On Sunday, the great artist David Bowie (Photo ©David Shankbone) passed away. He had cancer for some time but concealed his illness.
David Robert Jones, this is his birth name, was born on January 8, 1947, in London, England. Ever since he was a child, he showed a talent for music and, with the help of his half-brother Terry Burns, started studying it seriously.
In the ’60s, David Bowie was a member of some musical bands and then started an activity as a solo singer. His first album, “David Bowie”, came out in 1967 and received positive reviews but without having great commercial success. At that time, he also began working as an actor.
The success for David Bowie came in 1969 with the album “Space Oddity”. The BBC broadcast the song of the same name to accompany the services on the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Since then, the song has been associated with space exploration, so much so that in 2013 the astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a version with slightly different lyrics on the International Space Station.
In the following decades, David Bowie released a series of albums but that’s just a long series of titles that testify to the huge amount of songs written and sung by the artist. Those are data easily traceable but what really matters is the enormous influence that David Bowie had in the music world with his ability to experiment and reinvent himself over and over again.
Over the decades, David Bowie explored various musical genres but those are just labels and it’s really one of the cases where they’re limiting. Bowie created personas that became real alter egos, from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke, which became a nickname.
Even in the cinema world David Bowie left his mark in his own way in movies such as “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976), “The Hunger” (1983), “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983), “Labyrinth” (1986), “Absolute Beginners” (1986) and many more.
David Bowie has been married twice. In 1970 he married Mary Angela “Angie” Barnett, a marriage that lasted until 1980. She gave him his son Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, known as Duncan Jones and now a popular director. In 1992 he married Iman and with her, he had his daughter Alexandria Zahra Jones.
David Bowie’s influences goes far beyond the world of music and have been extensively analyzed by many experts over the years. He was an artist who in many ways left a mark in the arts that is impossible to quantify. The high acclaim received by his album “Blackstar”, released in recent days, is only a small testimony.
