During his 50th birthday at Madison Square Garden, David Bowie addressed the crowd: “I don’t know where I’m going from here but I promise it won’t be boring.”

This declaration to transform remained Bowie’s warranty to always be pop’s scandalous trendsetter. He was, above anything else, a collector of identities. The world wheezed when attempting to comprehend his constant state of evolution. From the Laughing Gnome to Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane to The Thin White Duke to Jareth the Goblin King, Bowie was the definitive demagogue of form.

Yet, despite his veracious desire to pilot art’s future, the pop alien’s legacy has left an inexcusable cultural imprint spanning over five pervasive decades in music, film and fashion. And while each of his strides were as perfectly premeditated as the last, there were moments of real tectonic action in his irrefutably curious career. Time may have changed David Bowie, but we can now trace his time spent on this planet with amorous reverence. Here are but a handful of those epochal ch-ch-ch-changes.

The punch that dilated his left eye

Bowie’s iconoclastic look was a facet that evolved with his change in character throughout the decades. Yet before Bowie was even Bowie – when he was David Robert Jones, a schoolboy at Bromley Technical in 1962 – he suffered a severe injury that permanently remodelled his face.

When fighting over a girl, a close friend, George Underwood punched the young Bowie in the left eye. It was feared that the rockstar in training would be left partially blind, yet after a series of operations the doctors were successful in saving the pupil’s pupil. Bowie was left with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated eye the colour of milky seawater.

This act of violence did anything but detract from Bowie’s external aura and only heightened his extraterrestrial semblance. Underwood and Bowie remained friends and later collaborated on the singer’s artwork for early albums.

Space Oddity

After a staggered stop/start as a trailblazing frontman it wasn’t until Bowie’s second album, David Bowie, in 1969, that he received his first UK Top 5 hit, Space Oddity. Originally utilised in a promotional film aiming to showcase Bowie’s talents as an artist, the song reappeared in full form, re-recorded and reproduced, for an album he hoped would be his international breakthrough. Space Oddity, a science-fiction ballad about astronaut, Major Tom, was an impeccably timed release for Bowie.

Its ambiguous folk prog lampooning resonated during a time where space travel was at its topical peak. The United States Apollo 11 mission to the moon launched five days later with the song almost soundtracking the highly documented trip. And while it’s arbitrary to suggest that Space Oddity was the real kickstarter to Bowie’s fruitful career, the song has become eulogised as one of his greatest ever releases.

Hunky Dory

This was the fourth album by Bowie, and it was the first to fully illustrate the artist’s thirst for shock. Recorded in the summer of 1971 and released by RCA Records, Hunky Dory exhibited Bowie’s hotchpotch approach to songwriting. Its display of folk mangled proto-punk rock’n’roll prog was elegantly trussed together by the record’s sexually stirring cover art.

Cleverly splicing high art with cockney tinged, semi-autobiographical poetry, this was the moment that Bowie began to sell the idea of sex in all its androgynous nonconformity. Tracks like Changes and Queen Bitch kindled an rebellious inferno in Britain’s disenchanted youth; one that forced you to embrace the artistic zeal of 70s counter culture. Hunky Dory has since gone on to be regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time, with Bowie himself deeming it to be one of the most important of his career.

Ziggy Startdust and the Spiders from Mars: the Retirement 

‘Not only is this the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show we’ll ever do,’ Bowie announced to a mouth gaping Hammersmith audience in 1973. By this point, his notoriety as a pop star had already been fully realised under the persona of Ziggy Stardust, a theatrically conceptual frontman.

Frequently photographed wearing Kansai Yamamoto’s komodo themed ‘man-dresses’, Ziggy’s androgynous sex appeal symbolised a retaliation against the norm. Instead, Ziggy was a liberation, an emancipation that resonated with a jilted generation. So it was this news at the Hammersmith Odeon that was met with genuine grief and confusion (captured excellently by the D.A. Pennebaker documentary of the actual gig). Many assumed Bowie was announcing his own retirement, yet he was already formulating his next mammoth career move.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

By 1976, Bowie was powdered nose deep in yet another persona, The Thin White Duke. The ‘Duke,’ while aesthetically toned down in relaxed cabaret garb, captured Bowie at his most staunchly paranoid state. Cocaine was omnipresent for the singer throughout the 70s and it was starting to show its wear. Somehow, Bowie kept it together and released multiple records disassociating himself from the publicly triumphant Ziggy Stardust.

The success of Aladdin Sane, followed by the ‘plastic soul’ period of Young Americans and the rejigged funk of Station to Station, painted a Bowie addicted to melancholic balladry and romantic occultism. And channeling through this Duke character, Bowie masterfully starred in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth; a surreal depiction of an insecure universe both aggressive and visually stunning. This was Bowie’s first starring role in a motion picture.

Despite not soundtracking Roeg’s cult classic, he would later go on to appear in the credits of movies including Tony Scott’s erotic horror The Hunger, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

The Berlin Years

By the tail end of the 70s, Bowie was wiped. His drug addiction had left him perplexed and world-wary (caught almost too honestly in Alan Yentob’s 1975 documentary Cracked Actor). In order to clean up his act and revitalise his career, Bowie moved first to Switzerland before settling west of the Berlin Wall in Schöneberg.

It seems almost crass to accumulate Bowie’s creative output during this time under such a broad header as ‘The Berlin Years,’ yet throughout this time, Bowie shared his apartment with Iggy Pop (another recovering household name) and released some of his most far-reaching music. Co-produced by Tony Visconti and working very closely with Brian Eno, Bowie issued a triptych of albums, Low, Heroes and Lodger. Bowie also co-wrote Iggy’s debut solo album, The Idiot. The music produced during this period, heavily influenced by minimal and krautrock, would transpire to be some of Bowie’s finest.

Performing as The Elephant Man

Playing John Merrick, The Elephant Man, at the Denver Centre of Performing Arts in 1980 was Bowie’s first attempt at acting onstage in a conventional role. It was apt for an artist such as Bowie to play a physically misshapen human, denounced as a monster yet misconceived and emotionally complex.

The performance was a sellout, with Bowie receiving multiple standing ovations for his concise interpretation of Merrick. And what The Elephant Man accentuated was not just how malleable Bowie’s personas could be, but how constantly distinct and direct Bowie allowed himself to be in public.

Live Aid

Having unshackled himself from the confines of drug abuse, Bowie made several successful stabs at the mainstream, which were greeted with both praise and cynicism. Yet no other release during this time did as much charitable good as his 1985 collaboration with Mick Jagger for a cover of Martha and the Vandella’s 1964 hit Dancing in the Street. The music video, later parodied in an episode of Family Guy, showcased two egotistical megastars literally having a dad dance off on an empty street. Nonetheless, all of the collab’s profits went towards the Live Aid famine and relief cause and paved the way for Bowie’s blistering performance at Wembley Stadium in the same year.

The Next Day

Regardless of releasing a slew of records, including his work with the vehemently underrated heavy rock supergroup, Tin Machine, the late 90s and noughties for Bowie were noticeably muted. He had this tendency to appear, vanish and reappear. In one instance he would be a soft spoken purveyor of industrial techno. In another he would be living through the guise of a neoclassicist computer game character.

Yet following a heart attack in 2004, Bowie had made the bold yet permanent decision to retire from touring. It seemed like one of the most admirable and unfortunate decisions the artist should have to make. But this hiatus lasted less than a decade as an unexpected announcement of a new record, The Next Day, in 2013 proved Bowie still had the capacity to cause cultural hysteria.

David Bowie is: a V&A Retrospective

As Bowie devised his 2013 comeback with The Next Day, a David Bowie retrospective was installed at the V&A Museum. Titled David Bowie Is… it featured more than 300 Bowie related objects including handwritten lyrics, original costumes, photography, music videos, films, set designs and instruments.

While this was not a project curated by Bowie himself, this exhibition stands to be the most encompassing of his career from its inception to present day. It underscored the gravity of his influence over the decades and how he didn’t just accompany the zeitgeist, he forged its future.

Blackstar

This calculated farewell gift came days before Bowie lost to an eighteen month fight from liver cancer. The sheer gravitas of ideas, of deviation, of refusal to integrate with a single form encompasses everything Bowie represented. This, his twenty-eighth and final studio album, is a prophetic gong for the future bogged down with cryptic vagary. What Bowie achieved with Blackstar is the continuation of his legacy from beyond the grave.

Here, he gracefully transcends from bleak sax honks to electronic noise to stuttered elliptical vocals; amorphous and giddy with ideas. Disfiguring genres has been a knack of his since the beginning, but it’s with Blackstar that it’s at its most extreme. The discourse around this record is only in its infancy and has added yet another kaleidoscopic gradient to David Bowie’s index of alter-egos. It’s the most well-thought-out adieu any fan could ask for. 

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