Hailed by many as the founding father of "glam rock," David Bowie defied rock star conventions and blurred the lines between music and performance art. Embracing the avant-garde, Bowie created futuristic, androgynous characters to represent the music he released in the form of seminal rock albums such as Space Oddity , The Man Who Sold the World , and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . A musical chameleon, Bowie reinvented his persona with every album and live performance, from the decadent Ziggy Stardust, to the enigmatic Thin White Duke, and helped pioneer several genres of music, including New Wave, industrial, and electronic. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee's constant reinvention and love of theatrics also influenced artists like Madonna and Lady Gaga, while his enormous talent allowed him to enjoy equal success as an actor, working with filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.
Renowned for exploring the fringes of pop music, Bowie carved a successful career out of change, and retained his reputation as an experimental artist as well as a true music icon. After more than a decade of musical silence, marked by health concerns, David Bowie returned with an iconoclastic new album, The Next Day, in 2013, followed by an even more experimental release, Blackstar, released on his 69th birthday, January 8, 2015. Sadly, David Bowie died following an 18-month battle with cancer only two days later, on January 10, 2015, at his home in New York City. Heathen was released in June 2002, preceded by first single Slow Burn featuring old friend Pete Townshend on lead guitar. Dave Grohl took the same role on the Neil Young cover I've Been Waiting For You. Guest turns aside though, Bowie played more instruments on Heathen than anything in memory, including the drums over his own loop on the Pixies cover Cactus, as well as nearly all the synth work and some of the piano.
As for the album title, "Heathenism is a state of mind", Bowie explained at the time. David performed Low in its entirety alongside Heathen as part of the festival. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, securing Bowie's involvement as the Goblin King Jareth was such a major feat in the development of Jim Henson's fairy tale fable "Labyrinth," that the orbit of the film shifted slightly to accommodate him. The film's writer, Terry Jones of 'Monty Python' fame, rewrote the script to allow more screen time for the character and for his songs, and when Bowie reportedly felt the script lacked humor thereafter, it was again rewritten to keep him onside. Also featuring a polish from Elaine May, the family film is the story of a young girl who has to face all sorts of otherworldly dangers and adventures when her little brother is taken, on her urging, by Goblins, whose king falls in love with her.
It was a flop on release, which allegedly depressed Henson so much he never directed again, and critically the reception was mixed at best. But the film developed a life on VHS thereafter and for a whole generation of sleepover-aged kids, Bowie's Jareth, with his 80s fright wig and "you remind me of the babe" nonsense dialogue, is one of his most indelible creations. While the Maurice Sendak-indebted film is not an out-and-out success, the casting of Bowie is kind of genius, as he brings his trademark ambiguity to making the villain both attractive and repulsive, lending the film, which is all puppets and riddles elsewhere, a slightly more grown-up slant as a result. Scary Monsters was Bowie's last album for RCA, and it wrapped up his most innovative, productive period.
Later in 1980, he performed the title role in the stage production of The Elephant Man, including several shows on Broadway. Over the next two years, he took an extended break from recording, appearing in Christiane F and the vampire movie The Hunger , returning to the studio only for his 1981 collaboration with Queen, "Under Pressure," and the theme for Paul Schrader's remake of Cat People. In 1983, he signed an expensive contract with EMI Records and released Let's Dance.
Bowie had recruited Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers to produce the album, giving the record a sleek, funky foundation, and hired the unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan as lead guitarist. Let's Dance became his most successful record, thanks to its stylish, innovative videos for "Let's Dance" and "China Girl," which turned both songs into Top Ten hits. He also developed a fascination with German electronic music, which Eno helped him fulfill on their first album together, Low.
Released early in 1977, Low was a startling mixture of electronics, pop, and avant-garde technique. While it was greeted with mixed reviews at the time, it proved to be one of the most influential albums of the late '70s, as did its follow-up, Heroes, which followed that year. Not only did Bowie record two solo albums in 1977, but he also helmed Iggy Pop's comeback records The Idiot and Lust for Life, and toured anonymously as Pop's keyboardist.
He resumed his acting career in 1977, appearing in Just a Gigolo with Marlene Dietrich and Kim Novak, as well as narrating Eugene Ormandy's version of Peter and the Wolf. Bowie returned to the stage in 1978, launching an international tour that was captured on the double-album Stage. In 1979, Bowie and Eno recorded Lodger in New York, Switzerland, and Berlin, releasing the album at the end of the year.
Lodger was supported with several innovative videos, as was 1980's Scary Monsters, and these videos -- "DJ," "Fashion," "Ashes to Ashes" -- became staples on early MTV. Given the amount of work Bowie packed into 1972 and 1973, it wasn't surprising that his relentless schedule began to catch up with him. After recording the all-covers Pin-Ups with the Spiders from Mars, he unexpectedly announced the band's breakup, as well as his retirement from live performances, during the group's final show that year.
He retreated from the spotlight to work on a musical adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, but once he was denied the rights to the novel, he transformed the work into Diamond Dogs. The album was released to generally poor reviews in 1974, yet it generated the hit single "Rebel Rebel," and he supported the album with an elaborate and expensive American tour. As the tour progressed, Bowie became fascinated with soul music, eventually redesigning the entire show to reflect his new "plastic soul." Hiring guitarist Carlos Alomar as the band's leader, Bowie refashioned his group into a Philly soul band and recostumed himself in sophisticated, stylish fashions. The change took fans by surprise, as did the double-album David Live, which featured material recorded on the 1974 tour. 1999 also saw David join Placebo at the annual BRIT Awards for a performance of the T Rex classic Twentieth Century Boy—a performance that went down so well that the UK's Mirror newspaper staged a campaign for the track to be released as a single. That July saw David voted both biggest music star of the 20th century by readers of The Sun newspaper and sixth Greatest Star of The Century by Q Magazine's readers (the Q poll also saw David place as third highest-ranking living star).
For something so influential, David Bowie's pansexual alien persona of Ziggy Stardust was relatively short-lived, and had come and gone before he was cast as an alien in his first starring role. In fact his characterisation of Thomas Jerome Newton in this indulgent but sporadically fascinating Nicholas Roeg oddity was based more on Bowie's next incarnation as the Thin White Duke. And with Bowie himself admitting this period saw his drug habit at its worst and that the emotionless, hollow, Ubermensch Duke became "an ogre" to him, you have some idea of the attraction and the repulsion that the character, and Roeg's capitalism-critiquing film, represent.
A fragmentary, often incoherent meditation on the alienation of modern life and the methods by which we numb ourselves to real connection, the film is sometimes dazzling and sometimes an utter bore, but Bowie is never less than mesmerizing as the alien descending into all-too-human depravity and vice. A cult classic almost the second it opened, it feels like now that Bowie's song has been sung through to its end, this is definitely one of the films that future generations will look to to explain his legacy — and with as little luck as any of us have had. "The Man Who Fell To Earth" will continue to defy straightforward comprehension, partly because of Roeg, but partly because however many times you may revisit it, at its core there is maybe the quintessential Bowie performance, and it is a perfect enigma. On October 25, 2015 it was confirmed that ★ would be the title of David Bowie's 28th album, to be released on David's 69th birthday, January 8, 2016. The album's titular 10-minute opener was released as a single on November 20, 2015 accompanied by a short film directed by Johan Renck, which received a sold out theatrical premiere at Brooklyn's Nitehawk Cinema featuring Q&As with Renck and ★ co-producer Tony Visconti. At age 13, inspired by the jazz of the London West End, he picked up the saxophone and called up Ronnie Ross for lessons.
Early bands he played with – The Kon-Rads, The King Bees, the Mannish Boys and the Lower Third –provided him with an introduction into the showy worlds of pop and mod, and by 1966 he was David Bowie, with long hair and aspirations of stardom rustling about his head. Kenneth Pitt signed on as his manager, and his career began with a handful of mostly forgotten singles and a head full of ideas. It was not until 1969 that the splash onto the charts would begin, with the legendary Space Oddity (which peaked at #5 in the UK). Amidst his musical wanderings in the late '60s, the young Bowie experimented with mixed media, cinema, mime, Tibetan Buddhism, acting and love.
That added another dimension to a career that can't be defined solely by albums and songs. For instance, in the years between his first few singles and the fame that came with Space Oddity, Bowie studied dance and mime under Lindsay Kemp. The things he sought out of dance not only influenced his acting, but also Bowie's sense of presentation in both music and videos. Along the way, he only had a handful of leading roles; most of the time, he was part of the supporting cast or had a cameo. A David Bowie appearance might not have always guaranteed critical acclaim, but – as you'll see in our comprehensive look back – it was usually a sign that the work would be creative and imaginative. Gabriel Range's biopic on pre-fame David Bowie, titled Stardust, was released on November 25.
The film stars Johnny Flynn as the mystifying rock star while he reinvents himself as Ziggy Stardust during his The Man Who Sold the World Tour. Stardust is proving to be controversial with fans, because none of Bowie's music appears in the film. Bowie's son, Duncan Jones, also stated that Salon Pictures did not get the family's blessing to make the movie. Bowie's first film role came in 1976, not long after his first number-one single "Fame" made him a crossover success in the United States. Playing Thomas Newton inThe Man Who Fell to Earth,the musician instantly established himself as an otherworldly, compelling screen actor.
For the next few decades, that establishment held with roles big and small in films such asThe Last Temptation of Christ,The Prestige, andLabyrinth.In 2016, his tragic death surprised fans a mere two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his final album,Blackstar. So, for both Anglophonic and Japanese audiences, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence featured an iconic pop star playing a sexually fluid role. If, like most of the world, you skipped this teen movie starring Vanessa Hudgens and Lisa Kudrow, you missed rare latter-day Bowie appearance on film. The legend plays himself in one scene, where he watches an online video of a fictional band and sends an email asking them to join his label.
The character, played by Gaelan Connell, is so thrilled by the news that he trips and falls flat on his face, adopting a pose reminiscent of Bowie's Lodger album cover. The result was the concept album Outside, released in 1995 as the first installment of a new deal with Virgin Records. The complex project explored the increasing obsession with the mutilation of the human body as art and the paganization of western society. Bowie's next foray into film was Just A Gigolo, which he describes as "all my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one." March of 1978 found him on tour again for the first time since the Station To Station outing.
Stage was released in September 1978, culled from that tour's swing through the United States, and featuring live interpretations of songs from the Berlin period alongside staples from Ziggy Stardust, Young Americans and Station to Station. During a May break from the tour, Bowie narrated Peter and the Wolf with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first of many children's projects he would consistently support over the years (now out of print, the result was a collectible green-vinyl album). A relocation to Switzerland was to follow, abandoned frequently due to a developing love affair with Indonesia, Africa and the Far East. On 15 January, following – ever so slightly – in the footsteps of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman another great musical biopic will land, this time with David Bowie as the focal point played by Johnny Flynn.
The Brixton-born genius (who has reached practical god-like status since his death in 2016) is no simple part to play, which is why actor and musician Flynn turned down the role when the film's director Gabriel Range first emailed him. It was only years later in 2018, when Flynn visited the 'David Bowie Is' exhibition in Brooklyn, New York, that he decided to take on the role and embrace his spirit. Eberts isn't entirely wrong — the film is a gigantic folly, one that didn't just destroy Goldcrest, but came close to crippling the British film industry as a whole. But that doesn't mean it isn't fascinating, and Bowie's performance as well as his song, are one of the movie's major redeeming features.
Temple takes Colin MacInnes' memoir of the birth of the teen in London's Soho in the 1950s and gives it an expressionistic, none-more-80s music video veneer, a cross between Alan Parker, Busby Berkeley and amateur dramatics. It's a hot mess, dramatically and aesthetically, but it's entirely fascinating for it, and Bowie has enormous fun as the near-satanic ad executive who takes lead Colin under his wing. Not enough of the star's film appearances let him flex his musical muscles, but both the title track and his lizardly seductive "That's Motivation," atop a giant typewriter, are heads and shoulders above the rest of the movie. So the world just got a bit smaller and less wonderful, and the stars look very different today. David Bowie's passing is an incalculable loss to the world of music, but it is also a heavy blow to the movie world.
His legacy as an actor may be dwarfed by that of his era-defining, decades-spanning music career, but that says less about the former than simply proving the near-planetary size and scale of the latter. Because as an actor too, Bowie had a unique screen presence, and he chose his roles so selectively and with such idiosyncratic, yet strangely consistent taste, that almost incidentally to the main narrative of his extraordinary life, he amassed an enviable onscreen filmography. Even in films that were not wholly worthy of his contributions, his contributions were invariably worthy of attention.
And many of even those roles that were critically derided at the time, now feel like they come into focus as glints off a life of artistry as complex and multifaceted as a precision-cut diamond. No one who was paying attention to David Bowie's career was surprised when he starting acting in movies. As a rock star, the man born David Robert Jones spent the 1970s trying on different characters, writing and singing songs as "Ziggy Stardust" or the "Thin White Duke." He put on unapologetically theatrical concerts, and showcased his music in trippy little short films years before MTV existed. With his soft, pleasant speaking voice, his angular face, and his faraway eyes, Bowie had a naturally magnetic screen presence. The one that started it all is also the best.The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of an extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth and struggles to assimilate himself into human culture.
Director Nicolas Roeg could have arguably not found a better actor to fill the lead role of Thomas Newton than David Bowie, who seems so at ease in his first film role it hardly feels at all like acting. With arresting visuals and a haunting, meditative tone, Roeg's film has rightfully become a midnight movie staple and the role of Newton synonymous with Bowie's legacy. Oftentimes, it felt as though the rock icon was an otherworldly being gracing humankind with his presence for a short time. While he is no longer with us, the music and astonishing film work of David Bowie remains.
David Bowie passed away nearly five years ago after giving us a life full of incredible music, mesmerizing style, and endless inspiration. Unfortunately, the upcoming movie Stardust starring Johnny Flynn as the iconic recording artist doesn't look like the kind of cinematic tribute that fans are waiting for. Bowie's multifaceted personae have become manifest through album covers, live performances, and, of course, his diverse and shifting musical stylings. But Bowie, while hardly a traditional rock star/film star hybrid, has also exercised much of his persona through his selective cinematic appearances, which exhibit his chameleonesque performance capabilities across media.
Greeted with massive success for the first time, Bowie wasn't quite sure how to react, and he eventually decided to replicate Let's Dance with 1984's Tonight. While the album sold well, producing the Top Ten hit "Blue Jean," it received poor reviews and was ultimately a commercial disappointment. He stalled in 1985, recording a duet of Martha & the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" with Mick Jagger for Live Aid.
He also spent more time jet-setting, appearing at celebrity events across the globe, and appeared in several movies -- Into the Night , Absolute Beginners , Labyrinth -- that turned out to be bombs. Bowie returned to recording in 1987 with the widely panned Never Let Me Down, supporting the album with the Glass Spider tour, which also received poor reviews. In 1989, he remastered his RCA catalog with Rykodisc for CD release, kicking off the series with the three-disc box Sound + Vision. Bowie supported the discs with an accompanying tour of the same name, claiming that he was retiring all of his older characters from performance following the tour. Sound + Vision was successful, and Ziggy Stardust re-charted amidst the hoopla. David Jones began performing music when he was 13 years old, learning the saxophone while he was at Bromley Technical High School; another pivotal event happened at the school, when his left pupil became permanently dilated in a schoolyard fight.
Following his graduation at 16, he worked as a commercial artist while playing saxophone in a number of mod bands, including the King Bees, the Manish Boys , and Davey Jones & the Lower Third. All three of those bands released singles, which were generally ignored, yet he continued performing, changing his name to David Bowie in 1966 after the Monkees' Davy Jones became an international star. Over the course of 1966, he released three mod singles on Pye Records, which were all ignored. The following year, he signed with Deram, releasing the music hall, Anthony Newley-styled David Bowie that year. Upon completing the record, he spent several weeks in a Scottish Buddhist monastery. Once he left the monastery, he studied with Lindsay Kemp's mime troupe, forming his own mime company, the Feathers, in 1969.
The Feathers were short-lived, and he formed the experimental art group Beckenham Arts Lab in 1969. Not long after Young Americans' release, Bowie moved to Los Angeles and starred in the cult classic Nic Roeg science fiction film The Man Who Fell To Earth. Almost immediately upon completion of filming, he returned to the studio for the recording of Station to Station, a travelogue of sorts featuring the 10+ minute opener/title track, Golden Years, Stay and the prescient tale of a holographic TV swallowing the narrator's girlfriend, TVC15. This period also saw RCA's release of David's first compilation of hits, ChangesOneBowie, in May 1976.
Never one to stay in one place too long, shortly after his tour finished, David relocated to the Schonenberg section of Berlin. If those two previous albums showed hints of Bowie's interest in the music he'd heard in America, U.S. soul filtered through a unique UK—truly a uniquely Bowie--perspective soon became more than a homage. The rhythmic, soul-laden tour de force yielded the titular smash single as well as Bowie's first ever U.S. #1 single, Fame—a collaboration with John Lennon resulting from an impromptu session at Electric Lady in New York and added to the LP at the last possible minute.
Young Americans also featured another David discovery soon to be known the world over as R&B icon Luther Vandross. A back-up singer on Bowie's live shows, Vandross was enlisted to contribute vocals on the album alongside the other legendary young American musicians such as Willie Weeks, Andy Newmark, David Sanborn and Mike Garson. Bowie's first starring role came in Nicolas Roeg's visionary sci-fi film The Man Who Fell to Earth, the story of an alien's surreal experiences after its spaceship crash lands on Earth. An image of Bowie from the film was used on the cover of the artist's 1977 masterpiece Low.
