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The 15 Best David Bowie Books

By Corey Seymour

Today marks four years since David Bowie died—two days after his 69th birthday, when he also released his final, monumental album, Blackstar . And while there was no shortage of books about him during his lifetime, the market has virtually exploded since his passing. It’s no big secret why: The nature of Bowie’s fame, genius, influences, and influence is an all-encompassing thing that’s relevant to art and photography, fashion, theater and performance, and every shade and school of critical analysis. (There’s also no dearth of scandalous tell-alls and tabloid-y, fly-by-night biographies, which we’re ignoring here out of respect—a man who orchestrated his passing with the level of discretion and artistic triumph that Bowie did doesn’t deserve to be feasted on by scavengers.)

Here’s our pick of the best Bowie books for every person, occasion, and special interest—whether you’re merely interested in looking at some pictures or have committed yourself to a self-taught course in Advanced Bowie Studies.

All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The Rise of David Bowie, 1972–1973 by Mick Rock

For pure visual splendor focusing on Bowie’s most well-known persona, Ziggy Stardust, nothing beats this volume of Bowie-blessed photographs from the artist’s official photographer and creative partner—with half of the photos in it published for the first time. For mesmerizing, fly-on-the-wall documentation of Bowie’s glitter-clad, glam-rock, his/her Ziggy, nothing beats this.

On Bowie by Rob Sheffield

Still personal—but less weird than Brooker’s search for meaning—is Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield’s tribute, written at lightning speed in the immediate aftermath of Bowie’s passing. Like The Last Interview , it’s a slim volume that packs a punch: While Sheffield’s knowledge of Bowie runs deep, this is neither a showy book nor an academic one, and while his sense of loss is palpable, On Bowie isn’t maudlin or morose—it’s deeply informed, often hilarious, and properly celebratory.

The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference by Paul Morley

Morley, a veteran British rock critic, pours blood, sweat, and tears on the pages in this freewheeling, deeply informed, and, yes, ragingly personal admixture of biography, memoir, loving tribute, cultural theory, and enlightened self-help book. Pretentious? At times, wildly—but that’s part of its immense charm. Morley—who conjured the theoretical framework and title of the David Bowie Is exhibitions—states early on that “everybody has their own Bowie,” and it’s his refusal to put constraints on either Bowie or his own rococo rendering of him that that makes these 496 pages so indispensable.

Strange Fascination: Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley

While this biography was published a decade before Bowie died—look elsewhere for coverage of his death, his legacy, and his last two albums—this is likely the most insightful critical biography we have, deeply learned about not just the songs, but the albums, the tours, the personas, and the artistic vision. You’ll have to put a bit more into it than most of the rest of these books, but you’ll reap more from it as well.

David Bowie

(1947-2016)

Who Was David Bowie?

Rock star David Bowie's first hit was the song "Space Oddity" in 1969. The original pop chameleon, Bowie became a fantastical sci-fi character for his breakout Ziggy Stardust album. He later co-wrote "Fame" with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon, which became his first American No. 1 single in 1975. An accomplished actor, Bowie starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1976. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Shortly after releasing his final album, Bowie died from cancer on January 10, 2016.

Early Years

Known as a musical chameleon for his ever-changing appearance and sound, David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, South London, England, on January 8, 1947.

Bowie showed an interest in music from an early age and began playing the saxophone at age 13. He was greatly influenced by his half-brother Terry, who was nine years older and exposed the young Bowie to the worlds of rock music and beat literature.

But Terry had his demons, and his mental illness, which forced the family to commit him to an institution, haunted Bowie for a good deal of his life. Terry committed suicide in 1985, a tragedy that became the focal point of Bowie's later song, "Jump They Say."

After graduating from Bromley Technical High School at 16, Bowie started working as a commercial artist. He also continued to play music, hooking up with a number of bands and leading a group himself called Davy Jones and the Lower Third. Several singles came out of this period, but nothing that gave the young performer the kind of commercial traction he needed.

Eventually, Bowie went out on his own. But after recording an unsuccessful solo album, Bowie exited the music world for a temporary period. Like so much of his later life, these few years proved to be incredibly experimental for the young artist. For several weeks in 1967 he lived at a Buddhist monastery in Scotland. Bowie later started his own mime troupe called Feathers.

Around this time he also met the American-born Angela Barnett. The two married on March 20, 1970, and had one son together, whom they nicknamed "Zowie," in 1971, before divorcing in 1980. He is now known by his birth name, Duncan Jones.

By early 1969, Bowie had returned full time to music. He signed a deal with Mercury Records and that summer released the single "Space Oddity." Bowie later said the song came to him after seeing Stanley Kubrick 's 2001: A Space Odyssey: "I went stoned out of my mind to see the movie and it really freaked me out, especially the trip passage."

The song quickly resonated with the public, sparked in large part by the BBC's use of the single during its coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The song enjoyed later success after being released in the United States in 1972, climbing to number 15 on the charts.

Bowie's next album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), further catapulted him to stardom. The record offered up a heavier rock sound than anything Bowie had done before and included the song "All the Madmen," about his institutionalized brother, Terry. His next work, 1971's Hunky Dory , featured two hits: the title track that was a tribute to Andy Warhol , the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan ; and "Changes," which came to embody Bowie himself.

Meet Ziggy Stardust

As Bowie's celebrity profile increased, so did his desire to keep fans and critics guessing. He claimed he was gay and then introduced the pop world to Ziggy Stardust, Bowie's imagining of a doomed rock star, and his backing group, The Spiders from Mars.

His 1972 album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars , made him a superstar. Dressed in wild costumes that spoke of some kind of wild future, Bowie, portraying Stardust himself, signaled a new age in rock music, one that seemed to officially announce the end of the 1960s and the Woodstock era.

More Changes

But just as quickly as Bowie transformed himself into Stardust, he changed again. He leveraged his celebrity and produced albums for Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. In 1973, he disbanded the Spiders and shelved his Stardust persona. Bowie continued on in a similar glam rock style with the album Aladdin Sane (1973), which featured "The Jean Genie" and "Let's Spend the Night Together," his collaboration with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Around this time he showed his affection for his early days in the English mod scene and released Pin Ups , an album filled with cover songs originally recorded by a host of popular bands, including Pretty Things and Pink Floyd.

By the mid 1970s, Bowie had undergone a full-scale makeover. Gone were the outrageous costumes and garish sets. In two short years, he released the albums David Live (1974) and Young Americans (1975). The latter album featured backing vocals by a young Luther Vandross and included the song "Fame," co-written with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar, which became Bowie’s first American number one single.

In 1980, Bowie, now living in New York, released Scary Monsters , a much-lauded album that featured the single "Ashes to Ashes," a sort of updated version of his earlier "Space Oddity."

Three years later Bowie recorded Let's Dance (1983), an album that contained a bevy of hits such as the title track, "Modern Love" and "China Girl," and featured the guitar work of Stevie Ray Vaughan .

Of course, Bowie's interests didn't just reside with music. His love of film helped land him the title role in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). In 1980, Bowie starred on Broadway in The Elephant Man , and was critically acclaimed for his performance. In 1986, he starred as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the fantasy-adventure film Labyrinth , directed by Jim Henson and produced by George Lucas . Bowie performed opposite teenage Jennifer Connolly and a cast of puppets in the movie, which became a 1980s cult classic.

Over the next decade, Bowie bounced back and forth between acting and music, with the latter especially suffering. Outside of a couple of modest hits, Bowie's musical career languished. His side project with musicians Reeve Gabrels and Tony and Hunt Sales, known as Tin Machine, released two albums, Tin Machine (1989) and Tin Machine II (1991), which both proved to be flops. His much-hyped album Black Tie White Noise (1993), which Bowie described as a wedding gift to his new wife, supermodel Iman , also struggled to resonate with record buyers.

Oddly enough, the most popular Bowie creation of that period was Bowie Bonds, financial securities the artist himself backed with royalties from his pre-1990 work. Bowie issued the bonds in 1997 and earned $55 million from the sale. The rights to his back catalog were returned to him when the bonds matured in 2007.

Later Years

In 2004, Bowie received a major health scare when he suffered a heart attack while on stage in Germany. He made a full recovery and went on to work with bands such as Arcade Fire and with the actress Scarlett Johansson on her album Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008), a collection of Tom Waits covers.

Bowie, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, was a 2006 recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He kept a low profile for several years until the release of his 2013 album The Next Day , which skyrocketed to number 2 on the Billboard charts. The following year, Bowie released a greatest hits collection, Nothing Has Changed , which featured the new song "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)." In 2015, he collaborated on Lazarus , an Off-Broadway rock musical starring Michael C. Hall, which revisited his character from The Man Who Fell to Earth .

Bowie released Blackstar , his final album, on January 8, 2016, his 69th birthday. New York Times critic Jon Pareles noted that it was a "strange, daring and ultimately rewarding" work "with a mood darkened by bitter awareness of mortality." Only a few days later, the world would learn that the record had been made under difficult circumstances.

Death and Legacy

The music icon died on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday. A post on his Facebook page read: “David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer."

He was survived by his wife Iman, his son Duncan Jones and daughter Alexandria, and his step-daughter Zulekha Haywood. Bowie also left behind an impressive musical legacy, which included 26 albums. His producer and friend Tony Visconti wrote on Facebook that his last record, Blackstar , was "his parting gift."

Friends and fans were heartbroken at his passing. Iggy Pop wrote on Twitter that "David's friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person." The Rolling Stones remembered him on Twitter as "a wonderful and kind man" and "a true original." And even those who didn't know personally felt the impact of his work. Kanye West tweeted, "David Bowie was one of my most important inspirations." Madonna posted "This great Artist changed my life!"

In February 2017, Bowie was recognized for the success of his final album, as he was named the winner in the Best Alternative Rock Album, Best Engineered Album (Non-Classical), Best Recording Package, Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song categories at the Grammy Awards.

In late 2017, HBO unveiled a trailer for the documentary David Bowie: The Last Five Years , which explores the period in which the artist released his final two albums and brought his stage musical to life. Airing January 8, 2018, on what would have been his 71st birthday, the documentary features never-before-seen footage of Bowie and conversations with the musicians, producers and music video directors who worked with him on his final tour.

In the spring of 2018, Spotify's "David Bowie Subway Takeover" was unveiled in New York City's interconnected Broadway-Lafayette and Bleecker Street stations. An extension of the "David Bowie Is" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, the subway displays included splashy photos, fan artwork and quotes from the musician, with each major piece containing a Spotify code for audio accompaniment.

That summer, it was announced that the earliest known studio recording of Bowie, from 1963, would go on sale at auction. Then still known by his birth name of David Jones and a member of a band called The Konrads, Bowie sang lead vocals on a song titled "I Never Dreamed" as part of an audition for Decca Records. The demo, never released, was discovered in the house of the group's former drummer and manager.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: David Bowie
• Birth Year: 1947
• Birth date: January 8, 1947
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: David Bowie was an English rock star known for dramatic musical transformations, including his character Ziggy Stardust. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• Death Year: 2016
• Death date: January 10, 2016
• Death State: New York
• Death City: New York City

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: David Bowie Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/david-bowie
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: August 24, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.
• I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

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• Bowie on Film

Here are a few books on David Bowie i have read and enjoyed, also here are books that members of our Facebook group have recommended. I have only included titles that are currently available.

David Bowie is.

David Bowie’s career as a pioneering artist spanned 50 years and brought him international acclaim. He continues to be cited as a major influence on contemporary artists and designers working across the creative arts. Published to accompany the blockbuster international exhibition launched at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, this is the only book to be granted access to Bowie’s personal archive of performance costume, ephemera and original design artwork by the artist, and brings it together to present a completely new perspective on his creative work and collaborations.

The book traces his career from its beginnings in London, through the breakthroughs of Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and on to his impact on the larger international tradition of twentieth-century avant-garde art. Essays by V&A curators on Bowie’s London, image, and influence on the fashion world, are complemented by Howard Goodall on musicology; Camille Paglia on gender and decadence and Jon Savage on Bowie’s relationship with William Burroughs and his fans. Also included is a discussion between Christopher Frayling, Philip Hoare and Mark Kermode, held at the V&A, of Bowie’s cultural impact. Over 300 images include personal and performance photographs, costumes, lyric sheets giving an unique insight into Bowie’s world.

David Bowie: Icon, released on September 28th, 2020.

David Bowie: Icon gathers the greatest photographs of one of the greatest stars in history, into a single, luxurious volume. The result is the most important anthology of David Bowie images that has ever been compiled. With work by many of the most eminent names in photography, this book showcases a stunning portfolio of imagery, featuring the iconic, the awe inspiring, the candid and the surprising.

An astonishing 25 photographers from around the world have contributed to this celebration. Their images are accompanied by personal essays and reflections about working with this astonishing artist. From memories of the earliest days at the Arts Lab in Beckenham to what it was like touring the world with Bowie, each contributor shares their experiences of working with – and knowing – this most extraordinary figure.

From portraits and album covers, performances and rehearsals, to rarely seen private moments and candid snapshots, this collection is at once powerful, sentimental and inspiring. The thoughts and reminiscences of the photographers, many sharing their memories for the first time, give us an insight into this artist unlike any other.

Photography and text by: Fernando Aceves, Brian Aris, Philippe Auliac, Alec Byrne, Kevin Cummins, Chalkie Davies, Justin de Villeneuve, Vernon Dewhurst, Gavin Evans, Gerald Fearnley, Lynn Goldsmith, Greg Gorman, Andrew Kent, Markus Klinko, Geoff MacCormack, Janet Macoska, Terry O’Neill, Denis O’Regan, Norman Parkinson, Mick Rock, John Scarisbrick, Steve Schapiro, Barry Schultz, Masayoshi Sukita and Ray Stevenson. With an introduction by artist and Bowie’s life-long friend, George Underwood.

When David Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016, the world lost a musical hero. But his legacy lives on. While his sound and style evolved throughout his career, two facts never changed: he was an innovator; and photographers adored him. This book pays homage to this ultimate icon.

Available to pre-order now via Amazon for only £35.35 (RRP is £50) (Released September 28th)

Ricochet, David Bowie 1983 by Denis O’Regan.

In 1983 David Bowie set out on the Serious Moonlight Tour, his biggest ever. On the road with him was his official photographer, Denis O’Regan. Few artists and photographers have had such a close touring relationship. This book is the result: a never-before-seen photographic portrait of a year with Bowie, from the theatre of performance to his most unguarded moments. Introduced by O’Regan and with every single image personally approved by Bowie, this is an intimate view of an icon at the height of his fame.

Strange Fascination, Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley.

David Bowie was arguably the most influential artist of his time, reinventing himself again and again, transforming music, style and art for over five decades.

David Buckley’s unique approach to unravelling the Bowie enigma, via interviews with many of the singer’s closest associates, biography and academic analysis, makes this unrivalled biography a classic for Bowie fans old and new. This revised edition of  Strange Fascination  captures exclusive details about the tours, the making of the albums, the arguments, the split-ups, the music and, most importantly, the man himself. Also including exclusive photographic material,  Strange Fascination  is the most complete account of David Bowie and his impact on pop culture ever written.

Bowie by O’Neill.

This book is the breathtaking result of iconic photographer Terry O’Neill’s creative partnership with David Bowie that spanned over a number of years,  including images published here for the first time .

Containing rare and never-before-seen photographs , their work together includes images from the last Ziggy Stardust performance, recording sessions for Young Americans and the renowned studio portraits for Diamond Dogs – plus live shows, film shoots, backstage moments and more.

With  more than 500 photographs , this is the ultimate portrait of an inspiring, challenging and ever-changing artist.

David Bowie: The Golden Years by Roger Griffin.

This is a day-by-day account of Bowie’s life from the start of 1970 to the end of 1980, his golden era that defined his work as a major artist a dozen inspired studio albums, five major tours, two feature films and critically acclaimed theatrical performances in Chicago and New York.

He reinvented stage presentation in rock and revived the careers of Mott The Hoople, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

At The Birth Of Bowie by Phil Lancaster.

It is 1965, and Swinging London is coming into its prime years. The streets are alive with mods and rockers, playboys and good-time girls, all revelling in the blossoming artistic, creative and cultural energies of the decade.

Amid the colour and chaos is a boy sporting drainpipe jeans, an immaculately tailored sports coat and a half-inch wide tie. A devoted fan of The Who, he looks the part in his pristine mod gear. As the lead singer of the Lower Third, his talent is shaping itself into something truly special.

His name is Davie Jones. In ten years, he will be unrecognisable as fresh-faced boy of 1965, and in just over fifty years, his death will be mourned by millions, his legacy the story of the greatest rock star of all time.

And through Bowie’s transition from pop group member to solo performer, Phil Lancaster was by his side. As the drummer in Bowie’s band, the Lower Third, Phil was there as the singer’s musical stripes began to show, and was witness to his early recording techniques, his first experimental forays into drug-taking, and the band’s discovery of his bisexuality in shocking circumstances.

In this riveting – and often very funny – memoir, Phil tells the story of life alongside the insecure yet blazingly talented boy who became Bowie, at a critical crossroad of time and place in music history. What follows is an intimate, personal and important perspective on the genesis of one of the most iconic musicians of the twentieth century – one that gets under the skin of the man himself, before the personas and alter-egos masked the fascinating figure beneath them.

At the Birth of Bowie  is essential reading for anyone who knows what happened on Bowie’s journey, but wants to understand how, and why, it ever began.

Rebel Rebel: All The Songs of David Bowie, ’64 to ’76 by Chris O’Leary.

David Bowie: every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn’t know. David Bowie remains mysterious and unknowable, despite 45 years of recording and performing. His legacy is roughly 600 songs, which range from psychedelia to glam rock to Philadelphia soul, from avant-garde instrumentals to global pop anthems. Rebel Rebel catalogs Bowie’s songs from 1964 to 1976, examines them in the order of their composition and recording, and digs into what makes them work. Rebel Rebel is an in-depth look at Bowie’s early singles and album tracks, unreleased demos, session outtakes and cover songs.

The book traces Bowie’s literary, film and musical influences and the evolution of his songwriting. It also shows how Bowie exploited studio innovations, and the roles of his producers and supporting musicians, especially major collaborators like Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Mick Ronson. This book places Bowie’s music in the context of its era. Readers will discover the links between Kubrick’s 2001 and “Space Oddity”; how A Clockwork Orange inspired “Suffragette City”. The pages are a trip through Bowie’s various lives as a young man in Swinging London, a Tibetan Buddhist, a disillusioned hippie, a rock god, and a Hollywood recluse. With a cast of thousands, including John Lennon, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Cher.

Ashes To Ashes: The Songs of David Bowie 1976 – 2016 by Chris O’Leary.

From the ultimate David Bowie expert comes this exploration of the final four decades of the popstar’s musical career, covering every song he wrote, performed or produced from 1976 to 2016.

Starting with  Low , the first of Bowie’s Berlin albums, and finishing with  Blackstar , his final masterpiece released just days before his death in 2016, each song is annotated in depth and explored in essays that touch upon the song’s creation, production, influences and impact.

Spider From Mars: My Life With Bowie by Woody Woodmansey.

For many fans, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era remains the most extraordinarily creative period in his career. As a member of Bowie’s legendary band at the time – The Spiders From Mars – Woody Woodmansey played drums on four seminal albums:  The Man Who Sold The World ,  Hunky Dory ,  The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars  and  Aladdin Sane .

Woody’s memoir, which he started work on in 2014, focuses on this key period and brings it to glorious life. With the confidence of youth, Woody always thought he’d be in a famous band but the nineteen-year-old rocker from Hull never expected to be thrust into London’s burgeoning glam rock scene, and also into a bottle-green velvet suit and girl’s shoes. Playing with Bowie took him on an eye-opening and transformative journey. In  Spider From Mars  he writes candidly about the characters who surrounded Bowie, recalling the album sessions as well as behind-the-scenes moments with one of the world’s most iconic singers. The result is an insightful, funny, poignant memoir that lovingly evokes a seminal moment in music history and pays tribute to one of the most outstanding and innovative talents of our time.

The Rise Of David Bowie, 1972 – 1973 by Mick Rock.

“Such a privilege to have known and worked with him. A remarkable man and artist. I loved him.” —Mick Rock, 2016.

A unique tribute from David Bowie’s official photographer and creative partner, Mick Rock, compiled in 2015, with Bowie’s blessing.

In 1972, David Bowie released his groundbreaking album  The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . With it landed Bowie’s Stardust alter-ego: A glitter-clad, mascara-eyed, sexually-ambiguous persona who  kicked down the boundaries between male and female, straight and gay, fact and fiction into one shifting and sparkling phenomenon of 70s self-expression . Together, Ziggy the album and Ziggy the stage spectacular propelled the softly spoken Londoner into one of the world’s biggest stars.

A key passenger on this glam trip into the stratosphere was fellow Londoner and photographer Mick Rock. Rock bonded with Bowie artistically and personally, immersed himself in the singer’s inner circle, and, between 1972 and 1973,  worked as the singer’s photographer and videographer .

This collection, featuring  around 50 percent previously unpublished images , brings together spectacular stage shots, iconic photo shoots, as well as intimate backstage portraits. With a lenticular cover of different headshots, it  celebrates Bowie’s fearless experimentation and reinvention, while offering privileged access to the many facets of his personality and fame . Through the aloof and approachable, the playful and serious, the candid and the contrived, the result is a passionate tribute to a brilliant and inspirational artist whose creative vision will never be forgotten.

David Bowie In The Man Who Fell To Earth by Paul Duncan.

Behind the scenes of Nic Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi masterpiece starring David Bowie

First advertised as a “mind-stretching experience,” Nicolas Roeg’s 1976  The Man Who Fell to Earth stunned the cinema world. A  tour-de-force of science fiction as art form , the movie brought not only hallucinatory visuals and a haunting exploration of contemporary alienation, but also glam-rock legend  David Bowie in his lead role debut  as paranoid alien Newton.

Based on Walter Tevis’s 1963 sci-fi fable of the same title,  The Man Who Fell to Earth  follows alien Newton from his arrival on earth in search of water; his transition to wealthy entrepreneur, leveraging the advanced technologies of his native planet; his sexual awakening with the young Mary-Lou; and then the discovery of his alien identity, his imprisonment, abandonment, and descent into alcoholism. Throughout, Roeg coaxed a beguiling performance from his cast, presenting not only Bowie in ethereal space-traveler glory, but also pitch-perfect supporting performances from  Candy Clark, Rip Torn, and Buck Henry .

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of this cult movie, TASCHEN’s  The Man Who Fell to Earth  presents a plenitude of  stills and behind-the-scenes images  by unit photographer David James, including numerous shots of Bowie at his playful and ambiguous best. A new introductory essay explores the shooting of the film and it’s lasting impact, drawing upon an exclusive interview with David James, who brings firsthand insights into the making of this sci-fi masterwork.

When Ziggy Played The Marquee by Terry O’Neill.

• Rare and unseen images from Terry O’Neill’s unprecedented access to David Bowie’s last performance as Ziggy Stardust, including candid backstage shots
• New and original interviews from a host of people who witnessed the last performance, including Geoff MacCormack – one of Bowie’s long-time friends and “Spider”; Suzy Ronson – Mick’s wife and stylist; Ken Scott – sound engineer and producer; Ava Cherry – backing vocals, and many more

When Ziggy played The Marquee Club in Soho, London, in October 1973, most of those invited to the small venue did not realise that this would be the last performance David Bowie would ever give as Ziggy Stardust. Terry O’Neill, celebrated photographer, was given unprecedented access to document the event.

O’Neill captured Bowie and his crew backstage as they went through costume changes, and Bowie transformed into the character he’d soon put to rest. On stage, dodging television cameras and lights, O’Neill snapped the incredible stage presence for which Bowie and his crew had become renowned. O’Neill remembers of Bowie: “He became a character on stage. As much as a person takes a role in a play for the West End or on Broadway, learning the lines, putting on the costumes – this was, I think, the way Bowie treated his stage. This night at the Marquee, I witnessed a modern-day Hamlet – and it was Ziggy Stardust”.

Award-winning music writer Daniel Rachel interviews key contributors of the day, including O’Neill, Ava Cherry, Amanda Lear and Geoff MacCormack along with new insights and memories from fans who were in the audience who played witness to this incredible moment.

**Currently on offer on Amazon US for only $13.36!**

David Bowie: Behind The Curtain by Andrew Kent.

David Bowie: Behind The Curtain  is a rare, exclusive, intimate, and very candid look at David Bowie during the rise of the Thin White Duke, his Station to Station tour, and numerous larger-than-life stories along the way. In 1975, rock ‘n roll photographer Andrew Kent landed the gig of a lifetime. He had been entrusted by Bowie to document, with unfettered access, anything and everything Bowie and his entourage encountered for the next two years. Backstage, on stage, private parties, birthday parties, limos, quiet hotel moments, dressing rooms, Berlin, Paris, New York, London, Helsinki, Moscow.

Also along during the Station to Station tour was an 18 year old Rolling Stone reporter researching a cover story on Bowie named Cameron Crowe. In 1976 Bowie took Iggy Pop, his manager Pat Gibbons, his personal secretary Coco, and Kent on an impromptu excursion by train to the Soviet Union. A mistake on the schedule at the train station caused the group to miss their return train to Helsinki leading the press to run frenzied headlines reading, “David Bowie Missing in Soviet Union!.” With his unprecedented access, Kent created a one-of-a-kind travelogue, capturing the unique and spectacular life of one of the most iconic musicians in rock ‘n roll history.

Starman: David Bowie – The Definitive Biography by Paul Trynka.

Has there ever been a more charismatic and intriguing rock star than David Bowie?

In  Starman,  Paul Trynka has painted the definitive portrait of a great artist. From Bowie’s early years in post-war, bombed-out Brixton to the decadent glamour of Ziggy Stardust to the controversial but vital Berlin period, this essential biography is a celebration of Bowie’s brilliance and a timely reminder of how great music is made – now with an update on the making and release of  The Next Day .

The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg.

Critically acclaimed in its previous editions,  The Complete David Bowie is widely recognised as the foremost source of analysis and information on every facet of Bowie’s career. The A-Z of songs and the day-by-day dateline are the most complete ever published. From the 11-year-old’s skiffle performance at the 18th Bromley Scouts’ Summer Camp in 1958, to the emergence of the legendary lost album Toy  in 2011, to his passing in January 2016,  The Complete David Bowie  discusses and dissects every last development in rock’s most fascinating career.

*  The Albums  – detailed production history and analysis of every album from 1967 to the present day.

*  The Songs  – hundreds of individual entries reveal the facts and anecdotes behind not just the famous recordings, but also the most obscure of unreleased rarities – from ‘Absolute Beginners’ to ‘Ziggy Stardust’, from ‘Abdulmajid’ to ‘Zion’.

*  The Tours  – set-lists and histories of every live show.

*  The Actor  – a complete guide to Bowie’s career on stage and screen.

*  Plus  – the videos, the BBC radio sessions, the paintings, the Internet and much more.

David Bowie: Photographs by Steve Schapiro.

At the apex of David Bowie’s spectacular rise to fame and glory, photographer Steve Schapiro seized a rare invitation from Bowie’s manager for a private photo session with the pop star in LA in 1974…

David Bowie, by 1974, was a man of many faces and as many albums, had already lived the life of  Ziggy Stardust  and launched  Aladdin Sane , with albums  Pin Ups  and  Diamond Dogs  soon to come. A musical force to be reckoned with, Bowie was also widely regarded as a fashion icon, pushing the envelope of sexuality and style and having created an internationally renowned persona.

The mostly never-before-published images in Schapiro’s rare collection represent Bowie at his most creative and inspired self and present a glimpse into the intimacy that Schapiro and Bowie shared during their time together. As Schapiro tells it: ‘From the moment Bowie arrived, we seemed to hit it off. Incredibly intelligent, calm, and filled with ideas, he talked a lot about Alistair Crowley whose esoteric writings he was heavily into at the time. When David heard that I had photographed Buster Keaton, one of his greatest heroes, we instantly became friends.’

The first photo session started at four in the afternoon and went through the night till dawn. Bowie went through countless costume changes, each more incredible than the last and each seemed to turn him into a totally different person. Bowie relentlessly created these unique characters, each seemingly alive in their own charismatic space for Schapiro to create visual images to complement their very existence and turn them into iconic images for all time.

Bowie and Schapiro kidded and laughed about shooting a series of close-up portraits on a putrid green background because they felt it was the worst possible background colour for a magazine, and so they did on this lark – with the image eventually becoming a  People  magazine cover.

The last image they made was at four in the morning to wrap up the marathon session when they went outside to shoot Bowie on his motorcycle – the sun hadn’t yet risen and the shot was lit dramatically by only the headlights of a car. This image remains one of Schapiro’s favourites and is certain to live on in posterity.

David Bowie Black Book by Barry Miles & Chris Charlesworth.

Now available once again after being out of print for several years, the David Bowie Black Book remains one of the most elegant books about the iconic superstar ever to have been published. Art directed by acclaimed graphic designer Pierce Marchbank and with text written by former NME journalist and cultural commentator Miles, the David Bowie Black Book contains photographs from every era of Bowie’s genre-defining career and was for many years the world’s best-selling Bowie book.

Earthbound: David Bowie and The Man Who Fell To Earth by Susan Compo.

‘Before there was Star Wars before there was Close Encounters there was The Man Who Fell To Earth. advertising tag line for 1981 reissue of the film. Earthbound is the first book-length exploration of a true classic of twentieth-century science-fiction cinema, shot under the heavy, ethereal skies of New Mexico by the legendary British director Nicolas Roeg and starring David Bowie in a role he seemed born for as an extra-terrestrial named Thomas Newton who comes to Earth in search of water. Based on a novel by the highly regarded American writer Walter Tevis, this dreamy, distressing, and visionary film resonates even more strongly in the twenty-first century than it did on its original release during the year of the US Bicentennial.

Drawing on extensive research and exclusive first-hand interviews with members of the cast and crew, Earthbound begins with a look at Tevis’s 1963 novel before moving into a detailed analysis of a film described by its director as ‘a sci-fi film without a lot of sci-fi tools and starring a group of actors Bowie, Buck Henry, Candy Clark, Rip Torn later described by one of them (Henry) as ‘not a cast but a dinner party. It also seeks to uncover the mysteries surrounding Bowie s rejected soundtrack to the film (elements of which later ended up his ground-breaking 1977 album Low) and closes with a look at his return to the themes and characters of The Man Who Fell To Earth in one of his final works, the acclaimed musical production Lazarus.

Life On Tour With Bowie by Sean Mayes.

“When David sat down later, he tucked one leg up under him and I noticed that the sole of his shoe was as clean as the day he d bought it. OK, maybe the shoes were new, but it struck me that he hardly ever sets foot in the street. It s all hotel, limousines, sterilized airports the life I was about to lead. I shivered, feeling poised at the top of a rollercoaster about to sweep across the world.” On 11 January 2016, the world was stunned to wake up to the news that David Bowie had died the day before. A genuine icon, he left behind a body of work among the most important in music history.

But only a lucky few were privileged to know the man behind that mystique, and know him well. Sean Mayes was one of them. In 1978, Sean toured the world with David Bowie, in what was one of the most important periods in the artist s history. Travelling first class and performing each night with one of the world s greatest rock stars at the height of his fame was an amazing experience fortunately, Sean had the foresight to document it.Here, in complete book form, Sean s tour diary is presented; a blow by blow record of how it felt to be part of a real rock circus. Providing page after page of fascinating insight into life on the road with Bowie, Sean’s account is a unique travelogue, a must for any Bowie fan or, indeed, anyone interested in life on a sell-out world tour.

David Bowie: Any Day Now, The London Years 1947 – 1974 by Kevin Cann.

Any Day Now is an in-depth and highly visual chronology charting the early life and career of one of music s all-time greatest icons: David Bowie. This book is the ultimate fan guide for David Bowie’s most devoted followers.

Packed with hundreds of interviews and images, Any Day Now offers a detailed year-by-year account of Bowie’s life- from his birth in postwar London in 1947 to his departure from the UK in 1974.

With a wealth of new information and with each page featuring rare photographs, news clippings and memorabilia, the book also includes the most concise listing of early Bowie performances ever published.

Author Kevin Cann unravels many of the myths that have surrounded Bowie s early career in this encyclopaedic reference that will fascinate and entertain. Cann has worked on reissues of Bowie’s back catalogues as well as anniversary releases of his albums. His role as a Bowie archivist for nearly 20 years has allowed him to amass extremely rare photographs and memorabilia, which are combined with interviews with a hundred of Bowie’s friends and associates. Through his dedicated research and its fascinating results, Cann has developed a reputation as one of Bowie’s greatest and most trustworthy biographers.

With the Victoria and Albert Museum’s unprecedented, career-spanning retrospective, “David Bowie” is underway and Bowie’s newest album The Next Day having shot straight up to number one on the music charts, now is the perfect time for fans to engross themselves in the best David Bowie book currently available.

Author Kevin Cann has worked closely with the V&A in producing the “David Bowie is” exhibition, meaning the same standard of care and prestige put into the exhibition has been put into this book as well. In fact, many of the rare photos on show at the V&A were first seen in  Any Day Now .

Duffy Bowie: Five Sessions by Chris Duffy and Kevin Cann.

Illustrates Brian Duffy’s five different photographic shoots with David Bowie, documenting Bowie’s career and pioneering reinvention, as well as Duffy’s special relationship with the artist over almost a decade -Includes some of the most famous Bowie images together with outtakes and rare shots “Talking about a creative session is like talking about a boxing match. It happened because there was a little bit of magic in the room that night. I’ll say it myself, it’s a fucking great cover.”

Brian Duffy defined the image of the 1960s, and was as famous as the stars he photographed. Together with David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he is recognised as one of the innovators of “documentary” fashion photography, a style which revolutionised fashion imagery and furthermore the fashion industry. Duffy’s most famous photograph dates from the 1970s and is the iconic and revolutionary cover of David Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane, a shot that became the defining look of Bowie’s long career, and has been referred to as the Mona Lisa of pop. The photographer and the rock star collaborated on four other projects: Ziggy Stardust, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and Lodger.

They worked together during the pivotal years of Bowie’s career; when the king of glam was assuming and discarding extraordinary personas, Duffy was capturing them all. Written by David Bowie’s biographer, Kevin Cann, Duffy/Bowie – Five Sessions features anecdotes and stories from those attending the shoots – including Tony Defries (Bowie’s manager at the time of Ziggy Stardust); Celia Philo (designer) & Philip Castle (airbrush artist) from the famous Aladdin Sane shoot; Francis Newman (Duffy’s studio manager); May Routh (costume designer) from The Man Who Fell to Earth; Geoff MacCormack (musician and Bowie’s childhood friend); Derek Boshier (art director of Lodger); Natasha Kornilof costume designer for Scary Monsters; Edward Bell (artist); Steve Strange (musician) and Duffy’s son, Chris, who also worked on the Scary Monsters session. Included are many unseen images and behind the scenes photographs. “It wasn’t until we saw the contact sheets the next day I remember thinking, God this is spectacular. You just knew you had cracked it, boy, did you know it.”

David Bowie: Album By Album by Paolo Hewitt.

Bowie: Album by Album examines every one of Bowie’s studio albums in fine detail, placing each within the context of the time in which it was recorded and charting all the albums’ subsequent influence and legacy. As well as commentary from the musicians, engineers and producers who worked on the recordings – such as Brian Eno and Tony Visconti – Bowie’s own quotes provide a fascinating insight into his restlessly creative mind.

Bowie’s Piano Man – The Life of Mike Garson by Clifford Slapper.

Pianist Mike Garson was David Bowie’s most frequent musician, on record and onstage throughout Bowie’s life. They played over a thousand shows together between 1972 and 2004, and Garson is featured on over 20 of Bowie’s albums. Bowie’s Piano Man is the first-ever biography of Mike Garson, written by Clifford Slapper, a fellow pianist who also played for Bowie, working closely with him on his last-ever television appearance. The book explores the special relationship between Garson and Bowie, beginning with the extraordinary story of how Garson went overnight from playing in tiny jazz clubs to touring the world on arena rock tours with Bowie after one short phone call and audition.

A noted master of jazz, classical, and other genres, Garson has composed thousands of original works and has taught countless students, acting as mentor to many. Bowie’s Piano Man explores his roots and childhood in Brooklyn, his ongoing strong presence in the jazz world, and his collaborations with a huge range of other artists in addition to Bowie. Touring and recording with the Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails are given in-depth attention, as is his approach to teaching and creating music. Explored in detail in particular is his commitment to improvisation as a form of composition, a manifestation of his more general dedication to living in the moment and always moving forward a trait he shared with Bowie.

Tony Visconti: The Autobiography, Bowie, Bolan And The Brooklyn Boy by Tony Visconti.

A name synonymous with ground-breaking music, Tony Visconti has worked with the most dynamic and influential names in pop, from T.Rex and Iggy Pop to David Bowie and U2. This is the compelling life story of the man who helped shape music history, and gives a unique, first-hand insight into life in London during the late 1960s and ’70s.

This memoir takes you on a roller-coaster journey through the glory days of pop music, when men wore sequins and pop could truly rock. Featuring behind-the-scenes stories of big names such as Bowie, Visconti’s unique access to the hottest talent, both on stage and off, for over five decades is complemented by unseen photographs from his own personal archive, offering a glimpse at music history that few have witnessed so intimately.

Soon after abandoning his native New York to pursue his musical career in the UK, Visconti was soon in the thick of the emerging glam rock movement, launching T.Rex to commercial success and working with the then-unknown David Bowie.

Since his fateful move to the land of tea and beer drunk straight from the can, Visconti has worked with such names as T.Rex, Thin Lizzy, Wings, The Boomtown Rats, Marsha Hunt, Procol Harum, and more recently Ziggy Marley, Mercury Rev, the Manic Street Preachers and Morrissey on his acclaimed new album ‘Ringleader of the Tormentors’.

Even Visconti’s personal life betrays an existence utterly immersed in music. Married to first to Siegrid Berman, then to Mary Hopkin and later to May Pang, he counts many of the musicians and producers he has worked with as close friends and is himself a celebrated musician.

Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust by Ken Scott.

Turn on any classic rock station and you ll soon hear a song that Ken Scott worked on. As one of the preeminent recording engineers and producers of the 20th century, Ken has garnered Gold, Platinum, and Diamond record sales awards; multiple Grammy nominations; and even a Clio Award (for his recording of the classic Coke ad I d Like to Teach the World to Sing ). Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust shares Ken Scott s intimate memories of working with some of the most important artists of the 20th century, while crafting a sound that influenced generations of music makers. Ken’s work has left an indelible mark on hundreds of millions of fans with his skilled contributions to Magical Mystery Tour and The White Album.

As producer and/or engineer of six David Bowie albums (including the groundbreaking Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) as well as other timeless classics, the sound Ken crafted has influenced several generations of music makers that continues to this day. Ken captured the sonic signatures of a who’s-who of classic rock and jazz acts, including Elton John, Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck, Duran Duran, The Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, America, Devo, Kansas, The Tubes, Missing Persons, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham, Dixie Dregs, and Stanley Clarke. This is his story, complete with funny, provocative, and oh-so-honest tales of the studio, stage, and even an infamous swimming pool incident. Plus, there are never-before-seen photographs and technical details, making Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust a must for every music fan.

Moonage Daydream; The Life And Times of Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie and Mick Rock.

In 1972, talented photographer Mick Rock spent 2 years as David Bowie’s official photographer. Rock accompanied Bowie on tour to the US and the UK, capturing his life both on stage and behind the scenes at the height of his Ziggy Stardust period. During this time Rock documented the rise and descent of Ziggy Stardust, and shot promotional films, album jackets, posters, artwork, videos like Life on Mars and Space Oddity and thousands of photographs. Rock’s camera caught more of the Ziggy legend than any other and followed Bowie into hotel rooms and dressing rooms, on the road and socialising with musicians and friends including Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger. The results are shown in this extraordinary book. The parties, costumes, hair-styles, photo shoots and concerts are all pictured in a fantastical style that sums up the spirit of the time. Bowie provides a fascinating running commentary to Mick Rock’s photographs, recalling his personal memories of life as Ziggy.

A must-have for any David Bowie fan.

My Bowie Story: Memories of David Bowie. Edited by Dale K. Perry.

In  My Bowie Story , sixty storytellers look back on more than four decades of memories featuring David Bowie. Filled with heartfelt stories and photographs, the fans describe how Bowie’s music, personas, and creativity changed their lives. The eighty five stories also offer a glimpse of Bowie’s kindness as he interacted with his admirers while relating the impact his message had on the sexuality, education, and the lifelong achievements of multiple generations. From Space Oddity to Blackstar, the tales include personal encounters with Bowie and offer deep insights that longtime fans and those just discovering his brilliance will cherish.

Bowie Style by Mark Paytress and Steve Pafford.

A richly illustrated 160-page chronicle of pop’s greatest exponent of style. This visual examination of a celebrated multi-faceted career documents the impact of David Bowie on twentieth-century fashion and culture, brilliantly capturing his spatial odyssey from dedicated follower to supreme arbiter of rock chic. As the book says, ‘Bowie’s “style” has always amounted to more than clothes, hair and cosmetics. Style, for Bowie, is inextricable from art…it is less a flight from reality than an entire way of life.’

The range of photographs is staggering. From his humble Brixton beginnings to the classy pop icon in the last quarter of the old millennium (every year from 1962 to 1999 is amply represented), the book shows a changing glamour gallery of Bowies down the years, all different and yet somehow all unified by an unerring grasp of Style with a capital S. Whether it’s on-stage with The King Bees in the Sixties, off-stage at Haddon Hall in the Seventies, on-stage (again) with Iggy Pop in the Eighties, or back-stage with Morrissey in the Nineties, Steve Pafford, editor of the UK’s ‘Crankin’ Out’ Bowie fan club magazine (PO Box 3268, London NW6 4NH), has unearthed some fascinating pix.

There are close to 500 images in BowieStyle, an all-time high, and around 40% are guaranteed previously unseen. There’s also an exclusive two-page interview with photographer Mick Rock, contributions from ex-manager Ken Pitt, as well as previously unpublished extracts of Crankin’ Out’s interviews with collaborator Tony Visconti, clothes designer Natasha Kornilof and Manish Boy Bob Solly. The informed, incisive text and picture captions are also littered with quotes from David himself, compiled from various media interviews conducted over the years, as well as his chats with Crankin’ Out, which appear in print for the very first time.

Lazarus – The Complete Book and Lyrics by David Bowie and Enda Walsh.

“Wild, fantastical… A surrealistic tour de force.” –Rolling Stone

‘I’m a dying man who can’t die.’

Thomas Newton came to Earth seeking water for his drought-ridden planet. Years later he’s still stranded here, sozzled on cheap gin and haunted by a past love. But the arrival of another lost soul brings one last chance of freedom…

Inspired by the book The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis and its cult film adaptation starring David Bowie, Lazarus brings the story of Thomas Newton to its devastating conclusion.

Written by Bowie with the playwright Enda Walsh, and incorporating some of Bowie’s most iconic songs, Lazarus was first performed at New York Theatre Workshop in 2015, starring Michael C. Hall and directed by Ivo Van Hove. The production transferred to London in 2016.

Unmade Up: Recollections of a Friendship with David Bowie, by Edward Bell.

Unmade Up features much previously unseen artwork and photography of the enigmatic singer David Bowie, by his go-to artist of his heyday, Edward Bell. His commissions included the sleeve for Bowie’s 1980 album ‘Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)’ which featured the number one single ‘Ashes to Ashes’. Bowie later bought all of Bell’s artwork for his private collection. “David Bowie: He soared, his eagle eye spied everything. His magpie nature urged him to plunder with ruthless perception. The Chameleon absorbed, then radiated, colours eclipsing. A butterfly mind, alighting, random and eclectic. Courageous, enigmatic, outrageous, and contradictory, he was Star Man, Elephant Man, a Diamond Dog, Tin Machine, the mythological peacock of incorruptible flesh. This account of my relationship with the man is written from the perspective of one who was of Bowie’s generation but preferred to listen to The Rolling Stones: who had been to art school, freelanced as a photographer and illustrator for magazines – Vogue, Tatler, The Sunday Times – a visual person, rather than musical. I greeted the shock of David’s death at first with a faint, sad shrug; the full impact was slow to dawn. If a drowning man is said to see his whole life experience on an instant in total recall, I was to experience a small death that lingered, and as it did so, forgotten incidents gradually returned with an extraordinary clarity. I felt compelled to write them all down, with the desire to share them.”

Bowie In Berlin: A new career in a new town by Thomas Jerome Seabrook.

Driven to the brink of madness by cocaine, overwork, marital strife, and a paranoid obsession with the occult, Bowie fled Los Angeles in 1975 and ended up in Berlin, the divided city on the frontline between communist East and capitalist West. There he sought anonymity, taking an apartment in a run-down district with his sometime collaborator Iggy Pop, another refugee from drugs and debauchery, while they explored the city and its notorious nightlife. In this intensely creative period, Bowie put together three classic albums — Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger — with collaborators who included Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Tony Visconti. He also found time to produce two albums for Iggy Pop–The Idiot and Lust For Life–and to take a leading role in a movie, the ill-starred Just A Gigolo. Bowie In Berlin examines that period and those records, exploring Bowie’s fascination with the city, unearthing his sources of inspiration, detailing his working methods, and teasing out the elusive meanings of the songs. Painstakingly researched and vividly written, the book casts new light on the most creative and influential era in David Bowie’s career.

David Bowie: Rainbow Man, 1967-1980 by Jérôme Soligny. (French Edition)

Pendant près d’un quart de siècle, en tant que journaliste musical, Jérôme Soligny a écrit à propos de David Bowie et a régulièrement échangé avec lui. Au printemps 2016, quelques semaines après son décès, il s’est attelé à une tâche aussi originale que conséquente : raconter Bowie, le musicien, ses enregistrements et ses tournées, avec le concours de ceux qui ont participé à l’édification de son oeuvre. En comptant les vedettes du rock qui s’étaient déjà exprimées à son micro au sujet de cet artiste hors-norme – dont il a rassemblé ici les déclarations – c’est près de trois cents personnes (producteurs, instrumentistes, ingénieurs du son, mais aussi designers, photographes, ainsi que des musiciens qui l’ont influencé ou qu’il a influencés…) qui prennent la parole dans Rainbowman. Elles contribuent à brosser un portrait, non pas conforme à l’idée que, depuis des décennies, les médias et le public se font de David Bowie, mais fidèle de l’homme de mots et de musique, du mélomane passé à l’acte que, humblement, il a prétendu être jusqu’à la fin de sa vie.

Main article photograph by Jimmy King.

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David Bowie, the Cool Chameleon From Mars

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By Dwight Garner

• July 21, 2011

A few years ago the critic Chuck Klosterman, writing about rock music, made an argument of the sort that can really disrupt a dinner party. Mr. Klosterman declared, “Given the choice between hearing a great band and seeing a cool band, I’ll take the latter every single time.” He didn’t add, but he might have, “Discuss.”

When he was in his late teens, David Bowie had little talent but cool to burn. His prettiness — think of Rob Lowe as an ethereal blond — was marred, provocatively, by his jagged and vampiric British teeth. A punch he’d taken as a schoolboy rendered one of his blue eyes permanently dilated, so it seemed to be a different color.

There was something alien and quickening about David Jones, as he was then still known, and people longed to gawk at him. He replaced more talented singers in bands because, well, that’s what cool kids do. “When John sang the kids kept on dancing,” a member of one of Mr. Bowie’s early bands said about its soon-to-be-replaced singer. “When David sang a number they stopped to look.”

Girls looked; boys did too. In his thoroughgoing new biography, “David Bowie: Starman,” the British rock journalist Paul Trynka considers at length the startling androgyny that made Mr. Bowie a defining human being of the 1970s. About Mr. Bowie’s flamboyant alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, and his band, the Spiders From Mars, Mr. Trynka writes, these guys were “dangerous, a warning to lock up not only your daughters but also your sons.”

What cool giveth, cool can taketh away. By the time Mr. Bowie entered my consciousness in the early 1980s, when I was in high school, he’d gone mainstream, and I loathed him in a way that only an ardent young record buyer can loathe. His new hits — “Let’s Dance,” “China Girl” — blurted from car radios like flatulence. He did a Pepsi commercial. Mr. Trynka quotes the music writer Charles Shaar Murray, wonderfully, about Mr. Bowie’s puzzling career choices during the ’80s. “I suddenly thought, He’s turned into a rock-and-roll version of Prince Charles,” Mr. Murray said, noting the “old-fashioned haircut like a lemon meringue on his head.”

I’ve since caught up, a bit, with Mr. Bowie’s earlier and best music, and I looked forward to “David Bowie: Starman” to hit the reset button on my sense of the man and his work. On that level this book works. It pursues a number of galvanizing themes. It argues for Mr. Bowie less as an instinctive rocker than as a shape-shifting cabaret singer and composer writ large, a performer working in the tradition of Harold Arlen, Frank Sinatra, Hoagy Carmichael and Bertolt Brecht as well as the blues. Mr. Bowie was an outsider. Before him, the author writes, “pop music had been mainly about belonging.” His music meant so much to so many because it presented “a spectacle of not-belonging.”

The book depicts Mr. Bowie as charming but calculating and ruthless — a man who made few close friends and cared mostly about tending to what the author calls “Brand Bowie.” The singer Morrissey said about him: “He’s a business, you know. He’s not really a person.”

Mr. Bowie was not a natural singer or songwriter and toiled for his success. He has a good ear, so good that some of his best material, the author argues, pickpocketed the work of others. Mr. Trynka notes how closely Mr. Bowie’s song “Starman” resembles “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Bowie’s hit “The Jean Genie” pilfered a riff from Muddy Waters’s “I’m a Man.” The song “Life on Mars” borrowed a chord sequence from a French song called “Comme d’Habitude,” later reworked into English by Paul Anka as “My Way.”

Mr. Trynka was the editor of Britain’s classic-rock magazine Mojo from 1996 to 2003; his books include the biography “Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed.” He interviewed more than 250 people to write “David Bowie: Starman,” and although Mr. Bowie himself did not cooperate, this book feels close to definitive. He deftly knocks down stories like one told by Mr. Bowie’s first wife, Angela, who claimed she caught him in bed with Mick Jagger. The idea that either of these rivals would submit to the other, the author reports, is unthinkable.

“David Bowie: Starman” is a better-than-average rock biography, but just barely. It’s patient and respectable without being quite likable, without ever quite becoming your friend. When you put this heavy thing down, it doesn’t call out to be seized back up again quickly. You may begin to circle its bulk warily.

The critic in Mr. Trynka too rarely emerges. Midway through I began to realize that the Bowie book I longed to read would be similar to Greil Marcus’s recent assessment of Van Morrison, the shrewdly essayistic “When That Rough God Goes Riding.” I wanted a critic’s case for Mr. Bowie, to be guided through his most transcendent work.

One can’t blame an author for not writing a book he didn’t write, however. And many moments in “David Bowie: Starman” made me lean forward with pleasure. Mr. Trynka has a way with a phrase. Writing about an early sexual experience Mr. Bowie supposedly had with a boy named Mike, the author doesn’t simply say the two of them made out. He writes, “Mike had investigated the contents of David’s trousers.”

About “The Laughing Gnome,” a terrible early song of Mr. Bowie’s, the author says, “As long as one is happy to abandon all notions of taste, the song is brilliantly crafted.” Even better, he adds about this song, “In the admittedly narrow niche of pseudopsychedelic cockney music-hall children’s songs, it reigns supreme.” The author quotes others well too, a quality I admire. A friend of Mr. Bowie’s, talking about the absurd amount of sex that went on in the singer’s home, reports, “I used to wake under a pile of bodies.”

Mr. Bowie was born David Robert Jones on Jan. 8, 1947, in the postwar gloom and rubble of the Brixton district of south London. His family was middle class. His father had owned a theater troupe and invested in a nightclub before going to work for a children’s charity. His mother, his father’s second wife, had been a waitress. Mr. Bowie had two siblings, a half-brother named Terry and a half-sister named Annette.

While contemporaries like Keith Richards were spellbound by rural American bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Mr. Bowie’s early hero was Little Richard, a rowdy city boy of indefinite sexuality. The young David Jones played with, and discarded, several bands before deciding to go solo and change his last name to Bowie, after the Texas folk hero Jim Bowie, played by Richard Widmark in the film “The Alamo.”

David Bowie, now 64 and married to the Somali-born model Iman, hasn’t released a new studio album since 2003 and in 2004 had emergency angioplasty for a blocked artery. “For the fans,” Mr. Trynka writes, “Bowie’s continuing absence seemed an almost unforgivable desertion.”

The epilogue of “David Bowie: Starman” contains this sanguine observation, however: “In 2012, his back catalog will be available for license once more, and many fans hope to see what is thought to be the most intriguing set of unreleased recordings of audio and video outtakes of any major recording artist.”

David Bowie’s greatness, this book suggests, more than caught up with his coolness.

DAVID BOWIE

By Paul Trynka

Illustrated. 530 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.

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David Bowie

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All Inductees >

INDUCTED BY

David Byrne (Talking Heads)

Glamorous. Futuristic. Alien. Mortal. You can never fully encapsulate the many faces of David Bowie.

Bowie’s fifty-year career is one of constant evolution, brilliant innovation, and enduring artistry. His legacy endures as one of a talent that defied form and a man who defied definition.

HALL OF FAME ESSAY

By Robert Hillburn

David Bowie’s revolutionary career is that he has bent rock & roll convention in so many imaginative and contradictory ways during the last quarter century that he has left many pop observers asking themselves if he was ever really a rock & roller at all.

It’s one thing for an artist to move between musical genres – in Bowie’s case, from the radical art-rock edges of Ziggy Stardust to the anxious soul strains of Young American s to the icy techno rock of Low . But this English singer/songwriter didn’t simply explore musical genres.

Back to All Inductees

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On the Books That Most Influenced the Great David Bowie

Genius recognizes genius.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists and pop-cultural icons of the 20th century, David Bowie created music that was laced with symbolism and references. This not only showcased Bowie’s talent as an artist but proved Bowie was an avid consumer of art himself. Below are some of the books that influenced and helped shape the artist and personality of David Bowie.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The debt owed by David Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity,” to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey couldn’t be more obvious. But Kubrick’s next film, a chilly adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange , is where the story really gets interesting.

Set in a totalitarian, future-present Britain, A Clockwork Orange is the story of delinquent, Beethoven-loving schoolboy Alex, the leader of a gang that spends its nights raping and pillaging while wired on amphetamine-laced “milk-plus.” Kubrick had set aside his planned biopic of Napoléon Bonaparte to make a movie version after being given a copy of the book by screenwriter Terry Southern, with whom he’d worked on Dr. Strangelove , and falling in love with it. In 1972 Bowie repurposed its swagger and shock value for his career-making turn as “leper messiah” Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual alien rock star with fluffy red hair and a weakness for asymmetric knitted bodysuits who ends up being killed by his fans.

Ziggy was a collision of unstable elements—some obscure (drugaddled rocker Vince Taylor; American psychobilly pioneer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy), others less so. It’s easy to see what Bowie took from Kubrick’s movie because, like his hijacking of the melody from “Over the Rainbow” for the chorus of “Starman,” the borrowing is so blatant. Bowie-as-Ziggy walked onstage to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, as played by Moog synthesizer maestro Wendy Carlos, while his band the Spiders’ costumes were modeled on those of Alex and his droogs—“friends” in Burgess’s invented language Nadsat.

The early 70s was a grim, embattled era in England. John Lennon sang in 1970 that the (hippie) dream was over. But 1971 was the year things turned brutish as the alternative society splintered into a mass of competing factions such as the radical-left urban terrorists the Angry Brigade—Britain’s answer to Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang—who launched a string of bomb attacks against Establishment targets. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange came out in the UK in January 1972, five months before The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . The following year the director withdrew it from cinemas after receiving death threats; the gesture amplified the film’s air of leering menace while saying a good deal about the febrile social climate.

Both the movie and its source novel celebrate the exquisite sense of belonging that being in a gang affords. But they’re also interested in the aftermath: what happens when the gang dissolves and the power that held it together leaks away. You can, if you want, see Alex as Ziggy and his droogs as the Spiders—the fictional band, not Bowie’s actual musicians Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder. In Bowie’s opaque Ziggy narrative they’re cast as bitter sidemen who bitch about their leader’s fans and wonder if they should give him a taste of the old ultraviolence by crushing his sweet hands. . . .

The novel itself had a tragic genesis. The story goes that in 1959 Burgess was diagnosed incorrectly with terminal brain cancer. Spurred into action, he wrote five novels very quickly to support his soon-to-be widow. A Clockwork Orange took him three weeks and was inspired by a horrific incident in April 1944 where his first wife, Lynne, pregnant at the time—she subsequently miscarried—was assaulted in a blackout by a group of American soldiers. She’d been on her way home from the London offices of the Ministry of War Transport where she was involved in planning the D-Day landings. A Clockwork Orange is interested not just in what might drive someone to carry out this kind of attack, but also in the ethics of rehabilitation. Can you force someone to be good by torturing them, as per the Ludovico Technique aversion therapy Alex undergoes?

If Burgess and Kubrick were equally important to Bowie, it’s worth noting the differences in their visions, differences Burgess considered so stark he ended up renouncing the novel because he felt the film made it easy for readers to misunderstand the book. He meant that his handling of sex and violence was more nuanced than Kubrick’s, which might be true, though in some ways the novel is nastier—for example, the scene where Alex rapes two underage girls after getting them drunk. In the movie they are clearly adult women, the sex is clearly consensual, and Kubrick uses a fast-motion technique to blur the action and create a slapstick tone.

The biggest difference, though, has to do with the ending. The British edition of the novel ends on an optimistic note, with Alex turning his back on violence and contemplating fatherhood. But the original US edition on which Kubrick based his screenplay omits this epilogue. It ends with Alex saying sarcastically, “I was cured all right,” having just shared with us his dream of “carving the whole litso [face] of the creeching [screaming] world with my cut-throat britva [razor].”

Burgess had been intrigued by the razor-packing teddy boys of the late 1950s. Kubrick picked up on the androgyny of the mod culture Bowie flirted with in the mid-1960s. For example, Kubrick turned Alex’s false eyelashes—bought in bulk from hip London boutique Biba, bombed by the Angry Brigade shortly after the shoot concluded—into a key visual motif. Nadsat, the Anglo-Russian slang spoken by Alex, crops up in “Suffragette City.” But the way Bowie used it decades later in one of his final songs, “Girl Loves Me,” suggests a deeper appreciation that leads back to the rich linguistic textures of the novel. For in “Girl Loves Me,” Bowie mixes it knowingly with the secret gay language Polari, reinforcing the cultural historian Michael Bracewell’s point that A Clockwork Orange was an audit on modern masculinity. Finding men to be in crisis, the movie hastened the birth of a new kind of loner—the young soul rebel, who offset corruption with an intense emotional idealism. That sounds like Bowie to me.

Read it while listening to: “Girl Loves Me,” “Suffragette City”

If you like this, try: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)

In the Berlin flat where he lived while he was recording “Heroes” , Bowie slept beneath his own painting of Yukio Mishima, the handsome Japanese multihyphenate (author, actor, playwright, singer, terrorist) who committed suicide by hara-kiri in November 1970 after he and four members of his Tatenokai private militia failed in their attempt to incite a coup intended to restore the power of Japan’s emperor.

What did Bowie find so admirable in Mishima’s warrior machismo? Perhaps the fact that it was so obviously a performance. Film historian Donald Richie, who knew Mishima, thought him a dandy whose talent was bound up with his understanding that if you behave the way you want to be, you will become it: you become who you are by practicing.

As a child, Kimitake Hiraoka—Yukio Mishima was a pseudonym—was raised in isolation by his deranged, bullying grandmother Natsu, who refused to let him play with other boys or be exposed to sunlight. Encouraged by her, he read everything he could lay his hands on and emerged a model of poised, precocious elegance. To exorcise his shame at having been rejected by the army on health grounds, an event recounted in his semiautobiographical first novel Confessions of a Mask , he transformed his weedy body into a solid knot of muscle. He learned the ways of the samurai, becoming skilled at kendo (swordsmanship).

Despite having a wife and two children, Mishima was openly gay rather than bisexual; he rationalized this paradox in a later autobiographical work, Sun and Steel , as a means of embracing contradiction and collision. (Another key scene in Confessions of a Mask is his first, explosively successful attempt at masturbation, electrifyed by a painting of St. Sebastian pierced all over by arrows.) To please his ailing mother, his marriage was an arranged one, in traditional Japanese fashion. Among Mishima’s requirements were that his bride should be no taller than he; pretty, with a round face; and careful not to disturb him while he worked. Eventually he settled on Yoko Sugiyama, the 21-year-old daughter of a popular Japanese painter.

Having himself come out as bisexual in 1972, albeit in what was felt to be a publicity stunt, Bowie was still talking up his fluidity four years later. His gay side was mostly dormant, Bowie explained to 19-year-old Cameron Crowe in a deliberately outrageous interview in the September 1976 issue of Playboy , but visiting Japan always roused it reliably: “There are such beautiful-looking boys over there. Little boys? Not that little. About 18 or 19. They have a wonderful sort of mentality. They’re all queens until they reach 25, then suddenly they become samurai, get married and have thousands of children. I love it.”

An allegory of Japan’s postwar humiliation not usually ranked among Mishima’s best works, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea has the brutal symmetry of one of the Grimms’ fairy tales Mishima devoured as a child. It unfolds in a suburb of Yokohama in the aftermath of the war. Fusako, a widow who runs a store selling European luxury goods, takes a sailor, Ryuji, as a lover. Her son Noboru watches them have sex through a peephole in his room. At first Noboru idolizes Ryuji as a hero who has traveled the world, but the next day, on the way back from killing and vivisecting a stray kitten with his sociopathic school friends, he meets Ryuji again and decides he is weak and ineffectual because he has sprayed water on himself to keep cool.

Ryuji swaps his seafaring life for domestic security with Noboru’s mother. But Noboru is unimpressed, even more so when Fusako catches him looking through the peephole a second time, and Ryuji refuses to punish Noboru despite Fusako’s urging. Noboru and his gang decide to restore Ryuji’s lost honor by giving him the full kitten treatment.

Anyone who managed to miss the Mishima-ish themes (affronted honor, repressed homosexuality) of Nagisa Oshima’s Second World War drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence , in which Bowie played imprisoned British officer Major Jack Celliers, could find elucidation in the title of David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s haunting theme song—“Forbidden Colors,” after Mishima’s novel of the same name. Bowie himself returned to Mishima on 2013’s The Next Day , borrowing Spring Snow ’s ominous image of a dead dog obstructing a waterfall for the lyrics of the sparse, Scott Walker–style “Heat.”

Read it while listening to: “Blackout”

If you like this, try: Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

The song “Black Tie, White Noise” from the 1993 album of that name is one of Bowie’s least elliptical lyrics and represents perhaps his most personal statement on the subject of race. Hiding from the 1992 LA riots in a hotel room, the recently married Bowie and Iman are having sex. But in the thick of this intimate moment Bowie looks into his Somali wife’s eyes and wonders if, despite being a well-meaning white liberal, he really understands her blackness, or if he’s living in a Benetton-advert multicultural fantasy world. He hints that he is scared himself, as a famous white man, by the rioting black crowds below. Assuming there’s a part of Iman that shares their anger, is any of it directed at him? In an astonishing line which he repeats three times, Bowie reassures himself that Iman—and by extension Al B. Sure!, with whom he is duetting and who functions as a sort of proxy for Iman in the song—will not kill him. Then he admits he sometimes wonders why she won’t, given white people’s appalling racism and mistreatment of black people through the centuries.

Of course, the reason Iman won’t kill him is because she loves him. And as James Baldwin assures us in The Fire Next Time , one of the wisest polemics ever written, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

The book, which is in two parts, had its roots in a letter to Baldwin’s nephew on the centenary of black America’s “emancipation.” The elegance of Baldwin’s sentences, with their teeming subclauses and rich biblical cadences, is a function of anger, the same anger that energized the LA rioters. It is also a desperate need to cancel out the real white noise—the spurious national mythology white people invoke to convince themselves that their ancestors were wise, fair-minded heroes who always treated their neighbors and ethnic minority populations honorably.

Baldwin has news for his nephew: it’s not for white people to decide it’s within their gift to accept him. Nor should he try to impersonate them in any way or be tempted to believe that he is what the white world thinks he is—inferior. Why should black people have respect for the standards by which white people claim to live when it’s clear those standards are illusory?

He sounds implacable. Yet Baldwin, like Bowie, believes that the future has to be postracial. Hybrid. Tolerant. There can be no frisson of shock, no disapproval on either side, when it comes to interracial marriage and mixed-race children. When, in the book, Baldwin meets with Elijah Muhammad of the separatist Nation of Islam, he understands the doctrine of black self-sufficiency and self-respect Muhammad preaches but is suspicious of the groupthink he inspires in his followers. Baldwin has white friends he would trust with his life. Can he set this fact against the historic evilness of white people? Muhammad would say no. But for Baldwin there is no other way forward.

There is an invented aspect to racial difference, Baldwin felt. Which is how it becomes a tool of oppression: “Color is not a human or a personal reality. It is a political reality.” Views like this set him apart from the radical black movements of the late 60s and early 70s, some of whose followers and leaders—Eldridge Cleaver, for example—saw Baldwin’s homosexuality as deeply suspect, even treasonous. Baldwin had no wish to be typecast, or to be a spokesman—hence his move to France at the age of 24.

Plenty of the books on Bowie’s list are thrilling, fun, or informative. Many of them are important. The Fire Next Time is essential.

Read it while listening to : “Black Tie, White Noise”

If you like this, try: James Baldwin, Another Country

———————————————

From Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life by John O’Connell. Copyright © 2019 by John O’Connell. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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David Bowie's 50 greatest songs – ranked!

What more could you ask for, at this bizarre, unnerving and outlandish time, than a roundup of the greatest hits of one of the most bizarre, unnerving and outlandish musicians of all time

50. Let Me Sleep Beside You (1967)

A rejected single finally released on a 1970 cash-in compilation, Bowie’s first collaboration with the producer Tony Visconti is better than anything on his debut album. Driven by acoustic guitar, its sound points the way ahead and there’s something appealingly odd, even sinister about the lyrical come-ons: “Wear the dress your mother wore.”

49. I Would Be Your Slave (2001)

Uniformly strong, the songwriting on Heathen stretched from the prosaic – the letter-to-adult-son of Everyone Says Hi – to the baffling. Its highlight sits somewhere between: ostensibly a love song that gradually reveals itself to be about God. The melody is beautiful, the arrangement – very Visconti strings over electronic beats – perfectly poised.

48. Loving the Alien (1984)

The solitary moment that sparked on 1984’s inspiration-free Tonight. A strange, genuinely great song about religion smothered by overproduction. A 2018 remix helps matters a little, and the stripped-back 00s live versions available online are better yet. The demo version – much talked up by Bowie in later years – remains unheard.

47. Jump They Say (1993)

Hailed as a return to peak form on release, Black Tie White Noise was nothing of the sort, but its first single was authentically fantastic. Jittery but commercial funk is undercut by a dark lyric that returned to the subject of Bowie’s mentally ill half-brother Terry, this time brooding on his 1985 suicide.

46. The London Boys (1966)

Tellingly, Bowie’s first great song centred on outsiders. A stark, brass- and woodwind-assisted depiction of those – like Bowie himself – left with their noses pressed against the glass of the Swinging London party, it feels like a monochrome kitchen-sink drama compressed into three minutes.

45. Fantastic Voyage (1979)

The album Lodger opened with that rarest of things in the Bowie canon, a protest song. Inspired by the ongoing cold war and its attendant nuclear paranoia, its combination of anger and fatalism still sounds pertinent. The music meanwhile is essentially a gentle reworking of Boys Keep Swinging: same key, same chords, only slower.

44. Lady Stardust (1972)

Ziggy Stardust’s most emotionally affecting moment is one of its most straightforward songs. Driven by Mick Ronson ’s piano, it paints a poignant picture beautifully: an overhyped gig by a hot new band, one man in the crowd sadly looking on as his younger ex-lover becomes a star. “I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey.”

43. Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

There was something charming about Bowie’s enthusiastic drum’n’bass experiments on Earthling, but its finest track had nothing to do with them: Bowie suggested it was inspired by 60s soul and the Pixies. Either way, its leaps from eerie atmospherics to blasting, wall-of-noise chorus are really exhilarating: an overlooked triumph.

42. Something in the Air (1998)

Another overlooked 90s gem, from the coolly received Hours, Something in the Air is both limpid and melancholy. The lyrics are filled with regret, the vocal parched and pained behind a liberal sprinkling of electronic distortion – and, when it hits its chorus, anthemic in a way that hints at All the Young Dudes.

41. Joe the Lion (1977)

Joe the Lion defies explication. Once you get past the opening lines about the transgressive self-mutilating performance artist Chris Burden – “Tell you who you are if you nail me to my car” – the lyrics make virtually no sense at all. The music – arcing, frantic atonal guitar and gibbering backing vocals – sounds deranged; Bowie sings like a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown. It is ridiculously exciting.

40. Hallo Spaceboy (1995)

After a decade spent courting the mainstream, Bowie clearly intended Outside to be seen as a grand artistic statement. It occasionally feels a bit laboured, but its highlights rank high: a Space Oddity-referencing Pet Shop Boys remix was a hit, but the original of Hallo Spaceboy is pummelling, chaotic and hypnotic.

39. I Can’t Read (1989)

Tin Machine was a hard rock folly that largely hasn’t aged well, but I Can’t Read is the exception that proves the rule: a brilliant, agonised, self-baiting study of the creative inertia that had overwhelmed Bowie in the 80s, over a dense wall of sheet metal guitars and feedback.

38. Rock’n’Roll Suicide (1972)

Ostensibly the tragic, French-chanson-and-50s pop-influenced finale to the Ziggy Stardust story, Rock’n’Roll Suicide’s epic coda seemed to take on a different, celebratory meaning as Bowie’s star rose, his howl of “You’re not alone / Give me your hands / You’re wonderful” summing up his effect on his fans.

37. Bring Me the Disco King (2003)

There’s a sense in which the final track on Reality , the last album he made before his decade-long “retirement”, would have worked perfectly as Bowie’s farewell: a beautiful, weary, uncertain and elegiac rumination on the 70s, set to Mike Garson’s distinctive piano, which shifts from hypnotic to spiky and surprising.

36. Always Crashing in the Same Car (1977)

“Self-pitying crap,” sniffed Bowie subsequently, which tells you more about his despondent mood during Low’s recording than the song itself. Always Crashing in the Same Car is a sublime sliver of moody paranoia, with distracted-sounding vocals, electronics that alternately bubble and drone, wiry, effects-laden guitar.

35. Stay (1976)

“It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine,” Bowie protested unconvincingly on Station to Station’s title track, but Stay – a taut, twitchy funk-rock hybrid – audibly was. As usual with Station to Station , the chaos of its creation (“a cocaine frenzy,” according to guitarist Carlos Alomar ) isn’t reflected in the finished product: it’s perfectly poised and confident.

34. Cracked Actor (1973)

There is a particular strain of Bowie song from 1973/74 that sounds like the work of someone who has had all the sex and drugs in the world at once. Cracked Actor may be the supreme example. A sleazy, bitter blast of distorted guitar that sounds like it is seconds away from collapse, it’s both intense and electrifying.

33. Moonage Daydream (1972)

You never want for high-drama rock anthemics on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but Moonage Daydream is the best example. It switches from the opening guitar chord’s strident call to something weirder and more ominous – its concluding encouragement to “freak out” doesn’t sound particularly inviting – and features a mind-blowing Mick Ronson guitar solo.

32. Diamond Dogs (1974)

Halloween Jack, the persona Bowie adopted on Diamond Dogs, never enjoyed the same cultural impact as Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke. That was no fault of the album’s title track, a propulsive, compelling strut that is simultaneously sensual and dark, as evidenced by its troubling opening cry: “This ain’t rock n’ roll, this is … genocide!”

31. The Width of a Circle (1970)

Not everything on Bowie’s self-consciously heavy album The Man Who Sold the World works, but its opening track is remarkable. It opens with an acoustic guitar that might have stepped off the 1969 David Bowie album, before exploding into something completely different: an eight-minute Ronson-powered homoerotic epic that swaggers with a newfound confidence.

30. John, I’m Only Dancing (1972)

Considered too controversial to release in the US, John, I’m Only Dancing blithely turned the era’s sexual mores on its head: in its lyrics, a straight relationship is the shocking, threatening aberration. The music, meanwhile, sashays insouciantly along – in another inspired theft, the guitar part is swiped from Alvin Cash’s 1968 funk hit Keep on Dancing .

29. The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)

Proof that Bowie worked in mysterious ways: it took a BBC Two adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia to return him to full creative power. Amid the Blackstar-prefiguring free-jazz experiments and Low-esque instrumentals lurked the fantastic, self-referential title track, a keen drawing of pre-fame Bowie, “screaming along in south London … ready to learn”.

28. Fame (1975)

Made up on the hoof in the studio – and allegedly constructed by Bowie cutting up a recording of Alomar playing a cover of the Flares’ 1961 hit Foot Stompin’ – Fame is a fantastic slice of funk, rendered nervy and strange by the pained delivery of lyrics that take a jaundiced view of the song’s subject: “The flame that burns your change to keep you insane.”

27. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)

Boasting a preposterously stage-y mockney vocal – “she ’ad an ’orror of rooms” – Scary Monsters’ title track apparently dated back to the early 70s. Bowie had attempted to donate it to Iggy Pop, before reconsidering. It’s the album’s most viscerally exciting moment: frenzied and aggressive, it coats everything from the guitars to Bowie’s voice in distortion.

26. All the Young Dudes (1972)

Glam rock’s unofficial national anthem. All the Young Dudes announced the arrival of a new era in pop via a Lou Reed-ish cast of characters – cross-dressers, speed freaks talking about suicide – and a timely, remarkably cocky dismissal of the past: “My brother’s back at home with his Beatles and his Stones … what a drag.”

25. Space Oddity (1969)

In his excellent book The Complete David Bowie , Nicholas Pegg notes that the episodic Space Oddity sounds like something the 60s Bee Gees might have written at their weirdest. He’s absolutely right, although where the Bee Gees would have played up the melodrama, Bowie perfectly inhabits its mood of blank-eyed, space-age alienation.

24. Where Are We Now? (2013)

The excitement over Bowie’s surprise re-emergence perhaps caused The Next Day to be slightly overrated, but its best moments are magnificent, not least Where Are We Now? ’s recollection of Bowie’s late 70s sojourn in Berlin. Fond, nostalgic and oddly fragile, it still sounds moving.

23. The Man Who Sold the World (1970)

It’s a song that was subsequently rendered as everything from pop-soul (by Lulu) to despairing acoustic commentary on global success and punk rock ethics (Nirvana), but Bowie’s original version has never been bettered. The title track of his eeriest album remains mysterious, creepy and haunting 50 years on.

22. I Can’t Give Everything Away (2016)

Of the Blackstar songs whose meaning suddenly pulled into focus with the news of Bowie’s death , none is more affecting than I Can’t Give Everything Away. The music is gloriously buoyant, but it’s hard to see the lyrics as anything other than a man bidding farewell, the musical quotation from Low’s A New Career in a New Town perfectly judged and poignant.

21. Fashion (1980)

Brilliantly claustrophobic, reggae-influenced post-punk funk that casts a jaundiced eye over the ever-changing trends in the world of the hip. The ironic tone of Fashion seemed to be largely missed, possibly because the idea of David Bowie, of all people, protesting about ever-changing trends was frankly a bit rich.

20. The Bewlay Brothers (1971)

There’s a compelling argument that the incredible flowering of songwriting talent on Hunky Dory may make it Bowie’s greatest album. Its most striking moment may be its extraordinary, enigmatic acoustic finale – possibly a depiction of Bowie’s relationship with his half-brother Terry – that goes from becalmed to chilling to genuinely frightening.

19. The Jean Genie (1973)

Aladdin Sane’s Ziggy-goes-to-America concept in miniature, The Jean Genie is tougher and sleazier than anything on Ziggy Stardust – its I’m A Man-ish guitar riff and bursts of harmonica sound absolutely filthy. Anyone inclined to view pop’s past through rose-tinted glasses should note it was kept off No 1 by Jimmy Osmond’s Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool .

18. Let’s Dance (1983)

The difference between Let’s Dance and Bowie’s other 80s pop albums is that his heart was in it; even if he was largely out to make money, he made an effort. If its title track signalled his temporary abandonment of the avant garde, it’s still a superb song, nervier and stranger than its global smash status might suggest.

17. Win (1975)

A ballad draped in echoing, fluttering sax, Win is utterly gorgeous. Despite Bowie’s insistence it was an attack on artistic rivals who didn’t work hard enough, there’s something oddly sexy about it, not least his delivery of the line: “Someone like you should not be allowed to start any fires.”

16. Rebel Rebel (1974)

Bowie’s fabulous, valedictory farewell to glam, Rebel Rebel is essentially a loving salute to the kids Bowie had inspired, a metaphorical arm around the shoulder of every teenage misfit who had ever posed in a bedroom mirror. “You tacky thing,” he sings, delightedly, “you put them on” – set to one of the all-time great rock riffs.

15. Changes (1971)

A perfectly written, irresistible mission statement that few heeded at the time, Changes has ended up one of Bowie’s most beloved songs. “It’s saying: ‘Look, I’m going to be so fast, you’re not going to keep up with me,’” he explained. It would count as youthful arrogance were it not for the fact that his subsequent career bore the boast out.

14. Golden Years (1976)

A moment of straightforward joy amid the complex, troubled emotional terrain of Station to Station, Golden Years perfectly matches its lyrical optimism with glittering, shimmering funk. What it would have sounded like had Bowie’s original plan to give the song to Elvis Presley is anyone’s guess.

13. Absolute Beginners (1985)

The theme to Julien Temple’s universally derided film of the same name, Absolute Beginners may well be the high point of Bowie’s 80s commercial phase. It’s a stately, sweeping, undeniable love song that reunited him with the pianist Rick Wakeman, and – at an artistic nadir – proved Bowie could still write incredible songs when he felt like it.

12. Boys Keep Swinging (1979)

Greeted with disappointment on release, Lodger’s reputation has grown with the years. It’s uneven, but contains some incredible songs, not least Boys Keep Swinging, which condensed the kind of sonic overload found on “Heroes” into a sparky three-minute pop song, complete with lyrics that archly, camply celebrated machismo.

11. Starman (1972)

More a cultural moment than a song. Starman’s epochal Top of the Pops performance is probably the most celebrated piece of music television in British history. It’s a series of compelling musical steals – equal parts T Rex, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Blue Mink’s recent hit Melting Pot (the morse code guitar) – and a brash announcement of Bowie’s commercial rebirth.

10. Drive-In Saturday (1973)

Glam doo-wop decorated with bursts of fizzing synthesiser, Drive-In Saturday is one of Bowie’s greatest singles, despite its peculiar lyrical premise. In “about 2033”, nuclear war has caused humanity to forget how to have sex and they have to relearn seduction techniques from old films. Incredibly, given its subject matter, the song sounds swooningly romantic.

9. ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore (2016)

Before Blackstar was revealed as the most exquisitely staged final act in rock history, it sounded thrillingly like a new beginning. A relentless, intense drum loop decorated with squalls of sax, Tis Pity She Was a Whore was unlike anything Bowie had done before. His final exultant whoop suggests he knew exactly how great it was.

8. Oh! You Pretty Things (1971)

There was an apocalyptic strain in Bowie’s songwriting almost from the start – see We Are Hungry Men from his 1967 debut – but it was never more beautifully expressed than on Oh! You Pretty Things, a song that sets an incredibly bleak message to a melody so lovely it could be covered by the lead singer of Herman’s Hermits.

7. Young Americans (1975)

Young Americans represents the point in Bowie’s career where it became apparent he could take virtually any musical genre and bend it to his will. A white British rock star adopting the breezy, sumptuous sound of Philly soul shouldn’t have worked at all, but it did, to life-affirming effect.

6. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) (1974)

The medley on side one of Diamond Dogs is the album’s sickly heart, seven minutes of music that takes glam rock as far as it could go. It’s so decadent and diseased-sounding it must have been hard to imagine where Bowie could possibly go next. As it turned out, he was just getting started.

5. “Heroes” (1977)

Its posthumous uplifting-sporting-montage-soundtrack ubiquity means it’s easy to forget what a weird, ambiguous song Heroes is – it has, metaphorically, lost the quotation marks around its title. But perhaps that is tribute to Bowie’s brand of alchemy: only he could turn six minutes of pulsing electronic noise, howling guitars and screamed vocals into an all-purpose air-punching anthem.

4. Life on Mars? (1971)

A no-further-questions masterpiece, bolstered by Ronson’s fantastic string arrangement, Life On Mars?’s confusing gush of images almost defies explication, but might well be Bowie’s first clarion call to suburban misfits. It says a lot about the sheer power of its melody that a song so lyrically impenetrable has become so widely loved.

3. Station to Station (1976)

By his own account so out of control he couldn’t even remember recording it, Bowie somehow contrived to make Station to Station a work of awesome power and focus, as evidenced by the lengthy title track. The shift into its second section – “Once there were mountains and mountains” – is possibly the single most thrilling moment in his entire catalogue.

2. Ashes to Ashes (1980)

Ashes to Ashes is one of those moments in Bowie’s catalogue where the correct response is to stand back and boggle in awe. Presumably a depiction of its author in his drugged-out mid-70s nadir, everything about it – lingering oddness of its sound, its constantly shifting melody and emotional tenor, its alternately self-mythologising and self-doubting lyrics – is perfect.

1. Sound and Vision (1977)

Picking Bowie’s 50 best songs is a thankless task. His back catalogue is so rich, you inevitably end up having to lose tracks every bit as good as those you have picked in the process: Queen Bitch, Suffragette City, Be My Wife, Dollar Days. Picking his best is even worse, but Sound and Vision is both a fantastic pop song and an act of artistic daring. A three-minute hit single that doesn’t even feature a lead vocal until halfway through, it twists a despondent lyric into something uplifting and, musically, transcends time. Completely original, nothing about its sound tethers it to the mid-70s. Its magic seems to sum Bowie up.

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Readers’ Poll: The Best David Bowie Albums

By Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone

This is hardly a revelatory statement, but David Bowie had a very good 1970s. Fueled by a heroic intake of drugs, the man worked like a machine and churned out masterpiece after masterpiece, pausing only to tour, produce amazing albums for other people and to ingest yet more drugs. This didn't do much for his physical or mental health (at one point he thought his TV was talking to him), but it did produce some of the greatest albums in rock history. We asked our readers to vote on their favorite Bowie albums, and the top 10 were all released between 1970 and 1980. Only Lodger failed to make the cut. Click through to see the results. 

10. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’

The Man Who Sold The World arrived on store shelves during a bizarre time in Bowie's career. After years of failed efforts, he'd finally scored a hit the previous year with "Space Oddity." His subsequent singles, however, failed to generate any heat, and it seemed like he might be a One Hit Wonder. Always one to know how to get attention, Bowie decided to wear a dress on the cover of his third album, The Man Who Sold The World . This was long, long before the days of Boy George, back when such a move was still shocking. He wore the gown to his first interview with Rolling Stone in early 1971. "I refuse to be thought of as mediocre," Bowie said. "If I am mediocre, I'll get out of the business. There's enough fog around. That's why the idea of performance-as-spectacle is so important to me . . . Tell your readers that they can make up their minds about me when I begin getting adverse publicity: when I'm found in bed with Raquel Welch's husband." The entire interview was conducted in the gown.

Despite his best efforts, the LP didn't make much of a commercial impact. When his career exploded about three years later with Ziggy Stardust , fans went back and discovered this album, and now "The Man Who Sold the World," "The Width of a Circle" and "The Supermen" are all classics. 

9. ‘Young Americans’

It would have been very easy for David Bowie to squeeze out glam albums like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane for years and years, but he knew to be a truly great artist he had to challenge his fans and move into different areas. With that in mind, he put all of his past music aside and started work on a Philly R&B style album. A young soul singer named Luther Vandross was taped for background vocals, and his new friend John Lennon helped Bowie write "Fame." The result was Young Americans . Some old fans were turned off, but the huge radio hits "Fame" and "Young Americans" introduced him to a whole new audience. 

8. ‘Heroes’

Heroes is the second album of Bowie's so-called "Berlin Trilogy," but it's actually the only album totally recorded at Hansa Studio in Berlin. After taking the experimentation pretty far with Low , Bowie decided it was time for a slightly more traditional pop record. Recorded almost within spitting distance of the Berlin Wall, the LP fuses Krautrock with the ambient sounds he'd been perfecting over the past couple of years. The title track, about lovers on different sides of the Berlin Wall, became one of the biggest hits of Bowie's career and helped the LP climb the charts all across the planet. 

7. ‘Scary Monsters’

Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is so incredible that for the next 20 years countless rock critics said that whatever new album he put out was "his best since Scary Monsters ." In some small ways, this is the fourth album of the "Berlin Trilogy," even though it was recorded entirely in New York and London. Once again, Bowie was working with Tony Visconti on music that was both commercial and highly artistic. This time he leaned more on the former, and scored hits with "Fashion" and the "Space Oddity" sequel "Ashes to Ashes." There really isn't a weak track on the album, proving that Bowie was almost unique among Seventies rock icons in his ability to stay relevant after the punk revolution. He made many great songs after this, but never again was any album this satisfying from start to finish. 

6. ‘Aladdin Sane’

The pressure was truly on David Bowie when he went into the studio in late 1972 to begin recording Aladdin Sane . Kids all across American has played Ziggy Stardust until the vinyl was worn down, and they wanted something new. Written during his first American tour, Bow labeled this album "Ziggy Goes to America." It was a worthy follow-up, and "The Jean Genie," "Panic in Detroit" and "Cracked Actor" all became instant Bowie classics. More important, it proved Bowie wasn't a One-Album Wonder. 

5. ‘Diamond Dogs’

David Bowie was halfway through writing a concept album about George Orwell's classic novel 1984 when he ran into a tiny snag: Orwell's estate denied him the rights to the book. Rather than start from scratch, Bowie opted to put some of the songs on a more traditional glam rock album. Diamond Dogs is a farewell to the already fading glam scene. On the cover, Bowie still has his Ziggy hair, but he's already morphing into some other creature. This was his first album after parting ways with the Spiders from Mars backing band, and the beginning of his long association with Earl Slick. "Rebel Rebel" was the only real hit from the album, though it never went higher than number 64 in America. 

4. ‘Low’

Many Bowie fans didn't quite know what to make of Low when it first appeared in January of 1977. "Sound and Vision" and "Be My Wife" were the only songs that even sounded somewhat like pop music, and the second side was filled with instrumentals. Clearly, Bowie wasn't aiming for the pop charts with this one. Instead, he took the experiments from Station to Station to a new level. The disc was produced by Tony Visconti, but Brian Eno played a large role in shaping the unique sound of the disc. While many of his peers were totally ignoring new music, Bowie was immersing himself in Krautrock and discovering entirely new ways to express himself. Low was underappreciated at the time, but now it's widely seen as a masterpiece. 

3. ‘Station to Station’

It's possible to do so much cocaine over a long period of time that you enter into a state of "cocaine psychosis," meaning you suffer from intense paranoia and memory failure. That explains why David Bowie claims to have no memory of recording Station to Station . He was doing shocking amounts of the drug, and not sleeping for days at a time. This disc was recorded largely long after midnight in a Los Angeles studio. E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan was sober, but most everyone else in the studio was high as a spaceship. This usually leads to horrible music, but by some miracle it produced some of the greatest songs of Bowie's career. On the epic title track Bowie even sings about the "side effects of the cocaine." It's 10 minutes and 15 seconds of absolute madness. You can almost smell the drugs when you listen to it. The disc wraps with a cover of "Wild Is the Wind," featuring some of the greatest singing of Bowie's career. This is a deeply weird album that just gets better with age. 

Note: don't try this at home. When Elton John and Oasis tried to record on this much cocaine, the results were absolutely dismal. Just listen to Leather Jackets and Be Here Now if you don't believe us. 

2. ‘Hunky Dory’

David Bowie began writing the music on Hunky Dory on his first visit to America in 1971. "The whole  Hunky Dory  album reflected my newfound enthusiasm for this new continent that had been opened up to me," Bowie said in 1999. "That was the first time a real outside situation affected me so 100 percent that it changed my way of writing and the way I look at things."

Traveling by bus from Washington, D.C., to California, Bowie fell in love with the country and was inspired to pen tributes to some of its most iconic artists ("Andy Warhol," "Song for Bob Dylan" and the Lou Reed tribute "Queen Bitch"). Inspired by folk-rock acts that were dominating the charts, Bowie began composing pretty acoustic tunes with surreal lyrics like "Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow," from "Life on Mars?" "When we were rehearsing songs for  Hunky Dory , David was playing by himself at folk clubs in London to, like, 50 people," says  Hunky Dory  bassist Trevor Bolder, who also played on Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane . "He had long hair and looked like a folkie."

On "Changes," which kicks off the album, Bowie offers a challenge to pop's reigning stars, singing, "Look out, you rock & rollers." "I guess it was more being sort of arrogant," Bowie said in 2002. "It's sort of baiting an audience, saying, 'Look, I'm going to be so fast you're not going to keep up with me.'" The album found a small audience, but flew up the charts later that year after the huge success of the follow-up, Ziggy Stardust . 

1. ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’

The world has just five years left and it seems like there is no hope, but suddenly an alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust enters the body of a man and offers us salvation in our dying days. Sadly, he "took it all too far" and wound up killing himself in a "Rock and Roll Suicide." It's a story that virtually nobody has ever bothered to follow, but that hardly matters. The songs on Ziggy Stardust represent the high point of the entire glam movement. Also, Bowie was reborn onstage as Ziggy Stardust, providing a much-needed rock star in an otherwise bleak music landscape. Even better, parents hated him. Bowie has had bigger hits and more acclaimed albums, but never in his career did he seem quite as important or refreshing. This is the Bowie album that will be in the history books. 

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David Bowie: A Life Hardcover – September 12, 2017

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• Print length 544 pages
• Language English
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• Publication date September 12, 2017
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Archetype (September 12, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 045149783X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0451497833
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.71 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.45 x 9.53 inches
• #2,519 in Rock Band Biographies
• #8,075 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

About the author

Dylan jones.

Dylan Jones studied at Chelsea School Of Art and then St. Martin’s School of Art. He is the award-winning editor of GQ magazine, a position he has held since 1999, and has won the British Society of Magazine Editors “Editor of the Year” award a record ten times. In 2013 he was also the recipient of the prestigious Mark Boxer Award.

Under his editorship the magazine has won over 50 awards.

A former editor at i-D, The Face, Arena, the Observer and the Sunday Times, he is the author of the New York Times best seller Jim Morrison: Dark Star, the much-translated iPod, Therefore I Am and Mr. Jones’ Rules, as well as the editor of the classic collection of music writing, Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy. He edited a collection of journalism from Arena - Sex, Power & Travel - and collaborated with David Cameron on Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones (shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year).

He was the Chairman of the Prince’s Trust’s Fashion Rocks Monaco, is a board member of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and a Trustee of the Hay Festival. He is also the chairman of London Fashion Week: Men’s, London’s first men’s fashion week, launched in 2012 at the behest of the British Fashion Council.

In 2010 he spent a week in Afghanistan with the Armed Forces, collaborating on a book with the photographer David Bailey: British Heroes in Afghanistan.

In 2012 he had three books published: The Biographical Dictionary of Music; When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World, and the official book of U2’s 360 Tour, published in October. Since then he has published

The Eighties: One Day One Decade, a book about the 1980s told through the prism of Live Aid, Elvis Has Left The Building: The Day The King Died, Mr. Mojo, London Rules, a polemic about the greatest city in the world, Manxiety and London Sartorial.

In June 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to publishing and the fashion industry. In 2014 he was made an Honorary Professor of Glasgow Caledonian University.

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The David Bowie albums you should definitely own

David Bowie’s back catalogue is one of the boldest in rock'n'roll, fizzing with reinvention and renewal - and these are his best albums

While most of his peers softened into water-treading middle-age, David Bowie’s view on art was that it was almost worth drowning for. 

“If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” he once advised. “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about at the right place to do something exciting.”

It was a soundbite that Bowie lived by, right from the start. Flying in the face of that overused ‘chameleon’ tag, after the release of his first batch of singles in 1966, the young songwriter forced the background to blend in with him. Then, invariably, once it did, he shed his musical skin and set out in search of fresh inspiration. 

Across his career, we watched Bowie repeat this thrilling pattern countless times, right up until the release of  Blackstar  in 2016, which he recorded with long-time producer Tony Visconti and a troupe of previously unheralded New York jazzers. The catalogue he leaves behind is, quite simply, one of the boldest in rock ‘n’ roll.

When young rock bands cite their ‘experimental’ new album, it typically means they’ve learnt a new chord. Bowie’s interpretation of the word was a bonfire of the old ways. When he reinvented himself, everything that went before was scattered to the winds. 

The musical direction might flip from crunching glam to breezy plastic soul. The production might trade sumptuous for scabrous. The persona could leap from visiting spaceman (aka Ziggy Stardust) to emaciated sieg-heiling provocateur (the Thin White Duke). Even Bowie’s musicians – always a vital strand of each new era – had little job security, as the artist hired and fired according to his muse.

Bowie’s flair for reinvention made him both irresistible and inconsistent. He ditched genres and collaborators when it seemed there was more gas in the tank. He hung around longer than we’d have liked in dubious territories like electronica and dance. Now and then, his skin-shedding seemed contrived – and during his final quarter-century there’s a case he missed the target more than he hit it. 

And yet, as he proved with 2002’s excellent  Heathen , with 2013's  The Next Day  and with  Blackstar , you discounted David Bowie at your peril. While most bands settled into their groove, he refused to be tied down: one of the few marquee artists who shocked, innovated and kicked out against familiarity, right until the end. 

The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (RCA, 1972)

Tantalisingly, the reverse sleeve advised us that Bowie’s career peak was ‘To Be Played At Maximum Volume’, and these songs deserved nothing less. Right at the sweet-spot between experimentation and cracking-good tunes, this loose concept album felt like a trip, from the impending doom of Five Years to the agonised Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide . 

Unlike most concept albums, though, the abundance of pop hooks meant songs like Starman sounded just as good heard in snatches on the radio. While Bowie would never be better, you could argue the album belongs equally to guitarist Mick Ronson : listen to the outro of Moonage Daydream , fall to your knees and give praise.

Hunky Dory ( RCA, 1971)

Hunky Dory is pure gold. It’s the one floating Bowie fans reach for, and understandably so. Why, after all, would you choose to slog through the atonal nether regions of Tin Machine II when you could bask in the soul-warming sunshine that beams from Changes and Fill Your Heart ? Why soldier through Earthling when you could swoon to the grandiloquent Life On Mars ? 

Stick a pin in even Bowie’s superior later records and you’ll find a dud or two. But the songs gathered on Hunky Dory never drop the ball. It’s the one Bowie album capable of giving Ziggy Stardust a bloody nose, and the only era-defining record that also sounds great at barbecues.

Low ( RCA, 1977)

Introducing the Berlin trilogy, Low is as fractured and inconstant as Bowie’s headspace at the time – although in the case of the music, this should be taken as a compliment. Written as he clawed back from the coke blizzard of the Station To Station era, this 1977 masterpiece saw Bowie lock in with Brian Eno to craft an off-kilter tapestry of sound, roaming from caustic post-punk tracks like What In The World , to nuclear-winter instrumental soundscapes ( Warszawa ). 

Aside from instant pleasers like Sound And Vision and Speed Of Life, Low has rarely troubled jukeboxes over the years, but you could argue that it’s amongst his bravest work, without being laughed out of the pub.

Aladdin Sane ( RCA, 1973)

Following the springboard of the previous year’s Ziggy Stardust , Bowie was a paid-up megastar. As such, much of this sequel was penned as he watched America whip past the windows of the tourbus. 

In lesser hands, the circumstances might have resulted in a transitional work, but Aladdin Sane felt like anything but a dashed-off postcard, offering a run of gems from Ziggy Stardust -esque rockers ( The Jean Genie ) to flesh-creeping anti-ballads ( Lady Grinning Soul ), from blues-rooted shuffles ( Panic In Detroit ) to blue-eyed pop ( Drive-In Saturday ). Towering above it all is opener Watch That Man , whose build-back-up outro might be the most exciting sound Bowie ever made. 

Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) ( RCA, 1980)

The Berlin trilogy’s legacy was critical acclaim and falling sales, but Bowie started the new decade with a record that hit UK#1 without budging an inch on his vision. Bolstered by the spidery lines of King Crimson ’s Robert Fripp and a guest spot from Pete Townshend on Because You’re Young , Scary Monsters ’ three greatest moments came from Bowie alone: Ashes To Ashes, Fashion and Teenage Wildlife remain deathless four decades later. 

The songwriter’s commercial renaissance would ramp up with Let’s Dance in 1983, but some would say Scary Monsters is his last properly great album.

Station To Station ( RCA, 1976)

Bowie’s herculean mid-’70s drug intake meant he claimed not to remember making Station To Station . For anyone less addled, this 1976 benchmark ranks amongst his most memorable albums. 

Comprising six lengthy tracks whose raw emotions hold up a mirror to Bowie’s mindset (at this point, he was trading as the problematic Thin White Duke), Station was a marked fork left from the rug-cutting soul of Young Americans , and implied the electronic leanings that the Berlin trilogy would soon explore. For instant gratification, it has to be Golden Years , but the album demands headphones and full focus.

“Heroes” ( RCA, 1977)

Bowie made following up Low look easy, speedily delivering his second Berlin-inspired album, recorded at the city’s Hansa Studio. “Heroes” has DNA in common with its predecessor (notably on austere instrumentals like Sense Of Doubt and Neuköln ). 

But there’s more light creeping beneath the curtain here, from the title track’s glorious defiance to the barrel-house stomp of Beauty And The Beast . It’s also noteworthy for the envelope-pushing guitar parts of Robert Fripp (reportedly recorded in a single day, despite the King Crimson man having never heard the songs before).

The Man Who Sold The World ( RCA, 1971)

The first hints of Mick Ronson’s foil potential came on this ’71 gem, which binned off Bowie’s folk-pop sensibilities and set him on the path to rock stardom proper. 

While not as front-to-back brilliant as the ’70s work that came later, there’s not much wrong with the primitive punch of Black Country Rock and the intro of The Width Of A Circle . Elsewhere, the riffs of She Shook Me Cold pointed the signpost to heavy metal, while the hypnotic and unsettling title track deserves better than to live in the shadow of Nirvana ’s Unplugged version.

Diamond Dogs ( RCA, 1974)

When Bowie was denied permission to stage a theatre production based on George Orwell’s 1984 , the redundant songs ended up onto the flipside of Diamond Dogs instead. 

Those cut-and-paste roots led to a loose concept album that vaguely riffs on a vision of a decaying future, but it works, thanks to some of Bowie’s toughest songs, taking in the full-throttle title track and the trashy cyclical riffing of Rebel Rebel . We were all missing Ziggy a little too much to pet this pooch properly at the time, but Diamond Dogs deserves to viewed as very much its own animal.

Blackstar (ISO/Columbia, 2016)

Much of Bowie’s output in his final quarter-century paid lip service to his avant-garde leanings while largely sticking within fairly straight indie-rock parameters. Blackstar went much deeper, marking his most adventurous and uncompromising set since his iconic run of Eno collaborations. 

Even more than 2013's ‘comeback’ album The Next Day , these seven songs suggested the sounds inside his head were in sync with long-standing soul brother Scott Walker, though thankfully he remained on closer terms with old-fashioned melody and emotion. It was the twist in the tail we’d hoped for.

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Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer . He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality , a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more. 

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David Bowie (1947-2016)

• Music Artist

IMDbPro Starmeter See rank

• 20 wins & 35 nominations total

• Thomas Jerome Newton

• David Bowie

• David Bowie (singing voice)

• Button Eyes

• Phillip Jeffries

• Cyrus Ogilvie

• Lord Royal Highness (voice)

Personal details

• Apple Music
• Davy Jones & the King Bees
• 5′ 10½″ (1.79 m)
• January 8 , 1947
• Brixton, London, England, UK
• January 10 , 2016
• Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA (liver cancer)
• Spouses Iman April 24, 1992 - January 10, 2016 (his death, 1 child)
• Duncan Jones
• Parents Margaret Mary Jones
• Other works Single (UK #1): "Under Pressure" (recorded with Queen ).
• 12 Biographical Movies
• 15 Print Biographies
• 12 Portrayals
• 12 Interviews
• 72 Articles
• 14 Pictorials
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• Trivia His eyes were both blue. However, one pupil was permanently dilated due to an incident when he was punched by a school friend, George Underwood , when he was 15, and as a result, one eye looked darker than the other. Underwood became a successful artist and remained a friend of Bowie's for the rest of his life; in fact, Underwood designed artwork for him.
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The Meaning Behind “Golden Years” by David Bowie and the Rise of The Thin White Duke

Run for the shadows in these golden years , David Bowie sings on his 1975 Top 10 single “Golden Years.” Bowie was dealing with some serious shadows of his own in his personal life at the time, but that didn’t stop him from continuing his incredible hot stretch with the song.

What is “Golden Years” about? Why was Bowie in such rough shape at the time he wrote and recorded it? And what music legend did Bowie first imagine singing the song? Let’s take a look back at one of David Bowie’s most successful singles.

The Rise of the Thin White Duke

To fans just following along on the radio and buying his albums, David Bowie probably seemed on top of the world in late 1975. His album from earlier that year, Young Americans , had broken through to a mainstream U.S. audiences like none of his previous records, in large part thanks to its urban sound and the No. 1 single “Fame.” The stateside commercial love was icing on the cake, as he had already achieved widespread critical acclaim and cultivated a fiercely devoted fandom that would follow him as he bounced through his various recording alter egos.

Yet Bowie was struggling in his personal life. His marriage to wife Angie was on the rocks, and he was also embroiled in legal proceedings with his former management. A massive cocaine habit, coupled with little sleep and a meager diet, left him looking emaciated.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the persona that he would inhabit for his 1976 album Station to Station was known as The Thin White Duke. The look was largely borrowed from the 1975 film The Man Who Fell to Earth , in which Bowie starred as an alien. Station to Station came to life with that haunting amalgam of character and artist as the driving force. Bowie would later claim in interviews he had hardly any recollection of making the album.

Going “Golden”

Even though Bowie’s deteriorating condition made the bulk of Station to Statio n a chore, “Golden Years,” which would be chosen as the first single, came together quickly as the first track written and recorded for the album. The slinky, somewhat elusive doo-wop/funk vibe of the song was an interesting progression from the more obvious dance music/Philly soul feel of the Young Americans album.

There are two competing stories about what Bowie had in mind when writing it. His then-wife Angie claimed “Golden Years” was meant to launch her singing career, but her husband didn’t follow through. Bowie himself said in an interview with Blender ( as reported by The Bowie Bible ) he actually was going to use the song as the springboard to a writing relationship with none other than Elvis Presley:

“Apparently Elvis heard the demos, because we were both on RCA, and Colonel Tom [Parker, Presley’s manager] thought I should write Elvis some songs. There was talk between our offices that I should be introduced to Elvis and maybe start working with him in a production/writer capacity. But it never came to pass. I would have loved to have worked with him. God, I would have adored it. He did send me a note once. (Perfectly imitates Presley’s drawl) ‘All the best, and have a great tour.’ I still have that note.”

What is the Meaning of “Golden Years”?

“Golden Years” encourages a positive outlook, but it does so in a way that acknowledges the forces that might make you want to look at the glass as half-empty. The narrator keeps giving advice to get the person he’s addressing to look on the bright side: Don’t let me hear that life’s taking you nowhere .

Still, there are moments when he realizes this girl might need a little help to get to a happy ending: There’s my baby, lost, that’s all / Once I’m begging you save her little soul. Bowie also seems to be dealing out pointers to himself. When he sings, Last night they loved you / Opening doors and pulling some strings , he was perhaps anticipating a time when he wouldn’t be everybody’s darling.

Although it jockeys back and forth between cheerful promises and concerned realities, “Golden Years” seems to end on an up note when Bowie sings, I believe, oh Lord, I believe all the way . Considering his own state as he created the song, however, that just might have been an earnest prayer emerging from David Bowie in the midst of this sneakily affecting hit.

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Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The post The Meaning Behind “Golden Years” by David Bowie and the Rise of The Thin White Duke appeared first on American Songwriter .

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