Pat Gilbert - Bowie: The Illustrated Story

Bowie surveys the audience at the 2002 Meltdown Festival in London, which he curated, and at which he performed in full his 1977 album Low alongside his then latest work, Heathen.

But one thing remained constant: something in Bowies music spoke directly, and intimately, to those who heard it. No one familiar with his catalog will ever forget the haunting image of the tragic astronaut Major Tom in his first hit, Space Oddity, the girl with the mousey hair in Life on Mars?, the lovers kissing by the Berlin Wall in Heroes, or the Asian siren who sensuously whispers, Shhh shut your mouth in China Girl. Nor will they ever forget the timeless, bewitching melodies of songs such as Starman, Golden Years, Ashes to Ashes, Loving the Alien, or Little Wonder.

But while Bowies extraordinary body of recorded work arguably remains unrivaled in musicas does his influence on street fashionhis work went way beyond the rock and pop world. From his teenage years, he was fascinated by film and theater, and in the 1970s and 1980s he enjoyed a parallel career as an actor, giving classic performances as John Merrick in the Broadway staging of The Elephant Man in 1980 and as the conflicted British army officer in 1983s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. It was his starring role as the visiting alien in the 1975 cult movie The Man Who Fell to Earth that was his big-screen triumph, his character Thomas Newton blending with his own mid-70s persona to create the otherworldly, drug-addicted Thin White Duke.

After Bowies commercial peak in the mid-1980s with Lets Dance and Tonight and the hugely lucrative world tours that followed, his boundless imagination and artistic restlessness never waned, and lesser-selling later albums such as 1. Outside, Earthling, and Reality demonstrated that hed lost none of his gift for peerless artistry that had informed his 1970s and 1980s canon. His last two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, suggested that he still had so much more to give the world had his life not been cut short by cancer. But then, as his friend and producer Tony Visconti points out, even Bowies death was turned into a powerful artistic statement: the video for the Blackstar single Lazarus showed him writhing on a hospital bed, blindfolded, mouthing the chilling lyric, Look up here, Im in heaven.

Bowie was a one-off, a pioneer, a messenger, a starman, a charming English gentleman, and a genius. But for all his ever-changing looks, extraordinary musical innovations, and effortless personification of cool, he was also the suburban London boy next door who, as the story in this book shows, transformed himself by sheer willpower into an exotic, outlandish creature with a healthy and enthusiastic disregard for straight societys hang-ups and norms. Perhaps Bowies death hit us so hard because, somewhere deep down in our souls, we know he was actually just one of us.

But, of course, he wasnt. He was David Bowie.

Pat Gilbert
London, February 2017

Angie, Zowie, and David at a press conference at the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam, February 7, 1974.

CHAPTER 1

19471967

London Boy

I ts perhaps fitting that David Bowie, an artist who combined music, image, theater, and myth with such boldness and originality, should have had a touch of the exotic in his background. At twenty-one years old, his father Haywood Jones, known as John, inherited a sizeable sum of money, which he invested inof all the options available in 1930s Depression-era Britaina nightclub revue featuring his first wife, Hilda. Clearly the young Jones had a liking for music and colorful characters, for when that venture failed, he ploughed the 1,000 he had left into a glitzy piano bar in Londons West End. But by the time World War II arrived in 1939, hed lost all his money and taken a clerical job at Dr. Barnardos, a famous charity that provided homes for abandoned and abused children.

Bowies father left his job to fight in the war but returned to Dr. Barnardos in 1945. Soon afterward, he met a waitress named Peggy Burns while on business in Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Peggy already had a son, Terry, born in 1937, and a wartime daughter, Myra, whod been given up for adoption. While the couple waited for Johns divorce from Hilda to be finalized, they settled at 40 Stansfield Road, a Victorian house in inner-city Brixton that John had bought cheaply at the end of the war for 500. It was there that Peggy gave birth to a son, David Robert Jones, on January 8, 1947. Fair haired and nice looking, he would be the last addition to the family.