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
GYBE are among my, erm, two favourite Montreal bands, Arcade Fire being the other.
From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.
Frankly, if I could get away with not having to perform, I'd be very happy. It's not my favorite thing to do.
You get to a certain age, and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines; you're not going to get played on radio, and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.
With a suit, always wear big British shoes, the ones with large welts. There's nothing worse than dainty little Italian jobs at the end of the leg line.
When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.
There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.
The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.
Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.
My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home - I think in those days we called them arguments - about who was right and who was wrong.
I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.
I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.