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[train motion humming]
[train screeching]
[car engines roaring]
[melancholic music]
- I'm very much a character when I go on stage
and believe in my part all the way down the line,
right the way down.
But I do play it for all it's worth
because that's the way I do with my station.
That part of what Bowie is supposedly all about.
I'm an actor.
- [Narrator] David Bowie,
one of the greatest pioneer artists and rock stars
of the 20th century,
a visionary, an innovator, a provocateur,
extravagant and controversial.
He transcended music, fashion, and art.
A genuine songwriter,
whose songs reached unprecedented heights around the world.
A man who kept expanding, exploring,
and evolving throughout his life.
Inspiring and teaching generations of musicians
about blending different styles of music,
changeable and unpredictable.
He remains immortal in the hearts of many.
- Music is like a journey through your life
and his music punctuated my life in terms of question marks
and exclamation marks and everything.
That's wonderful about music.
I kinda followed it through.
So yesterday is a tragic day
for a lot of music lovers
and he's about light and music and love
and everything that's wonderful in the world
when there's so much dark in the world
that some like barriers they're creative
and they can just lift anybody.
So that's why I find it so sad really
that someone so special is gone.
[melancholic music]
- Listen to the chords he used,
they are so unbelievably difficult.
The song structures are just incredible.
He didn't write three minute pop songs,
he wrote pieces of art that we could listen to.
- [Narrator] David Bowie was a rock and roll revolution,
driven, fierce, and always wanting to escape conformity,
an outsider, an adventurer,
a man out of this world.
[melancholic music]
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones
on January 8th, 1947 in Brixton, South London.
He came from a working class family.
He had strong bonds with Terry, his half-brother,
but he grew up in an unconventional household.
A dark cloud roamed over his family.
A number of his mother's relatives were touched
by mental illness and suffered from schizophrenia.
Some also committed suicide.
[acoustic music]
Terry's mental health deteriorated later on
and Bowie was scared that he would also
eventually be affected by this illness.
In fact, some even said that the different personalities
that David created throughout his life was a way
of coping with his latent schizophrenia tendencies.
He grew up a complicated man.
When he was just 15 years old,
a traumatic event happened to him.
Bowie got in a fight over a girl and got punched in the eye.
This led him to four months of hospital treatment,
after which doctors came to the conclusion
that young David wasn't going
to see completely clearly again.
He was left with a permanently dilated pupil.
The incident gave Bowie those unique extra terrestrial eyes
and his most iconic feature.
At 17 David was already different and determined.
He wore his hair long, really long considering the times.
After so many insults thrown his way about his hairstyle,
he decided he just wasn't going to take it anymore.
He formed a society called the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.
This move was his first step on the path to fame
that he would achieve within five years.
- Well, I think, we're all fairly tolerant,
but over the last two years we've had comments like darling
and can I carry a handbag, thrown at us.
I think you just have to stop now.
No, I like it, and I think we all like long hair
and we don't see why
other people persecuted us because of this.
England has a marvelous habit of being able
to dissipate everything through this marvelous media
and long hair quickly got dissipated.
I mean, I used to be able to stop traffic quite easily
by just walking down the street,
no move, not just that, 'cause I had long hair.
- [Narrator] A year later at the age of 18,
David Jones adopted the name David Bowie
and from then on, he dreamed of reaching fame.
Bowie was fascinated by space travel and inspired
by the British rocker, Vince Taylor,
the legendary Stardust cowboy,
who after taking too many drugs
and an emotional breakdown decided
he was an alien god on earth.
He created an androgynous
and flamboyant persona called Ziggy Stardust.
The name Ziggy came from a tailor shop
he had seen from a train window.
Bowie took Ziggy Stardust as a stage persona.
Ziggy was for him an alien rockstar sent
to earth as a messenger.
His intention was to create a character
who looks like he's landed on Mars.
With flame red hair and striking colorful costumes,
he quickly developed his own style
and looked extraordinary out of this world.
His appearance actually reflected
his feelings of being an outsider.
He said that he often felt a drift
and alienated from the normal world,
but that seemed to appeal to audiences.
It made him relatable because he had something for everyone
and appeal to people who thought they were outsiders too.
They were grateful to him for that.
He made them feel like it was okay to be different.
- Whenever I photographed him live,
he always had the 20 different costumes and so on.
He was very different and he gave people the opportunity to,
he made people understand that it was okay to be different.
And a lot of kids when they're growing up,
certainly in the substances in late 60s,
they weren't sure not only of their own sexuality,
but of lots of things, lots of kids are loners,
and not just said, "Well, I'm different.
You can be different
and just get out there and be your self."
And I think he encouraged a lot of people to do that.
And the fact that people say he was chameleon-like,
but in a way I think, he was an inventor as well,
an originator, and he never made the same album twice.
I think when we were watching Ziggy Stardust,
we felt we were part of a cult really,
our parents were horrified
that we would go and see a man who dressed like that.
Bowie was always quite an underground artist anyway.
I mean, he was mainstream because the tabloids
in the UK were kind of appalled by the way he looked
and so it was easy for them to put a splash
on the front cover and criticize him.
These are all papers now who did 20 page pullouts
about how great he was.
But at the time they weren't supportive at all.
- It became obvious to me that every young person
at some point in their life thinks of themselves
as the other, the outsider, the freak.
And they had found in at least one of Bowie's many personae,
the other, the outsider, the freak.
They related to that, it gave them hope.
Bowie had something for everyone, including black people.
Very important in the United States where he did
that soul album, "Young Americans" and the Live Soul Tour,
and also in a famous confrontation on MTV in 1983, in which
he criticized them for not playing enough black music.
The widest range of people for the widest variety
of reasons related to and felt grateful to this man.
And I think that that is the lasting legacy of Bowie
more so than any particular song or any particular album.
- [Narrator] Just five days before the first moon landing
in 1969, Bowie released "Space Oddity".
It became his first top five entry
on the UK single chart after its release.
[electronic music]
♪ This is Ground Control to Major Tom ♪
♪ You've really made the grade
♪ And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear ♪
♪ Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare ♪
In 1972, he released the single "Life on Mars",
which reached number three in the UK.
♪ Is there life on Mars
- [Narrator] There was magic
and mystery in his music and lyrics.
Following this success,
his Ziggy Stardust tour catapulted him to stardom
as he toured over the UK and the USA for a year and a half.
This started a cult of Bowie and a long lasting fandom.
- I'm really trooping, you know.
This is my life really, writing or performing.
I don't know, there's not much else I want.
- It was at that point with Ziggy
that his previous releases started flooding into the charts.
And in late 72 and 73 Britain had Bowie IDAs,
where everything he'd done was
in the chart at the same time.
And it was a very giddy period for people
who had not known his work because it was
suddenly like this is the most productive man of the year.
And in early 73, "Space Oddity" was
finally a hit single in the United States.
Of course, "Space Oddity" was helped in Britain by the fact
that the BBC played it in coverage of moon operations.
- Just when Starman was a success,
just when the Ziggy Stardust album was a huge success,
I saw him playing the Glasgow, huge venue,
and it was so popular to do two shows.
And I was working that night, I was playing that night.
So I went along to see this afternoon show
and it was just astounding.
I heard four people on stage making this amazing noise.
And the presence that the man had it was uncanny.
It had them tight audience that palm of his hands.
And I seem to remember in my memory of it
'cause it gets colored over the years,
my memory was completely exciting, vibrant show.
In reality, it was four guys on stage brilliant music
and a few flashing colored lights,
but it was something I'd never experienced before.
It changed my opinion on music forever.
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
♪ He'd like to come and meet us ♪
♪ But he thinks he'd blow our minds ♪
♪ There's a starman waiting in the sky ♪
- [Narrator] Bowie became famous not only for his music,
but also for his appearance,
something that the whole world talked about.
He looked strange, but he was made to be in history.
Bowie married Angie Barnett in 1970, his first wife.
She was the one who actually encouraged him
to feel confident in dressing more feminine.
They had a son they named Zowie Bowie,
now known as Duncan Jones, who was born in 1971.
But it was more of a marriage of convenience,
a show business marriage.
Their love was doomed from the beginning.
He ended up getting tired
of her wanting to direct his career.
Their golden years turned to ashes
and they divorced in 1980.
Bowie declared himself gay in an interview
in 1972 coinciding with his campaign for stardom as Ziggy,
which was deemed very courageous.
On other occasions, he declared himself bisexual in 1976
and in 1993, a closet hetero.
He did say that these were more a product
of the times than his own feelings.
He knew that this would allow him to get more attention
from the media and draw more audiences to his music.
His goal was super stardom, to reach worldwide success,
and to be moving the culture.
He refused to be put in a category
so that he could have room to work in
and could remain creative.
No label could describe him.
Some declare that he was more transgressional
than he was ever really gay, heterosexual, or bisexual.
He probably liked experimenting out of curiosity,
the same way he experimented everything else in his life.
Bowie was never politically engaged or an activist,
but by being a queer icon,
he did a lot for the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
His influence was even above the activists.
- You often heard the word visionary used about Bowie
and he was, throughout the 1970s into the early 80s,
ahead of everybody's curve.
It's very interesting to read a couple of comments
by people from today's LGBT community, trying to figure out
how Bowie relates to today's community
by the standards of today's community.
Because everybody notices, well, he didn't
actually do any political activism
and that's because he was above political activism
and what he was doing had a greater effect
than political activism because he didn't affect laws,
he affected human beings and he probably did as much
for gay liberation as any individual law
during the time period
because he liberated the people in themselves.
- He was weird.
I mean, I have to say working class kids growing up
in Glasgow, quite a hard city at the time,
to see this androgyny on national television was shocking
and unbelievably exciting 'cause the music was great.
The look of the guy was fantastic.
Him and Mike Ronson, he's a guitarist sidekick,
were just outstandingly powerful, but brilliant music.
So it kind of took that whole, I don't know,
we'll just call it glam rock,
I'm not sure you'd call it glam rock,
that took that whole idea of top of the pops been a bit fun
and bubbly in water and challenged
that held a mirror up to us all saying,
"Okay, you know what you think your life is okay,
this is what we can do, this is acceptable.
This is okay to have this bizarre presence on your screen."
Yeah, and you saw it, you saw people react
in very strange and wonderful ways,
but it was like a door opening in the use of that period.
It was a door opening that exposed them to something
that they had never ever thought about.
This fantastic, weird, almost alien light character coming
into your sitting room, it was just incredibly exciting.
- [Narrator] In 1972, he released the lead single
to his album "Aladdin Sane" that would remain one
of his signature tunes, "The Jean Genie".
It became Bowie's biggest hit to date.
♪ Jean Genie lives on his back
♪ The Jean Genie loves chimney stacks ♪
♪ He's outrageous
♪ He screams and he bawls
♪ Jean Genie, let yourself go
In July, 1973 Bowie and his backing glam rock group,
The Spiders from Mars, performed
at the Hammersmith Odeon in London.
The sold out concert was triumphant,
but Bowie made the sudden surprise announcement
that the show would be the last show he would ever do.
Later understood to mean
that he was retiring his Ziggy Stardust persona.
- It was the most exciting thing
I'd ever seen on stage to that day.
Seeing Bowie marry that theatricality in a way
with rock music was something nobody had had ever done.
People were talking about it for weeks beforehand
and really, really looking forward to it.
And then on the night, so many kids were dressed up.
So many people wanted look like Bowie
and we'd all love to have Panart
and various degrees of success.
Your memory of it at the time, you didn't have that
to compare it to, you have nothing to compare it to.
And it was until and the most exciting thing I've ever seen.
I would still say it was one
of the greatest shows I've ever seen.
♪ Ziggy played guitar
♪ Jamming good with Weird and Gilly ♪
♪ And the Spiders from Mars
♪ He played it left hand
- It was some kind of discovery in the 80s I think
that a lot of what I am is my enthusiasms,
that I've always been a very curious
and enthusiastic person,
again, it says from when I was a teenager.
And that it really wasn't up to me
to try and identify exactly what that meant.
I just had to accept that I was a person
who had a very short attention span,
who would move from one thing to another quite rapidly.
- [Narrator] Throughout his career,
he appeared in over 30 movies,
television shows, and theater productions.
His love for acting manifested
in the way he immersed himself completely in the characters.
He often stated that he preferred dressing up as Ziggy
rather than being David.
His musical and film roles added another dimension
to his career, whatever persona he was playing,
the work was always creative and imaginative.
His theatricality and creativity fascinated people.
His shows like "Ziggy Stardust"
and "Aladdin Sane" were filled with shocking stage moments,
where he looked almost as if he was being possessed.
As soon as he walked on the stage,
he unleashed this crazy character,
but off stage, he was intensely private.
- That's great.
There must be moments where the persona takes over,
the character kind of dominate
because all we ever get to see, but then you see the guy
behind it and it says the character Manatee.
So it's a vehicle for him to express himself,
but every time I ever met him,
he was this funny, lovely, warm, just great character.
- I'm very much a character when I go on stage.
I feel it.
Yeah, I believe in my part all the way down the line,
right the way down.
But I do play it for all it's worth
because that's the way I do with my station.
That's part of what Beau is supposedly all about.
I'm an actor.
- I think he was saying tensely private off stage.
And he can dress up and be this outrageous figure
of video and film on stage, but off stage in a way,
he was never much of a public figure.
- [Narrator] With his fame,
came difficulties and challenges.
Some of his singles and albums didn't have the success
that he was expecting and he was often disappointed
and angered by the crowd's response.
At 27, 1974, he was also broke
and in serious financial trouble
due to lack of business management.
- I need the money.
I desperately need the money.
I've been a silly boy about my financial arrangement.
And it's only over the last couple of years
that I've been able to get back anything
from almost 10 years working publicly.
So I really, I really have to do this.
I mean, it sits my job when it sort of it's
like carting your paintings around the exhibitions
and the gallery is trying to sell it for you,
and for me, it's the equivalent thing.
- [Narrator] He also started
to struggle separating Ziggy Stardust
from his own character off stage
and his personality became affected.
Bowie was always striving
for innovation, novelty, and experimentation.
And it turned out that playing the same character
over and over was exhausting.
His enthusiasm started to fade.
[upbeat music]
In 1975, at 28, he relocated to Los Angeles
leaving his Ziggy alter ego behind.
Bowie released his 10th album "Station to Station"
in 1976 with a new character.
After Ziggy Stardust came the elegant thin white Duke.
Again, the persona was based on a humanoid alien played
by Bowie in the film, "The Man Who Fell to Earth",
the album may the top five in both the UK and US charts.
And this put him back on solid financial ground.
♪ The return of the Thin White Duke ♪
♪ Throwing darts in lovers' eyes ♪
♪ Here are we, one magical moment, such is the stuff ♪
♪ From where dreams are woven
- Again, he was so different
and the influence of soul on this music
and the kind of music he'd been listening to
in the US made a completely different album.
But I loved that persona as well The Thin White Duke period.
I don't know if it again it's because I saw him then
and I was so young and it kind of formed an impression,
but it was so mysterious.
But it was very exotic for me
as a young child, it was very exciting.
[melancholic music]
- [Narrator] However, the 70s were one
of the worst periods of his life.
He became addicted to cocaine,
which caused severe weight loss and paranoia
and it affected his sanity deeply.
He overdosed several times during the year of 1976.
He even claimed that he was pro-fascism
and compared Hitler to rock stars, such as Mick Jagger,
which he later on apologized for
and blamed on his psychosis from cocaine use.
It was a time of huge emotional
and inspirational struggle for him.
He claimed that his drug addiction
and delusional behavior were due to Los Angeles,
which he came to resent as he felt the city alienated him
and that he was living like one of his characters.
He was falling apart,
but he realized it and decided to make a change.
- And as I really didn't want to be by myself,
I was living more and more in the style of one
of my characters who wanted terrific success
because they're all Messiah figures most of them,
either light or dark shadowings.
And so because I knew, I really felt
that the material aspect was something that had to be done
in Los Angeles because it's driven into you.
It's the food of Los Angeles, Hollywood rather,
not Los Angeles, unfair on Los Angeles.
And so I just packed up everything one day
and I moved back to Europe again.
- [Narrator] He and his family left California for Europe
in late 1976 to improve his physical and mental wellbeing.
He moved to Switzerland for a time
where his cocaine use decreased
There, he indulged in his childhood passion of painting,
which was a way for him to make sure he was
always doing something productive and creative.
He was also an art collector.
That's the first thing I did when I got back to Europe,
was to sort of stop thinking about music and performing
for a bit and think about something that I hadn't done
for a long time, which was paint.
And that helped me get back into music again actually.
Whatever the job in hand is,
is the style that I tend to adopt.
I'm pretty anti-consistency in style much as I am in music.
- [Interviewer] Would you give up music for art?
- No, but neither would I give up art for music.
I am really fortunate in having both the time
and the inclination and
possibly the talent to work in both media.
And I'm not a buyer of things.
I think the only thing that I buy
addictively and obsessively probably is art.
I'm not really a house man or a car man.
The only nice car I've ever bought
for myself was a 1967 HR, one and half,
which is I would get the half.
And I don't know things, I don't have a plane.
I haven't got very much, Jone.
I'm not a buyer of stuff.
I do tend to regard money
as the order to get other things going.
I feel more comfortable with the money.
- [Narrator] But he wasn't completely over his drug use.
He settled in West Berlin in early 1977,
joining his friend Iggy Pop
to clean up and revive his career.
He felt we vitalized, even though he struggled sometimes
to stay clean and sober.
While he was sharing an apartment with Iggy,
he started to gain more interest in the German music scene
and began focusing on minimalistic ambient music.
In October, 1977, he released
his 12th studio album "Heroes".
It became the best received work
of his Berlin Trilogy and a commercial success.
♪ For ever and ever
♪ We can be Heroes, just for one day ♪
♪ We can be Heroes
- But Bowie not only knocked it out of the park with heroes,
he made heroes seem like an anthem for the day,
we can be heroes just for one day.
The fact that people still want to heroes,
even though it was novel at the time,
shows it's a quality piece
regardless of the fact that it was innovative.
And similarly the whole album still sounds great.
- He's described his time here
as the happiest period of his life.
The city seemed to correspond with his personality
from his interest in history from the Weimar Republic
to the Berlin he discovered here in the 1970s,
his passion for discovery and innovation,
his interest in art, which whilst in Berlin,
let him to take up painting again.
It was here that he seemed to escape his demons to throw
off creative burnout and rejuvenate his inspiration.
- [Narrator] By 1978, he'd broken his drug addiction
and was slowly recovering to a healthy enough mental state.
Isolar II world tour was the first tour
where he didn't have to take copious quantities of cocaine
before taking the stage.
By the time he had reached 30,
his marriage with Angie had deteriorated.
They reached a breaking point in 1980
and Bowie gained sole custody of their son.
This was a bold move and he was determined
to be a good role model for him.
In 1980, he moved to New York and made his debuts
in Broadway with "Elephant Man",
where he played a man with a grotesque disfiguring disease.
He identified with the role as he always had an attraction
to alienated people, feeling like one himself.
His work was critically acclaimed.
- But Bartholomew does not care about Juliet,
I care.
- Does he take her pants, does he get the doctor?
Does you make sure?
No, he kills himself.
The illusion follows him because he does not care about her.
He only cares about himself.
I always look for characters who have
either an emotional or a physical limp.
I find that for me not being, I don't really see my future
in acting to a greater extent than my involvement now.
So I really liked to have characters
that I can at least play around with.
In 1981, Bowie moved to the new romantic and pop era.
He paired with Queen
for one off single release "Under Pressure",
the duet was a hit.
♪ Pressure, pushing down on me
♪ Pressing down on you, no man ask for ♪
♪ Under pressure, that burns a building down ♪
♪ Splits a family in two
♪ Puts people on streets
He reached his prime at 36 with "Let's Dance"
and other hits such as "Modern Love" and "China Girl".
"Let's Dance" reached number one in the UK, the US,
and various other countries in 1983.
It sold more than 10 million copies worldwide,
making it Bowie's best-selling album of all time.
♪ Let's dance put on your red shoes and dance the blues ♪
♪ Let's dance to the song they're playing on the radio ♪
- If you were starting out now,
I think did I read somewhere
that you said if you were 19, you wouldn't go into [mumbles].
- I think that's probably quite right.
I think I'd probably just be a fan
and a collector of records.
- [Male Interviewer] What would you do?
- I wanted to be a musician
because it seemed rebellious, it seems subversive.
It felt like one could affect change to a form.
It was very hard to hear music when I was young.
When I was really young, you had to tune
into AFM radio to hear the American records.
There was no MTV,
it wasn't sort of wall-to-wall blanket music.
And so therefore, it had a kind of a call
to arms kind of feeling to it.
Is that this is the thing that will change things.
This is a dead dodgy occupation to have.
It still produce signs of horror from people
who you said you're, I'm in rock and roll is my goodness.
Now, it's a career opportunity.
- [Narrator] His fan base exploded
as he entered popular culture
by becoming less underground and controversial.
He reached a wider audience
and appeared more accessible and mainstream,
topping charts along with Tina Turner and Michael Jackson.
- I think his breakthrough kind of crossover album is
obviously "Let's Dance" and that's when I felt
he'd got a bit too commercial for me.
'Cause you kind of like your artists
to be unknown and be underground
and you to be part of the secret society almost.
- David Bowie is great.
- And ugly.
- I'd like to embrace the idea
that there's a new demystification process going on
between the artist and the audience.
I think when you look back at say this last decade,
there hasn't really been one single entity, artist,
or group that have personified
or become the brand name for the 90s.
And like it was starting to fade a little in the 80s.
And in the 70s there were still definite artists.
In the 60s, there were the Beatles and the Hendrix.
In the 50s, there was Presley.
Now it says subgroups and genres.
It's hip-hop, it's girl power.
It's a communal kind of thing.
It's about the community,
it's becoming more and more about the audience
because the point of having somebody
who led the forces has disappeared
because of the capillary of rock is too well known.
It's a currency that is not devoid meaning anymore,
but he's certainly only a conveyor of information.
It's not a conveyor of rebellion
and the internet has taken on that as I say it.
And so I find that a terribly exciting era.
So from my standpoint, being an artist,
I'd like to see what the new construction is
between artists and audience.
There is a breakdown, there's a personified, I think,
by the rave culture in the last few years,
where the audience is at least as important
as whoever is playing at the rave.
It's almost like the artist is to accompany the audience
and what the audience is doing.
And that feeling is very much permeating music.
- [Narrator] However, he eventually came to realize
that being mainstream was not what he was really after.
He was more used to being stubborn,
obscure, and confrontational.
- It's quite a relief, really.
I feel a lot more free in what I do.
I just needed a positive decision to only do what I want
to do and not do things for the sake of what
either David Bowie or whoever I was playing last time thing
like juke or something, what he was expected to do.
- [Narrator] Bowie always loved pushing limits,
challenging himself.
He in fact, believed that a good artist has
to go out of their depth to become meaningful, and that
it requires some kind of social dysfunctional nature.
- Incredibly interested artist.
He was interested in various kinds of music
and of course the various arts.
And he picked up elements from the avant-garde and all sorts
of areas and incorporated them into his own work.
I got to a stage two years ago where I found
that the experimenting that I was doing was eradicating
a lot of the subject matter of my writing,
but now I feel for the next few years,
I'll be concentrating a lot more basic kind of material.
- [Narrator] In January, 1985, during Bowie's prime,
he received a devastating news that would break his heart.
His brother Terry had committed suicide.
It was a difficult and tragic period for him.
He would later on write a song
about the death of his brother called "Jump",
but he had to put his struggle aside.
In 1988, he formed a new act,
Tin Machine, a hard rock supergroup.
He wants more reinvented rock and roll.
However, it was hard to top his previous hits.
Tin Machine didn't have as much success.
As he had expected as he was once again experimenting
by doing different things to challenge himself,
he fell on it from many people.
♪ You belong in rock 'n roll
♪ Well so do I
♪ I love how she moves me
♪ It makes me
The 1990s seem to be the legend's forgotten decade,
where his work was overlooked,
but he didn't dwell on the negatives
and he was determined to move on to the next adventure.
- He had a lot from the 90s.
He had his bad period for a few years,
but I think in my opinion,
he came back, he came through that.
And I think in his own admission,
he would say he was often taking the money
and his creativity suffered massively.
- In my tour of television studios the day Bowie died,
not a single person asked me about Bowie in the 1990s.
It's as if his work
in that decade had existed only for his fans.
And even though one of his albums did reach number one
in Britain during that decade.
But the curious thing is that Bowie in the 90s was
still an extraordinarily influential person.
- [Narrator] In 1992, he married his second wife
in Switzerland, the Somali American fashion model, Iman,
with whom he had one daughter named Alexandria.
In 1996, his musical success was finally recognized
and he was inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame.
This was a groundbreaking accomplishment.
- [Announcer] Mr. David Bowie.
[audiences applauding]
- While me and my buddies are hanging out
on the Hollywood Entertainment Museum,
I would've just whip out a mirror on the opposite side,
that's my star up there
with my name written backwards, divaD eiwoB.
[audiences applauding]
Thank you very much.
If I make any more bad albums, you can come all over here
and walk all over me, all right?
[audiences laughing]
- [Narrator] He finally had reached a stable,
successful life, which gave him more time to focus
on both his passions, music and painting.
- I'm doing a music for self gain.
I'm doing a lot of stuff on the internet.
I'm doing a lot of painting and a little bit of sculpting.
I'm enjoying married life tremendously.
It was my 7th wedding anniversary the other day on the 6th,
6th of June.
The hub of my creativity comes from what I do, where I go,
and I put myself in places that maybe I've never been before
or that I feel there's a certain tension involved.
I can't really write or produce much
if I'm in a place that's relaxing.
I have to have a set of conflicts going around me,
not necessarily of my own doing,
I've learned that that is particularly bad idea.
- What do you mean?
- Well, I don't create my own conflicts in my own life.
I think I might've done that to quite an extent
when I was young as actually things are going too smoothly,
being an addictive personality,
I would be drawn to create conflicts
that would reduce the attention necessary to write.
Now, I find that I can do it by observation more than being
deeply involved in a mess to become to write.
- That means, at personal level, you don't do drugs anymore.
- [David] No, absolutely not.
- And you don't drink.
- [David] I don't drink either, no.
- Not even a glass of wine or anything?
- No, it would kill me if I start it again.
- [Male Interviewer] What do you mean it would kill you?
- I'm an alcoholic, so it would be a kiss of death
for me to start drinking again.
My relationships with my friends, my family,
everybody around me, are so good
and have been for so many years now.
I wouldn't do anything to destroy that again, you know?
It's very hard to have relationships
when you're doing drugs and drinking.
I felt for me personally anyway.
And you become closed off, unreceptive, insensitive,
all the dreadful things that you've heard
every other pop singer ever saying.
And I was very lucky that I found my way out of that.
♪ A whisper of hope that seems to fade ♪
- [Narrator] In 1999, the front cover
of "Hours" showed an older Bowie with shoulder length hair.
From then on, he never released anything
as frenetic as he did in the 1990s.
- A lot of what I am is my enthusiasm.
That I've always been a very curious
and enthusiastic person.
Again, this is from when I was a teenager
and that it really wasn't up to me to try
and identify exactly what that meant.
I just had to accept that I was a person
that had a very short attention span,
would move from one thing to another quite rapidly
when I got bored with the other.
I became comfortable with that and didn't try
and identify myself or trying to ask myself who I was.
The less questioning I did about myself
as to who I was, the more comfortable I felt.
So now I have absolutely no knowledge of who I am.
I'm extremely happy.
- [Narrator] In 2003, Bowie performed his Reality Tour,
which would become his last tour.
♪ And I'm never ever gonna get
♪ Never ever gonna get old
The show was cut short after a blocked artery forced him
to have emergency heart surgery.
He retired from live performing three years later
and stepped out of the public eye to focus on his family,
but he never stopped being part of the music scene
and continued to produce albums.
On January 10th, 2016,
the world was shaken by heartbreaking news,
David Bowie died from liver cancer.
He apparently had been quietly battling
with it for 18 months.
He had told very few people about it,
focusing rather on creating a new album "Blackstar",
which would reveal itself being a farewell album.
Blackstar reflected the theme of death
and mortality and mysticism of the afterlife.
And he wanted his last album to outlive him.
Days before his death, people didn't guess that he was ill.
He put on a brave face until the end.
And even the press wrote
that he looked very well and healthy,
but behind the podium from his Lazarus musical premiere,
he collapsed from exhaustion.
Having kept his illness a secret from the world,
he died two days after his 69th birthday
and the release of his 25th and final album "Blackstar",
which took on a whole new unexpected depth.
♪ By the time I got to New York ♪
♪ I was living like a king
♪ There I'd used up all my money ♪
- Obviously, the Blackstar album, everybody's now,
since he died, has seen the meaning in the lyrics
and it's really obvious now,
but obviously without him dying,
it wouldn't have been that obvious at all.
- He was just always out there ahead extraordinary.
And then the ultimate
artistically planning for his own death.
When they were making the album Blackstar,
which actually was in the first half of 2015,
at one point, Tony Visconti, his producer,
looked to him and said, "You're writing a farewell album,"
and Bowie laughed.
Tony Visconti was the first to realize, this is goodbye.
To make even your final weekend a work of art.
This is just off the scale of performance art.
It takes your breath away, such courage,
and the scene where he walks backwards
into the wardrobe and closes the door.
[rock music]
- [Narrator] All his life, he dealt
with personal and professional struggles.
And his career wasn't always filled with successes,
but he always overcame what life through at him.
- People were actually ringing
in a state of shock and incredibly upset.
So many people were so touched by it and so shocked by it
because I think Bowie, because he was quite over-worldly,
you never really thought he had the same mortality.
And it was a shock, it was a terrible shock.
- You can never imagine such a loss until it happens
because he was a life force.
And the reason why so many people are touched
by this news is because he touched their personal lives.
In the 1970s, with all of those various images
that he went through, he was always doing some variation
of the other, the outsider, and every young person thinks
of themselves as the other, the outsider, the freak,
and they latched on to one or more of those Bowie images.
And thus his loss is very personal
to so many people watching at this moment.
- [Narrator] Bowie channeled his family's mental illness
by expressing himself through different personas.
He overcame drug addiction and found peace and stability.
He never stopped reaching for the stars
and influenced generations.
Family, frustration,
and failure would shape the icon we know today.
- He's one of a kind.
This is one reason why the grief is so widespread
and so deep is because people know that this is it.
That was it.
Just to think that the earth is billions of years old
and you happen to live at the same time as David Bowie.
Well, we did see someone unique that's for sure.
- He did everything and he never stopped.
He never stopped challenging himself for his audience
and I think that's incredibly special.
I mean, when you look
at today's artists no one's pushing it like that.
It just doesn't touch people in the same way.
- [Male Contributor] It's magic, his music is magic.
It takes you places, it's other worldliness,
it's so spiritualist in a sense,
but it's about romance and love
and everything that's good in the world
about being different and being accepted.
- He teaches us that change is possible,
that we're not fixed as human beings,
that we can be anything that we wanna be.
And he also really spoke to people that are unique
that don't quite fit in because he was kind
of this alien angel child that came down to set us all free.
- When he was at his peak, it was completely all inspiring.
And you go to see the shows and they'd be utterly different.
Not all of them successful, but hey, it didn't matter
because come back in six months and there'd be a new one.
And that's literally the way it was.
And this is how Bowie could have the occasional mess
and no one held that against him
because they knew they're trying something different
and then he'd be back in six months or something else.
- When I was a teenager, I had it in my mind
that I would be a creator of musicals.
I sincerely wanted to write musicals
for the West End or for Broadway, whatever.
I didn't see much further than that as a writer
and I really had the idea in my head
that people would do my songs.
And I was not a natural performer.
I didn't feel the decency at all.
I had created this one character, Ziggy Stardust,
that it seemed that I would be the one that would play him
because nobody else was doing my songs
and the chances of him
actually getting musical mounted were very small.
And so I became Ziggy Stardust for that period.
And things sort of led, I liked the idea
and I felt really comfortable going
on stage as somebody else.
And it seemed a rational decision to keep on doing that.
And so I've got quite decided with the idea
of just creating character after character.
And I think probably there must've been a point
in the late 70s, or in otherwise,
where I felt that the characters were
in fact getting in the way of myself as a writer
and I endeavored to kind of kill them off
and start writing for me as just a singer songwriter.
I'm not sure if I was ever successful in that
because I do take a degree of theatricality
when I go on stage all the time.
It's sort of that's how I deal with the stage situation.
I'm still not comfortable on stage.
- But I mean David Bowie himself is an invention.
I mean, do you think you've yourself as Bowie
or David Jones from South London?
- Less and less Bowie, Bowie, Bowie [laughs].
- The astonishing body of work that an amazing collection
of music that is so original all the time,
and that sometimes draws on what's around at the time
and all the times kind of sets the agenda
for all the new musicians.
I don't think there's a single rock musician today
who hasn't been influenced by Bowie in some way or other.
- He was a giant of the music industry.
Not just someone who had been successful over a long period,
which is a very difficult thing to do,
but someone who consistently pushed the boundaries,
who consistently challenged
what people would expect to hear.
- [Narrator] He earned our respect as he chose
to stay true to himself rather than commercially safe.
- The odds against another David Bowie are astronomical
because of the commercial pressures
of the music industry forced most artists to conform.
Occasionally, there's someone who stays true to themselves
like Adele and the public latch onto that and love it.
But very few, even of those kinds
of artists have the variety of interests
and talents that Bowie did.
Even now to watch him in his film roles,
whether they're great films or not, he is charismatic,
he is a presence to contend with.
And I think of so many people watching right now
who will in their minds have an image of David Bowie,
but it won't be the same image
because he did so many different things.
Such a variety of styles
and images can only come from an inquiring mind.
And that's what Bowie had an intensely interested mind.
He was always picking up elements of the avant-garde
and bringing them into the mainstream.
And thus in the 1970s alone,
we had this amazing progression, science fiction
to bisexuality, to American soul music, to electronic music,
and the images, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane,
The Thin White Duke, the Soul Look,
the Berlin Electronic Music Look.
There was so much to digest.
In the 1970s alone, 24 hits singles, 15 albums.
This is amazing.
And that's why people have been digesting his work
ever since, there's just so much there.
- My phone started ringing at 7:00 o'clock
in the morning that David Bowie's death was announced.
I have not had so many requests for broadcast commentaries
since John Lennon day 36 years ago.
That's phenomenal.
That tells you the widespread impact of Bowie
amongst the current generation
'just that hundreds of millions of people
all had personal relationships with David Bowie.
And this is what became so movingly apparent so quickly.
This showed you that somehow some aspect
of his life had affected the widest possible range
of world personalities
and of course people who were not famous.
I found this deeply moving.
Genius is an overused word, but I think musically,
creatively, artistically David Bowie was a genius.
For someone of my age,
he provided a lot of the soundtrack of our life.
So we mourn the loss of a great talent.
We think about his family and friends
who've lost a loved one too early,
but I think also we an immense British talent
who has enriched all of our lives.
- I grew up listening to David Bowie.
My mom was really, really loved him
and I suppose he was my first introduction
to sort of queerness and outsider-ness
and just such a strong joyful presence.
- Having him as an influence from when
I was very young influenced everything I've done really
from how I dress to artwork to everything.
And just to being confident in who I am.
He's done more for me than anyone could really.
- I felt he just liberated so people from mundane things.
He came from suburban,
just a lot of people could relate to that.
And the how he just made life just sexy
and vibrant throughout his career.
It's gonna be a very different world without Bowie in it.
I hadn't really given it a lot thought about his passing,
'cause why would I?
It's like really thought he would live forever, really.
[upbeat music]
- [Narrator] Few artists mark the 20th century
like David Bowie did.
He was an astonishing, passionate,
and eclectic performer that didn't belong in a box.
Searching for change was the only constant
that didn't change throughout his life.
He was a true artist in every sense of the word.
His art included not only his music and sound,
but also his style and appearance, his films, and videos.
Bowie had a unique vision and courage
and seem to turn everything into art.
The Human League Founder, Martyn Ware,
declared that he lived his life
as though he were an art installation.
His influence is deep.
- His generosity, his energy, his spirit, so full, so real.
That's the essence of being alive because let's face it,
how many people can die
and have 28 albums sell in large quantities.
- [Male Contributor] What he did is absolutely timeless,
will be listening to in 100 years' time.
Any musicians out there, listen to the chords he used,
they are so unbelievably difficult.
The song structures are just incredible.
He doesn't write three minute pop songs,
he wrote pieces of art that we can listen to.
- If you were there in the 60s and 70s, you were there,
if you weren't, you missed.
You can still love the music, don't worry.
But to have been there as well as to have lived
through a very special moment in musical history,
and David Bowie is one of the giants of the period.
[upbeat music]