David Bowie
David Bowie
David Robert Jones, better known by his stage name David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, regarded by critics and musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, his music and stagecraft significantly influencing popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world's best-selling music...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth8 January 1947
CityLondon, England
I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.
I started playing around with local rock band swith the alto. And then, in a nutshell, somebody fell ill one night, the lead singer of one of the bands, and they knew I could sing, so they asked me if I would stand in. And I quite enjoyed it, actually, I must say, at 14. It was a real trip to have girls wave at you and smile and everything just because you opened your mouth and sang.
When I was 9 years old, I wanted to be the baritone sax player in the Little Richard band.
I can't keep my fingers out of any pies.
I think everything that I learned about stagecraft and carrying through - creating a through point for a theatrical device.
I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.
I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time.
Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.
Rather than really have, like a close relationship to anything that's coming out today, people are just, they've got it on as background music. It's kind of the same way the cabdrivers use music; it's very disposable.
The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.
If I wasn't going through a thing where I was also being my characters offstage, uh, I'm much happier just wearing the most low-profile things that I can come up with just so I can get down the street....
I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.
People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, "This guy's hot you should buy this record."
I never really had much of an interest in fashion.