OBITUARY: BOWIE WAS AN OTHERWORLDLY VISIONARY
A master of reinvention, David Bowie was a rock icon and a rare talent
David Bowie, who died Sunday, a few days after turning 69, was a rock musician of rare originality and talent. He was also, variously, a producer, painter, film actor, art critic, the progenitor of bisexual chic, a family man and an astute multimillionaire.
Endlessly manipulating his public identity, Bowie was once rumoured to be an alien from outer space.
“I’m an actor,” he said. “My whole professional life is an act.”
Although he drew heavily on other artists for his inspiration, he had a wealth of new ideas of his own and wrote some of the most quirky and poignant songs of the 1970s and 1980s: Space Oddity, Changes, Fame, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Aladdin Sane.
Jangling and melancholy, his music matched imagistic lyrics with his rich, Britishaccented singing style and tunes that owed as much to white opera as to black soul, and to the simple pop of the Beatles as to the drugged edginess of the Velvet Underground. He had a protean personality to match. A supermodel before the era of supermodels, Bowie was eel-thin with the face of a starved child and the teeth of a pike.
He looked like an alien, and had an extraordinary left eye, green with a dilated pupil; rumours spread that it was a sign of his extraterrestrial origins.
It was, in fact, an injury sustained in a scuffle in the days when he was David Jones from south London.
In the early 1970s he played upon the science fiction theme, creating the persona of Ziggy Stardust, a rock star from outer space whose music drove audiences to kill.
The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) was accompanied by a stage show for which Bowie dyed his hair orange, painted his face white and donned a multicoloured jumpsuit while The Spiders dressed in gold lamé.
The weird aura around Bowie was boosted by his role as a marooned alien in Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976).
Drugs made a significant contribution to his creative output.
“I did nearly kill myself a number of times,” Bowie said. “Once I blew my nose and half my brain fell out.”
In the late 1970s his cocaine habit was so bad that he took himself off to hide in Berlin.
The best of Bowie’s music always had a cold, alienated quality with which the young identified. There was a great deal of genuine fear in his music, reflecting the strain of madness in his family and his shock at the suicide of his half-brother, Terry, who had schizophrenia and for whom he wrote the song Five Years.
David Robert Jones was born in Brixton on Jan. 8, 1947. In early interviews he played up the brutality of his upbringing — the rough street brawls, his drunken, gambling father and his “nutty” family.
After toying with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk, he set his heart on rock music, learned the saxophone and put his first bands together: David (or Davie) Jones and the Lower Third, then David Bowie and the Buzz.
It was the 1969 release, called David Bowie and soon retitled Space Oddity, that many considered the first “proper” Bowie album.
In the latter half of the 1970s Bowie was all but destroyed by cocaine, but found time for a peculiar appearance on Bing Crosby’s 1977 Christmas show to perform a duet (Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy) that became a huge hit.
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980 produced a hit single in Ashes to Ashes.
After that, he moved to Switzerland in 1981. There he masterminded a comeback with Let’s Dance (1983). The album sold six million copies.
In later years, the gaps between albums and tours became longer.
A major development in Bowie’s life was the priority he gave to his friendships. With age he also stopped worrying about his identity and was satisfied that his interests were challenging and his appetites “sane ones.”
Bowie is survived by his second wife, the Somalian-born model Iman Abdulmajid, their daughter Alexandria, and his son Duncan Jones.