Remembering David Bowie on His 73rd Birthday
- hottubsandskeletons
- Jan 8, 2020
- 5 min read
David Bowie is known for his unique music, fashion sense, and acting career, but there is much more about Bowie than is usually realized. His life experiences built his creativity into what he has left behind for people to enjoy and cherish.
Bowie was born January 8, 1947 to the name of David Robert Jones. His mother, Margaret Marry, and father, Haywood Stenton Jones, lived in Brixton, South London at the time of his birth. Even at the age of six, Bowie was recognized as a gifted and defiant child by his school, and by the age of eight, he was singing in choir and playing the recorder. In later years, his father brought home a few 45s by Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, The Teenagers, The Platters, and Little Richard. This was Bowie’s first spark of passion towards music, specifically when he listened to the song “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard which he later stated that he “heard God” through this song.
Bowie attended Ravens Wood High School, formerly known as Bromley Technical High School where he studied music, art, and design. During his years at Bromley, his half-brother introduced him to modern jazz. From there he decided to learn the saxophone, his mother gifting him the instrument in 1961.
During his high school years, he and his friend George Underwood got into a fight about a girl, and ended with Underwood punching Bowie in his left eye. This resulted in a permanent injury by the name of anisocoria (unequal size of one’s pupils that only affects 20% of the population). Most people are born with this condition, but in Bowie’s case, it was caused by a bad migraine. Anisocoria makes it appear as if one of his eyes is discolored, but that is just due to the size of his pupil. Typically, this condition is harmless, but for Bowie, it led to limited sight out of his eye. Despite Bowie and Underwood’s high school fist fight, they remained friends, and during the same year, they started a band. Underwood also later went on to design a few of Bowie’s early album covers.
In 1962, he formed his first band with Underwood called the Konrads, which was named after Lisa Konrad who was an olympic swimmer in 1960. In October of 1965, they released a single in the UK titled “Baby It’s Too Late Now/I’m Over You” on the CBS label, and in December of 1966, they released a single in the U.S. - “I Don’t Know How Much/I Thought Of You Last Night.” After a few of the band’s releases, Bowie decided to leave the band due to his musical differences. The band continued without him and later went on tour with The Rolling Stones.
Once Bowie left The Konrads, he further pursued his dream of becoming a pop star by joining a various amount of bands such as The King Bees, The Manish Boys, The Lower Third, The Buzz, and The Riot Squad. Throughout his journey of finding a band he was satisfied with, he was going by the name of Davy Jones, but later decided to change it due to confusion with Davy Jones from the Monkees. He concluded apon David Bowie which was influenced by an American pioneer named James Bowie. After realizing he didn’t fit with any of the bands he had been in, he went solo. He released a handful of singles in the mid-1960s, but they never took off his career.
In 1967, he enrolled in a dance class in London, where he met Lindsey Kemp. They quickly became coworkers and great friends. Bowie credited him for blossoming his interest in his image, which later created his stage characters and outfits. As Kemp and Bowie continued to work together, Bowie met Hermione Farthingale via a music video Kemp asked him to dance in. Not too long after the two of them met, Farthingale and Bowie began dating, and they moved into a flat together in London.
Farthingale formed a group with Bowie and John Hutchinson in 1968. They performed a small amount of concerts, consisting of poetry and mime with a folk sound. Though in early 1969, the band and couple broke up and Farthingale moved to Norway. From this breakup emerged one of Bowie’s most popular songs, “Life on Mars?” as well as “Letters to Hermione” and “Space Oddity.” “Space Oddity” rose to the top five in the UK. Following these songs, he released his second album as a self-titled album in the UK, but was later named Man of Words/Man of Music in the US. During the time of its release, the album’s success rate was not in Bowie’s favor.
The Man Who Sold the World was released in 1970, and the lyrical content within the album hinted to his biological inheritance of schizophrenia. During the album’s tour, Bowie developed his famous character of Ziggy Stardust. The surname Stardust came from his idea of wanting to take the image of space as well as the “Legendary Stardust Cowboy,” and Ziggy was inspired by Iggy Pop. Ziggy Stardust’s first appearance on stage was in February of 1972. A year after his tour, Aladdin Sane was released which was charted in the UK and was his first number one album.
Once Bowie’s solo career took off, a documentary was made about him in 1975, highlighting his cocaine addiction and furthering public information about his paranoia. His interest in acting was sparked when he began creating his stage characters, but the interest grew even more after the film was made about him. Bowie has acted in many movies, a few being Labyrinth, Basquiat, The Hunger, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and even doing a voice in Spongebob Squarepants.
Bowie continued releasing albums along side new characters, his most popular being: Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, A Thin White Duke, Halloween Jack, Jareth the Goblin King, Thomas Jerome Newton, and Aladdin Sane.
Though he was good at putting on different faces on stage, Bowie had personal and family issues that kept building on his shoulders. In 1985, his half-brother, who was also diagnosed with schizophrenia, escaped from his psychiatric hospital and committed suicide by stepping in front of a moving train. Three of his aunts were diagnosed with schizophrenia, one getting “treated” with a lobotomy and one consistently going in and out of mental hospitals, who died in her thirties. His mother also struggled with a small amount of schizophrenia, which inserted a fear into Bowie’s head at a very young age that one day he would become mad. He fought with this fear his whole life, some moments worse than others. He contributed in many different drugs all throughout is fame, his drug of choice being cocaine, but because of his life-long fear, he never experimented with LSD. Though this being a great burden on Bowie, he learned to channel it through creativity, pouring it into his music. He continued releasing music throughout his lifetime, adding up to 27 studio albums, 11 live albums, 128 singles, 51 compilation albums, and 72 music videos.
On January 10, 2016, Bowie died from liver cancer. Since his death, murals, shrines, tribute concerts, and other forms of artwork has emerged to express how much his fans adored him, world-wide.
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