David Bowie
David Bowie
David Robert Jones, better known by his stage name David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, regarded by critics and musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, his music and stagecraft significantly influencing popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world's best-selling music...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth8 January 1947
CityLondon, England
He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar.
Hitler was the first superstar.
Nothing prepared me for your smile
I woke up one day and realized I was a closet hetero
I don't make changes to confuse anyone. I'm just searching. That's what causes me to change. I'm just searching for myself.
It's true -- I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.
Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of "The Elephant Man" and just recently collaborated on "Lazarus," an off-Broadway musical that's a sequel to his 1976 role in the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth."
I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the '70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else.
I think that the history of rock could be recycled in a different way and brought back into focus without the luggage that comes along with it.
I never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you're a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don't see so much of that anymore.
And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.
I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.
If I hadn't had my children, I would have been discouraged a lot quicker. It would have been much more easy for me to say, "You know what, let the whole thing go. Have a good time, because these people, this place - it's just not worth it." You know? I can't do that anymore. I look into those eyes and they look at me so trustingly that I'm gonna make sure that [they're thinking], "Hey, you did a good thing bringing me into the world, daddy. I'm going to have a great life!"