Overview
He is normally referred to as the chameleon of popular music, predicting trends & adjusting his style & persona, when holding in to his have ideas and creative thinking. He 1st rose to prominence using a heady, 1969 folk rock single "Space Oddity" but is perhaps better known for the flamboyant, androgynous glam rock of Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), and Aladdin Sane (1973). Subsequent albums keep close at hand explored blue-eyed soul, electronica and new wave, often predating these genres' popularity or a point at which it were defined when genres.

Bowie has experienced a profound influence in rock and roll from either the 1970s to the present. In the cable music network VH1's 2000 list of the 100 greatest creative person of rock & roll, Bowie graded seventh. In the British Broadcasting Corporation's list of C greatest Britons, Bowie ranked Twenty-nine. He has sold an guessed 136 million albums within his career & has been inducted into a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Additionally to his musical career, Bowie has experienced limited profits as an actor, starring around 1976's The Man Who Fell to Earth 1983's The Hunger, 1986's Labyrinth, 1996's Basquiat, and 2001's Zoolander.

History
1947 to 1967: Early years
David Robert Jones was innate within Brixton, London on January 8, 1947, apparently at his family's home at 40 Stansfield Road (however watch discussion report). He sleep in Brixton until he was six years old, when his personal moved to Bromley in Kent (now a portion of Greater London). He accept his parents until he was 18. He stated that his earliest musical goal was to become the saxophone player in Little Richard's group. At first the saxist, he, quite by accident, was found as the singer after he subbed witharound for the missing vocalizer at a club in London. He played by owning various blues groups, like "The King Bees," "The Mannish Boys" & "The Lower Third" in the 1960s. Bowie's greatest nature & severity throughout his career has been his ability to adapt his public image to healthy, and typically anticipate, a prevailing musical trends. His early shift through the blues and Elvis-esque music while working sustaining several British pop styles.

Popular legend has it that in the spring of 1962, Bowie and his class fellow, George Underwood, had into the fight above the girl. Underwood was wearing the ring after he struck Bowie, & it hit him in the left eye. Bowie was forced away from school for eight months & at one point it was despised that he would lose a sight inside his left eye. He experienced many operations, however a doctors may not fully repair a damage, going his pupil permanently dilated. Following, Bowie has faulty depth perception and his left eye, although actually blue, now commonly appears to become light brown or even green (based on the ambient lighting). In any experience, the difference between his eyes added an exotic element to the practiced looks that would profit Bowie throughout his career. Coincidentally, Underwood later in went on to clean graphics for Bowie's earliest [http://www.georgeunderwood.com/underwood.html album covers].

Heavy influenced per dramatic arts—from either avant-garde theatre and mime to Commedia dell'arte—much of his work has involved the creation of characters or personae to present to the world.The aspiring rock star needed to use a different stage name to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, so he chose the last name Bowie after the Alamo hero Jim Bowie and his famous Bowie Knife. David pronounces "Bowie" to rhyme by owning "Joey".

Bowie freed his foremost solo album inside 1967 for Deram records, simply known as David Bowie, an amalgam of Psychedelic Rock and Easy Listening. Besides discharged was one, "The Laughing Gnome", by having a cult-classic B-side "The Gospel According to Tony Day". None one managed to chart; a 1967 album is arduous to call for now, although it lives inside fake copies. Still the materials of two a album, a only, & many more works were later on recycled inside a people of compilation albums, & "The Laughing Gnome," very much to Bowie's embarrassment, was re-freed within 1973, selling over 250,000 copies to turn into one of his better selling singles.

1969 to 1973: Glam rock and Iggy Pop
His number one flirt by owning fame come inside 1969 when his single Space Oddity was released to coincide by using a number one moon landing. This ballad was the story of what was typically known as Bowie's number one dual-subject & role, Major Tom, an astronaut who becomes lost inside space. The failure once number one freed, it late became the UK hit record. Its corresponding album was originally highborn David Bowie, & hwhen driven occasionally confusion, as each of Bowie's number 1 & 2nd albums were freed therewith title in the UK. In the U.S. a 2nd album wore a title HuHuman of Words, Man of Music. In March 19, 1970, David married Mary Angela Barnett (Angie/Angela Bowie) in Kent, England. Within 1972, the 2nd album wwhen re-freed as Space Oddity. When a album is non when difficult to locate when a original David Bowie, a highlights of the album come hardly easily known.

The Man Who Sold the World (1970), rejected the acoustic guitar sound of Space Oddity, replacing it with a heavily rock backing provided by long-term collaborator Mick Ronson. In Bowie's a portion, a album provided occasionally interesting musical roundabout way, like a title track's utilize of Latin sounds to hold a melody. A track provided an unconvincing hit for UK pop singer Lulu and would be covered by numbers of elastic all over a years, including Nirvana. the handle of the number 1 release of this album, around which Bowie is seen reclining inside a dress, was an early indication of his interest in exploiting his androgynous appearance.

His next record, Hunky Dory (1971) saw the unfair link to of the fey popular singer of Space Oddity, using lightly fare like a droll "Kooks" (dedicated to his immature boy known to the globe when Zowie Bowie but legally named Duncan Zowie Heywood Jones) & "Oh! You Pretty Things" alongside a semi-autobiographical "The Bewlay Brothers". Lyrically, Bowie besides took the profound could have against more popular musicians of the period within his songs "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol" and "Queen Bitch". A next month Bowie produced Lou Reed's solo breakthrough Transformer. Supported per hit singles "Changes" and "Life on Mars?", Hunky Dory sold tremendously swell & lifted Bowie into a number 1 rank of stars. Bowie so experienced iv top X albums & eight top 10 singles within the UK in Xviii months between 1972 and 1973.

s as Ziggy before the striking & abrupt onstage "retirement" within 1973. A record contained occasionally of Bowie's virtually all acclaimed function, good deal of it a reaction to his have fame & a conflict between his privacy needs & the reality of stardom.

These themes were farther explored, by using a equivalent musicians, in 1973's Aladdin Sane, another conceptual function all about a disintegration of society. A album is normally known as his "On the Road" album, because the lot of the songs (except for a newly version of an old only, "The Prettiest Star") were write about a bus or even trains when you took the tour. A album's handle, featuring Bowie shirtless using Ziggy Stardust hair & the red, black, & blue lightning bolt across his face, is one of a best known covers ever. It involved a hit "Jean Genie" and a handle of The Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together". Mike Garson joined Bowie to play piano on this album, and his performance has been known as a album's highlight. To this day, Garson typically plays around Bowie's band.

Pin Ups, an indifferently standard collection of cover of 1960's hits, was released in 1973. By that instance, a "Spiders from Mars" were yearn split, & Bowie was trying to shake his Ziggy persona.

A androgynous public & stage persona Bowie affected when you took this cycle sold records, however its popularity inside gay culture and the emerging gay rights movement created controversy inside England, where homosexuality was legally considered "sodomy" and was punishable by imprisonment. Bowie would farther stir higher arguing by publicly proclaiming himself bisexual, a claim he has since retracted & distanced himself from either.

1974 to 1976: Soul, R&B, and the Thin White Duke
1974 saw a release of Diamond Dogs, another challenging album by owning the spoken word passage and the song-period ('Sweet Thing/Candidate'). Diamond Dogs was the product of 2 distinct ideas - the musical theater according to the uncivilized first around a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music ('1984', 'Big Brother', 'I am A Dead').

Bowie experienced planned in actually writing the musical comedy to 1984, however his interest waned when encountering difficulties around licensing a novel, & he utilized a songs he got written for Diamond Dogs. A album — & an NBC television favorite, a 1980 Cabaret, broadcast at around a equivalent period — demonstrates Bowie headed toward a genre of soul/disco music, the track 1984 existence the prime lesson.

By owning the album come wow profits, & Bowie launched a occident tour that lasted from either 1974 to 1975, the Diamond Dogs tour. Wildly overproduced & filled sustaining theatrical special effects, Bowie performed no encores therein pleasantly high-budget stage production, which hwhen been noted as pleasantly memorable. (Bowie himself, all a same, has commented that the sequent survive album David Live ought really to be known as David Bowie Is Alive & Easily & Dwelling Exclusively Inside Theory.)

Although however slowly morphing away from his Ziggy Stardust glamor, within 1975 Bowie made a sudden & super rocky step around the freshly counsel, with taken the genderless-alien-cum-rock-star to (& even beyond) its restrict, culminating leading role around Nicolas Roeg's film The Human World health organization Fell to Globe. He shed a glam rock trappings and, using Young Americans, explored Philadelphia soul with backing from either the immature Luther Vandross. (A Diamond Dogs tour got been renamed a Philly Dogs tour inside its down the road stages.) Young Americans likewise contained his first number one hit in the U.S. Fame", co-written with John Lennon (who also contributed backing vocals) and one of Bowie's favourite guitarists and band members, Carlos Alomar, and based on a version of James Brown's Footstompin' which Bowie's band had taken to playing live during the Philly Dogs period.

1976's Station to Station featured a bleaker version of this soul persona, called The Thin White Duke. By then Bowie was heavily dependent on drugs, especially cocaine (it is rumoured that Bowie was in such a cocaine-induced haze that he actually does not remember the production of this album). Many have attributed the chopped rhythms and emotional detachment of the record to the influence of the drug, and often Bowie has blamed his addiction on a lack of judgement while being introduced to the substances in America. Nonetheless, there was another large tour in 1976, the Station to Station World Tour, which featured Bowie's soul hits. However, Station to Station presented an interesting new direction in Bowie's music, with interesting use of synthesizer and electronic sounds and a lean towards German pop music.

At around this time, Bowie became embroiled in a controversy caused by his comments to Playboy magazine apparently praising Hitler, and his statement to the effect that "Britain may advantage from either the fascist leader". This was accompanied by some theatrics involving an open-top vintage Mercedes and what some claimed was a Nazi salute staged outside Victoria Station. Bowie would later angrily deny that "possibly I personally" would do something so "gooselike" as raise a Nazi salute, although the open-top car ride perhaps offered much scope for misinterpretation. This incident, along with similarly controversial racist remarks by Eric Clapton around the same time, were catalysts for the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. Later, Bowie retracted his comments, excusing himself by claiming his judgement had been affected by substance abuse.

1976 to 1980: Brian Eno and the Berlin era
Bowie's interest in the growing German music scene and his drug addiction prompted him to move to Berlin to dry out and rejuvenate his career anew. Sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with his friend Iggy Pop, he produced two more of his own classic albums, as well as aiding Pop in his solo career, helping him forge two of his most popular albums, Lust for Life and The Idiot; all four albums were released in Bowie's annus mirabilis 1977. The brittle sound of Station to Station was a precursor to that found on Low, the first of three recorded in collaboration with Brian Eno. Heavily influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and others, the new songs were relatively simple, repetitive and stripped, a clear and typically perverse reaction to punk rock, with the second side almost wholly instrumental. (By way of tribute, proto-punk Nick Lowe recorded an EP entitled "Bowi".) The album provided him with no real hits, only a few favourites such as Sound and Vision and Always Crashing in the Same Car. However, it was renowned for having been far ahead of its time, and fascinates many to this day. Many have called it Bowie's best album. It was produced in 1976 and released in early 1977.

The next record, "Heroes", was similar in sound to Low, but slightly more accessible. The mood of these records fit the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city that provided inspiration. The title track was a worldwide hit and remains one of Bowie's best known, a classic love story about two lovers who met at the Berlin Wall. Also in 1977, Bowie appeared on the ITV music show Marc, hosted by his close friend and fellow glam pioneer Marc Bolan, with whom he had regularly socialised and jammed since before either became famous. He turned out to be the show's final guest, as Bolan was killed in a car crash shortly afterwards. Bowie was one of many superstars who attended the funeral.

There was a brief world tour in 1978 which featured the music of both Low and "Heroes". A live album of this tour was released, known as Stage. 1978 was also the year that featured Bowie releasing a narration recording of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and The Wolf, which to this day is one of the best such recordings for Peter and The Wolf of all time.

Lodger (1979) was the final, and most accessible, of Bowie's so-called "Berlin Trilogy". It featured the hits "D.J.", "Boys Keep Swinging", and "Look Back inside Anger", and it did not contain any instrumentals. However, the album is renowned for being quite a contorted mix of punk rock and world music, and pieces such as African Night Flight and Yassassin were surprising detours even by Bowie's standards. This was Bowie's last album with Eno until 1995's 1. Outside.

In 1980, Bowie did an about-face and made an unabashed bid for commercial success. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) included the #1 hit Ashes To Ashes, revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The imagery Bowie used in the song's music video was seen by many as that which gave international exposure to the underground New Romanticism movement and, with many of the followers of this phase being devotees, Bowie visited the London club "Blitz" - the main New Romantic hangout - and recruited several of the regulars to act in the video, renowned as being one of the most innovative music videos of all time. Scary Monsters clung to the principles that Bowie had learned in the Berlin era, however; it was very fresh considering the brutal transformation Bowie had gone through during the experience. Bowie had divorced his wife Angie, gone through withdrawal from the drugs of the "Thin White Duke" era, and his conception of how music should be written had totally changed. The album had a very hard rock sound with many innovations, and it laid much of the foundation for rock music in the 1980s.

The 1980s: Bowie the superstar

In 1981, Bowie released "Under Pressure", co-written by and performed with Queen. The song was a hit and became Bowie's third number one single as well as one of Queen's all time classics. The song appears on the Queen album Hot Space.

Bowie then scored his first truly commercial blockbuster with ''Let's Dance'' (1983), a slick dance album with co-production by Chic's Nile Rodgers. It was a departure from Scary Monsters for which Bowie received a bit of inside criticism; rather than joining the musical revolt against 1980s dance music, he had definitely joined the scene. Its title track has become a standard, and the album also featured the singles "Modern Love" and "China Girl", the latter causing something of a stir due to its suggestive promotional video. Oddly enough, "China Girl" was actually a new version of a song which Bowie had co-written with Iggy Pop for The Idiot. ''Let's Dance is also notable as a stepping stone for the career of the late Texan guitar virtuoso Stevie Ray Vaughan, who played on the album and was to have supported Bowie on his new world tour for the album The Serious Moonlight Tour''. The tour was a huge success, and one concert actually scored Bowie a million dollars on its own. Vaughan, however, never joined the tour after a pay dispute between Bowie and Vaughan's manager at the time. Vaughan was replaced by Earl Slick.

The 1984 followup album Tonight, became his next big dance album, featuring collaborations with Tina Turner and a cover of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows". Critics slammed it as a lazy effort, dashed off by Bowie simply to recapture ''Let's Dance'''s chart success. Yet the album bore the minor hit "Blue Jean", whose long-form video, a 22-minute short film directed by Julien Temple, reflected Bowie's long-standing interest in combining music with drama. It also featured the minor hit "Caring a Alien". The album also has a pair of dance version rewrites of "Front yard Threat" and "Tonight", old songs Bowie wrote for Pop, both of which originally appeared on Lust for Life.

In 1985, Bowie performed several of his greatest hits in a memorable performance at the Wembley leg of Live Aid. At the end of his set, he introduced a film of the Ethiopian famine, for which the event was raising funds, which was set to the song "Cause" by the Cars. At the event, the video to a fundraising single was premiered – Bowie duetting with Mick Jagger on a version of "Dancing In The Street", which quickly went to Number 1 on release.

In 1986 Bowie contributed the theme song to the film Absolute Beginners. The movie was not well reviewed but Bowie maintained for many years that the song, a UK Number 2 hit, was one of the best and most professional he'd ever written. Also, after taking a role in the film Labyrinth, he wrote songs for the film, some of which became singles.

Bowie's final dance album was Never Let Me Down (1987), which drew some of the harshest criticism of Bowie's career, condemned by critics as a faceless piece of product and ignored by the public—Bowie himself openly apologised in an interview for the album being so bad; defenders of the album maintain that many of its songs are underrated and that Bowie at this time was simply facing the inevitable backlash of an overexposed superstar and argue that the singles, "Day-Inside, Day-Out" and "Period May Crawl" are actually rather good songs.

The Glass Spider World Tour sought to market the album; however, critics slammed it as being too silly, overproduced, and pandering in its special effects and dancers. However fans that saw the shows from that Glass Spider tour were treated to many of Bowie's classics.

1989 to 1991: Tin Machine
In 1989, for the first time since the early 1970s, Bowie formed a regular band, Tin Machine, a hard-rocking quartet, along with Reeves Gabrels, Tony Sales, and Hunt Sales. Obviously influenced by many ascendent alternative rockers (including the Pixies), Tin Machine released two studio albums and a live record. The band received mixed reviews and a somewhat lukewarm reception from the public, but Tin Machine heralded the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between Bowie and Gabrels.

The original album, Tin Machine (1989), was actually a success, holding the number 3 spot on the charts of the UK. Tin Machine launched its first world tour, featuring a now unshaven David Bowie, that year. Despite the success of the Tin Machine venture, Bowie was mildly frustrated that many of his ideas were either rejected or changed by the band.

Bowie began the 1990s with a stadium tour, in which he played mostly his biggest hits. The "Healthy + Vision Tour" (named after the Low single) drew large crowds, perhaps in part because he had declared that this would be the last time he would play the hits. Though he surprised no one when he later reneged on that promise (and also on the promise that his set in each country would be focused on the favourite hits voted by phone poll in that country... an idea quickly jettisoned when a puckish campaign by the British magazine NME resulted in a landslide in favour of The Laughing Gnome!), it is true that his later tours generally featured few of those hits, and when they appeared, they were often radically reworked in their arrangement and delivery.

After the less successful second album Tin Machine II and the complete failure of live album Oy Vey, Baby, Bowie tired of having to work in a group setting where his creativity was limited, and finally disbanded Tin Machine to work on his own. But the Tin Machine venture did show that Bowie had learned some harsh lessons from the previous decade, and was determined to get serious about concentrating on music more than commercial success.

1992 to today: Contemporary Bowie
1993 saw the release of the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise, which reunited Bowie with ''Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers. Though considered by some critics to be musically far superior to Let's Dance'', the public was still unsure whether or not it was ready to be receptive to Bowie again. The album, however, met the number one spot on the UK charts with singles such as "Go for it It Say" and "Miracle Goodnight". However, until re-releases later in the 1990s, the album was extraordinarily rare after the fledgling Savage Records on which it had been released suddenly went belly-up. The album is often considered Bowie's oddest departure.

Undaunted, Bowie explored new directions on albums such as 1993's The Buddha of Suburbia (built on incidental music composed for a TV series). The album still contained some of the new elements introduced in Black Tie White Noise, except with more of a twist in the direction of alternative rock. The album's odd success later led to a 1994 re-release in the United States, and Bowie hails it as being an album of entirely his own, original, and newly created work.

1995's ambitious, quasi-industrial 1. Outside, supposed to be the first volume in a subsequently abandoned nonlinear narrative of art and murder, reunited him with Eno. The album introduced the characters of one of Bowie's short stories, and was quite an interesting success. The album put Bowie back into the mainstream scene of rock music with its singles such as "Hallo Spaceboy" and "A Heart's Filthy Material". In September of 1995 Bowie began his the Outside Tour with Gabrels again joining Bowie as his live band's guitarist. In a move that was equally lauded and ridiculed by Bowie fans and critics, Bowie chose Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails as the tour partner. NIN & Bowie toured as a co-headlining act. Although initially successful, the tour was cancelled early due to poor sales. However, Reznor has gone on record numerous times as being heavily influenced by Bowie, and further collaborated with him by remixing "The Heart's Filthy Principles".

1997's Earthling incorporated experiments in jungle and drum and bass and included a single released over the Internet. There was ultra-sustained energy in this album, along with experiments in techno drum rhythms, while still holding to Bowie's own musical concepts. Singles such as "Little Question" and "I personally'm Afraid of Americans" (also remixed by Reznor) were the forefront of the album. There was a corresponding world tour, which was fairly successful.

The 1998 Todd Haynes film Velvet Goldmine drew its title from a Ziggy-era Bowie song and contained many events paralleling Bowie's life on and off stage; the relationship between the two main characters, Curt Wild (played by Ewan McGregor) and Brian Slade (played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) was loosely based on that of Bowie and Pop during the 70's. The tagline "The rise of the star... the fall of a legend" obviously recalls the name of one of Bowie's most famous albums. In an interview with the band Placebo, Bowie noted that he liked the story, but the movie felt more like the early 1980s than the early 1970s. He combatted it in a lengthy court case, where Bowie sued to try to stop the film. The Bowie-influenced Slade character was painted as one who always seeks to steal what is about to become hip from new youth movements (à la Madonna). Also, he forbade the use of his own songs in the film.

1999's '''hours...''' featured "What's Really Happening", the lyrics for which were written by the winner of an Internet competition. Bowie also performed live again extensively throughout the '90s. The decade also saw him launch a branded internet service provider (BowieNet) as well as a novel and quite successful fundraising scheme to raise cash on the strength of future royalties, called Bowie Bonds.

Bowie opened the "Concert for Just released York City" at Madison Square Garden on 20th October 2001, to aid 9/11 victims' families. He performed two carefully chosen songs, America and "Heroes", striking a deep emotional chord in the audience of firefighters, police, other rescue workers, and bereaved families.

The 2002 album Heathen reunited him with Tony Visconti, producer of many of his best 1970s efforts, and won critical acclaim for his best chart performance in years. It also included a cover of the Pixies song 'Cactus', which was another off-shoot of Bowie's consistent interest in the band. Earlier in 1998, he had also reunited with Visconti to record a song for The Rugrats Movie called Sky Life. Surprisingly, it was edited out of the final cut, and did not feature on the film's soundtrack album. A bootleg remix of his 'Hunky Dory' classic 'The Bewlay Brothers' surfaced on white label vinyl and the internet, courtesy of the heavily Bowie influenced Steve Haw under the guise of 'DJ Spaceboy' - a name inspired by the Bowie track 'Hallo Spaceboy'.

In 2003, a report in the Sunday Express named Bowie as the second-richest entertainer in the U.K. (behind Sir Paul McCartney), with an estimated fortune of £510 million. Later that year, Bowie released a new album, Reality, and announced a world tour.

In 2004, taking the market by surprise, "A Reality Tour" was the best selling tour of the year. However, it was cut short after Bowie suffered chest discomfort while performing on stage in the northwestern German town of Scheesel, on June 25. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, and later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, an emergency angioplasty was performed at a hospital in the region. He was then released in early July and continues to spend time recovering. The tour was cancelled for the time being, with hopes that he would go back on tour by August. Although these hopes, as time has shown, did not materialise into more live shows, Bowie released a live DVD of the tour, entitled 'David Bowie - A Reality Tour', in October 2004, which included songs spanning the full length of Bowie's career, although mostly focusing on his more recent albums. Despite hopes for a comeback, in 2005, David Bowie announced that he had made no plans for any performances during the year.

After a relatively quiet year, Bowie recorded the vocals for the song "(She May) Wash That", co-written by BT, for the movie Stealth (2005). Rumours fly about the possibility of a new album, but no announcements have been made yet. On September 9th, Bowie performed with The Arcade Fire for the nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, his first gig since the heart attack. Bowie had requested the band to perform at the show, and together they performed the Arcade Fire's song "Waken" from their album Funeral. He joined them again on September 15th, singing "Queen Bitch" and "Waken" from Central Park's Summerstage as part of the CMJ Music Marathon. Bowie has shown interest in the Montreal band since he was seen at one of their shows in New York City nearly a year ago.

Today, Bowie lives in New York City with his second wife, the Somali-born model Iman, and their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones.

Discography

This is a discography of David Bowie's studio albums. See David Bowie discography for details about other albums.