David Bowie - The Dandy Who Fell to Earth

David Bowie, that is: one, no one, and a hundred thousand. Fifty years of a career built on metamorphosis, on an unrelenting urge to chase and anticipate the times: "Time may change me, but I can't trace time" ("Changes", 1971) has always been his creed. A mutant genius, then. But shape-shifting is only the showiest of this indecipherable dandy's many arts; he is the embodiment of all the fascinations and contradictions of rock, and ultimately of Western society itself. No one has exposed the clichés of stardom like he has, the morbid yet hypocritical relationship between idols and fans, the false myth of the rocker's sincerity, the absurdity of the supposed divide between art and commerce. Bowie was also one of the very first musicians to conceive of rock as "total art" (pop art?), opening it up to contamination from theatre, music hall, mime, dance, cinema, comics, the visual arts. With him, every boundary between "high" and "low" culture disappears. Because - in his own felicitous phrase - he is "both Nijinsky and Woolworth". It's thanks to his shows that the rock stage dressed itself in apocalyptic set design, in an aesthetic at once decadent and futurist, drawing on literary and cinematic traditions as well as the street art of mimes and clowns. And musically, his influence was fundamental to the evolution of genres as disparate as glam rock, punk, new wave, synth-pop, dark-gothic, neo-soul and dance, as many of their leading figures have themselves admitted.

But Bowie is also the ultimate proof that rock criticism is an inexact science. No one has set the world's critics and hacks at each other's throats quite like him. Today, at the dawn of a new millennium, very few are left who would dispute his role as an innovator and forerunner of rock. Few, and often in bad faith. Because Bowie is among the most beloved, but also among the most hated, idols of contemporary popular music. Hard to swallow - especially for the less ironic fringes of criticism - was his haughty prima donna attitude, but above all his heterodoxy with respect to rock's sacred commandments: his shameless use of image, his ostentatious artifice, his wish to be an avant-garde artist while selling himself to the public like a Broadway starlette.

London was a powder keg. Drugs were rampant. I wanted to see and understand what was going on. My fear was of walking right past some new trend that was about to arrive. All I wanted was clubs. I went both for the experience and to fill my ears with sound. For the loud volume, to listen to Georgie Fame, to discover jazz.

(David Bowie)

The birth of "Red Orb"

The portrait of the artist as a young man is that of a restless middle-class kid named David Robert Jones (8 January 1947), scraping by between studies and dreams in the London suburb of Brixton. His father, Haywood Stenton Jones, recently back from the front, works as a clerk; his mother, Margaret Mary Burns, works as a cinema cashier and already has a son from her first marriage, Terry, who suffers from schizophrenia: he will spend long stretches in psychiatric hospitals and will die by suicide in 1985. His half-brother's illness will long remain an obsession for David, who will always live in fear of going mad himself; as if to exorcise that madness and sublimate the turmoil caused by Terry's death, he will write the song "Jump (They Say)" in 1993.

In 1957 the Jones family moves to the Bromley area; David studies at the Technical High School to become a graphic designer. One day, leaving school, he gets into a fight with his friend George Underwood that marks him for life: his damaged left eye takes on a permanent reddish tint, earning him the unkind nickname "red orb" from the local kids.

"Swingin' London" boasts a dazzling rock scene (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Who, Animals, Yardbirds). The young David is captivated: he sings, plays sax and tries to make it fronting underground outfits like Manish Boys, The Konrads, King Bees and Buzz. He dreams of becoming the new Little Richard, his idol since childhood. "London was a powder keg," he would later tell Les Inrockuptibles. "Drugs were rampant. Pills were the mods' currency. They survived purely on amphetamines, which let them dance and drag themselves through the whole night. Heroin came later, at the end of the Sixties. I wanted to see and understand what was going on. My fear was of walking right past some new trend that was about to arrive. All I wanted was clubs. I went both for the experience and to fill my ears with sound. For the loud volume, to listen to Georgie Fame, to discover jazz."

It's his manager, Kenneth Pitt, who suggests he adopt the surname Bowie (after the "bowie knife") to avoid confusion with Davey Jones of the Monkees.

His solo career, however, struggles to take off. Bowie can't decide between the high road of British (and Dylan-esque) folk, the psychedelic temptations of California's "Summer Of Love", and the rhythm'n'blues revival of the era. His debut album, David Bowie, released by Deram in 1967, lays these contradictions bare, revealing a songwriter who is still very green and unsteady on his feet. A clownish, Anthony Newley-style delivery pervades ballads like "Uncle Arthur", "Rubber Band" and "Love You Till Tuesday". But these are little more than amateurish divertissements. The most genuine record of that early Bowie is arguably the Deram Anthology, which, besides his best song of the period ("London Boys"), includes the curious "Laughing Gnome", the vaudeville turn of "The Gospel According To Tony Day", and an early, embryonic version of "Space Oddity".

Despite his immersion in London life, Bowie is confused and restless; he feels like a foreign body within his own generation, is light years away from the fashionable "communal" ideologies of the day, and seeks refuge in Buddhism: he spends three months in monastic isolation with four Tibetan lamas in Scotland, together with his partner Hermione Farthingale (whose gender the spiteful even claimed was not entirely certain...).

Given all this, no one could have imagined that just a year later this frail folksinger would land one of rock's great classics and, in effect, set a new songwriting standard. Yet that's exactly what happens in 1969, when the "old" "Space Oddity" finds its perfect form in Paul Buckmaster's symphonic-psychedelic arrangement and its ideal historical moment amid the celebrations for the first Moon landing. The song has a spectacular structure: an eerie opening, marked by Bowie's voice lost in space, is followed by a sudden jolt from the stylophone, then an epic, aching chorus carried by Rick Wakeman's mellotron, and a dissonant instrumental coda. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and centred on the saga of the fictional astronaut Major Tom, "Space Oddity" is the first space ballad in rock history and the forerunner of that sci-fi strand which would become one of the cornerstones of Bowie's body of work. The song's success (No. 5 in Britain) is such that Bowie even records versions in other languages, including the infamous "Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola" (!), with Italian lyrics by Mogol, for the Italian market.

The self-titled album Space Oddity (originally released in 1969 as "Man Of Words/Man Of Music" and reissued three years later), however, doesn't add much of significance, aside from the sweet serenade of "Letter To Hermione" (dedicated to his first partner), destined to remain one of the few explicitly love-themed lyrics of his career, and the epic-folk fairytale of "Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud", which would become a live staple. The more than nine minutes of "Cygnet Committee", on the other hand, are above all a testament to Bowie's prescience, pre-emptively marking the end of the hippie era and even hinting at punk (couldn't the "guns of love" of the chorus be the future Sex Pistols?).

Meanwhile, Bowie has also grown as a singer and performer. Decisive was his meeting, on 14 July 1967, with the mime and dancer Lindsay Kemp, the first act of a long collaboration that would continue over the years. "From him," he would recall, "I learned the language of the body; I learned to control every gesture, to charge every movement with dramatic intensity; in short, I learned how to be on a stage." His manager changes too: with the partnership with Ken Pitt over, it falls to the more aggressive Tony De Fries to manage a talent that is growing, if still a little naive.

On 20 March 1970 Bowie marries the American Angela Barnett, of whom he would say: "I met her because we were both seeing the same guy." The marriage would last a decade, giving Bowie his son Zowie (later renamed Joe). On the musical front, his meeting with guitarist Mick Ronson sets the stage for the first major turning point of his career.

Rock'n'roll with lipstick on

There's a four-piece on stage at London's Roundhouse on the evening of 22 February 1970. They call themselves Hype, and they're pounding away at their instruments like madmen. Ronson's guitar is their totem, but what grabs the attention is the effeminate, curly-haired singer, decked out in multicoloured silk robes. It's in this guise that David Bowie, having buried the shy folk minstrel of his early days, definitively sets off down the road of a sensual, ambiguous rock'n'roll. It's one of the decisive turning points of his career, soon followed by the release of the new album, The Man Who Sold The World (1970), which effectively marks the beginning of Bowie's golden run. Alongside Ronson's contribution, producer Tony Visconti is in the control room. Thanks in large part to their input, a hard, saturated sound is born, a kind of "hard-soul-rock", dominated by booming bass, slashing guitar, a far-sighted Moog (courtesy of Ralph Mace) and Bowie's strangled vocal delivery. For the first time, Bowie appears in women's clothing on the cover (censored in the US) and writes grotesque lyrics, poised between a horror-tinged futurism ("All The Madmen", "Saviour Machine") and the Nietzschean myth of the Superman ("Supermen"), reaching its peak in the title track, led along at a lopsided pace by the percussion and steeped in an Orientalist atmosphere by the organ and the memorable guitar riff: it would resurface thirty years later, reinvigorated in Nirvana's new "grunge" version. The debt to the tightrope-walking hard rock of Cream and Led Zeppelin is paid off in the riffs of "She Shook Me Cold" and "Black Country Rock", while the pastiche of sexual perversions in "Width Of A Circle" will give Ronson the cue to stage a live electric bacchanal worthy of the Velvet's masters. Perhaps, though, the most surprising track on the record is "After All", a dark, melancholy waltz with the same sly gait as the Stooges' best ritual incantations.

Bowie hones an aesthetic whose sharpest weapons are ambiguity and shape-shifting. To fulfil his last contractual obligations with his old record label, under the pseudonym Arnold Corns (a tribute to the Arnold Layne of Barrett's memory) he puts out a couple of singles; for the occasion, in a thoroughly Warholian move, he hands the frontman role to his eccentric stylist Freddi Buretti and releases a handful of songs (including a prototype version of "Moonage Daydream" and the title-tellingly allusive "Man In The Middle"), already dripping with transgression and the urge to shock. Even though the impact is minimal, it's a prelude to the events that will upend his career.

Changes

Turn and face the strange

Changes

Just gonna have to be a different man

Time may change me

But I can't trace time

("Changes")

The decade's first masterpiece is Hunky Dory (1971), in which Bowie openly embraces the glam rock that had exploded in England on the wave of Marc Bolan's T. Rex. It's the age of the "dudes", neo-freaks who turn their hippie cousins' tedious eco-pacifist gatherings into an unrestrained festival of kitsch. "Peace and love", sure, but no longer tied to any political or ideological agenda. What triumphs instead are disengagement, cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity, in a flood of sequins and paillettes, feather boas and mascara, boots and space-age jumpsuits. "Rock'n'roll with lipstick on", as John Lennon would later dub it.

Bowie, who had already anticipated the trend in the previous album, at least in attitude and look, realises this could be his stairway to heaven. And the cover of Hunky Dory, which portrays him in a fatal, Greta Garbo-esque pose, is already a manifesto in itself: it would also strike Brian Eno, who would in effect clone it three years later for "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)".

But it's not only glam that glitters among the grooves of Hunky Dory: breezy pop, sickly atmospheres à la Velvet Underground, and folk of Dylanesque descent embellish a record that celebrates American socio-cultural myth through a gallery of characters: from Frank Zappa to Bob Dylan, from Lou Reed to Walt Disney and Andy Warhol. And for the occasion a first-rate cast comes together. Ronson, in fact, brings along bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey: the future Spiders From Mars. Behind the mixing desk, Visconti is replaced by the seasoned Ken Scott. Bowie plays guitar, sax and piano, "as far as his ability allows" (as he quips in the liner notes); for the more elaborate parts there's a special guest: Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman. But the lion's share of the credit goes to Ronson's orchestral arrangements - as well as being able to shred on six strings like no one else, he's also a refined pianist and musician.

It opens with "Changes", a cocktail-lounge number avant la lettre, which behind its catchy chorus conceals a bittersweet reflection on life's critical turning points; the equally hooky "Oh You Pretty Things" even reveals dark Nietzschean undertones. After the piano-and-guitar-only interlude "Eight Line Poem", comes the quintessential Bowie ballad: "Life On Mars?", with a majestic orchestral arrangement and a textbook vocal performance; the lyrics are a visionary succession of images from consumer society (Lennon, Mickey Mouse, Ibiza) seen through the eyes of a girl fleeing reality and taking refuge in the fiction of a film. The following "Kooks", an affectionate tribute to little Zowie, is a catchy tune led by a vaudeville piano and punctuated by Trevor Bolder's simple trumpet lines. Closing out side one is "Quicksand", a sweet acoustic ballad whose lyrics, with their references to Aleister Crowley, reveal one of the darker sides of the future Thin White Duke.

The unease is swept away by the freshness of "Fill Your Heart", the only cover on the record (written by American Biff Rose), which boasts a delightful arrangement built around Wakeman's piano. "Andy Warhol", "Song For Bob Dylan" and "Queen Bitch" are less tributes than reworkings of lessons learned from the greats. The first is an ironic, acoustic, almost amateurish portrait of the pop-art guru. The second is a folk-rock plea to Dylan to reclaim his role as a leader. The music of "Queen Bitch" immediately brings Velvet Underground to mind, but in truth, right from the title, we're already in glam territory. The closer is "The Bewlay Brothers", a dark, psychedelic folk track with a circular, claustrophobic structure, recalling Syd Barrett and the acoustic nightmares of The Man Who Sold The World; the lyrics centre on the peculiar relationship between Bowie and his half-brother Terry, who was already undergoing psychiatric treatment at the time.

Bowie has finally won over the critics, but that's not enough for him, because he has only one obsession on his mind: "Becoming famous". And he will succeed, with an almost ferocious determination, closer to the clear-eyed vision of a scientist than to the naive utopianism of post-'68 rockers. While rock was busy celebrating itself at great pacifist gatherings or in hippie communes, the Warholian Bowie was studying himself in his dressing-room mirror, searching for just the right mask to bewitch the public. The answer would come from the impossible combination of an interstellar being and a Japanese Kabuki theatre actor. The first great character in his gallery.

I’m the space invader

I'll be a rock'n'rolling bitch for you

("Moonage Daydream")

The alien who fell to Earth

Let's be honest: who would have bet a penny on this alien in a leotard, with carrot-colored hair and cut-rate drag-queen make-up? A gawky, damnably kitsch creature who looked like he'd stepped straight out of a trashy sci-fi comic strip. And yet it was in this very guise that Bowie would first achieve the worldwide fame he'd long chased and would never again let go of. The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars is a concept album about the rise and (self-)destruction of a "plastic rocker". He is "the man who fell to Earth", the messiah of a rock revolution that lasts just one season, the span of time between his rise and his fall. And within this parable lies the whole essence of Bowie's art: the staging of Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame", the morbid hedonism of Dorian Gray, the parody of stardom and the fleeting myths of consumer society, and, not least, the premonitions of a bleak, Orwellian future. "Extraterrestrial", and therefore free of the sexual taboos that shackle humanity, Ziggy Stardust is the quintessence of the glam spirit. Past and future coexist within him: a child of the decadent aura of pre-war Mitteleuropean cabaret, yet thrust forward into the futurist momentum of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), whose opening notes would open the shows on the Ziggy Stardust Tour. He is the mask that embodies every rock stereotype filtered through glam's grotesque lens. A caricature of the star, destined to be idolized by the public and crushed by the star-system. His models are the noble forefathers of rock (Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix), but also unlikely figures such as Vince Taylor, the "French Presley", a Sixties rocker who died mad and by suicide, whom Bowie would cite as a direct inspiration for his "creature", and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, aka Norman Carl Odom, an eccentric American bluesman. But stage fiction soon overtakes reality, and Bowie becomes his alter ego so completely that he ends up sacrificing it on stage, granting it immortality.

Recorded with the same band from the previous album, rebranded for the occasion as "The Spiders From Mars", the album alternates romantic ballads with electrified, breakneck rock'n'roll bordering on punk. Eleven tracks unleash the whole glam arsenal: from brash, effeminate vocals to razor-sharp guitars, from pompous string arrangements to aching melodies. Yet amid so much melodrama, Bowie never takes himself too seriously: his songs are a sneer at prudish morality, an essay in ironic transgression and, often, pure nonsense. The Ziggy saga opens with the apocalyptic prophecy of "Five Years", which starts as a languid ballad and builds into a magnificent crescendo, until it bursts into Bowie's hysterical scream. Cradled by the swinging rhapsody of "Soul Love", the listener is projected into a waking dream: "Moonage Daydream" — the Lunar Age has arrived, and with it its messiah: "I'm the space invader, I'll be a rock'n'rolling bitch for you". Ziggy, then, is a redeemer, but also "a whore": the symbol of rock's lost virginity, of the music-business's prostitution. Fired up by Bowie's shrill falsetto, Ronson's dizzying Gibson Les Paul distortions and an explosive sax solo, it's a dazzling electric ride and the definitive apotheosis of glam rock. Ziggy is the starman, invoked in the spatial ballad of "Starman", one of Bowie's most legendary melodies.

Melodicism also triumphs in the swooning "Lady Stardust", probably dedicated to Marc Bolan ("the boy in the bright blue jeans jumped up on the stage"), with saturated guitars and Ronson's aching piano figures backing his crooner-style vocals. The album's only cover, "It Ain't Easy", bears Ron Davies's signature, a space-country number with an almost gospel chorus. Breaking up this dreamy, 1930s-musical atmosphere are a couple of proto-punk raids fired off at breakneck speed by the Spiders From Mars: "Hang On To Yourself", which by the Sex Pistols' own admission would inspire "God Save The Queen", and "Suffragette City", an ode to prostitutes complete with a post-orgasmic exclamation ("Ohhh, wham bam thank you ma'am!"), which would soundtrack Bowie and Ronson's sexual pantomimes on the Ziggy Stardust Tour stage. Having become a "Star" by now, Ziggy is celebrated by the immortal riff of the title track: Ronson's rasping guitar underscores the story of the star who ends up as prey to a horde of fan-executioners. The album's natural conclusion can only be a "rock'n'roll suicide", played out in the most theatrical of fashions, in an Edith Piaf-like 1950s mood, cigarette in mouth, begging for one last gesture of affection ("Gimme your hands, cause you're wonderful"), which Ziggy would mime in live shows by reaching out into the crowd; the Spiders From Mars mount another terrifying crescendo, the ideal backdrop for Bowie's neurotic vocals.

In this bonfire of vanities, the dark side of planet Mars doesn't go unnoticed: a meditation on alienation and death, on the fleeting fate of stardom as a metaphor for the human condition itself.

The Ziggy saga takes the world by storm, even resurrecting some of its predecessors on the charts, as well as setting a universal glam rock standard that allows Bowie to turn producer for Lou Reed's "Transformer" and his friend Iggy Pop's Stooges' "Raw Power", and author-patron for Mott The Hoople, to whom he gifts a guaranteed hit: the glam generational anthem "All The Young Dudes".

Transgression is a key ingredient: Bowie tells Melody Maker he's "always been gay", declares himself bisexual live on the BBC, cross-dresses as a woman, and officially ushers in the era of ambiguity in rock. Morrison too had caused scandal, Jagger too had worn make-up, the Fugs too had been obscene, countless other rockers had winked at a gay audience, but with Bowie, for the first time, sexuality broke free of every barrier. It became perverse and complex, "from another planet", and therefore undefined and shape-shifting: just another costume to change on stage.

Ever since I was born I've been searching for an identity. I only believe in my own actions. I always deny the past, I live for the future. I think I'm my own worst enemy…

(David Bowie)

A multicolored lightning bolt striking across his face, a slight change of make-up, and the glam epic can continue a year later on Aladdin Sane (a pun on "A Lad Insane"). If it hadn't come right after "Ziggy", it would be hailed as another great masterpiece in its own right. Its only real limitation, in fact, is that it reprises a sound that had already reached its climax on the previous record. "Ziggy in America", Bowie would later call it, highlighting the distinctly "rock'n'roll" soul running through it, but also the lyrics, in which the reality of the American continent is transfigured into a series of vignettes, now futuristic and hallucinated (the post-atomic visions of "Drive In Saturday" and the nightmare of "Panic In Detroit"), now parodic ("Cracked Actor", "Watch That Man"), now almost dreamy and melancholic (the tribute to his wife Angie in "The Prettiest Star", with its pompous 1950s Hollywood-style horn section). Ronson's guitar work is still front and center, snarling out supersonic riffs worthy of Keith Richards on "Exile On Main Street" (and the homage to the Stones comes via the cover of "Let's Spend The Night Together").

For the rest, Bowie once again proves himself a hugely inspired songwriter, able to craft explosive rock'n'roll anthems like "Watch That Man", "Panic In Detroit" and the bluesy "Jean Genie" (dedicated, depending on who you ask, to either Jean Genet or Iggy Pop), to poke fun at himself, Hamlet's skull in hand, in the Hollywood-star parody of "Cracked Actor" ("I'm stiff on my legend… /Crack, baby, crack; show me you're real"), and to sink into the melodramatic crooner's swoon of "Time" and "Lady Grinning Soul", two splendid decadent ballads with an alienating, Brechtian cabaret accompaniment. The Bowie you don't expect, on the other hand, is the one on the title track (inspired by Evelyn Waugh's novel "Vile Bodies"), a curious, experimental avant-lounge-jazz piece that goes completely off the rails in Mike Garson's closing piano solo, and on "Drive-In Saturday", an odd blend of sci-fi, doo wop and glam.

But Aladdin Sane also marks the requiem for the glam era: a sarcastic funeral, officiated by a fallen aristocrat who looks in the mirror and watches time "bend and change like a whore" ("Time"), leaving painful wounds (such as the death from overdose of his friend Billy Murcia, drummer of the New York Dolls) and burning through fame and glory in a hurry (the "Cracked Actor", but also Aladdin himself in the title track, who "runs it down, tying up his old bouquet, dead roses").

Bowie had sensed that the glam rock scene was already running out of air, unable to renew the freshness of its early days. Restless and fickle, he goes looking for new challenges, new planets to explore. So, at the end of the album's promotional tour, he makes a symbolic, theatrical gesture: he gets rid of his cumbersome alter ego Ziggy Stardust by "killing" him on stage and disbanding the Spiders From Mars. Not long after, the glam epic itself would dissolve, into the stardust of its own hero. The coup de theatre actually conceals the pragmatism of an artist who, by killing off the character that had brought him his long-sought fame, shows he grasps the inner workings of the rock audience's behavior, which buries artists as quickly as it worships them: Bowie has no intention of being crushed by a character who would soon have worn out his welcome with the public; the philosophy of sudden changes aimed at keeping attention fixed on himself, which would prove far more than just a lucky hunch, would guide him in the years to come, eventually turning him into a shrewd businessman.

Bowie, meanwhile, had become a gay icon. A poll run by the weekly magazine "Sound" crowns him "the worst-dressed woman in the world"! Yet he chooses never to fully embrace any cause, nor any political faith. When the British Gay Liberation movement asks him to become its official spokesperson, he flatly refuses. "Ever since I was born I've been searching for an identity," he would later say. "I only believe in my own actions. I always deny the past, I live for the future. I think I'm my own worst enemy…"

Futuristic nightmares and American dreams

Success, however, keeps smiling on him. Aladdin Sane reaches no. 1 on the British charts, as does Pin-Ups, a collection of glam rock-style covers drawing on the Sixties repertoire of bands like Pink Floyd ("See Emily Play"), Them ("Here Comes The Night"), Pretty Things ("Rosalyn"), the Who ("I Can't Explain", "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere"), the Kinks ("Where Have All The Good Times Gone") and the Yardbirds ("Shapes of Things"). But the biggest hit of all is the single "Amsterdam/Sorrow", a tribute to Jacques Brel, one of Bowie's "masters" alongside another great crooner, the American Scott Walker, from whom he would borrow his deep, melodramatic singing style.

That this was, for Bowie, a moment of transition, if not an outright crisis, is confirmed by the following Diamond Dogs (1974), a sprawling sci-fi/horror epic inspired by William Burroughs's "Wild Boys" and George Orwell's "1984", and branded with a disturbing cover on which Bowie turns into a monstrous creature, half man, half dog. The "diamond dogs" are the survivors of a nuclear catastrophe that has reduced man to the condition of a deranged dog, inhabitants of a world now rotten and crumbling, subjugated by Big Brother, in which the only possible salvation is that of the lovers in "We Are The Dead". Pretentious and bombastic as it is (as well as deliberately kitsch), the project confirms Bowie's foresight, anticipating the creeping mood of the coming new wave generation: the fear of a technological, dehumanizing future that reduces man to a state of mental impairment.

Described by Bowie as "the first album I ever made where it was entirely under the influence of coke," it emerged from chaotic sessions with sound engineer Keith Harwood. The tracks reflect that compositional disorder. Some glam essence still lingers: the orchestral arrangements of "1984," where new funky sonorities also surface, but also the theatrical grandiloquence of "Rock'n'Roll With Me." The three-part suite "Sweet Thing"-"The Candidate"-"Sweet Thing (Reprise)," staged as a kind of menacing post-Brel crooning, offers perhaps the most interesting moments. But what will really seduce the public is the Stones-like vein of the single "Rebel Rebel" (with a riff as sticky as it is banal) and the r'n'b vigour of the title track.

The album divides critics, but it's redeemed by a stunning tour, designed by Jules Fisher. In an apocalyptic setting, among crumbling skyscrapers and spaceships, limping dog-men and other scattered wreckage of humanity scurry about. Bowie presides from atop a crane, acting, miming, and constantly changing look. The "Diamond Dogs Tour" show at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia would be recorded for the double live album David Live, enriched by a surprising soul rendition of his "All The Young Dudes."

Fame makes a man take things over

Fame lets him loose, hard to swallow

Fame puts you there where things are hollow (fame)

Fame, it’s not your brain, it’s just the flame

That burns your change to keep you insane

("Fame")

After Ziggy, the glamorous Bowie is officially dead too. What rises again, phoenix-like, is a dandy who has lost his platform boots, paillettes and a good deal of his mascara along the way, but has kept an ambiguous, unsettling look. The new musical frontier, already touched on in some of the arrangements of the "Diamond Dogs Tour," is America — specifically the America of funk, rhythm'n'blues and the budding disco music of the Philadelphia Sound. An America that has shed the sinister overtones depicted in Aladdin Sane and (all things considered) in Hunky Dory too, and that becomes once again "the land of a thousand dances."

The manifesto of this hybrid "plastic-soul" — warm like black music but also vaguely robotic — is the title track of Young Americans (1975), which unfolds over disco pulsations, with piano and sax to the fore, backed by festive choruses. Behind the scenes of this shift was the guidance of new guitarist Carlos Alomar, who co-wrote the hit single "Fame" (No. 1 in America) together with Bowie himself and John Lennon (whose contribution, however, was more that of a kind of "spiritual guide": the former Beatle was present in the studio during the recording). "Fame" is a funky-beat meditation, almost a rap, on the fleeting nature of success: “Fama, ti mette lì dove le cose sono false/ Fama, non è il tuo cervello, è solo la fiamma Che brucia il tuo cambiamento per mantenerti pazzo/ …Fama, quello che ottieni è nessun domani/ Fama, quello di cui hai bisogno devi prenderlo in prestito”. Despite the illustrious partnership, though, the track turns out to be one of Bowie's weakest singles since his Deram days. Lennon then also takes part in the ill-fated disco cover of the Beatles' "Across The Universe."

The whole album is really a polished exercise in style, with superb vocal arrangements courtesy of Luther Vandross and contributions from top-tier session musicians such as Willy Weeks and David Sanborn. It's a score that Bowie seems more inclined to comment on than to inhabit, save for a few sporadic exceptions: the title track, "Win," "Fascination" — all of them still below his usual standard, however.

The repudiation of his past disappoints many fans and also brings about the end of his relationship with manager De Fries, who is replaced by Michael Lippman. Despite the public's disorientation, Young Americans was hailed by the press as "the first black soul record made by a white musician."

Drawn in by the sirens of show business and cinema, in which he makes his debut with a role in Nicolas Roeg's film "The Man Who Fell To Earth" (1976), Bowie settles in Los Angeles, where he would go through one of the darkest and most dramatic periods of his life.

North Doheny Drive, Bel Air, a stone's throw from the house where, in 1969, Charles Manson's followers murdered five people, including actress Sharon Tate. It's here that the future Thin White Duke sinks into full narcotic chaos, prey to dealers and loan sharks as well as his own demons. His marriage is falling apart, his relationships with his managers are stormy, and his existence seems on the verge of imploding. Skeletal and emaciated like an urban vampire, he withdraws into his apartment, a prisoner of his own phobias. The magazine Uncut reconstructs those days like this: "With his mind warped by cocaine, Bowie became convinced that two fans wanted to steal his semen to be impregnated in a satanic ritual, so as to spread satanism across the world. He spent his days scrawling huge pentagrams on the walls of his home, keeping his own urine in the fridge to ward off curses, sculpting giant monoliths in front of the TV... Visiting him, friends John Lennon and Elton John became convinced he was close to death."

It’s not the side-effects of the cocaine

I’m thinking that it must be love

("Station To Station")

But it was precisely during those Californian days, amid deranged sessions ("I know they took place in Los Angeles because I read about it," he would later admit), by the light of black candles burnt to ward off spirits, that a record as revolutionary as Station To Station (1976) came into being — an album that would kick off another, intoxicating musical season.

For the occasion, a new character stood ready to be idolised: the "Thin White Duke": pleated black trousers, waistcoat and white shirt, red-blond hair slicked back. A cold, aristocratic being, alienated by urban paranoia and isolated in his world of robotic music. Onto him Bowie would vent all the obsessions of the period, including an unhealthy fascination with Nazi mythology evoked in some rambling interviews. "The Thin White Duke was an ogre, but ultimately the best way to fight an evil force is to reduce it to a caricature," he would theorise a few years later.

Where Young Americans had failed, remaining pure formal abstraction, Station To Station hits the mark dead-on, blending guitar-driven rock with electronics, the warm, primal pulse of afro/black music with the icy synths of the German bands Kraftwerk and Neu! (on California's highways, Bowie travelled with "Autobahn" as his permanent soundtrack, dreaming of a return to "his" Europe). "It's not the side-effects of the cocaine/ I'm thinking that it must be love," and again: "the European canon is here," he cries out in the title track, over a layer of rhythms and noises that mimic the sound of a speeding train. "Station To Station" is a funk-rock ride in three movements: the synthetic sound of a locomotive heralds Earl Slick's embroidered guitar riffs and a handful of sparse synth phrases, before the entrance of the "Thin White Duke" and the dizzying final crescendo, in which Bowie once again proves himself an extraordinarily theatrical performer. If anything, the live version included on Stage, the live album released in 1978, is even better.

Inspired by Kraftwerk's “Autobahn”, Bowie would in turn end up seducing the Teutonic quartet, who the following year, in their definitive suite “Trans-Europe Express”, would recite: “…from station to station, back to Dusseldorf city, meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie…”. This game of cross-references, continued later with “V2 Schneider” on Heroes, would prove so dazzling that it would decisively break into the imagination of a new generation of wave musicians (Ultravox, Joy Division, Bauhaus and many others), for whom the Bowie/Kraftwerk pairing would become guiding lights.

With his mind cast toward the future, the Thin White Duke writes cryptic lyrics inspired by cybernetics and sci-fi television systems, pushed to extremes in the avant-garde proto-industrial of “Tvc15”: a vintage piano opens the curtain on an interlocking game of guitar and synth-pop keyboards (years ahead of its time), seasoned with delirious vocalizing (the “oh oh oh oh” repeated a full 28 times!). “Golden Years”, on the other hand, is the single that Young Americans was missing: “plastic soul”, yes, but hugely evocative, with alluring harmonies, handclapping, and a melody as conventional as it is effective. The only non-original track is “Wild Is The Wind”, a poignant cover of a theme written by Dimitri Tiomkin in 1956 for a western film: acoustic guitars and soft keyboards support chill-inducing vocal acrobatics. Bowie also shows growth as a singer, unveiling for the first time that low, powerful voice destined to become one of his trademarks.

A sorrowful record, steeped in dark and unsettling symbolism, Station To Station bears witness to Bowie's peculiar American “via crucis”.

The subsequent tour abandons the excesses of the past in favor of bare, Brechtian-inspired stage sets, lit by cold white neon lights, over which images from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalì's film “Cane Andaluso” are projected. Bowie renews his homage to Kraftwerk, using their music before he takes the stage, and brings on Iggy Pop, just released from a mental health institute. Destroyed by their American adventure, the two former “chemical brothers” would reunite in Europe, where a new life was about to begin for both of them.

What day is it in Berlin?

Once the tour was over, Bowie moved with his assistant Coco Schwab and with Iggy Pop to Berlin, where he was immediately drawn in by the city's Mitteleuropean atmosphere. The electronic music scene, the expressionist cinema of Lang, Murnau and Pabst, Brechtian cabaret, and the new German painting all captivated the decadent soul of the former “Gun of Brixton”. It is in this setting that the celebrated Low–Heroes–Lodger trilogy took shape, the fruit of his partnership with Brian Eno. The ambient music guru had met Bowie in the spring of 1976 in Wembley, at a stop on the “Station To Station Tour”, and had been utterly struck by the direction the former Ziggy's music had taken. Bowie himself had already begun working back in 1975 on instrumental pieces conceived for the soundtrack of “The Man Who Fell To Earth”, using a compositional and instrumental approach akin to that of Kraftwerk and of Eno himself. It is no accident, then, that one of the most celebrated partnerships in rock history was born.

Every chance that I take

I take it on the road

Those kilometres and the red lights

I was always looking left and right

Oh, but I’m always crashing

in the same car

(“Always Crashing In The Same Car”)

Eno's role on Low, the first chapter of the trilogy, is nonetheless marginal: arriving at the studio once the sessions were already well underway, he contributed more as a sonic supervisor than as an active member of Bowie's team (with the exception of “Warszava”), beginning to introduce compositional techniques that would find fuller expression in the following works (above all, the use of the “Oblique Strategies”). A contribution that is often instead underrated is the work of producer Tony Visconti: to him we owe, among other things, the percussion sound experiments carried out through a new kind of device, the “Harmonizer”, which gave the drums unprecedented timbres. Low is in fact a record that expresses itself first and foremost through sound: most of the tracks are instrumental, and in the sung pieces the lyrics are often just small brushstrokes over a scenario already sketched out.

The record was recorded in autumn 1976 at the Chateau d'Herouville in France, where Bowie had just finished recording “The Idiot” with Iggy Pop, a new wave work with “dark” overtones contemporary with the emerging punk scene (it would also become the tragic soundtrack to Ian Curtis's suicide). Later mixed at Hansa Studios in Berlin, Low was released late due to RCA's wariness, who considered it “too experimental”.

There is a clear divide between the two sides: one more devoted to the song form, the other mainly instrumental. In the first part, the icy atmospheres of kraut fuse with the passion of rhythm and blues (thanks to the tight rhythm section of Alomar-Murray-Davies): “Speed Of Life” still sounds futuristic today (Bowie is on synths here), “Breaking Glass” is a menacing, robotic funk, “What In The World” carries an uncontainable expressive urgency in its rhythm, “Sound And Vision” is glacial disco, with its cascade of synthesizers and the steady pulse of treated drums; “Always Crashing In The Same Car” is Dylan-esque folk transfigured through electronics, dominated by the fantastic filtered guitar of Ricky Gardener, future standard-bearer for Iggy Pop, while “Be My Wife” brings out Bowie's own guitar playing, running nervously over a bed of keyboards. The side closes with “A New Career In A New Town”, an instrumental that serves as the manifesto of the new musical direction taken, reconciling tradition (the simple harmonica motif in the distance) with innovation (the “cold” sounds of machines). The lyrics mirror Bowie's inner turmoil: resignation bordering on apathy (“Always Crashing”), memories of a turbulent domestic life (“Breaking Glass”), a strong need for support (“Be My Wife”), awareness of the difficult path undertaken (“Blue blue electric blue/ that’s the color of my room/ where I will live”, in “Sound And Vision”).

The second part of the album rests on the backbone of the six-plus minutes of “Warszawa”: the ambient sound, aseptic by definition, takes on ethnic overtones thanks to the voice (treated with the Harmonizer), which soars in a wordless chant made of sounds evoking Balkan languages and modulations. It marks a step beyond ambient music: world music (which would be explored further on Lodger) is just around the corner. “Art Decade” and “Weeping Wall” (the latter dating back to the already-mentioned, aborted soundtrack for “The Man Who Fell To Earth”) recall certain moments from “Another Green World”, filtered however through Bowie's own sensibility: the result is thus far more tormented than Eno's own work. The record closes with “Subterraneans”, which, in the darkness of its sounds and its desolate sax line, perfectly captures the atmosphere of post-division East Berlin, where “only jazz saxophones remained to represent the memory of what once was” (in Bowie's own words).

Low opened countless doors for the development of rock: the entire 1980s and new wave would certainly not have been the same without this record. Bowie manages to originally merge European culture (kraut-rock, existentialism) with African-American culture (rhythm'n'blues), arriving at the definitive breakdown of transcultural barriers and creating one of his most genuine and profound records.

I, I will be king

And you, you will be queen

Though nothing will drive them away

We can be heroes, just for one day

(“Heroes”)

For the next chapter of the saga, Heroes, a stellar team assembles at the Hansa by the Wall studios in Berlin: alongside Bowie (handling vocals, keyboards, guitars, saxophone and koto) and Eno, there's Robert Fripp (guitarist and leader of King Crimson, as well as co-author with Eno himself of two albums that can genuinely be called “time machines”), Carlos Alomar (guitar), Dennis Davis (percussion) and George Murray (bass). An intoxicating hallucination of dreamlike visions, ambient textures, synthesizers and visionary vibrations, Heroes lets a few rays of light filter through here and there, whereas Low was pure black tragedy. Yet the avant-garde atmospheres remain – tense, claustrophobic, glacial – as does the two-part structure of the tracklist, with nearly all the sung songs on side one and the instrumentals on side two. The link to the following Lodger (1978) instead comes in the closing “The Secret Life Of Arabia”, where we catch the first hints of the sound Bowie would unveil two years later: traces of Middle Eastern flavour and “African” sounds.

In the opening “Beauty And The Beast”, the glam essence of Roxy Music merges with a hardcore guitar riff and a beat-driven rhythm pierced by Bowie's irreverent vocal. The singing style, harsh and dissonant, isn't far removed from what Bowie was working on with Iggy Pop around the same time, and it marks a clean break from the fairy-tale mood of the story (and of Jean Cocteau's film of the same name). “Joe The Lion” is another lash of Fripp's guitar, with Bowie “scripting” the protagonist's delirium. A surreal mood that almost seems to distract the listener from the arrival of that hurricane of emotion that is the title track. Built on the interplay between Fripp's magical guitar embroidery and Eno's monotonous, obsessive harmonies, “Heroes” is above all one of the most illuminating essays in Bowie's melodic gift. The “Thin White Duke's” voice reaches peaks of searing intensity. It's the desperate cry of the last romantic on Earth who, amid the rubble of a crumbling world, begs his woman not to leave, because “we can be heroes, just for one day”; yet at the same time he knows that love will end the very moment it's lived (“though nothing will keep us together…”). The backdrop is the Berlin Wall, an obstacle between the two lovers and a monument to a Europe shattered by the Cold War. That the album has reached its emotional climax is also clear from the following “Sons Of The Silent Age”: a poignant ballad, swollen with desperate melancholy. Its breathtaking opening, with Bowie using the saxophone in an “alienating” way, almost like a siren, soon gives way to a driving chorus, in a kind of distorted rhythm'n'blues, while a spectral choir rises in the background.

In the harsh “Blackout”, buoyed by unusual vocal harmonies and Fripp's guitar acrobatics, you can already hear the seeds of much new wave to come. A whistling synth and a bass line introduce the robotic “V-2 Schneider” (an ambiguous reference to the German bombs meant to secure Hitler's victory in World War II, and at the same time a tribute to Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider), in which the Thin White Duke delivers a “dissonant” sax performance. A synthesis of Bowie's obsession with pop-dance and Eno's studies in rhythm'n'blues, the track acts as the dividing line between the album's two halves, ferrying the listener into the even colder, foggier landscapes of the second part. Eno's funereal keyboards carve out the stunning “Sense Of Doubt”, which drifts with the weight of a Teutonic tragedy. The atmospheres grow more abstract, brushing against the ambient music and new age sounds of many years later. The delicate “Moss Garden” finds Bowie engaged in a duet between koto and synthesizer, in a Zen watercolour of colour and light that exudes the scents of the East with an ecstatic sensuality. “Neukoln” is a dark-hued expressionist fresco, disfigured by the piercing high notes of an Ornette Coleman-style sax. The scenery shifts abruptly for the finale: from the mists of Mitteleuropa to the desert of “The Secret Life Of Arabia”. But what changes most of all is the music: the atmospheric electronics of the previous episodes give way to a dance-rock streaked with kitsch, decadent shades. It's at once the most conventional and the most disorienting track on the record.

Blending Bowie's decadent sensibility, Eno's oblique genius and Fripp's reckless guitar work, Heroes marks a formal milestone in the hybridization of rock and avant-garde electronics. Even Bowie's voice, at the peak of its expressive powers, becomes an instrument in service of this project. And in the background remains Berlin, the ideal “canvas” for the Thin White Duke's healing psychodrama (“It was my clinic,” he would later recall), but also a metaphor for his sense of anguish and alienation. The allure of these two twin albums would not escape Philip Glass, who would translate some of their tracks into symphonic form.

I am a DJ

I am what I play

(“Dj”)

In May 1979, the underrated Lodger closes out the trilogy, and although it falls back on a more conventional song format, it stands as the logical culmination of that exploration of ethno-music only sketched out in the previous chapters. David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Japan and many other musical travelers at the crossroads of folklore and electronics would all owe it a debt. The album also proves forward-thinking in its recording techniques, furthering the pursuit of chance in composition and anticipating the use of loops. Beyond its ethnic experiments ante litteram (the Arabic-tinged sounds of "Yassassin" and the Afro-pop-funk triptych of "Red Money", "African Night Flight" and "Repetition"), highlights include the motorik pulse à la Neu! on the splendid "Red Sails", the electric slashes and celestial choir of "Look Back In Anger", and the two excellent singles that, beneath their wacky surface, conceal an exceptionally refined instrumental weave: "DJ" is a perverse "disco-funk" crossbreed of dissonant guitars and violins (recorded backwards) and keyboard pulses; "Boys Keep Swinging" is a blistering slice of power-trash-pop, embellished by Adrian Belew's monstrous guitar solo, which even manages to mimic the most outlandish noises.

Meanwhile, Bowie records a new version of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" with the Philadelphia Orchestra, acting as narrator. He also continues his film work with his second feature, "Just A Gigolo", directed by David Hemmings, alongside Kim Novak and Marlene Dietrich. The two years of German exile transform the former Californian zombie into a mature artist: "I felt calmer and more productive," he would recall, "I spent my days reading, writing and painting. I'd like to be known as a painter on the day I finally have the nerve to show my canvases."

It's time to change again. Bowie has by now decided to return to the United States. The definitive farewell to Berlin will come a year later, with a new album and a new turning point.

Major Tom at the Disco

Recorded in New York, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) is the connecting link between Bowie's "avant-garde" phase and his later pop-dance drift. The last work to benefit from Visconti's production and the Alomar-Murray-Davis rhythm triad, the album also features two exceptional "guest stars": Robert Fripp, whose virtuoso guitar snarls through "It's No Game" and "Scary Monsters", turning softer across the seven minutes of the ballad "Teenage Wildlife" (cut from the same cloth as "Heroes"); and Pete Townshend, who picks up rhythm guitar to launch into the gallop of "Because You're Young". The cacophonous dissonance of "Fashion", another shrewd parody of consumer society in which fashion and automation march hand in hand, is a legacy of the era's post-punk climate; the cover of Tom Verlaine's anthem "Kingdom Come" is a tribute to the new wave that Bowie helped found and now wholeheartedly embraces; while "It's No Game-Part I & II" is a curious avant-garde sketch, bolstered by the distorted vocalizations and sound effects of two Japanese artists, Michi Hirota and Hisahi Miura.

What truly elevates the whole album, though, is the single "Ashes To Ashes", a "narcotic" rehash of Major Tom's (mis)adventures, now reduced to a drifting "junkie": "We know Major Tom's a junkie/ Strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low". Built on an off-beat rhythm, icy synth chimes and a disorienting play of echo effects, it's one of the great masterpieces of Bowie's songbook: helping drive it to success was also a memorable video clip, in which Bowie dons the costume of a hallucinated clown designed by Natasha Kornilof.

Also thanks to yet another image change, the album won new converts among the musicians who would go on to form the "new romantic" movement (Steve Strange, frontman of Visage, already sporting his effeminate look, appears in the "Ashes To Ashes" video alongside Bowie, together with one of the two backing singers from Human League).

In 1980 Jack Hofsiss offers him the lead role in the stage production of “The Elephant Man”, which goes on to win great acclaim with audiences, including in the US. At the end of that same year, Bowie is named “most influential artist of the decade” by Melody Maker. And it could hardly be otherwise. A decade full of exaltation, unrepeatable in every sense. And indeed, it will never be repeated. From then on, Bowie's career will slide almost continuously downhill, alternating resounding flops with sporadic flashes of the genius he once was.

The first step toward the abyss of Bowie's decennio horribilis is usually pinpointed as the “commercial” turn of Let's Dance (1983), his debut for his new label, EMI. Perhaps, though, it would be more fitting to remember this album as Bowie's last real attempt to say something, in a decade that will see him flailing among a thousand ideas without ever managing to grasp one. What scandalized critics was the notion that an avant-garde artist could so brazenly throw himself into the most frivolous of musical branches: dance music. That it was dance music of real class, however, there's little doubt. Under the deft direction of one of disco music's gurus, Nile Rodgers (ex-Chic), the former Thin White Duke crafts at least a couple of gems to add to the family collection, such as the vibrant “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”, co-written with Giorgio Moroder and destined for the soundtrack of the film of the same name, and the cover of Metro's “Criminal World”, which wraps a pedigree melody in smooth, seductive arrangements.

But what truly broke through on the charts — the album would stay on the British charts for 56

weeks — were above all the soft-dance of the long (and tedious) title track, the syncopated funk of the irresistible “Modern Love”, and the hit cover of Iggy Pop's “China Girl”, accompanied by a sexy video showing the former gay icon with an Asian model on the shoreline, promptly censored by TV broadcasters. The rest of the album, however, is steeped in glossy dance music that, behind a chic production (in every sense...) and a rich instrumental palette (r'n'b horns, funky bass lines and guitar solos from Stevie Ray Vaughan), conceals a substantial poverty of ideas.

With the Serious Moonlight Tour, for the first time I found myself in front of a huge audience that wasn't mine, that didn't know me as an artist. I didn't know how to behave, so I set experimentation aside and focused on the more straightforwardly commercial side.

(David Bowie)

The onset of creative crisis is, however, brilliantly masked by the sumptuous Serious Moonlight Tour, which celebrates the Bowie myth with breathtaking choreography, a formidable ensemble of musicians and a crowd-pleasing setlist. “For the first time I found myself in front of a huge audience that wasn't mine, that didn't know me as an artist. I didn't know how to behave, so I set experimentation aside and focused on the more straightforwardly commercial side,” he will explain.

The former Thin White Duke, who in the meantime has shattered the charts alongside Queen with the single “Under Pressure”, also consolidates his reputation on the big screen, thanks to the soundtrack and cameo in “Christiane F. — We Children from Bahnhof Zoo”, and his roles in “The Hunger” alongside Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon (with music by Bauhaus) and “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, Nagisa Oshima's film featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also composes the gorgeous theme “Forbidden Colours”, performed by David Sylvian.

In July 1983 Bowie has 10 albums simultaneously in the British Top 100.

Distracted by his countless extramusical interests and satiated by the global success he's achieved, Bowie loses his way and heads straight for the cliff edge with Tonight (1984), which vies with its successor for the title of worst album of his career. The single “Blue Jean”, awash in 1950s rock'n'roll horns, marimba and cloying riffs, is even more embarrassing than its interminable video (over twenty minutes!), in which Bowie plays the dual role of singer and spectator. The ill-advised reggae of the title track (a reworking of a track from Iggy Pop's “Lust For Life”) serves as the backdrop for a plastic-sounding duet with Tina Turner. The uptempo funk of “Tumble And Twirl” is a yawn-fest. And the garish cover of “God Only Knows” manages to ruin even one of Brian Wilson's gems.

What actually survives, in fact, is only the most ambitious track, “Loving The Alien”, which showcases yet another spectacular vocal performance from Bowie in service of a new extraterrestrial fantasy.

A couple of duets mark the following year: “Dancing In The Street”, the old Martha & The Vandellas hit performed with Mick Jagger on the Live Aid stage and paired with a video, and the previously unreleased and decidedly more interesting “This Is Not America”, recorded with the Pat Metheny Group. Bowie's film career also veers toward projects of dubious taste, such as the vapid musical “Absolute Beginners” — redeemed, however, by its fine title theme — and the unlikely fantasy film “Labyrinth”, whose music this time is far less convincing. The image of Bowie, powdered and bewigged as the wicked Goblin King in “Labyrinth”, is the defining picture of his terrible decade.

The sound of this period is a flabby “Adult Oriented Pop”, weighed down by ill-advised horn sections and by now utterly devoid of the perverse, irreverent streak of his early years. Bowie's miracle, if anything, lies in his ability to keep feeding his legend while continuing to put out such mediocre music. A textbook example is the Glass Spider Tour, which draws three million people to stadiums around the world thanks to a brilliant marketing operation and kitsch, blockbuster-style stage sets, managing to almost completely obscure the flop of the dreadful Never Let Me Down. The album vying with Tonight for the title of worst of his career is, in fact, a jumble of fake-aggressive sounds (the single “Day-In Day-Out”, which tries to ride in the wake of the Velvet-esque “White Light, White Heat”), Lennon-esque falsetto ballads (“Never Let Me Down”), and pretentious philosophical musings (“Zeroes”). Amid so much confusion, even a harmless refrain like that of “Time Will Crawl” comes as a breath of fresh air.

I no longer knew what I was doing; intoxicated by success, I had lost my natural enthusiasm for things. I believed I had nothing left to say and thought only about earning as much as possible; I feared I was nearing the end. Meeting Reeves Gabrels made me realize I couldn't go on like that.

(David Bowie)

A heavy-metal catharsis

Aware that his creativity is hitting absolute zero, eager for another shift that might restore his enthusiasm for playing, and drawn to the jagged sound of the Pixies, of whom he's a great admirer, Bowie pulls yet another trick out of his bottomless hat: a new project, a quartet called Tin Machine, featuring guitarist Reeves Gabrels and brothers Tony and Hunt Sales, previously part of Iggy Pop's band for “Lust For Life”. Beyond his wish to step back for a moment from center stage (“I don't want to be David Bowie anymore, I just want to be the singer in Tin Machine”), the London-born artist seems almost to be seeking a kind of catharsis, purging the hedonism and slack disengagement of recent years through the near heavy-metal violence of this new sound. “In those ten years I wasn't up to par,” he would admit some time later. “I no longer knew what I was doing; intoxicated by success, I had lost my natural enthusiasm for things. I believed I had nothing left to say and thought only about earning as much as possible; I feared I was nearing the end. Meeting Reeves made me realize I couldn't go on like that.”

The outcome will be modest (two mediocre studio albums and a dreadful live album), but it will at least help Bowie shake off the sonic residue of the previous five years. The subsequent Sound+Vision tour will serve as a kind of reconciliation with disappointed fans, straddling the line between a jukebox revue of his roaring years and a farewell to his old hits ("I want people from now on to come to my shows for what I'm writing today, not for what I wrote twenty years ago," he would confess once the shows had ended). The tour was accompanied by an anthology box set of the same name, which had the merit of introducing a new generation of fans to the evergreens of his past.

When he returns to solo production after six years, Bowie indeed shows that he has rediscovered the urge to play and (partly) to experiment. Black Tie White Noise (1993), produced by Nile Rodgers and made in collaboration with the trumpeter of the same name, Lester Bowie, bears the mark of the euphoria that followed David's marriage to the stunning Somali model Iman Abdulmajid (on June 6, 1992, in Florence): the instrumental "The Wedding," complete with music box, is the original soundtrack for the ceremony, which evocatively blended the atmospheres of the two rites (Protestant and Muslim).

The lyrics range from personal themes (the refined single "Jump They Say," dedicated to his brother Terry) to social snapshots (the title track, a duet with Al B. Sure, inspired by the Los Angeles riots in the Black ghettos). The sound attempts to refresh the pan-European modernism of the Berlin trilogy with gusts of free jazz that pair well with what Bowie had already explored in terms of harmonic disarticulation on albums like Lodger and Scary Monsters. House music, jazz, rock and soul thus become the coordinates of a new attempt to define "modern dance." What's lacking, if anything, are the songs, the refrains, the hooks typical of Bowie's finest work.

A further confirmation of his rediscovered experimental streak is the following The Buddha Of Suburbia, the soundtrack to the TV film of the same name, based on the novel by Anglo-Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi.

No longer anxious about topping the charts, the dandy of Brixton devotes himself to all manner of activities: he contributes as a columnist to the magazine Modern Painters; together with Brian Eno he puts together the fundraising collection "War Child: Little Pieces From Big Stars" in London, at the Flowers East Gallery, enlisting rock legends such as Paul McCartney, Bono, Pete Townshend and Charlie Watts; he opens the first exhibition of his own work at the Cork Street Gallery in London: paintings, sculptures and two wallpaper designs created for Laura Ashley; he appears as Andy Warhol in the film "Basquiat," the directorial debut of painter Julian Schnabel. And that this is a moment of creative reawakening for Bowie will be confirmed by his next studio album as well.

Stay away from the future

Back away from the light

It's all deranged

No control

Sit tight in your corner

Don't tell God your plans

It's all deranged

("I'm Deranged")

When Outside comes out in 1995, the fruit of his renewed collaboration with Brian Eno, critics, for the first time in fifteen years, evoke the glories of the Berlin period. The album is indeed a kind of compendium of Bowie's electronic experiments, updated to the sounds of the new decade (above all the aggressive industrial of Nine Inch Nails, who would in turn declare themselves indebted to him and with whom he would tour) and to cyberpunk aesthetics (extreme art, serial killers, virtual reality). It's an uneven but ambitious, complex work. A sense of death dominates ("but the will to live is dead"... "This chaos is killing me") along with a sense of chill ("Cold winter bleeds on the girders of Babel"), the pessimistic vision of a desolate future, in which there will no longer be hope even in religion (“Stay away from the future/ Back away from the light/ It's all deranged/ No control/ Sit tight in your corner/ Don't tell God your plans/ It’s all deranged “), la rappresentazione del crimine come sintomo estremo di una società in putrefazione (“Blended sunrise/ and it’s a dying world”).

The narrative thread is described in the accompanying "Diary of Nathan Adler," created by Bowie using Burroughs' "cut-up" literary technique: "The investigations of detective Nathan Adler, of the Art-Crime Division, into certain ritual art murders, conceptual muggings and other misdeeds," set in a hypothetical society at the turn of the millennium. Through the stories of seven characters, the album examines the condition of the "outsider," of life on the margins of society, of the American periphery. One chilling episode, the ritual murder of Baby Grace Blue, immediately plunges the listener into macabre, unsettling atmospheres: a prime example is the single "Hearts Filthy Lesson," not coincidentally chosen for the soundtrack of the cult thriller "Seven": driven by an obsessive rhythm and marred by metallic crackles and heavy clangs, it's a dazzling industrial "ballad." Another noir-tinged track is "I'm Deranged," which David Lynch would include in the soundtrack of his "Lost Highway." While the title track (taken from the Tin Machine repertoire) returns to more melodic, seductive tones, "Voyeur Of Utter Destruction" still gives off the radioactive emissions of heavy industry, while "Hallo Spaceboy," yet another "reprise" of Major Tom, is a spectacular trip-hop track ahead of its time, driven by a pounding rhythm section (it would be remixed by the Pet Shop Boys). Bowie's more melancholy side comes through in the love song "The Motel" and in the fatalistic "Strangers When We Meet," already sung on Buddha Of Suburbia.

A sort of catalogue of the "coolest" sounds of the era (cyberpunk, funk, industrial, techno, ambient), a meticulous work of experimentation on sonic layering applied to song form, 1.Outside was meant to be only the first chapter of a far more ambitious project, which, for now, has been shelved.

The former Thin White Duke seems resurrected, both as a musician and as a singer, with vocal performances worthy of his golden years.

In 1997, Bowie celebrated his 50th birthday with a huge party at Madison Square Garden in New York, bringing together old and new friends such as Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Robert Smith, Billy Corgan, Foo Fighters and Frank Black, all together on stage singing with him. Even his look adapts to the times: a porcupine hairstyle, an earring and a devilish goatee conceal the wrinkles of age. Bowie has miraculously managed to keep his legend young even after twenty years of music, winning over new legions of fans and admiring musicians alike.

The call of the jungle

But the motto is "if something works, throw it away". So, rather than ride the nostalgic wave of a return to the past, Bowie swims against the current and dives into a new sonic universe, that of underground clubs, marked by the frenetic rhythms of jungle and drum'n'bass. It's a risky gamble. But the Thin White Duke pulls it off once again, crowning a new rebirth.

Written and produced in just two weeks, the new album Earthling is preceded by another twist: the internet release of one of its tracks, the electrifying "Telling Lies". In just the first four days, the track is heard by more than 46,000 people. The razor-sharp guitars (again courtesy of Gabrels) wage a furious hand-to-hand battle with a bass/drums rhythm section racing wildly, against a synthetic backdrop teeming with all manner of samples. The result is a whirlwind of sounds that intoxicates and fascinates, but at times seems to hide, behind its ultra-modern packaging, some shaky songwriting. The single "Little Wonder", for instance, effectively blends rock riffs with jungle rhythms (he'll even take it to the Ariston stage at Sanremo); the feverish dance of "Dead Man Walking" sounds a bit overstuffed, while the hard rock outburst of "Looking For Satellites" mainly serves to indulge Gabrels' fiery guitar work. Bowie, if anything, seems more at ease playing the sardonic scourge on "I'm Afraid Of Americans", a vibrant anti-American invective set to a funk beat, and the mystic traveller of "Seven Years In Tibet", the record's emotional climax, which after a drum'n'bass intro slides into a slow trance groove, with violin samples and a solemn choir (translated into Mandarin Chinese, Seven Years In Tibet would become the last number one on the Hong Kong charts before the handover to Chinese control in June 1997).

Bowie seems to have finally pulled himself out of the quagmire of the previous decade, even if some suspect that, after long anticipating styles and trends, he is now simply trying to jump on the bandwagon of the era's most fashionable trends.

I'm not cut out for realism, for slogans. I'd rather leave that job to Sting. I have little sympathy for humanity. People are right to try to change it, but I think it's a wasted effort.

I'm too selfish to get involved.

(David Bowie)

The personal battle against time waged by this Dorian Gray of rock shows no sign of letting up. The former glam-boy who was travelling to Mars when man had barely reached the Moon stays up every night, searching for a new challenge, faithful to the Wildean imperative of "life as a work of art". Surprising people, after all, is David Jones aka Bowie's favourite sport. "I'm just the person most people think I am," he has often stated. And his current mask is that of a billionaire businessman, who plays at chasing the most varied music-tech trends, floats himself on the stock exchange (with the genuinely unfortunate venture of the "Bowie Bonds"), repeatedly launches revolutionary projects on his website BowieNet, and even sets up his own online "Bowie Bank".

The Thin White Duke is by now a seasoned bluffer, who seems to have forgotten the transgressions of his wild years. The dishevelled naive alien has become a businessman, with properties all over the world and a touch of philanthropy (Live Aid, the Africa megashow, the "Long Live Tibet" CD in support of the Tibetan people). But Bowie remains the apolitical rockstar par excellence: "I'm not cut out for realism, for slogans. I'd rather leave that job to Sting. That kind of music doesn't interest me. It's enough for me to send a few cheques. And besides, I don't do it to ease my conscience. I'm not altruistic by nature. I have little sympathy for humanity. People are right to try to change it, but I think it's a wasted effort. I'm too selfish to get involved".

Meanwhile, he can laugh at toy manufacturers putting dolls modelled on his old "masks" on the market. He can appear detached in the face of the glam rock revival to which his friend and photographer Mick Rock dedicated an exhibition in New York, deny his fellow producer Michael Stipe the use of his songs for the film "Velvet Goldmine", dismissing it as merely "a good trailer for my film about Ziggy Stardust". As brazen as ever, this master of the stage seems almost to enjoy irritating his detractors. And yet with "old age" has come a shower of awards, including even honorary degrees and "definitive" accolades, such as the one from the rockstars polled by NME, who elected him "most influential musician of all time", or the one from readers of the British newspaper "Sun", who crowned him "greatest music figure of the century".

But heaven forbid he should stop. And with Hours (1999) the script changes again: a return to the past, to classic, slightly nostalgic ballads, in the style of Hunky Dory. "The album," he explains, "is about a man looking back and retracing his life. That's why I wanted to give a sign of how I used to write songs". Hence the glam reminiscing of "The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell" and the nostalgic single "Thursday's Child", in other words the old Bowie melody carried over into the new millennium. Overall, though, the record rarely delivers a jolt, giving the impression that the spark that followed the Tin Machine period has once again gone out.

Rock is the most important artistic expression of this century. But I also love creating characters, narratives, scenarios. So I'm pulled in several directions at once, and trying to keep it all in balance in my mind is a damn hard job.

(David Bowie)

Two years later, Heathen (2002), recorded at the Allaire studios near Woodstock, in a 1920s building, largely confirms that suspicion. There's a lot of retro-electronic gear recovered, old 80s synths and even further back (the legendary Theremin, the Stylophone), even the original EMS synthesizer from the Berlin trilogy. It's not a concept album, although a common thread - the theme of paganism - links the twelve tracks. Bowie gives vent to all his doubts and fears about his relationship with God. There's no shortage of illustrious collaborations: Visconti returns to production duties, Pete Townshend plays guitar on the single "Slow Burn", a classic Bowie ballad, anguished and melodramatic; while Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters plays five-string bass on "I've Been Waiting For You", a cover from Neil Young's debut album. Also "cloned" are "Cactus" by the Pixies and "I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship" by The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, a Bowie idol since his glam days. The set closes with two already-known tracks: "I Would Be Your Slave", already performed at New York's Carnegie Hall at the benefit concert for Tibet House, and "Afraid", already made available in 2001 to BowieNet subscribers.

Despite the wealth of resources on display, Heathen is a rather monotonous record, offering only a few rare emotional peaks, thanks mainly to Bowie's performances, always memorable, as he had in the meantime become father to little Alexandria Zahra Jones.

Not even Reality (2003), unveiled with great fanfare via an interactive show broadcast simultaneously in cinemas around the world, manages to reverse the trend. The two covers are lacklustre: "Pablo Picasso" by Jonathan Richman and "Try Some, Buy Some" by the late George Harrison. The first unleashes a rather monotonous wall of sound; the second, drowned by Visconti in an overblown orchestration, finds no sufficient reason for its existence in Bowie's vocal. Not even the single "New Killer Star" manages to take off, leaving its good intentions mired in a pop chorus that would look out of place even on the most pandering Blur records. The title track is a poor copy of "Hallo Spaceboy", while the atmospheric dance beat of "Looking For Water" is propped up by a guitar riff that's been heard many times before. The elegant stride of "Bring Me The Disco King" isn't enough to redeem a record that is simply pointless.

A family man, a brilliant manager of his own image, Bowie seems to have by now lost the darkly restless spirit that branded his masterpieces. With age have also come a few aches and pains: in 2004 surgery became necessary to fix a circulatory problem that had sidelined him on tour. But this ever-enduring Gatsby of rock retains unexpectedly deep reserves of energy. He keeps fit by boxing. He moves effortlessly from stage to film set, from celebrity parties to art exhibitions. "Rock," he says, "is the most important artistic expression of this century. But I also love creating characters, narratives, scenarios. So I'm pulled in several directions at once, and trying to keep it all in balance in my mind is a damn hard job".

Sitting in the Dschungel

On Nurnberger Strasse

A man lost in time

Near KaDeWe

Just walking the dead

Where are we now?

(“Where Are We Now?”)

The rebirth of the 2010s

To celebrate his 66th birthday, though, Bowie comes out into the open, silencing the rumors about himself and his future, with a new album, The Next Day (2013), exactly ten years after his last studio work.

The imagery and the music of this umpteenth reincarnation – backed up by the single "Where Are We Now?", which preceded this release by two months – seemed to suggest the acknowledgment of a human being dropping the mask and, in splendid melancholy, bowing his head toward the twilight. All dramatically realistic, except that listening to The Next Day reveals an artist who is anything but subdued, with plenty of drive and inspiration left to amaze us once again.

Bowie gathered the partners who had worked with him in the years before his disappearance, Tony Visconti first and foremost, brought them into the studio and, in total secrecy, unleashed an energy he hadn't shown since the days of the electronic pairing Outside–Earthling. Rock'n'Bowie comes roaring back right from the start with the title track, which happily dusts off the rhythm section of "Lodger", the crooning of "Beauty And The Beast" from Heroes, and the Fripp-esque guitars of "It's No Game" from Scary Monsters, wiping out, in just over three minutes, years of silence and indecision, along with that sense of glorious closing credits conjured up by "Where Are We Now?". And so, while "Dirty Boys" dusts off the sick saxophones of decadent Berlin for a fleeting tribute to his partnership with Iggy Pop, the new single "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" settles into epic frequencies, briefly interrupted by a fleeting bridge excursion into Roxy Music territory, echoing "If There Is Something?" (which, not by chance, was already covered back in the Tin Machine days).

With "Valentine's Day", Bowie turns pop and wholeheartedly reclaims his most melancholic pathos, and then with "If You Can See Me" he peeks through – still in a rock vein – amid the drum'n'bass pulses that once belonged to Earthling, while on "I'd Rather Be High" he grows so sharp as to brush against the robotic psychedelia immortalized by John Foxx on his sadly overlooked "The Golden Section". "Dancing Out In Space" plays on even rhythms, unleashing a guitar line and chorus that stick from the first listen, while "How Does The Grass Grow" offers – bizarrely disguised – an opening reminiscent of "Boys Keep Swinging", the chords of "V-2 Schneider" and, believe it or not, the chorus of "Apache", the classic sixties instrumental by the Shadows. Still on the subject of the Sixties, here comes "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die", which could fit right into the repertoire of a vintage Scott Walker (though the final quote is a nod to the drums of his own "Five Years"), preceded by the forged metal of "(You Will) Set the World On Fire" – the song he never managed to write for Tin Machine – and followed by an explicit tribute to the more recent, experimental Scott Walker of "Climate Of Hunter", with "Heat" closing out this album's sparkling whirl of "remakes & remodels".

Now that's what you call a great comeback.

Sealing the event is also the largest retrospective exhibition ever dedicated to his career, staged at the Victoria And Albert Museum (until 18 July) and featuring 300 items coming directly and exclusively from his private archive in New York. Visitors can thus retrace fifty years in the career of one of rock's icons through private letters, drawings, artwork, exclusive shots and photographs by Herb Ritts and Helmut Lang, as well as, of course, his eccentric outfits.

The years go by, fleeting musical idols fade away, but Bowie, for better or worse, remains. Perhaps it's true that Bowie can never be understood, only followed along his zigzagging paths, in his sincere artifice. Because his characters are indeed the screen he keeps placing between himself and the world, but they are also the most truthful testimonies of his personality. Clues to an enigma that, almost fifty years after his debut, still remains entirely to be deciphered. After all, while other grand old men of rock throw their audiences a bone, Bowie seems to want to slap his in the face instead, forever playing at being "disturbing". Which, some might say, is in fact the equivalent of a bone for Bowie's audience – the fact remains that, seen from a distance, the effect is explosive. His videos stir up fierce controversy, his lyrics are accused of satanism and attacks on Christianity, his symbolism of being Masonic, his messages of being deviant, his music of being crooked, off-key, "wrong". And since 8 January 2016 marks his 69th birthday, that's no small feat.

The seal on this rediscovered creativity of the 2010s-era Bowie is Blackstar, released at the start of 2016, preceded by the title track of the same name – already used as the theme for the TV series "The Last Panthers" – and by a handful of singles and music videos.

The album is more than solid. It certainly resembles some of the experimental Walker material and Radiohead's "Kid A" and "Amnesiac", except that Walker began his experimental phase with 1978's "Nite Flights", which, by his own admission, owed everything to Low and Heroes, and that Radiohead in turn drew on many elements of the Berlin trilogy (the marriage of experimental electronics and brass, the hypnotic rhythms, the spacey atmospheres and so on), albeit filtering them through the aesthetic of their own era. The worst Bowie can be accused of, then, is simply reclaiming what was his in the first place.

There are also tracks that are pure, unmistakable Bowie, like the melancholic acoustic ballad "Dollar Days" or the velvety electronics of "I Can't Give Everything Away", which simultaneously quotes the opening of "Thursday's Child" and the harmonica of "Never Let Me Down".

"Sue" and "'Tis A Pity She Was A Whore" were drastically reworked compared to the versions released as 7-inch singles, the former cut down to half its length and pumped up with drum'n'bass structures, the latter losing its apocalyptic edge but gaining richer arrangement.

The title track is perhaps the most overtly prog piece of his career, capable in ten minutes of travelling from Idm to glam by way of jazz, while at the opposite end sit songs with far more essential writing, such as "Girl Loves Me", with its robotic rhythms, and "Lazarus", a kind of bluesy noise-rock steeped in noir atmospheres.

In essence, on the title track the album hits upon a masterpiece worthy of his major works, while the rest is marked by an effective use of horns and a rather amused Bowie, which is enough in itself.

Just as the world was celebrating his latest feat, unfortunately, came the news that everyone had feared for a few years, given his precarious health: David Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016, after an eighteen-month battle with cancer. The announcement came directly from the great English artist's Facebook profile, and confirmation soon followed from the Twitter account of his son, Duncan Jones, a director of undoubted talent who will know how to carry forward his father's visionary spirit.

Perhaps the most beautiful words used to remember him came from his longtime producer and lifelong friend, Tony Visconti: "He always did what he wanted. And he always wanted to do it his way and in the best possible way. His death was no different from his life — a work of art. He made 'Blackstar' for us, as a gift. I knew for a year this would happen, but I wasn't prepared for it. He was a magnificent human being, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it is appropriate to cry."

An irreplaceable loss for the world of music. But if it's true, as Fred Frith and Howard Howe write in the essay "Art Into Pop", that "Bowie is a blank canvas on which people write their own dreams", all that's left is to close our eyes and keep living forever suspended in his stardust.

A year later, on the day that would have been his seventieth birthday, the Ep No Plan was released, containing "Lazarus" and three other previously unreleased tracks, a worthy complement to his final recorded effort. The three songs had been written for the musical "Lazarus", co-written by Bowie himself together with Irish playwright Enda Walsh, a sequel to "The Man Who Fell to Earth", the film adaptation of Walter Tevis's science-fiction novel, which starred the same former Ziggy Stardust on the big screen in 1976. The stage show features many of the White Duke's best-loved songs, performed by the cast and recorded by them in a session that began (incredibly, yes) on the morning of 11 January 2016, amid general grief, later collected on the soundtrack titled Lazarus Cast Album, released in October 2016. "Lazarus" premiered in New York, running from 18 November 2015 to 20 January 2016, with Bowie himself often present at rehearsals despite his difficult health conditions, and at the official opening night (7 December), in what turned out to be his triumphant final public appearance. At the end of the show he took to the stage with the cast and the show's director, to receive his final (knowing?) standing ovation.

Only on 8 January 2017 were the three tracks released as a standalone Ep, just two days before the first anniversary of his death. Leading the way is the already familiar "Lazarus", while the other three tracks remain in keeping with the legendary English musician's most recent output: the aching, melancholy-soaked "No Plan", the rock-tinged despair of "Killing A Little Time" showing just how much fire still burned in the White Duke's songwriting, even in his final days, and the mid-tempo "When I Met You", picking up the thread laid down by "The Next Day" and the other albums of the new millennium. It's no coincidence they were left off the tracklist of "Blackstar", but in 2017 they take on a new meaning, powerful and decisive, representing neither the bottom of the barrel nor the most predictable nostalgia exercise, but rather the perfect remedy for the thirst for new material among the millions of fans scattered across the globe (even if the most devoted already knew them from the musical's soundtrack). The definitive seal on the conclusion of an unprecedented artistic and musical arc, and perhaps one with no plausible successors.

To commemorate David Bowie's entire artistic journey, between 2015 and 2025 six celebratory box sets were released, reconstructing his entire discography in strict chronological sequence (with the exception of his debut and the Tin Machine period), enriched with numerous extra contents. After "Five Years (1969-1973)", "Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)", "A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982)", "Loving The Alien (1983-1988)" and "Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001)", the sequence was brought to a close in September 2025 by I Can't Give Everything Away (2002-2016), which borrows its title from the closing track of "Blackstar", focusing on the final stretch of the English artist's career, still rich with ideas and masterstrokes. The box set (thirteen CDs or eighteen vinyl records) houses Bowie's last four albums – remastered with Tony Visconti's involvement – as well as the Eps "The Next Day Extra" and "No Plan", but its real treasure lies in two full concerts, one for each of the tours that followed the release of "Heathen" and "Reality", recorded respectively on 18 July 2002 at the Montreux Jazz Festival and on 22-23 November 2003 at the Point Theatre in Dublin. While the latter had already been officially released in 2010 (the live album "A Reality Tour", albeit with a different running order), the Montreux Jazz Festival concert had previously only circulated as a bootleg. A performance that has become legendary, partly thanks to the near-complete rendition of "Low".

Another point of interest regarding I Can't Give Everything Away (2002-2016) is the inclusion of the exclusive compilation created specifically for the occasion, "Re:Call 6": a full 41 tracks of b-sides, live recordings, alternate versions and remixes, never before included on any album. Standout moments include collaborations (in the studio or live) with Lou Reed, Arcade Fire, David Gilmour, Kristeen Young, Earl Slick, Maynard James Keenan and John Frusciante. Rounding out the lavish box set is an elegant book containing previously unseen notes, drawings and handwritten lyrics by Bowie, numerous photos, memorabilia and liner notes written by Tony Visconti and Jonathan Barnbrook. The result is an almost complete account (something inevitably is missing) of the White Duke's final fourteen years, an essential item for die-hard completists, even though the contents will already be well known to dedicated collectors of Bowie's catalogue. The price is not exactly cheap, but all the content can be streamed on the major platforms. It may well be the most fitting way to remember a genius of transformation ten years on from a loss that still hurts far too much.

Contributions by Antonio Puglia ("Hunky Dory", "Low"), Marco Bercella ("The Next Day"), Federico Romagnoli ("Blackstar"), Claudio Lancia ("No Plan", "I Can't Give Everything Away (2002-2016)").

Special thanks to Marco Bercella for his advice and to the Velvet Goldmine website for the translations of lyrics and interviews and for the biographical information.

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