Things I didn't know about Bowie until recently.......

Watching the recent documentary about Bowie, Five Years, the main thing that struck me was how much and rapidly he'd changed his various images as a solo performer, and how profuse his albums were.

But included  here are other things that have either surprised me lately, or that I'd forgotten that I knew, or that wouldn't have made sense at the time or been so interesting, only with hindsight.......

He went to school with Peter Frampton, in fact Frampton's father was a teacher and head of the art dept. at his school and encouraged them both in their musical careers.

George Underwood, the boy who accidentally gave him the eye injury which has left his left pupil permanently fully dilated, was later in one of his early bands; they had been fighting over a girl, but made it up later; Underwood also created the artwork on Bowie's first albums.

Guitar wasn't one of his first instruments - piano, sax, ukelele, tea-chest bass, all came first. His half-brother Terry Burns introduced him to jazz, Mingus and Coltrane. But the Konrads, his first band with Underwood when he was 15, was guitar based rock and roll, with anything from four to eight members.

He says he used to dream of becoming Mick Jagger - didn't of course, though he did sing the fundraising 'Dancing in the Street' with him. Although he might have dreamed of being a Rolling Stone, he didn't want to be a Monkee and so changed his name from David Jones to Bowie after the frontiersman Jim Bowie, who had had the Bowie knife named after him.

After at least four unsuccessful bands he said he was going to study to become a mime artist at Sadler's Wells: in the late 60s he trained under Lindsay Kemp, who appears in a couple of his videos (John I'm Only Dancing).

On meeting Andy Warhol later in 1971 he was disappointed that the artist didn't like the song he'd written about him, and expressed his anti-climax at the meeting by miming his organs including his heart coming out of an opening in his chest.
('Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all' from Hunky Dory)
 In 1996, Bowie played Warhol in the film Basquiat, a bio-pic about the painter Jean-Michael Basquiat, mentored by Warhol. Paul Morrissey, who directed many films that Warhol produced, praised Bowie's take on the artist saying his was the best portrayal of him, showing him 'comical and amusing', not pretentious as many play him.


So given this history of mime, it's no surprise that his first hit was a dramatic story, with the first of many characters he introduced us to: Space Oddity, was released five days before the launch of Apollo 11, and was awarded the 1969 Ivor Novello Award, together with 'Where do you go to my lovely?' by Peter Sarstedt.

Not that it was the first record he released. After its original release in 1967, The Laughing Gnome, a pastiche of Anthony Newley, was re-released twice, 1973 and 1982 (why!!???) and a public vote for the numbers to be performed on  the Greatest Hits Sound and Vision tour was probably cancelled because NME tried to get readers to vote for it - Just Say Gnome.

       To promote his third album, The Man Who Sold the World(1970), he toured the States, and gave interviews wearing the dress in the cover photo, causing mixed reactions.The album was originally more successful in the States than in the UK. To some it heralded the beginning of glam rock, while others claim that that was Marc Bolan performing 'Ride a White Swan' on TOTP at the end of the same year. In the past Marc Bolan had worked with him as a session guitarist.

Shortly after his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, was born in 1971, he wrote the song Kooks for him; this song was later used as inspiration for the band who named themselves after it. ('Will you stay in our lovers' story.... with a couple of kooks hung up on romancing'). Zowie was named after the Greek word 'Zoe', life. The track Kooks was on the Hunky Dory album, whose cover photo was influenced by Marlene Dietrich, with Bowie posing as if a star of the silver screen.

When he dyed his hair red and invented Ziggy Stardust (and the Spiders from Mars) he took this a stage further: he imagined a popstar, began acting like one, and so it happened . Ziggy was a combination of the music of Lou Reed and the persona of Iggy Pop; as Bowie described him, someone who looks as if he's landed from Mars. On watching Alan Yentob's documentary for the BBC, Cracked Actor, director Nicolas Roeg recognised that Bowie was just the right person for his new film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. He didn't change Bowie's looks for the role, and his directing was minimal,. But he warned Bowie that the character would probably linger for a while, and Bowie certainly used at least the images from the film for album artwork, including the cover of Low.  Originally Bowie was to provide the film soundtrack, though legal wrangles prevented this, and the music he composed later became the album Station to Station.

Towards the end of the film, where the alien tries to get into the spaceship he had made, there is a cameo by Jim Lovell, the real-life commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, who is in the crowd that greets him.
 

In New York Bowie composed Fame with Lennon, who was repeating a syllable, Bowie added the F in front to make the word; under it was the riff played by Carlos Alomar, based on Footstompin,  a doo-wop number by the Flairs .The track was featured on 'Young Americans', what Bowie calls a plastic soul album, which he achieved with the help of several black backing singers and funk and soul musicians, including a not yet famous Luther Vandross. It was Bowie's first album with Carlos Alomar: they met during Lulu's recording of Bowie's song 'Can you hear me?' 'Young Americans' was recorded by Tony Visconti, as  much as possible live with a continuous take of Bowie's vocals and the full band. Bowie was one of the first white artists to be on the US variety show, 'Soul Train'.

Meanwhile 'Space Oddity' was re-released and became his first UK no 1 'Golden Years', from 'Station to Station' was offered to Elvis Presley but he declined to record it. Bowie reckoned he wrote it for Presley; Angie reckoned it was about her.

'Station to Station' was influenced by German electronic  bands such as Kraftwerk, and the philosopher Nietzsche, and Bowie calls it a plea to return to Europe. He was living on peppers and milk, suffering debilitation and mental problems caused by cocaine addiction; and while working on 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' had begun writing a pseudo-autobiography, 'The Return of the Thin White Duke' a character Bowie described as ice masquerading as fire. He recorded 'Wild as the Wind' after meeting Nina Simone, who had recorded it on her album of the same name.

Moving to West Berlin in 1976, to a studio just 500 yards from the Wall, where he managed to revitalise his music and deal with his addiction, he worked with Brian Eno on three of his own albums beginning with Low;  but also with Iggy Pop on his albums 'The Idiot' and 'Lust for Life'. For 'Heroes' he was joined by the ex King Crimson guitarist, Robert Fripp, called out of retirement by Eno. The title song is Bowie's second most covered song (first is Rebel, Rebel), including being the lead track on Peter Gabriel's recent 'Scratch my back'.It's a song about survival: on 'Five Years', Bowie commented what a relief it was to find he could still write without being under the influence of drugs. Some of his tracks on 'Lodger' were written using Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategy cards, which encourage lateral thinking, a mixture of New Wave and World Music, lighter and more pop-orientated but still very experimental.

In 1992, Philip Glass  used Low, which he described as work of genius, as a basis for his 'Symphony no 1 Low'; and in 1996 used Heroes to create his Symphony No 4 Heroes.

Ashes to Ashes revisited the Major Tom story, and the video featured and gave international exposure to the emerging New Romantic movement members from the Blitz club; the video contained new filming techniques. While that hit number one, Bowie was appearing in the title role of  The Elephant Man on Broadway for three months.

In 1981 he paired with Queen for a one-off hit, 'Under Pressure'.The video features none of them because of touring committments, instead just showing traffic jams.

In 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan was the guest guitarist on 'Let's Dance', Bowie's best selling album, what he calls blues-rock guitar against a dance format.They met at the 1982 Montreux Jazz festival; the guitarist was not very familiar with Bowie's music. In fact the album and tour were so successful Bowie felt his integrity was compromised.

In 1987 on the Glass Spider tour he was joined by old friend Peter Frampton on guitar. The tour was criticised as overproduced, the most elaborate and expensive Bowie has ever performed in. But by 2010 it was being named one of the top concert tour designs of all time. However the criticism of the tour and the album, 'Never Let Me Down', led to Bowie moving away from a solo career temporarily, with the formation of Tin Machine. Since then Bowie has also explored new directions in music, composing the soundtrack to 'The Buddha of Suburbia', a concept album with Eno, 'Outside', and a soundtrack for a computer game, Omikron. Recently he's revisited the inspiration of his Berlin days in  his first studio album for ten years, ' The Next Day'.

The tv programme, Five Years, certainly did the right thing in concentrating on five of the  most intense years of his life as a performer. It's hard to get an overview of a personality like Bowie, someone who has changed his music, style and looks so frequently, responding to the climate but also setting trends that most of the rest of us follow in the news, or as fans, or in our own style and music tastes. I'd forgotten quite how much acting he'd done, that would be a career in itself. And looking again through his back catalogue he has produced far more records than I remembered and worked with far more musicians of a much greater variety than I'd imagined. And yet for much of that career he has probably seen himself as a performance artist where albums are a lucrative by-product.