite as 

troublesome again, although his audiences still 

seem to make a bit of an effort when he comes to 

town. 

Bowie didn’t merely inspire copycats. The young 

Billy Idol was one of the Bromley Contingent, a group 

of early punk enthusiasts who saw no contradiction 

in watching The Sex Pistols one night, and Bowie 

doing his Thin White Duke routine the next. “We 

liked to be noticed,” he told England’s Dreaming 

author Jon Savage. “We were influenced by Bowie, 

Roxy and Clockwork Orange but we were doing it in 

our own way. Bowie had dyed his hair red, but we 

went into a hairdressers and saw all these tubes of 

crazy colour and went mad.”

“The audiences are always about one tour behind me, but 

then they always were. I’d get worried if they turned up in outfits 

that I’d never seen before. I’d think I was a tour behind.”

“For about a year I tried to look like Bowie, but it never 

happened for me, unfortunately. For a very short period I had the 

Thin White Duke look. I used to wear the waistcoat and I had the 

blond bit at the front of my hair.” - Gary Numan. 

The headlines soon began to pile up. “The best 

thing to happen is for an extreme right government to 

come.” “I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And, yes, I 

believe very strongly in fascism… People have 

always responded with greater efficiency under a 

regimental leadership.” “Rock stars are fascists too. 

Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. I think he 

was quite as good as Jagger. And, boy, when he hit 

that stage, he worked an audience.” “(Ziggy) could 

have been Hitler in England… I think I might have 

been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent 

dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.”

“I’d got this thing in my mind that I was through with 

theatrical clothes and I would only wear Sears & Roebuck. 

Which on me looked more outlandish than anything I had made 

by Japanese designers.” 

Later that summer, Eric Clapton interrupted a 

concert in Birmingham to advocate the repatriation 

policies of the Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell. It 

proved the last straw for a handful of activists who, 

after a vigorous letter-writing campaign in the music 

press, founded Rock Against Racism (RAR) to stem 

pop’s swing to the far right. One of their pamphlets 

pictured Bowie’s face alongside Powell’s.

“I thought he looked coolest around Station To Station, but it 

wasn’t so much the clothes - it was his hair, his face, just the 

elegance of it.” - Iggy Pop. 

The politics of fear fed off the sense of imminent 

crisis that gripped mid-Seventies Britain. The 

economy was in a mess, the workers were getting 

restless and social disorder didn’t seem very far off. 

The chattering classes could find no easy solution, 

but they certainly didn’t welcome glib and 

inflammatory statements from rock stars. Ultimately, 

though, it wasn’t really Bowie they feared but the 

people out in the blue-collar heartlands, the ones 

who were starting to vote National Front in bielections, 

who tended to seek their scapegoats first 

and ask questions later.

Duke Of Earl. Bowie had recorded a version of the Gene 

Chandler classic with The Mannish Boys more than 20 years 

before this photo was taken. 

Bowie, too, was motivated by fear of the masses 

more than any love for the ideology of fascism: 

“People aren’t very bright, you know. They say they 

want freedom, but when they get the chance, they 

pass up Nietzsche and choose Hitler, because he 

would march into a room to speak and music and 

lights would come on at strategic moments.” His 

elitism was shameless, but the real tragedy was that 

the thrust of his argument wasn’t necessarily untrue.

”I hadn’t liked the non-eyebrow period, which basically went 

from Aladdin Sane to Young Americans. Then he got the 

eyebrows back, and his hair was fantastic in The Man Who Fell 

To Earth and thus rekindled my wanting to be David Bowie 

again.” - Ian McCulloch.

‘Be My Wife’. Bowie filmed a video for one of his more 

under-rated singles during this sojourn in Paris, June 1977.

Man In The Middle. “I never felt like a leader. I always felt 

terribly insecure when I was in the company of dedicated 

followers of fashion, because they always knew all the 

designer’s names.” 

Power, control, fear, social collapse, 

totalitarianism, flirting with the unthinkable – all had 

preoccupied Bowie for years. It would have been 

more surprising had the contemporary malaise 

passed him by. But those who bothered to look 

beyond the headlines discovered that Bowie’s take 

on fascism was more complex than it first seemed. 

“You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up 

and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything 

up. Then you can get a new form of liberalism,” 

sounded no less apocalyptic but the ultimate goal 

was quite different. 

By 1977, the new, crisis-inspired punk movement 

had adopted the swastika as part of its anything 

goes symbolism. Bowie, who was heralded as a 

new wave sage in some quarters, saw no reason to 

recant his dystopian predictions: “What I said was 

Britain was ready for another Hitler, which is quite a

different thing to saying it needs another Hitler. I 

stand by that opinion – in fact I was ahead of my time 

in voicing it. There are in Britain right now parallels 

with the rise of the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany. A 

demoralised nation whose empire had 

disintegrated.” Two years later, Margaret Thatcher 

was elected. 

World Shut Your Mouth. “A lot of people provide me with 

quotes. They suggest all kinds of things to say and I do, really, 

because I’m not very hip at all.”

THE COLLABORATORS 

Bowie/Ronson performing ‘Starman’ on Top Of The Pops, 

London, July 1972. 

Mick Ronson 

High-profile collaborations with Mick Jagger, 

Freddie Mercury and Tina Turner aside, Bowie has 

rarely allowed another figure to share the limelight 

with him on anything like equal terms. Only Mick 

Ronson, an unassuming ex-gardener from Hull who 

could never quite grasp the appeal of grown men 

dressed in satin and tat, was allowed an occasional 

glimpse of the action. 

On stage, Ronno was a prop – a chicken-headed 

male tart for his master to feign fellatio with, a guitarhero 

who soloed endlessly while Madame Twinky

changed outfits – but his real worth was probably in 

the studio, where he rehearsed the Spiders to 

perfection and contributed more on the production 

side than he was given credit for at the time. In 1970, 

Mick Ronson inspired Bowie to form his first proper 

rock band. By 1973, he was expendable, dismissed 

just weeks after the Spiders’ rhythm section, 

drummer Mick Woodmansey and bassist Trevor 

Bolder, were made jobless on a London stage. 

Ronson, who later married Ziggy hairstylist Susie 

Fussey, briefly fell under the MainMan spell, 

releasing a solo album, Slaughter On Tenth 

Avenue, amid the usual DeFries hype. But The Next 

Bowie he was not. Instead, he pursued a solid if 

unremarkable career over the next two decades, 

before reuniting with Bowie on Black Tie White 

Noise. Ronson lost his two-year battle with liver 

cancer in April 1993. He was, Bowie said, “my Jeff 

Beck”. 

Brian Eno 

Mick Ronson was the perfect partner to help Bowie 

through the conflicting tangle of Glam and 

Progressive Rock. Brian Eno, Bowie’s next notable 

collaborator, couldn’t have been more different. An 

egghead who’d lost out to Bryan Ferry in the battle 

for the soul of Roxy Music, he’d happily retreated to 

the margins where he could put his musical theories 

into practice without being constrained by 

commercial expectations. Well-read, and a selfprofessed 

“non-musician”, Eno’s acutely-developed 

ear and analytical mind dovetailed well with Bowie’s 

raw talent and frontiersman spirit, and over the 

course of three mid-to-late Seventies albums – Low, 

“Heroes” and Lodger – the pair developed a unique, 

wholly modern take on pop. “He’s got fantastic 

ideas,” Bowie told Tony Visconti at the outset of their 

musical journey.

Bowie/Eno receive the Q Inspiration Award, London, 

November 1995. 

Nowhere was this more keenly felt than on their 

first collaboration, Low. The album’s vocal tracks 

(side two largely consisted of bleak instrumentals) 

seemed to encapsulate Bowie’s quest for high/low 

art perfection – daring arrangements couched in a 

pop format. In some ways, Low ’s first side is the 

ultimate David Bowie musical experience. Unusually, 

their friendship outlived their working relationship 

and, inspired by the new technology at their 

disposal, they reunited for 1995’s Outside. In the 

meantime Eno had amassed a fortune producing 

U2. 

Tony Visconti 

Hip, American and new in town, Tony Visconti struck 

gold in autumn 1967. He discovered Marc Bolan 

singing in a small underground club in London – and 

was instrumental in Bolan’s transformation from cult 

folkie to the first star of Glam Rock. He was also 

invited to produce another unknown with big ideas; 

for the next 13 years, Visconti became Bowie’s only 

long-term collaborator, producing or co-producing 

nine albums, and performing a last-minute salvage 

operation on another, Diamond Dogs. (Ken Scott 

oversaw the four Glam-era titles.) As his fierce bassplaying 

indicates, he was also a driving-force behind 

The Man Who Sold The World, and played the part 

of Hypeman in Bowie’s shortlived Hype venture in 

1970.

Bowie/Visconti at the Daily Mirror Rock & Pop Awards, 

London, February 1981. 

The singer’s early Eighties epiphany necessitated 

Visconti being frozen out in favour of Nile Rodgers 

when Bowie came to record Let’s Dance. Relations 

deteriorated further when David took offence at 

some comments the producer had made to the 

Starzone Bowie-zine, though more recently, they’ve 

kissed, made up and even begun working together 

again. 

Reeves Gabrels 

Guitarist, arranger, computer programmer, cosongwriter 

and co-producer, Reeves Gabrels played 

a pivotal role in Bowie’s musical rehabilitation during 

the Nineties. 

Few beyond the immediate circle of diehards 

would ever recognise him, an unassuming man with 

a receding hairline who tends to hide behind dark 

glasses, but as the person credited with 

reawakening Bowie’s interest in music in the late 

Eighties, his influence must not be underestimated. 

His lead guitar technique, high-pitch squalling that 

can sound like Queen’s Brian May after a nervous 

breakdown, still manages to divide fans – though his 

playing on 1997’s Earthling iced the Industrial-metal 

and drum & bass backings brilliantly. He coproduced 

and co-wrote every track on 1999’s 

‘hours…’.

Bowie/Gabrels leaving Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy eaterie, 

London, September 1998. Reeves had been a big Ziggy fan: “It 

was a great period because you could go to school with a green 

streak in your hair and say, Fuck you, I look like David Bowie.”

2.5 

Punk Pierrot 

Bowie gives a twirl for this promotional shot for “Heroes” in 

1977.

Punk was Bowie’s Shock Rock writ large. Not 

since the Ziggy Stardust /Aladdin Sane era had 

rock experienced such an outbreak of extravagant 

fashions and exaggerated personalities. It was as if 

the next generation had digested Bowie’s pet 

obsessions – identity, gender confusion, morbid 

curiosity – and spewed them out again in even 

greater displays of flamboyance and outrage. 

She Shook Me Cold. “He had a big influence on that old boot 

Siouxsie. She was just a Bowie fan, she was never into the punk 

side of things.” - Captain Sensible of The Damned.

At a VIP gala premiere of The Man Who Fell To Earth with 

Sydne Rome at the Gaumont Elysees Theatre, Paris, June 1977. 

If his Thin White Duke routine had cast David Bowie 

further adrift from the rock mainstream, it soon 

began to work in his favour. Technically, Bowie, 

who’d turned 30 in January 1977, was a fully paid-up 

‘Old Fart’, but his eternal outcast status demanded 

that he not be put out to pasture just yet. After all, 

many of the new, so-called Blank Generation 

(shades of Warhol there) had been reared on a 

Bowie-sanctioned diet of Velvet Underground, Iggy 

Pop and the death-wish star supremo, Ziggy 

Stardust. One of the new acts, Siouxsie and The

Banshees, had virtually come into being at one of 

Bowie’s Station to Station Wembley shows. 

Cabaret, 1991: “This was based on a businessman I saw 

walking to work one morning in Berlin. He had his briefcase, and 

a suit and tie on - not a dickie bow - very traditional, apart from 

this bright red lipstick. I stored the image in my head for years!”

This Ziggy-era reissue of Bowie’s 1969 LP pre-dated 

Lydon’s late Seventies look by five years. David: “Oh, if Ziggy 

Stardust had had a son. When Ziggy fell from favour and lost all 

his money, he had a son before he died… Johnny Rotten!” 

Punk’s rude interruption carried distinct echoes 

of Bowie’s arrival in 1972. The Swindle, Malcolm 

McLaren’s 10-point dissection of The Sex Pistols’ 

mission to destroy the record industry, was a 

naughtier version of MainMan’s scams couched in 

manifesto form. (The first lesson was “How To 

Manufacture Your Group.”) The Spiders weren’t 

exactly one-chord wonders, but like punk, they 

offended trad rock sensibilities with vibrant, cuttingedge 

chords and unfussy rhythms. More important 

still, punk’s revived sense of carnival – with obvious 

sexual and anti-social overtones – owed much to 

Ziggy’s dashing cocktail of A Clockwork Orange and 

Warhol’s Factory Superstars. With hundreds of 

aliases – Johnny Rotten, Polly Styrene, Rat Scabies 

et al – on the loose, it was as if Glam Rock had 

returned having made a pact with the devil. 

Sharing a joke with ex-punk Pistol, John Lydon, Halloween 

in Hollywood, 1995.

Bowie wisely maintained a low profile during the 

early months of punk. He spent much of his time in 

Berlin, the ideal haunt for resuming a life of artful 

debauchery with his constant companion and 

similarly acclaimed Godfather Of Punk, Iggy Pop. 

Bowie’s punk-era albums Low and “Heroes ” (both 

1977) forged new ground, although not all of his old 

admirers welcomed his experimentally inclined 

robotic cabaret routine: “(Low) stinks of artfully 

counterfeited spiritual descent and emptiness,” was 

Charles Shaar Murray’s verdict. Nevertheless, they 

won him a new, left-field audience (encouraged by 

the involvement of Eno and Robert Fripp), and 

compared favourably with, say, Bryan Ferry’s 

Casanova conceits. One ad published around the 

time of Heroes cleverly sought to remove Bowie 

from the style wars: “There’s Old Wave, There’s New 

Wave. And then there’s David Bowie”. 

The Henna-haired little wonder: Bowie returned to punky 

orange spikes in 1997.

Photographed by Snowdon, June 1978. “I like the sense of 

change, of things happening. It doesn’t burn me out the way it 

does other performers. It’s probably ‘cos I’m such a restless 

person, and the constant movement prevents me from getting 

bogged down in my neuroses.”

“The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t 

a clue where I’m gonna be in a year. A raving nut, a flower child 

or a dictator, some kind of reverend. I don’t know. That’s what 

keeps me from getting bored.” 

In March 1978, Bowie made his move. He 

gambled on a huge world tour, and had the good 

sense to restore a good percentage of Ziggy 

Stardust material into his set. (A ‘Ziggy Lives’

anner was draped over a balcony at Earl’s Court in 

appreciation.) His usual costumes were pitched at 

two dominant subcultures: a squeaky clean white 

outfit, gaily set off with a sailor’s cap, favoured by 

disco audiences; and the tight-fitting tops and 

punkish trousers of the new wave. The shows were 

cautionary, cabaret-like affairs intended to please 

the diehards and placate the cynics. With Bowie 

enviably preserved, and performing against a seedy 

neon backdrop, it just about worked. 

The late Seventies were incredibly kind to David 

Bowie. Punk opened many doors, including one for 

a bunch of synthesizer-brandishing amateurs with 

steely gazes and lop-sided haircuts. Dubbed the 

Cold Wave, these artful experimentalists often 

appeared caught between Bowie’s shocking 

presentation of old (the Human League’s Phil Oakey 

sported two hairstyles on one head) and the eerie 

electronic mood-pieces of his recent work. 

Two further albums, Lodger (1979) and Scary 

Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) kept him at 

the outer limits of the mainstream, but it was one of 

those visual masterstrokes that nursed him back to 

full critical and commercial health. 

Swing your pants. 

The tour’s mixed reception had concerned Bowie. 

A video for a 1979 single, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, 

put him back in women’s clothes – and on screen – 

again. Musically, he was fresh, too: both ‘Boys’ and 

‘Look Back In Anger’, sounded as contemporary as 

anything else that year. A version of Brecht/Weill’s

‘Alabama Song’ released in 1980 beat the new 

iconoclasts at their own game – it was the musical 

equivalent of a drunken brawl. But it was the followup, 

‘Ashes To Ashes’, that really caught the public’s 

imagination. Magnificently self-referential, infused 

with melancholy, stunningly arranged and with an 

irresistibly understated hook, it was ‘Space Oddity’ 

all grown up. It dominated the entire summer. 

In the accompanying video, Bowie returned to 

some core themes – alien landscapes, madness 

and gender confusion – with costumes to suit. But it 

was his updated Pierrot outfit, designed by Natasha 

Kornilof, that eclipsed everything else. Bang on cue, 

Bowie had tapped into a flamboyant new scene 

centred on the Blitz club in Holborn, London, coopting 

a handful of its leading faces, including the 

club’s co-owner Steve Strange, for the video.

Dallas, April 1978: with hooded micro-fibre tops and glazed 

cotton combat-style pants, Bowie was twenty years ahead of 

the pack. 

In kimono with actor Peter Straker, at the London premiere 

party for Just A Gigolo, Valentine’s Day 1979.

I was stone and he was wax. “I’ve still got that mannequin 

at home, you know.” 

Many of these Blitz Kids, or later, New 

Romantics, had been aspiring wedge-headed Soul 

Boys during the mid-Seventies. Now, having come 

of age, they were dedicated to a way of life that 

revolved around gender-bending and club culture 

hedonism. Punk had pogoed itself to death; the 

independent scene had come over all earnest. The 

Blitz crowd – with transvestite Marilyn on the door, 

Boy George swanning around the crowd and 

Spandau Ballet on stage – wanted only fun and the 

freedom to create jaw-dropping new guises for 

themselves on a nightly basis.

“I think (music) should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, 

a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.” 

By the end of 1980, Bowie had made it onto the 

cover of the new style bible, The Face. His 

confidence had been restored to such an extent that 

he could even afford a gentle dig at all his young 

pretenders: “One of the new wave boys… same old 

thing in brand new drag” (‘Teenage Wildlife’). He 

could also add a new entry to his extensive list of 

credits: survivor.

‘TVC 15’. In pencil skirt uniform for Saturday Night Live, 

New York, December 1979, Bowie’s “Communist Chinese airhostess 

look”, designed by Natasha Kornilof.

Costumes and comments by Natasha Kornilof: “The clown 

was based on a Jacobean costume with big padded trousers 

and sleeves. It was layer-upon-layer of blue shiny fabric with 

silk organza and braid over that. And silver net over blue lurex.”

“I was amazingly gratified with the white trousers, which 

were cut like Jacobean trousers. I couldn’t believe I’d just 

changed the shape of what everyone was wearing. All the 

Futurists and New Romantics came from that.” And MC 

Hammer.

ERASE & REWIND 

Come Blow Your Horn. On stage during a special fan club 

gig at the 600-capacity Hanover Grand, London, June 2, 1997.

Come Fly With Me. On stage during a Serious Moonlight 

show at the 60,000 capacity Milton Keynes Bowl, England, July 

2, 1983. 

For two decades, Bowie had stayed ahead of or 

at least abreast with – the pack thanks to his 

uncanny ability to sniff out emerging trends and 

give them his own spin. During the Eighties and 

Nineties, his instincts proved as sharp as ever. He 

played huge stadium extravaganzas when 

everyone temporarily forgot they were naff, and 

hung out in tiny drum & bass clubs when he wanted 

to remind audiences of his cultish disposition. The 

vision and sounds kept moving on, but something 

fundamental had changed: it’s as if the David 

Bowie that re-emerged in 1983 had erased huge 

chunks of his past. It’s only in recent years that he’s 

been able to ‘rewind’ again, evidence that, beneath 

the masks and the guises, David Bowie has finally 

achieved his ultimate creation – that of a wellrounded, 

multi-faceted and essentially contented 

character.

3.1 

I’m Only Dancing 

As the new decade began, Bowie’s record sales 

were higher than ever and his critical reputation in 

rude health. Punk’s defiantly ‘anti’ stance was 

looking tired in the face of the New Romantics, and 

the aggressively upbeat “Go For It!” culture that was 

being nurtured by the Thatcher administration. 

Where punk had once threatened the very fabric of 

popular music, its woeful lack of staying power and 

quickly compromised ideals provoked a reaction 

that amounted to a virtual amnesty for the old guard. 

David Bowie was voted Best Male Singer by NME 

readers at the start of 1982 despite having done 

virtually nothing the previous year. Phil Collins 

started ‘shifting units’ in vast quantities. It was, as all 

the cynics agreed, “Like Punk Never Happened”.

PROTÉGÉS 

Iggy Pop remembers his Raw Power: ” I think the little 

touches Bowie put on the mix helped, and I think some of the 

things MainMan did helped, and more than anything else, what 

the whole experience did was to get me out of Detroit and onto 

a world stage.”

Proof that the deification of David Bowie in 

1972-73 was not necessarily misplaced came when 

nearly every struggling artist that brushed past him 

in a studio suddenly enjoyed a revival of fortunes. 

Arnold Corns 

Bowie’s Fairy Godmother touch took time to nurture. 

His first stab at building a family of like-minded 

talents around him stalled at the first hurdle when 

Arnold Corns, who he proclaimed would be bigger 

than The Rolling Stones, failed after one measly 

single. The band was basically a dry run for the 

Spiders, with Bowie’s dress designer Freddi Burretti 

sharing the vocals. 

With Freddi Burretti, 1971. Bowie: “Freddi was a very 

straight sort of queen. He took one look and screamed, ‘I can’t 

wear that!’. It took me all day to get him into that dress.” 

Iggy Pop 

Iggy Pop had thrown up on stage one too many 

times for Elektra Records executives. His band The 

Stooges were dropped in summer 1971 and the 

music biz shed few tears. Bowie admired Iggy’s 

destructive persona and unrelenting Detroit rock; he 

instructed Tony DeFries to get The Stooges a new 

deal and bring them over to the UK where Bowie

would advise them. The result was Raw Power, 

brilliant but half-smothered by Bowie’s misguided 

attempt to get an authentic subterranean sound. It 

sold few copies, but Ig’s legend was assured. 

Mott The Hoople 

Bowie’s auteurist ambitions were advanced 

considerably when, in mid-1972, he dragged the 

hapless Mott The Hoople out of semi-retirement to 

record a song he’d just written, ‘All The Young 

Dudes’. Within weeks, the band had a record deal 

and a Top 3 hit; and the Clockwork Orange 

generation had an anthem that underscored Bowie’s 

Ziggy philosophy – with its coded references to 

drugs, cross-dressing and suicide. Bowie produced 

a tie-in album and the band’s fortunes were 

transformed. 

Lou Reed 

Reed was another underground legend with a bad 

attitude who owed his rehabilitation to Bowie. For a 

while, Reed was grateful, claiming that Bowie was 

“the only interesting person around. Everything has 

been tedious, rock’n’roll has been tedious, except 

for what David has been doing. There’s a mutual 

empathy between us.” After finishing work on the 

Mott album, Bowie and Ronson produced 

Transformer for Reed; one song, ‘Walk On The Wild 

Side’, gave the one-time Velvet Underground 

monotone man a British chart hit. Was there no limit 

to Bowie’s sorcery? 

Mott mainman Ian Hunter insists: “I never saw anything

sexual about ‘Dudes’ as a lyric. To me it was just a great song. 

After ‘Dudes’ we were considered instant fags. It was comical. I 

met some incredible folk.” 

Though Transformer is regarded by newer converts as the 

home of the original ‘Perfect Day’, for many the LP will be 

remembered as a classic glam experience. However, Lou Reed 

plays it way down: “A lot of it reminded me of when I was with 

Warhol. It was just that more people were doing it. Then it 

became stylised and commercialised. When that happened, it 

became nothing.” 

The Astronettes 

During 1973, Bowie had been conducting an affair 

with his very own young American, Ava Cherry. Ava 

was one of a trio of Astronettes that occasionally 

danced and sang backing vocals at the more 

prestigious Bowie shows, and that summer, the

singer decided she would be his next star. 

Unfortunately, the task proved to be more difficult 

than he’d imagined, not least because the Spiders 

were splitting and Bowie was suffering from burnout. 

The project was still-born – though the unfinished 

tapes were released years later as People From 

Bad Homes. 

Lulu 

Bowie’s success with women on an informal level 

was rarely matched in the studio, excepting a brief 

collaboration with Lulu. When they first met, in the 

mid-Sixties, she was hot property and he a virtual 

squatter outside the gates of pop’s impenetrable 

fortress. By 1974, things had changed; Lulu was the 

outsider, a small screen celebrity who appeared to 

have squandered her vocal talents. Bowie offered 

her ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, produced the 

session and played sax on the record. Despite a 

hilarious dance routine, Lulu enjoyed the heady 

heights of Top Three success once again, but her 

revival in fortunes was brief.

Lulu performing ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ on German 

TV, 1974: “Lulu and I did a whole bunch of stuff that I thought 

had been lost. What we found recently was a really wonderful 

version of ‘Can You Hear Me’. I would love to try and get this 

released, I think it would be quite beautiful.” 

Dana Gillespie 

Bowie was involved in two songs on Dana 

Gillespie’s Weren’t Born A Man LP, released in

1974, but neither that, nor Dana’s obvious sexual 

charms, played to the hilt in the publicity campaign, 

could save the record. Thoughts of making Amanda 

Lear or Wayne/Jayne County MainMan stars were 

quickly reconsidered.

“My wife says that David wears clothes better than almost 

any man since Fred Astaire.” - film director John Landis. 

Bowie, had undergone a complete transformation 

during a two-year retreat between 1981 and 1983, 

and was perfectly poised to embrace the new poplite 

culture. His previous album, Scary Monsters 

(And Super Creeps), had been the last under the 

terms of the old MainMan/RCA contract. That was 

incentive enough to crack a huge market with the 

next one. There was also the matter of John

Lennon’s death which, along with the Sharon Tate 

killing in 1969, had sent a grim reminder to 

celebrities that their status made them extremely 

vulnerable. 

With Keith Richards in New York. 

‘China Girl’ video shoot in the Australian outback, (right) 

1983. 

Bowie, who positioned the very idea of stardom at 

the centre of his art, had always felt under siege, 

despite the protective shells of Ziggy, the Thin White 

Duke, et al. The intense fan worship he’d inspired 

worldwide inevitably attracted its fair share of 

cranks, most of whom, if the Vermorels’ Starlust 

book is anything to go by, indulged in harmless 

sexual fantasies. But since his teenage years, Bowie 

had often associated stardom with death, or at least 

decay, a suspicion that manifested itself publicly with 

Ziggy’s ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’ and his shopping-list of 

phobias about flying and staying in tall hotels.

“If anything, maybe I’ve helped establish that rock ‘n’ roll is 

a pose.”

Announcing his plans for Eighties domination throughout 

the nation in a Georgian suite at London’s Claridges hotel, 

March 1983: “I’ve learned to relax and be my present age and 

my present position. I feel comfortable in my mid-thirties. It 

doesn’t seem such an alien place to be.”

STARMAN: THIRD BYTE 

Showing off his star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, 1997. 

Many of Bowie’s subsequent activities have been on the World 

Wide Web. BowieNet was launched in 1998, followed by 

BowieBanc.com, David’s own online banking service, in 2000. 

When Bowie re-emerged in 1983 for the Let’s 

Dance album and world tour, he was a picture of 

health – bronzed, bleached, ‘scrambled egg’ hair, 

and with a permanent grin. On one level, it was 

simply the latest in a series of makeovers, one that 

picked up from his Young Americans look of 1975.

Like punk never happened, indeed. At a deeper 

level, it marked a necessary retreat from the 

complex characters of the Seventies. Like the wider 

world at large, Bowie was playing safe, reducing the 

margin of error, in a quest for self-preservation that 

had been unfamiliar to him since the early Seventies. 

David Bowie was indeed alive and well and hoping 

to keep it that way. He even changed his brand of 

cigarettes. 

On the run from the style police: ‘I’m Afraid Of Americans’ in 

New York, 1997. 

This break with the past was largely prompted by 

the events of December 8, 1980, when John Lennon 

was shot dead by a fan who claimed that ‘his’ star 

had let him down. For Bowie, who’d spent a large 

chunk of his career musing on the true meaning of 

stardom, often relating it to death, or at least 

personal collapse, the murder of a close friend who 

just happened to be one of the most famous men in 

the world hit him harder than he’s ever let on. The 

effect was cataclysmic: it was as if the fatal shots 

had finally freed him from the self-destructive route 

his works had taken him. It was a filthy lesson, but an 

important spell had been broken.

Distraught Beatles fans gather outside the Dakota Building 

in New York, 1980. 

Within hours of Lennon’s death, Bowie had 

stepped up security at the Booth Theatre on 

Broadway in New York, where his portrayal of John 

Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, had critics 

searching for new superlatives. Days later, he 

decided to end the run prematurely, spent Christmas 

with his mother for the first time in years, and then 

retreated to his Swiss residence. And, apart from 

venturing out for a couple of acting roles, that’s 

where he remained for the next year or so, until he 

was ready to face the most difficult role of his career 

– leaving all the disguises and neuroses behind and 

coming out as a rather less complicated David 

Bowie. 

The final night of Bowie’s extensive 1983 

‘comeback’ tour closed in Hong Kong on the third 

anniversary of Lennon’s death. It was a coincidence, 

but Bowie had been alerted to it a few days 

beforehand, and he came prepared. He told the 

audience that his last hours with the ex-Beatle were 

spent in Hong Kong. “I saw a Beatle jacket on a stall 

and asked him to put it on so that I could take a 

photograph,” he said. Holding back the tears, in a 

rare public display of emotion, Bowie then launched 

into a version of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.

A conservative-looking Bowie with not so tasty ‘scrambled 

egg’ hair-do, 1983.

Tonight (1984): Bowie portrays Screamin’ Lord Byron in the 

video for the album’s lead single, ‘Blue Jean’.

In his dual ‘Blue Jean’ role as the nerdish Vic, Bowie tried to 

tempt fellow style merchant and Seventies rival, Bryan Ferry, 

into the role of his well-dressed flatmate. 

Perfoming ‘Golden Years’ in 1983: “That’s one of my 

favourite songs of his. It’s a direct descendent of ‘Happy Years’, 

a Fifties single by The Diamonds.” -Mannish Boy, Bob Solly. 

This clean slate was reflected in his Bowie’s 

music and stage presentation. Let’s Dance was slick

and upbeat, bearing all the sophisticated dancefloor 

trademarks of Chic’s producer Nile Rodgers. The 

tie-in Serious Moonlight tour, which lasted seven 

months, was conducted on a grand scale, with Mark 

Ravitz, a veteran from the Diamond Dogs s hows, 

returning to supervise the sets. The musicians were 

casually dressed in the manner of a Fifties Hong 

Kong bar band; Bowie in his pastel-coloured suits, 

shirt, tie and braces, looked more like a hip Wall 

Street businessman than the “magnificent outrage” 

of yore. He was pushing 40, still undeniably pretty 

and eager to show that he had the enthusiasm and 

bushy-tailed outlook of a spoilt teenager. 

Rock in the mid-Eighties became sophisticated, 

ironic and fiercely individual. No one believed in 

purity anymore. The get-rich-quick philosophy was 

mirrored by a fame-at-any-price fix. The bastard 

offspring of David Bowie were everywhere, from 

Eurythmics and Scritti Politti in Britain, U2 in Ireland 

and Madonna and Talking Heads in America, though 

some were more clever than others. Certainly most 

were more financially astute than Bowie had once 

been. Unfortunately, not many of them were capable 

of making decent records because everyone was so 

overawed by technology and desperate not to 

appear behind the times that they handed over their 

music to the technobores who sat behind the mixingdesks. 

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a Brian Eno 

amongst them.

‘Under Pressure’ with Annie Lennox, 1992. Eurythmics have 

covers of Bowie’s ‘Sound & Vision’ and ‘Fame’ in their vaults. 

More recently, they closed their Millennium Concert with ‘Life 

On Mars?’. 

“David Bowie really played with ideas, and iconography and 

imagery. He’s a brilliant man. And a gentleman too.” - Madonna.

STAGECRAFT 

Bowie revived 1974’s memorable ‘Cracked Actor’ 

skullduggery with even greater success on the Serious 

Moonlight tour nine years later. 

Brian Eno is in no doubt where Bowie’s true 

creative value lies: “He’s one of the most important 

European musicians of the whole rock era. I think he 

introduced something that was always there, but was 

unstated and very unclearly articulated, which was 

this notion of theatricality – this idea of, ‘Look, what 

we’re doing is about theatre, it’s not just about 

music.’ Nobody had done it quite as artistically.”

“I was trying to redefine my version of rock - personally, in 

the way that I felt it, as a more stage-oriented, theatrical kind of 

artist.” 

Bowie’s sense of drama was not always so well 

defined. In the late Sixties, he wrote a television play, 

The Champion Flower Grower, and submitted it to 

the BBC. The response didn’t make comfortable 

reading: “Mr. Bowie has really not yet begun to 

consider what a play is and this total lack of dramatic 

development just rules the script out.” Wisely, he 

stuck to the occasional walk-on part while he waited 

for the real plum role to arrive – playing David Bowie 

on the greatest stage of all. 

Dressed as Mephistopheles (from Gounod’s opera Faust) 

for the 1999 Video Music Awards, MTV’s Night At The Opera, in 

New York. Note the silver spider. 

Even without an avowed guise, Bowie has always 

“felt like an actor”. That’s how he credited himself on 

the Hunky Dory album in 1971; it’s why his skull-

wielding skit on Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the 

Diamond Dogs tour was so memorable; and why he 

admired the camp, exaggerated personalities of 

Andy Warhol’s court crazies. He was virtually 

required to play himself playing Aladdin Sane for 

The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1975, which was 

bags more fun than the majority of his subsequent 

‘proper’ acting roles. But Bowie’s theatricality was 

not about traditional acting roles but playing out 

something far more dramatic on the rock stage – 

where many felt it didn’t belong. 

Rock and theatre became irrevocably entwined the 

day Elvis Presley first shook his hips for American 

television. The cameraman was told to shoot from 

the waist up, and the persuasiveness of rock’n’roll’s 

visual power was assured. Early British acts, such 

as Screaming Lord Sutch, with his long coloured 

hair, loin-cloth, monster feet and coffin, owed more 

to the vaudevillian tradition-ghoulish gimmicks 

performed for a giggle. Even the hippies demanded 

showbiz theatrics: that’s why Jimi Hendrix had to set 

fire to his guitar, why no Hawkwind concert was 

complete without dancer Stacia parading her ample 

bosom (below).

Mostly, rock theatre was either transparent, like 

Mick Jagger’s increasingly butch androgyny, or else 

played for laughs, like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah 

Band. 

Bowie’s achievement was to expose the fiction of 

that transparency, and to elevate rock theatre into an 

integral part of the experience. 

Alice Cooper, persona non grata in the Bowie 

camp during the early Seventies, had set the ball 

rolling with his Love It To Death stage show that 

utilised weapons, a boa constrictor and a staged 

execution. 

It was compelling rock theatre but, Bowie insisted, 

it had little to do with art. 

For Cooper, the role-playing ended as soon as the 

curtain went down. 

Throughout 1971, Bowie had been telling 

interviewers that he was going to become “much 

more theatrical, more outrageous”; his shows would 

be “quite different to anything anyone else has tried 

to do before”. “Entertainment (is) what’s missing in 

pop music now,” he maintained. “There’s only me 

and Marc Bolan.” By 1973, Ziggy and Aladdin had 

blurred the boundaries between rock and theatre, 

between play and role-play. The spectacle briefly

took over during 1974, but for most of his career, 

Bowie has always applied a panoramic perspective 

to his live performances that drew not only from the 

European (and, later, Japanese) stage but to art 

cinema and the digital medium. 

With Lindsay Kemp, 1973. “He introduced me to a lot of 

extraordinary things - Artaud, Theatre Of The Absurd, all that 

kind of thing. A lot of my attitude toward the stage, and staging, 

really came from Linsday. He was my mentor.” 

Late in 1973, at a function to celebrate the work 

of Lindsay Kemp (above), Bowie said: “There’s 

been a lot of talk over the past couple of years about 

rock theatre. Well, here’s the man who started it all, 

with whom I spent two fantastic years learning and 

working.” 

Bowie later revived his Kemp-procured mime 

skills for the stage adaptation of The Elephant Man 

(far right) on Broadway to great critical acclaim. 

For all his Pop Art icono-clasm, Bowie never lost 

his respect for the traditional theatrical arts. 

After seeing the stage version of Cabaret, starring 

Judi Dench, which later became the inspiration for 

his 1976 shows, he said: “The stage lighting was 

phenomenal… What I didn’t know is that it was 

Brechtian lighting. It was just stark white light, and I’d 

never seen that before in my life, and that became a 

central image for me, of what stage lighting should 

look like. I mean, I’d never seen it on a rock’n’roll 

stage.” 

Ultimately, Bowie believes that the power of 

theatre eclipses that of sound. Promoting his Black

Tie White Noise album in 1993, he said: “The eyes 

are a lot hungrier than the ears, and I think that when 

something is presented at a theatrical level, that’s 

the foremost impression that is made, and the more 

cerebral aspects of one’s work, which go in through 

the ears, will often take a secondary situation.” 

Besides, as he once quipped many years earlier, “I 

can’t stand the premise of going on in jeans and 

being real – that’s impossible.” 

There ain’t nothing like a Dame: Cabaret photocall at 

London’s Palace Theatre, 1968.

Doing ‘Time’ at London’s Marquee Club, 1973: “What I said 

went. I was young, I was going to burn the world up.” 

Super-heavy silver V-neck body suit with solid glass-bead 

fringing, Earl’s Court, 1973.

A spot of Japanese mime for the ‘Miracle Goodnight’ video, 

Los Angeles, 1993. “I refuse to be thought of as mediocre. 

That’s why the idea of performance-as-spectacle is so 

important to me.” 

On Broadway: “The trouble is I always look for parts with an 

emotional or physical limp, and I always seem to get them.”

Waiting in the wings. Doing ‘Time’ for another stretch at 

Wembley Stadium, London, 1987. 

Any sense of Bowie’s cutting-edge appeal, 

trumped up during the punk days, had been wilfully 

abandoned. He became a model of sun-kissed 

family entertainment, took holidays in hot places 

instead of being holed up in the gay bars of Berlin,

and joined celebrity squares like Mick Jagger and 

Tina Turner for nights on the town and the occasional 

collaboration. 

Ms Ciccone inducts David into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, 

1996. “It’s not just the mass marketers who make fashion, it’s 

the stars: Bowie and Madonna are geniuses at this. They are the 

ones who make us all try harder.” - streetwear designer Tommy 

Hilfiger. 

Bowie was beginning to bear an uncanny 

resemblance to Tommy Steele, both in look and 

attitude, and seemed happy to spend more time in 

front of the film camera than worrying about music. 

There were no Angry Young Men in rock anymore, 

and therefore no edgy competition for Bowie to spar 

with. The air of revivalism had even rehabilitated The 

Beatles, who’d been virtually ignored during the 

previous decade. 

With Mick and Tina in Birmingham, after a Prince’s Trust 

charity show, June 1986. Bowie: “I’m still younger than 

Jagger… Most people are.” 

In 1987, on the back of a poor album, Never Let Me 

Down, Bowie assembled his most extravagant stage 

set ever, sported a fashionable mullet hairstyle, set

off by a more informal suit and suede winklepicker 

boots, and performed in the shadow of a 40-foot 

‘Glass’ Spider. As in ‘83, the tour was a huge 

moneyspinner with crowds flocking to pay homage 

to top-tier rock royalty, but Bowie was in danger of 

being eclipsed by his props. Worse still, his quickchange 

strategies had grown unflattering and 

cliched. At least a young pretender like Madonna 

had youth and the element of surprise on her side. “I 

succumbed, tried to make things more accessible, 

took away the very strength of what I do,” he now 

says. “I started to appeal to people who bought Phil 

Collins albums.” 

At Live Aid in London, July 1985.

One of Bowie’s Glass Spider scarlet linen suits, lined in 

black chiffon, was auctioned with matching collarless silk shirt 

at Christie’s of South Kensington for £1,800 in 1998.

The way you wear your hat. A Sinatra-esque Fifties look for 

1986’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ video. “You’re never alone with a 

Strand,” shouted an assistant, referring to the cigarette ad. 

Bowie misheard it as “You’re never alone with a band” and 

promptly formed Tin Machine. Tin Machine (1989): Baal in a 

designer suit, basically.

THE BOOKS I READ 

Bowie, who has lately described himself as “a 

born librarian with a sex drive”, was first encouraged 

to read by his father, who introduced him to classics 

of Western literature such as Thackeray, Shaw and, 

so he says, French writers like Voltaire and 

Rousseau. Bowie soon discovered that he 

preferred less formal, “stream-of-consciousness” 

writing because, he said, it allowed more room for 

interpretation. By 1976, the man The Times 

dubbed “T.S. Eliot with a R&R beat”, had a 

personal library of some 5,000 books. Today, his 

enthusiasm for literature hasn’t waned a bit, and 

one of his most recent internet wheezes has been 

to review books online.

“He knows everything. He’s so well read it’s ridiculous. You 

just sit there and you feel quite a worm in comparison.” - 

Suede’s Brett Anderson. 

Robert Heinlein 

Bowie became fascinated with Robert L. Heinlein’s 

Stranger In A Strange Land during his months spent 

touring Aladdin Sane. He described the book’s 

central character, Michael Valentine Smith, as “a 

peace and love messenger from another planet”, 

and claimed he was about to land the role in a 

forthcoming film. In fact Smith was a power-fixated 

alien whose fantasies of creating a religious 

movement end when he is beaten to death by an 

angry crowd. Any film idea was, in the book’s argot, 

quickly “discorporated”. 

William Burroughs 

One of the most memorable scenes in the 1975

BBC TV documentary Cracked Actor is when Bowie 

demonstrated how he wrote his lyrics using the “cutup” 

method. It wasn’t his invention; painter-writer 

Brion Gysin is generally credited with the idea. By 

randomly juxtaposing words and phrases from 

various sources, cut-up enthusiasts sought to unlock 

deep truths that lay beneath the ordered text. It 

leading advocate was William Burroughs, the Beat 

Generation guru hellbent on destroying all rational 

thought. 

Bowie, who would read out passages from 

Burroughs’ The Wild Boys during the Diamond 

Dogs sessions, struck up a friendship with the writer 

after Rolling Stone magazine fixed up a meeting 

between the two (photographed by Terry O’ Neill, 

and which Bowie, taking on Burroughs’ look, recreated 

nearly twenty years later with Brett Anderson 

for NME) later published as “Beat Godfather Meets 

Glitter Mainman”. “Nova Express really reminded 

me of Ziggy Stardust,” Bowie told the author, who 

probably had a right to look puzzled. But the 

musician’s enthusiasm was genuine: “I derived so 

much satisfaction from the way he would scramble 

life,” he said after Burroughs’ death in 1997. Bowie 

returned to the cut-up method for much of his 

Nineties work, though he now uses a computer 

programme rather than the scissors-and-paste 

approach. 

Christopher Isherwood 

Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin provided much of 

the source material for Cabaret, the 1972 film that 

revealed parallels between Glam’s campy artifice 

and the showy decadence of pre-war Germany. 

Bowie’s move to Berlin in September 1976 is often 

ascribed to the influence of Isherwood’s writings.

George Orwell 

1984 – The Musical? That was going to be Bowie’s 

first major post-Ziggy project until George Orwell’s 

widow refused to play ball. His interest didn’t go to 

waste, though. The influence of the classic antitotalitarian 

novel was noticeable throughout much of 

Diamond Dogs (most obviously on ‘1984’ and ‘Big 

Brother’), and inspired both the 1980 Floor Show, 

filmed at the Marquee Club in October 1973, and 

Bowie’s extravagant tour of the States the following 

summer.

Oscar Wilde 

Bowie encountered Oscar Wilde’s works on his first 

visit to Ken Pitt’s flat in 1967. Two quotes from A 

Picture Of Dorian Gray (1891) seem particularly 

appropriate to Bowie’s work: “To be the spectator of 

one’s own life is to escape the suffering of life,” and 

“Insincerity is merely a method by which we can 

multiply our personalities.” (Though today he’ll 

probably derive more satisfaction from this fragment 

of Wildean wisdom: “Every great man nowadays has 

his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the 

biography.”)

Jean Genet 

Genet’s A Thief’s Journal (1949) was a lowlife 

classic that blurred the boundaries between crime 

and art. Bowie’s 1972 single, ‘The Jean Genie’, was 

a thinly disguised tribute to the Sartre-endorsed 

writer who was both a convicted felon and openly 

gay. 

Bertolt Brecht 

Bowie has played the lead role in Brecht’s Baal for 

BBC-TV, recorded an extraordinary version of 

Brecht & Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’, and once 

discussed making a film version of The Threepenny 

Opera (1928) with Fassbinder. But most important 

of all was Brecht’s notion of epic theatre, which 

rested on a belief that – via a string of devices such 

as directly addressing audiences and frequent 

musical interruptions – theatregoers should never 

forget that what they were watching was spectacle. 

Bowie’s music-with-theatre spectacles often had the 

same alienating effect.

Hanif Kureishi 

Born near Beckenham, Kureishi (right) had another 

reason to feel like an outsider in his suburban 

environment: his parents came from Pakistan. But 

the inspiration for his debut novel, The Buddha Of 

Suburbia (1990), came from his own generation, the 

so-called Bromley Contingent, a flamboyant crowd of 

Bowie and Cabaret -inspired decadents who 

followed The Sex Pistols. When the BBC 

commissioned a four-part series based on the novel, 

Bowie jumped at the chance to write the music, 

eventually releasing an acclaimed album on the back 

of the broadcasts, in late 1993. 

Jack Kerouac 

On The Road (1957) was the first stop on any young 

radical’s road to freedom during the Sixties. 

Women, dope, hipster talk, a life of constant change 

and a search for who knows what that was eternal, 

the themes engaged the teenage David Jones, 

given the book by his half-brother Terry.

Bowie as Baal, August 1981.

3.2 

Futures & Pasts 

The LA launch concert for 1991’s Tin Machine II LP. “I never 

really thought I was cool. I always thought I was vulgar, with a 

veneer of class.” 

“You can’t go on stage and live -it’s false all the way. I can’t 

stand the premise of going out in jeans and a guitar and looking 

as real as you can in front of 18,000 people. I mean, it’s not 

normal!” 

Out of sight during the Sixties, out of sorts during 

the Seventies and out of character during the 

Eighties: as the Nineties began, David Bowie came 

dangerously close to becoming out of fashion. His 

latest project, a designer rock band Tin Machine, of

which Bowie was, he maintained, merely one fourth 

part, had been conceived in a bid to erase the 

showbiz years and regain an edge to his appeal. 

Unfortunately, while his new partnership with guitarist 

Reeves Gabrels showed some potential, the project 

failed amid poor sales and heaps of critical abuse. 

Join The Gang. Tin Machine’s final photo session, by Sukita, 

February 1992. Bowie, in Thierry Mugler suit and Jean-Paul 

Gaultier spectacles, would later reflect: “They charged me up. 

Then personal problems within the band became the reason for 

its demise. It became physically impossible for us to carry on.”

“He had this T-shirt on that said ‘Fuck You I’m In Tin 

Machine’. I wanted to go up to him and point to the shirt and say, 

Yes, but does anyone really care?” -comedian Vic Reeves.

Soundchecking at the Freddie Mercury Concert For Aids 

Awareness, Wembley Stadium, April 1992. 

In some ways, the cynicism with which Tin Machine 

was received set the tone for the decade. Bowie’s 

stylistic changes back in the Seventies may not 

always have pleased the cognoscenti all the time, 

but that work was usually received in a context of 

inquisitive artfulness. Critics found it difficult to be 

quite so generous to his Eighties work, claiming it 

rang of cash-registers and creative emptiness. 

Bowie’s activities have been plagued by suspicion 

ever since. What might once have been acclaimed 

as a strategic masterstroke is as likely now to be

egarded as the latest twist in the desperate plot to 

keep Bowie visible and credible. 

Despite what this picture may suggest, Bowie does read 

fan magazines.

On stage in the Nineties. Tin Machine’s It’s My Life tour at 

Brixton, November 1991. The one-time King Bee in Hermes shirt, 

Mugler jacket and bespoke striped luminous Levis.

The Outside tour at Pittsburgh, September 1995. In his 

‘Painter Man’ overalls, tastily topped off with mock snakeskin 

plastic jacket, originally designed for the 1978 tour by Natasha 

Kornilof.

Tired Of My Life. “I’d hate to be like Bowie, singing ‘Rebel 

Rebel’ at 50, looking bored.” -Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive.

Mandarin style at the Rock Torhout festival, Belgium, July 

1997. 

Therein lies a degree of truth, and one that may 

apply equally to contemporaries like Mick Jagger, 

Neil Young and Lou Reed. Yet because none of 

these ever made the issue of stardom an integral 

part of their artistic mission, their longevity tends to 

be regarded with a transparency that is rarely 

extended to Bowie, who is regarded as arch and 

studiously gifted in the art of self-preservation.

Unfair, yes, but kind of understandable. 

During the early Seventies, Bowie gave the guise 

of being controlled and manipulative when in fact he 

flailed about in a vortex of fame and infamy that 

threatened to destroy him. His audience recognised 

the cracks and celebrated him for living a knife-edge 

existence where his ‘self’ was in a state of perpetual 

collapse. Everything he’d invested in his Ziggy and 

Aladdin creations -apocalyptic fame, divided self, 

death-drive -rebounded back on the all-too human 

David Bowie, who spent the rest of the decade 

attempting to make sense of his lot. 

The Nineties has seen the emergence of a quite 

different Bowie, one who, after years of pillaging 

guises and styles from others, has derived his raw 

material from his own career. In synthesising his 

cultural trailblazing of the Seventies and the clean-up 

boy of the Eighties, he’s struck perhaps his most 

uncharacteristic pose yet: a David Bowie who finally 

seems at peace with himself. This seemingly unholy 

union has brought with it some dodgy, George 

Michael-styled facial hair and a good deal of 

tiresome, publicity-seeking internet activities, but all 

this seems churlish when measured against the 

balancing act he’s seemingly achieved between 

private contentment and worthwhile public works - 

not to mention occasional flashes of revived musical 

genius.

“The union jacket was designed by myself and Alexander 

McQueen. I wanted to recontextualise Pete Townshend’s jacket 

of the Sixties, but then I got a bit carried away and thought it 

would look rather nice as a frock coat. Then Alex got even 

further carried away and cut bits of it up. I thank you.”

In 1996, Bowie’s hair made an atavistic journey back to the 

flame orange upswept brush cut of the Ziggy years. The dandy 

frock coat, lined with black velvet, was another McQueen 

creation. 

Photographed by Iman, backstage on the Outside tour in 

New Jersey, 1995. 

The man who once interrupted interviews by 

worrying about the UFOs outside the window, or 

dreaming he was destined for dictatorial greatness, 

is now probably the most avuncular, obliging 50something 

in rock. This is a sure sign of a personal 

exorcism, but it’s also a characteristically Bowie-like 

reflection of the zeitgeist. The detached, untouchable 

celebrities of old (Bowie, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) 

seemed largely out of place in the Nineties, when the 

stars of grunge, Britpop and dance music were 

notable for their ordinariness. Even Bowie’s

patronage of younger artists (usually those cut from 

his distinctive cloth), like Suede and Placebo struck 

a parental, rather than competitive note. 

The last of the Mohicans. A funny smile with some Black 

Hole Kids in California, 1997.

Rakish Georgian sleeves backstage on the Sound + Vision 

tour, 1990.

In 1994, Bowie ditched the legendary crooked fangs for 

divine straight-capped symmetry. 

Another change has chimed even more successfully 

with contemporary trends. Bowie has always been a 

good talker, but during the Eighties, the subject of 

his past was virtually a no-go area. As luck would 

have it, this period of denial ended just as the CDinspired 

boom in reissues promised to give a new 

lease of life to the old guard. When in 1990, 

Rykodisc, a specialist American label, reactivated 

16 of Bowie’s previous albums, together with an 

extravagantly packaged three-CD box set, he came

up with the perfect marketing strategy: he set off on a 

six-month world tour to promote the catalogue, 

offered his audience a chance to vote for the songs 

he should play, and insisted that he’d never perform 

them ever again. Inevitably, that promise was 

broken, but in reminding the world of his substantial 

body of work, much of which had travelled well 

(though not ‘The Laughing Gnome’, which NME tried 

desperately to get included on his set-list), Bowie 

managed to banish some of the stale odours that 

lingered from the Eighties.

Dipping his gaily painted toes into outré androgyny once 

more. Backstage at the Phoenix rock festival, July 1997.

David in theatrical black, on stage at the Manhatten Center 

Ballroom where he played a brief set in September 1995 during 

a benefit show to celebrate the anniversary of Joseph Papp’s 

Public Theater in New York.

Fashionably unshaven, Bowie played Bernie in the stylish 

Manchester gangland flick, Everybody Loves Sunshine in 1998.

I’m Not Losing Sleep. In Neil Young-style lumberjack shirt at 

New York’s Chung King Studios, 1999. 

He has also benefited from rock’s own 

renaissance. Early in the Nineties, Nirvana 

popularised his ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, 

performing a thrilling version of the song on the 

band’s MTV Unplugged swansong late in 1993.

Back home, Suede invoked the spectre of Glam 

Rock, and invited Bowie to join the press party. The 

Industrial/Metal interface, best represented by the 

punishing drive of Nine Inch Nails, found its way into 

elements of Bowie’s 1995 album, Outside, most 

notably on ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, probably his most 

dramatic recording in 20 years. Then, on 1997’s 

Earthling, he appropriated the distorted, contorted 

rhythms of dance contemporaries like drum & bass 

star Goldie on a handful of cuts. Oddly, while 

Bowie’s cut-and-paste working method has a 

lengthy pedigree, and the emergence of the DJ as 

musical creator has depended largely on creative 

plagiarism, this seemed to bypass most reviewers 

who claimed that the move was that of a desperate 

man. That was a pity, for Earthling is surely Bowie’s 

most vibrant, surprise-filled album since 1977’s Low.

Bowie received an honorary doctorate at Boston’s Berklee 

College Of Music in May 1999. 

The Nineties also saw an explosion of Bowie’s 

desire to become a cultural all-rounder. He has 

never been busier. While his albums tend to be 

biannual affairs, he maintains a regular film career, 

despite insisting that these endeavours are little 

more than “a distraction”. His profile as an art critic 

and an exhibiting painter, not to mention his 

collaborations with BritArt buddies, has gained him 

a foothold in the art world mainstream. He also has 

his own Internet Service Provider, which means that 

thousands of email addresses around the world bear 

his name (davidbowie.com). He maintains houses in 

several parts of the world and co-writes songs with 

fans over the net. He baffles club audiences with 

sets of new material and is a pillar of music industry 

respectability. He is an avatar of cultural plunder and 

a complete one-off. He is David Bowie and he’s a 

particularly precious kind of butterfly.

50th birthday VIP party at Julian Schnabel’s New York 

residence, January 9, 1997, with Iman and Kurt Cobain’s widow, 

Courtney Love. 

With Jarvis Cocker, London, November 1995.

The male stiletto at The Brit Awards, London, February 

1996: “I learned to walk in high heels over 25 years ago. They’re 

Katharine Hamnett’s new line. Lovely, aren’t they?”

In October 1999, Bowie received the Commandeur des Arts 

et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honour. “Some people 

say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that 

sounds like a definition of pop to me.” - Brian Eno.

Bowie Style

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