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David Bowie 1998 caricature

September 10, 1998 - Multi-talented musician and actor David Bowie celebrates his 60th birthday.

Singer David Bowie is routinely described as a chameleon of pop music, but this does not do justice to the versatility and intelligence of a performer who has held on to his place at the top of the mainstream music industry for decades by daring to experiment at its fringes. The British musician, songwriter and producer will turn 60 on January 8, 2007.

In 2004 time appeared to catch up with the ever-youthful Bowie after he broke off a tour to undergo emergency heart surgery. Since then, however, he has returned to answer critics of his acting style with an acclaimed part in the film, The Prestige. But then Bowie has always pursued his diverse creative interests according to his own agenda.

Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, in 1947, and spent his formative years in Bromley, Kent. As a boy, one eye was damaged in a playground fight, leaving him with not only a permanently dilated pupil but also different-coloured eyes. A key influence was his half-brother Terry, whose schizophrenic illness and later suicide feature in several Bowie songs.

Despite initially dreaming of playing as a saxophonist, he launched his music career as a vocalist for blues groups including The King Bees and The Mannish Boys while working a day job as a commercial artist. In 1966 he changed his name to David Bowie -- after Alamo hero Jim Bowie and his famous Bowie knife -- to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees. He founded the Beckenham Arts Club, but his focus shifted inevitably to music after the success of his Space Oddity album in 1969.

The early 1970s were a period of intense experimentation. He followed Hunky Dory (1971) with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), in which he developed his first alter ego, the androgynous extraterrestrial rock star, Ziggy Stardust. Bowie frustrated glam-rock fans by reinventing himself as the Thin White Duke of his “plastic soul” era that included Fame, Young Americans and the album Station to Station.

Despite his commercial success, however, his personal life was unravelling. He vanished to Berlin to cure himself of drug addiction, divorced first wife Angie, with whom he had had a son, Zowie (now Duncan), and eventually returned to collaborate with producer Brian Eno on the 1977 albums Low, and Heroes, and Lodgers two years later. Scary Monsters was a hit in 1980, but nothing had prepared Bowie for the impact of Let’s Dance in 1983, a huge commercial success but one that was seen as an artistic compromise for the singer.

Though Bowie has shown an uncanny sense of the zeitgeist, he has been most successful when pursuing his own intellectual and creative interests within this context: his 1990s band Tin Machine eventually foundered on poor reviews and internal disagreements, leaving Bowie to pursue a solo career that has included Black Tie White Noise, and Outside, and in 2002 the darkly atmospheric Heathen showed he was not done with yet.

He achieved critical acclaim in his first major film role, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, in 1976, and also on the Broadway stage in 1990, when he appeared as John Merrick in The Elephant Man. Subsequent movie roles have incuded Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (1993), and Andy Warhol in Basquiat (1996).

As one of the most influential rock musicians of all time, with sales of over 135 million records, Bowie can be said to have translated what he once called his “repulsive need to be something more than human” into an impressive body of work that has transcended several genres.

Since 1992 Bowie has been married to Somali-born model Iman, with whom he has a six-year-old daughter, Alexandria.

Sources
PUBLISHED: 10/9/1998; STORY: Joanna Griffin; PICTURES: Bob Hoare
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