David Bowie

David Robert Jones, known as David Bowie, was born in Brixton, south London, on 8 January 1947 and died in New York on 10 January 2016. He was a singer, songwriter, actor, multi-instrumentalist, producer and designer. Regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, he was known for his constant reinvention and the visual staging of his work, traits that shaped popular music for almost five decades.

His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy", of Irish descent, worked as a cinema usherette, while his father was a promotions officer for the children's charity Barnardo's. In 1953 the family moved to Bromley, where the young Bowie was praised for his voice in the school choir, his recorder playing and his unusually imaginative dancing. His father brought home American 45s by Frankie Lymon, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, and Bowie later said that hearing Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" was like hearing God. In 1961 his mother bought him a saxophone, after his much older half-brother Terry Burns had introduced him to modern jazz. He studied art, music and design at Bromley Technical High School. In 1962 a schoolmate, George Underwood, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. The injury left him with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil, which later became one of his most recognisable features. Underwood remained a friend and went on to design the artwork for Bowie's early albums.

In 1962 he formed his first band, the Konrads, at the age of fifteen, playing rock and roll at youth gatherings and weddings. He then moved on to the King Bees, the Manish Boys and the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by the Who. His first manager was Leslie Conn, and his debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones with the King Bees, was not a commercial success, nor were the records that followed. He signed with Pye Records through his new manager, Ralph Horton. Because the name Davy Jones was already associated with the Monkees in the mid-1960s, he took the stage name David Bowie, after the nineteenth-century American pioneer James Bowie.

His breakthrough came in July 1969 with "Space Oddity", which reached the top five of the UK singles chart. After three years of experimentation, he returned in 1972, during the glam rock era, with the extravagant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, carried by the single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His biographer David Buckley wrote that Bowie challenged the core of rock music of the time and created perhaps the most important character in popular culture. In 1975 he scored his first American number one with "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, and with the album Young Americans, which he himself described as the definitive plastic soul record.

In 1977 he released Low, a sparse record and the first of three albums made with Brian Eno. These works, known as the Berlin Trilogy, reached the UK top five and won praise from critics. In 1980 Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and its single "Ashes to Ashes" topped the British charts, and he had a number-one hit with Queen on "Under Pressure". Let's Dance, released in 1983, produced the singles "Let's Dance", "China Girl" and "Modern Love". In the following decades he kept exploring styles such as blue-eyed soul, industrial, jungle and R&B. He stopped touring after the A Reality Tour in 2003 and 2004 and did not perform live again after 2006. His final album, Blackstar, appeared on 8 January 2016, two days before his death.

His legacy lies in his influence as much as in his sales, which reached an estimated 136 million records. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 greatest Britons he placed 29th, and in 2004 Rolling Stone ranked him 39th among the greatest artists of all time. Buckley argued that his influence on popular culture was unique and that he had changed more lives than any other public figure.