7 David Bowie 7Bowie had similarly diverse tastes regarding the work of
others, being an admirer of the showmanship of British
actor and musician Anthony Newley as well as the romantic
lyricism of Belgian musician Jacques Brel.
During the mod era of the 1960s Bowie fronted various
bands from whose shadow he—having renamed himself to
avoid confusion with the singer of the Monkees—emerged
as a solo singer-songwriter. “Space Oddity,” the science-
fiction single that marks the real beginning of his career,
reached the Top Ten in Britain in 1969, the song’s well-
timed release coming just after the Apollo 11 Moon mission.
Bowie’s third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970),
displayed an unprecedented hybrid of folk, art rock, and
heavy metal sounds. But it wasn’t until Hunky Dory (1971)
that Bowie became truly popular, the hit single “Changes”
being the prime vector of that fame.
The singer’s ever-changing appearance, too, created a
record-selling buzz. At once lighthearted and portentous,
Bowie’s dramatic chameleonlike approach was tailor-made
for the 1970s, his signature decade. Bowie created a series
of inspired, daringly grandiose pastiches that insisted on
utopia by depicting its alternative as inferno, beginning with
the emblematic rock-star martyr fantasy The Rise and Fall of
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). In the process
he stayed so hard on the heels of the zeitgeist that the doom-
saying of Diamond Dogs (1974) and the disco romanticism of
Young Americans (1975) were released less than a year apart.
Bowie’s public disclosure of his bisexuality, rather than
derailing his growing popularity, boosted his enigmatic allure.
Similarly, his later recantation of such sexual proclivities
had no negative affect on his career. Yet all this public display
of personal matters took a private toll. By 1977 Bowie had
decamped, ditching his idiosyncratic version of the main-
stream for the avant-garde austerities of the minimalist album
Low, a collaboration in Berlin with Brian Eno, the influential