David Bowie Biography - Artistopia Music

'''hours...''' featured "What's Really Happening", the lyrics for which were written by Alex Grant, the winner of Bowie's "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition. This album presented Bowie's exit from heavy electronica, with an emphasis on more live instruments, and, through songs like "Thursday's Child" and "Survive", a thematic move into Bowie's sense of his own aging and sentimentality


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. After this album, Bowie's guitarist, Reeves Gabrels, quit working with Bowie, feeling that the music was becoming "too soft".
Plans surfaced after the release of '' 'hours...' for an album titled Toy'', which would feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs. Sessions for the album commenced in 2000, but the album was never released, leaving a number of tracks, some as yet unheard, on the editing floor. Bowie and Visconti continued collaboration with the production of a new album of completely original songs instead. The result of the sessions was the 2002 album Heathen, which had a dark atmospheric sound, and was Bowie's biggest chart success in recent years.
2002 also saw Bowie curate the annual Meltdown festival in London. Amongst the acts selected by Bowie to perform were Phillip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. Bowie himself played a show at the Royal Festival Hall which notably included a rare performance of his experimental opus Low in its entirety.

In 2003, a report in the Sunday Express named Bowie as the second-richest entertainer in the UK (behind Sir Paul McCartney), with an estimated fortune of £510 million. However, the 2005 Sunday Times Rich List credited him with a little over £100 million.

In September 2003, Bowie released a new album, Reality, and announced a world tour. 'A Reality Tour' was the best-selling tour of the following year. However, it was cut short after Bowie suffered chest pain while performing on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany, on 25 June 2004. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery; an emergency angioplasty was performed at St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg by Dr Karl Heinz Kuck.

He was discharged in early July 2004 and continued to spend time recovering. Bowie later admitted he had suffered a minor heart attack, resulting from years of heavy smoking and touring. The tour was cancelled for the time being, with hopes that he would go back on tour by August, though this did not materialise. He recuperated back in New York City.

In October 2004, Bowie released a live DVD of the tour, entitled A Reality Tour of his performances in Dublin on 22 November and 23 November 2003, which included songs spanning the full length of Bowie's career, although mostly focusing on his more recent albums.

Still recuperating from his operation, Bowie worked off-stage and relaxed from studio work for the first time in several years. In 2004, a duet of his classic song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher appeared in Shrek 2. The soundtrack for the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou featured David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese by cast member Seu Jorge (who adapted the lyrics to make them relevant to the film's story). Most of the David Bowie songs featured in the film were originally from David Bowie (debut album), Space Oddity, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs. Bowie commented, "Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs acoustically in Portuguese I would never have heard this new level of beauty which he has imbued them with".

Despite hopes for a comeback, in 2005, Bowie announced that he had made no plans for any performances during the year. After a relatively quiet year, Bowie recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written by Brian Transeau, for the movie Stealth. Rumours flew about the possibility of a new album, but no announcements were made.

David Bowie finally returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, alongside Arcade Fire, for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, his first gig since the heart attack. Bowie has shown interest in the Montreal band since he was seen at one of their shows in New York City nearly a year earlier. Bowie had requested the band to perform at the show, and together they performed the Arcade Fire's song "Wake Up" from their album Funeral, as well as Bowie's own "Five Years" and "Life on Mars?". He joined them again on 15 September 2005, singing "Queen Bitch" and "Wake Up" from Central Park's Summerstage as part of the CMJ Music Marathon.

Bowie contributed back-up vocals for TV on the Radio's song "Province" from their album Return to Cookie Mountain. He made other occasional appearances, as in his commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio. He appeared on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 release, No Balance Palace, which was produced by Tony Visconti. The album also featured a spoken word performance by Lou Reed, making it the second project involving both Bowie and Reed in two years, since Reed's 2003 The Raven.

On 8 February 2006, David Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In November, Bowie performed at the Black Ball in New York for the Keep a Child Alive Foundation alongside his wife, Iman, and Alicia Keys. He duetted with Keys on "Changes", and also performed "Wild is the Wind" and "Fantastic Voyage".

For 2006, Bowie once again announced a break from performance, but he made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May 2006 concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He sang "Arnold Layne" and "Comfortably Numb", closing the concert. The former performance was released, on 26 December 2006, as a single.

In May 2007, it was announced that Bowie would curate the High Line Festival in the abandoned railway park in New York called the High Line where he would select various musicians and artists to perform.

Bowie contributed backing vocals to two tracks - "Falling Down" and "Fannin' Street" - on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head.

On 29 June 2008, Bowie released a new compilation entitled iSELECT. This CD was a collection of personal favourites compiled by Bowie himself and was available exclusively as a free gift with the British newspaper The Mail On Sunday. The compilation is notable in that it only contained one major hit single, "Life on Mars?", and concentrated on lesser-known album tracks.

Acting career

Bowie's first major film role in The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1976, earned acclaim. Bowie's character Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien from a planet that is dying from a lack of water. In 1979's Just a Gigolo, an Anglo-German co-production directed by David Hemmings, Bowie played the lead role of a Prussian officer Paul von Pryzgodski returning from World War I who is discovered by a Baroness (Marlene Dietrich) and put into her Gigolo Stable.

In the 1980s, Bowie continued with film roles and also starred in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man (1980-1981). In 1982, he made a cameo appearance as himself in Christiane F., focusing on a young girl's drug addiction. Bowie also starred in The Hunger (1983), a revisionist vampire movie with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In the film, Bowie and Deneuve are vampire lovers, with her having made him a vampire centuries ago. While she is truly ageless, he discovers to his horror that although immortal, he can still age and rapidly becomes a pathetic, monstrous husk as the film progresses. In Nagisa Oshima's film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), based on Laurens van der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Another famous musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto, played the camp commandant who begins to be undermined by Celliers' bizarre behavior. Bowie had a cameo as The Shark in Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy made by some of the members of Monty Python, and a small part as Colin the hit man in the 1985 film Into the Night. During this time Bowie was also asked to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985), but turned down the role, stating that "I didn't want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off mountains."

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence impressed some critics. His next major film project, the rock musical Absolute Beginners (1986), was both a critical and box office disappointment. The same year he appeared in the Jim Henson cult classic, the dark fantasy Labyrinth (1986), playing Jareth, the king of the goblins. Jareth is a powerful, mysterious creature who has an antagonistic yet strangely flirtatious relationship with Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), the film's teenage heroine. Appearing in heavy make-up and a mane-like wig, Bowie sang a variety of new songs specially composed for the film's soundtrack. Bowie also played a sympathetic Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). He was briefly considered for the role of The Joker by Tim Burton and Sam Hamm for 1989's Batman. Hamm recalls "David Bowie would be kind of neat because he's very funny when he does sinister roles". The role ended up going to Jack Nicholson.

Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in the 1991 film The Linguini Incident, and played mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). He took the small but pivotal role of Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1998 Bowie also co-starred in an Italian film called ''Gunslinger's Revenge (renamed from the original Il Mio West). However, it was not released in the United States until 2005. In it he plays the most feared gunslinger in the region.

Before appearing in The Hunger, a TV horror serial based on the 1983 movie, Bowie was invited by musician Goldie to play the aging gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Brighton Rock inspired movie, Everybody Loves Sunshine. He played the title role in the 2000 film, ''Mr. Rice's Secret, in which he played the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve year old. In 2001, Bowie appeared as himself in the film Zoolander'', volunteering himself to be a walkoff judge between Ben Stiller's character Zoolander, and Owen Wilson's character, Hansel.

In 2006, Bowie portrayed Nikola Tesla alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan. It follows the bitter competition between two magicians around the turn of the century. Bowie has voice-acted in the animated movie Arthur and the Minimoys (known as Arthur and the Invisibles in the U.S.) as the powerful villain Maltazard. He also appeared as himself in an episode of Extras. Bowie (in the context of the show) improvised and sang a song mocking the

Personal life

Romantic relationships

Bowie met his first wife Angela Bowie in 1969. According to Bowie, they were "fucking the same bloke" (record executive Calvin Mark Lee). Angie's sense of fashion and outrage has been credited as a significant influence in Bowie's early career and rise to fame.Buckley (2000): pp.92-93 They married on 19 March 1970 at Bromley Register Office in Beckenham Lane, Kent, England where she permanently took his adopted last name. Their first son was born on 30 May 1971 and named Zowie (Zowie later preferred to be known as Joe/Joey, although now he has reverted to his legal birth name - "Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones"). They separated after eight years of marriage and divorced on 8 February 1980, in Switzerland. The marriage has been cited as one of convenience for both.

Bowie married his second wife, the Somali-born supermodel Iman Abdulmajid, in 1992. The couple have a daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones (known as Lexi), born 15 August 2000, and live in Manhattan and London.

Sexual orientation

Bowie outed himself in an interview with Melody Maker in January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust. In a 1976 interview with Playboy, Bowie said: "It's true - I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me." He distanced himself from that in a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, saying his earlier declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made".

In 1993, he made the claim that he had always been a "closet heterosexual", and that his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture was more a product of the times and situation than his own feelings. Bowie stated, "It wasn't something I was comfortable with at all."

Bowie expressed a different view in a 2002 interview with Blender; where he was posed with this question: "You once said that saying you were bisexual was 'the biggest mistake I ever made'. Do you still believe that?" His response:

Interesting. pause I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners or be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that [1] became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.

Politics

In September 2007, he made a contribution of U.S.$10,000 to the NAACP for the Jena Six Legal Defense Fund to help with legal bills of six teenagers arrested and charged with crimes related to their involvement in the assault of a teenager in Jena.

Discography

Studio albums

David Bowie (1967)
Space Oddity (1969)
The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
Hunky Dory (1971)
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
Aladdin Sane (1973)
Pin Ups (1973)
Diamond Dogs (1974)
Young Americans (1975)
Station to Station (1976)
Low (1977)
"Heroes" (1977)
Lodger (1979)
Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)
''Let's Dance (1983)
Tonight (1984)
Never Let Me Down (1987)
Black Tie, White Noise (1993)
The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)
Outside (1995)
Earthling (1997)
'''hours...' (1999)
Heathen (2002)
Reality (2003)

Filmography

Awards

Bowie has previously declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003.

External Links
AskMen.com - David Bowie
Copyright Citations
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