David Bowie: The Man Who Kept Becoming Someone Else

Most artists spend a lifetime searching for a single voice. David Bowie spent his refusing to keep one. Across five decades he was a folk singer, a glam alien, a soul man, a Berlin recluse, a stadium pop star and, at the very end, a jazz-haunted ghost writing his own eulogy. He changed so completely, so often, that the changes became the art. He has been gone since 2016, and pop culture still hasn't replaced him — because what he did can't really be copied. It can only be admired.

Brixton to Bromley: David Jones Before Bowie

He was born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947 in Brixton, south London, and grew up in suburban Bromley. As a teenager a scuffle with a friend left one pupil permanently dilated — the famous "different-coloured eyes" that weren't two colours at all, just one eye frozen wide, giving him an otherworldly stare for the rest of his life.

He cycled through bands and flopped singles all through the mid-sixties, even changing his surname to Bowie so as not to be confused with Davy Jones of The Monkees. For years, nothing worked. Then, in 1969, everything did.

Space Oddity and the Art of Arriving

Space Oddity — the story of doomed astronaut Major Tom drifting away from Earth — landed the same week the world watched Apollo 11. It was eerie, lonely and perfectly timed, and it made Bowie a name. But it was the next move that made him a legend: rather than chase the hit, he disappeared and came back as someone else entirely.

Ziggy Stardust: Killing the Star to Save the Man

In 1972 Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust — a flame-haired, sexually ambiguous alien rock messiah sent to a dying planet. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars turned glam rock into theatre and Bowie into a phenomenon. Then, at the height of Ziggy's fame, he walked on stage in 1973 and announced it was "the last show we'll ever do" — retiring the character live, in front of fans who had no idea it was coming. He had built a god and killed it on purpose, before it could consume him. It was the first of many escapes.

The Thin White Duke and the Berlin Escape

The personas kept coming — Aladdin Sane, the "plastic soul" of Young Americans, and then the Thin White Duke, an elegant, hollow figure born of Bowie's cocaine-ravaged Los Angeles years. To survive that period he fled to West Berlin, cleaned up, and made three of the most influential records of his life — Low, "Heroes" and Lodger — with Brian Eno. The "Berlin Trilogy" traded stardom for experiment and produced, in "Heroes", one of the most beloved songs he ever wrote: a defiant ballad of love beside the Berlin Wall.

Let's Dance: The Mainstream on His Terms

In 1983, working with Nile Rodgers of Chic, Bowie made Let's Dance — sleek, funky and enormous. It was the biggest commercial success of his career and proved he could conquer the mainstream whenever he chose. Characteristically, he soon found the fame uncomfortable and spent the rest of the eighties dismantling it.

The Actor, the Icon, the Shape-Shifter

He was never only a musician. He fell to Earth as an alien in Nicolas Roeg's film, ruled a fantasy kingdom as Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth, and faced down a POW camp in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. He shaped fashion, gender, and the basic idea that a pop star could be a moving target rather than a fixed brand. Every reinvention since — every artist who has changed their look, their sound, their name to stay ahead of expectation — is walking a path he cut.

Blackstar: A Death Foretold

In 2013, after a decade of near-silence and a heart scare, Bowie returned without warning. Then, on his 69th birthday — 8 January 2016 — he released Blackstar, a strange, beautiful, jazz-inflected record. Two days later he was dead, of a liver cancer almost no one knew he had. The album, it turned out, was a deliberate goodbye: Lazarus, opening with a line about being in heaven, was a man scoring his own departure. He had turned even his death into a final, generous piece of art — the last reinvention.

Bowie at Skeleton House

On Dead Reckoning it is Prince who sings for him — Bowie — and no pairing on the album feels more inevitable. Two shape-shifters, two masters of persona and androgyny and total creative control, both lost in the same cruel year of 2016. When Prince sings to Bowie, it is one chameleon saluting another across the same darkness. There's more on the whole project in the Dead Reckoning concept and the album announcement — and, for the other lost frontman in this series, our Freddie Mercury tribute.

Watch the Dead Reckoning visual album →

Some artists find themselves. David Bowie kept losing himself on purpose — and somehow, in all those disappearances, became the most unforgettable star of all.