- See David Bowie died.
- See now – that makes no f****n’ sense. Wha’ you just said.
- I know wha’ yeh mean. How can Bowie be dead? He was never alive, like the rest of us.
— Roddy Doyle, writer
Who was David Bowie, really? The British glam rock icon with many public faces, who incorporated huge drama into his incomparable music, died on Sunday, two days after his 69th birthday. He had been battling cancer for 18 months.
The chameleon-like musician was trained in theatre and mime, which explains the ease with which he took on and discarded multiple musical personas.
Christened David Jones, Bowie believed in letting his "freak" flag fly high. He was the first rock star to proclaim publicly that he was gay. In a January 1972 interview he said, "I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones."
Through his music and acting career he donned manifestations of alien, punk rocker, lonely astronaut, goblin king, a man-dog hybrid, and many others.
Below is the original video of the successful title track from the album Space Oddity, which came out in 1969, early in his career. Here's Bowie as Major Tom.
After 1969, his music wasn't hitting the right notes with the fans.
It is widely reported that after a visit to Andy Warhol's studio, The Factory, and at his wife Angie's insistence, Bowie took on the androgynous flaming carrot-top hair look that became the best-known of his avatars: Ziggy Stardust.
The video below is from a 1973 live performance at The Hammersmith Odeon (London). Bowie performs one of the most popular tracks, Suffragette City, from the album The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.
Next came Aladdin Sane, a derivation of the phrase "a lad insane", a rougher and tougher iteration of Ziggy Stardust, and more Americanised now.
The video below is the first track from his album named Alladin Sane, called Watch That Man.
Bowie continued mutating the Ziggy Stardust character in the next album as well. In 1974 his dystopian concept album titled Diamond Dogs featured the musician as a Stardust-Sane like hero named Halloween Jack. The album was based on George Orwell's novel 1984.
The original and controversial album cover of Diamond Dogs depicted Bowie as a man-dog hybrid, with visible genitalia. Painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, it became a collector's item. The record company airbrushed the image, however, soon after the release.
In 1975 Bowie's new album brought on a new identity, that of the Thin White Duke. This is the phase during which he was allegedly using cocaine, giving him his ultra-thin appearance. Here he's performing the track Young Americans on the Dick Caveatt Show.
In this music video of the song Ashes to Ashes from the early 1980s, we see Bowie play the lonely, lost Pierrot wandering on a beach, menaced by a chorus of priests.
In this short animated video, David Bowie talks about his most popular persona, that of Ziggy Stardust
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