Innehållsförteckning för Classic Rock Special: Bowie från Classic Rock

Has there ever been a greater or more influential run of albums than the ones David Bowie released between 1970 and 1980? From mystical hard rock and extra-terrestrial glam to ‘plastic soul’ and icy Mittel European art rock, Bowie breathed new life into rock’n’roll, frequently pushing it into territories it had never previously conceived of entering. As astounding as that 10-year period was, Bowie’s entire career is no less remarkable, from his days as a wannabe superstar in Swinging London right up to the release of Blackstar, easily the greatest parting gift any musician has given the world. Yet he was so much more than a musician – he was an actor on film and on album, an internet early-adopter, an art lover, a cultural lightning rod. This special 132-page…

By March 1970, Major Tom was becoming something of an albatross to his 23-year old earthly counterpart David Bowie. The single of Space Oddity, which reached No.5 in the UK and sold nearly 150,000 copies, had pushed up fees for Bowie’s live shows and made him flush for the first time in his six-year career. But the song’s connection to the Apollo Moon landing had coloured it with a novelty status that he was finding it hard to get past. His latest single, The Prettiest Star, written for his new bride Angie and featuring Marc Bolan on lead guitar, moved only 800 copies, never denting the charts. Bowie had other troubles on his mind too. He was grieving his father, who died a few months earlier at age 56. His…

PERFECT PIANO It’s been called “the best rock‘n’roll piano ever.” The Bechstein grand at Trident Studio was on The Beatles’ Hey Jude, Queen’s Killer Queen and Elton John’s Levon, to name just three songs. And Rick Wakeman played it on Changes. “It had a cut-through sound,” Rick recalls, “beautifully balanced from top to bottom. From about 1970 through 1973 it was an absolutely perfect instrument. It went to auction when Trident closed. It had a guide price of £100,000 and it didn’t sell. Nobody truly knows what happened to it after that, because nobody had the serial number.” In the spring of 1971, when David Bowie wrote the now classic line ‘Turn and face the strange’, he created a mission statement for the next decade of his career. At the…

One afternoon in July 1977, David Bowie was looking out of the window of Hansa Studio in Berlin when he noticed a couple kissing near the Berlin Wall. “I always said it was a couple of lovers by the Wall that prompted the idea for “Heroes”,” Bowie tells Classic Rock. “Actually, it was [Bowie producer] Tony Visconti and his girlfriend. Tony was married at the time, so I couldn’t talk about it. But I can now say that the lovers were Tony and a German girl [Antonia Maass] that he’d met while we were in Berlin. I think possibly his marriage was in the last few months. And it was very touching because I could see that Tony was very much in love with this girl, and it was that…

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) Bowie’s first major screen role, as an extraterrestrial tourist lost in the alien weirdness of America is rich in autobiographical echoes. Director Nicolas Roeg was a perfect fit for Bowie: both were visionary English mavericks who enjoyed a fertile imperial phase of creative originality and critical acclaim across the 1970s, each bringing avant-garde methods into the mainstream. Bowie arrived for the New Mexico shoot during a period of heavy cocaine use, and reportedly struggled to keep his promise to Roeg not to use drugs on set. “I was stoned out of my mind from beginning to end,” he later claimed. Even if true, he still gives a radiant and magnetic star turn as Thomas Jerome Newton, a homesick alien trying to save his…

David Bowie (PHILIPS, 1969) Securing a new record contract and entering into the orbit of sometime bandmate/producer Tony Visconti for the first time, the album universally known as Space Oddity was a few notches above Bowie’s debut, even if there was far better to come, and soon. The centrepiece, of course, was his extraordinary tale of an astronaut’s blast-off and eventual burnout: an entire sci-fi movie told in five minutes flat, still icily brilliant after all these years. Elsewhere, Bowie settles a little too often on a slight brand of psych-folk, but there are further highlights, including the gloriously chaotic seven-minute gang-chant finale, Memory Of AFree Festival, inspired by a real-life gathering in Croydon Recreation Ground. Black Tie White Noise (SAVAGE, 1993) By the early 90s, any uptick was seized…

The London that David Bowie was born into on January 8, 1947 still bore the scars of World War II. This was a landscape pockmarked by bombsites, the detritus of destruction and inhabited by a shell-shocked population living with rationing, austerity and making do. Then again, nothing was conventional about him right from the start. Born David Robert Jones in Brixton, south London to Haywood ‘John’ Jones – a PR executive for the children’s charity Barnardo’s – and cinema usherette Margaret ‘Peggy’ Burns, the future Starman was eight months old before his parents married. Both had children from previous relationships and his father had had showbiz ambitions of his own when he tried to launch his previous wife, Hilda, as a singer. His efforts came to naught. By all accounts,…

“I’m very happy with Ziggy. He was a very successful character and I think that I played him well.” Half a century on from his creation, Ziggy Stardust arguably remains the most beloved character from David Bowie’s illustrious sevendecade career. Combining glamour and a thenoutrageous sexuality, this bisexual alien rock star fell to earth as the 60s dream had turned sour in the wake of Altamont, and the economic boom of the previous decade had finally burst. The music scene was becoming as grim as the outside world. Clive Dunn’s mawkish single, Grandad topped the charts at the start of 1971 while Benny Hill’s Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) brought it to a close. By 1972, the likes of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy hit the top spot…

Released in the summer of 1974, Diamond Dogs found David Bowie navigating the dog days of the glam-rock era – a hot and sultry period before the cultural weather broke.Having surfed and defined the pop zeitgeist about as well as any individual star since Elvis Presley, he was now cresting the last stretch of a wave as it came crashing into shore. Diamond Dogs was a resounding commercial success – No.1 in the UK, No.5 in the US. But the album was marked down at the time. “A rather grandiose mood piece… It’s okay, you know, but is it really necessary?” was the NME’s verdict. And, retrospectively, it tends to get brushed aside in the grand sweep of things as a transitional album, marking the point in Bowie’s artistic timeline…

By the end of the 1970s, Major Tom had been ‘sitting in a tin can’ for 10 years, his circuits all but dead. Meanwhile, back at ground control, his alter-ego had turned into a succession of slightly more terrestrial sorts: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke. Then, just when it seemed that everyone’s favourite rock’n’roll astronaut would remain marooned in space for ever, he re-entered our orbit. First there was the stark ’79 remake of Space Oddity. Next, the following year, came Ashes To Ashes, the hypnotic and funky update and centerpiece of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Not only did both song and album carry David Bowie back to the top of the charts, establishing his 80s artistic reputation, it also served as a powerful look back…

What next? 2013’s The Next Day did its job like no David Bowie album since Let’s Dance, back in the last century. His first British No.1 since 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, it was also his highest charting album in the US where it soared to No.2. Moreover, for all that The Next Day took fewer chances than much of his 21st Century output, it was objectively a superior effort: the songs were better. Having retreated – though not retired – from public life since his heart attack of 2004, the release of The Next Day came as a surprise. Bowie had regained his aura of mystery. The question remained, though. What next? With no touring duties to fulfil and no interviews to give, Bowie submerged with as little fuss…

STYL’ LEADER “David Bowie plays Stylophone on Space Oddity !” trumpeted the magazine ad, which pictured the curlyheaded singer poised thoughtfully above the device – a miniature toy keyboard played with a pen-like stylus. Invented by Brian Jarvis in 1967 and promoted on TV by Aussie entertainer Rolf Harris, the “pocket electric organ” sold millions in the early 70s. Kids loved it, as did budding electronic musicians (Kraftwerk, Pulp and Daft Punk were eventual users). But “the greatest craze since the yo-yo” began with Bowie and those interstellar noises on SpaceOddity. In the darkness of London’s Casino Cinerama, a 21-year-old David Bowie stared at the space embryo floating across the theatre’s huge, 70mm screen. It was summer 1968, and this was the third time the singer-songwriter had been to see…

JANUARY, 1971. THERE was trouble in outer space. Major Tom’s signal was growing fainter by the day. And Ziggy Stardust was still an undefined blip on the interstellar radar. Meanwhile, back at ground control, David Bowie was staring at the grey sky outside his Beckenham flat and worrying about his career. His last single, The Prettiest Star, had been a flop, failing to build on the momentum of Space Oddity. His third album, The Man Who Sold The World, was languishing in the vaults of Mercury Records without a firm release date. His guitarist, Mick Ronson, had moved from London back to Hull to work as a gardener. Meanwhile, Bowie had fired his manager of five years, Ken Pitt. Although Pitt’s replacement, the cigar-chomping Tony Defries, had offered the age-old…

On September 10 1972, David Bowie and wife Angie – “Britain’s most famous bisexual couple” – boarded the Queen Elizabeth 2 at Southampton Docks bound for New York City. Where were the Spiders? Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey joined them a week later in NYC where a chartered Greyhound bus would take them on tour. First stop: Cleveland, Ohio. As the bus pulled away from Grand Army Plaza, awoman on the sidewalk pulled down her skirt and defecated into a paper bag. Welcome to America. It wasn’t Bowie’s first stateside visit. Three months earlier, Dave’n’Ange had tottered down Pennsylvania Plaza in their freak flamed-hair finery to see Elvis Presley at Madison Square Garden. They sat next to fellow VIPs John Lennon, Led Zeppelin, Simon and Garfunkel and Bob…

I’ve gone through some pretty interesting changes”, Bowie told NME’s Andrew O’Grady in 1975. “Rock and roll certainly hasn’t fulfilled its original promise… it’s just become one more whirling deity, right? Going around that never-decreasing circle. Rock and roll is dead. It’s a toothless old woman. It’s really embarrassing”. What he was saying wasn’t a million miles away from what punk rockers would soon shout. But this was 1975, and Bowie had become a soul man. His blue-eyed – or as he put it, “plastic” – soul switched a generation of white boys on to the joy and pain of black music. His alleged inauthenticity was of no significance. He sang it, felt it, transmitted it. The listener was moved by the result, never mind the process. The influence of…

A new David Bowie was born on a beach near Hastings in the summer of 1980. Bowie was on location filming the video for Ashes To Ashes, the song that would become his second No.1 single when something happened, he said, that profoundly changed him. Director David Mallet was filming Bowie as he walked up the beach dressed in the pierrot outfit he wore on the cover of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) when an old man and his dog walked into shot. The director and the crew yelled at the old guy, asking him to get out of the way. The man –who probably walked there every day – was unfazed: “Screw you,” he said, “this is my beach”. So Bowie took a seat next to Mallet and waited…

The London Boys B-side of Rubber Band, 1966 The most sophisticated of all Bowie’s early recordings, this frank portrait of a 17-yearold’s attraction – like a moth to a flame – to the capital’s burgeoning mod scene and its strutting peacock ‘faces’ was first recorded back in 1965. Alive favourite with a compelling lyric, it was originally passed over for release after producer Tony Hatch raised concerns about its references to drugs (specifically pills). Redolent of The Kinks, but with the bite of kitchen-sink drama, The London Boys nearly saw its verses repurposed as linking passages between Pin Ups’ tracks in 1973, but was ultimately revisited for 2021’s Toy. Space Oddity Single, 1969 TONY IOMMI, Black Sabbath “It’s such a timeless song. The concept is brilliant, and it was put…

While most of his peers softened into water-treading middle-age, David Bowie’s view on art was that it was almost worth drowning for. “If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” he once advised. “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about at the right place to do something exciting.” It was a soundbite that Bowie lived by. Flying in the face of that tiresome ‘chameleon’ tag, the songwriter preferred to innovate and let the rock landscape blend in with him. Then, once that musical skin became too snug,…