He was born on 8 January 1947 in London to Margaret Mary Burns, a cashier at a London cinema, and Haywood Stenton Jones, a former soldier at the time. We are talking about the legendary David Bowie, who would be 78 years old today.
It was his half-brother Terry Burns who introduced him to music, as he was a jazz enthusiast and an avid reader of beat writers, which greatly influenced little David.
In 1959 his mother gave him a saxophone and David, on Terry’s advice, began taking lessons from jazz saxophonist Ronnie Ross. He subsequently joined several bands until he conquered the world as a soloist in the 1970s.
Chameleonic, eclectic, always avant-garde, the famous White Duke (one of his countless alter egos) is considered the greatest entertainer of the 20th century.
In the Seventies Bowie didn’t just make music: he rewrote the rules of pop. With characters like Ziggy Stardust he transformed the stage into theater, playing with identity, sexual ambiguity and science fiction when the audience wasn’t yet ready. Each record was a mutation, each tour a declaration of intent: Bowie didn’t follow trends, he anticipated them or destroyed them.
In the following years he continued to reinvent himself, moving from the experimental electronica of Berlin to the more accessible pop of the 1980s, without ever losing credibility. Painter, actor, style icon and restless mind, Bowie proved that art can be risk, vision and total freedom. Not just a simple rock star, but an artist who has left an indelible mark on contemporary culture.
Blackstar
His latest artistic gesture is called Blackstarpublished on January 8, 2016, on his sixty-ninth birthday, just forty-eight hours before his death. After a life spent hiding behind masks and alter egos, Bowie decides to show himself without filters: in the videos he is lying on a bed or with his eyes covered, a fragile and visionary figure, like a blind prophet staging his own end. Even the cover – a black star which, when illuminated, reveals other stars within it – is an open puzzle: cosmic symbol, esoteric reference or allusion to illness. In any case, an authentic swan song, full of meanings to decipher.
To complete the farewell there is Lazarusthe theatrical show brought to Broadway as the ideal continuation of The man who fell to Earth: Bowie worked on it until the end and on 7 December 2015 he attended the premiere, in his last public appearance. A legacy that is far from over: in September the David Bowie Center opened in London, a permanent archive with over 90 thousand materials, while the story of an artist who transformed even the end into a creative language continues through books and documentaries. After all, he had always known it: the future belongs to those who can feel it coming.
