Trivia / David Bowie

• Acting for Two: On 1. Outside, he gives voice to a 52-year-old detective, a 14-year-old female murder victim, mad artists of both genders, a 78-year-old shopkeeper, etc. (There are pictures of most of them in the booklet, via the magic of makeup, costume, and image manipulation.)
• Artist Disillusionment: After the Glass Spider Tour, Bowie seriously considered focusing on his hobby of painting instead of music, having found so little lasting satisfaction in trying to please the fans Let's Dance had brought him. Reeves Gabrels convinced him that he could learn to love his work again if he just focused on what made him happy, and from there the seeds of Tin Machine were planted...
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Inverted when he turned down the role of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill because he hated the script and didn't think it would be fun to work on ("I didn't want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs"). Played straight with several of his film roles, which he usually picked over other, more conventional star vehicle offers because he wanted to work with their directors, performers, or simply liked the concepts.
• Better Export for You: CD releases of the man's catalog are notoriously spotty in quality, going all the way back to the earliest run of releases on the format by RCA Records. However, RCA's CDs had two major instances where the US version is widely agreed to be better than the equivalents in Bowie's native UK: Aladdin Sane features clearer audio on the earliest US CDs pressed by CSR, while the US RCA CD of Diamond Dogs features improved equalization (the UK CD featured an unusual amount of bass-boosting). Tellingly, the 2016 remaster of Diamond Dogs by Parlophone Records used the US RCA CD as its reference point.
• Breakthrough Hit: "Starman". In the U.K., his Top of the Pops performance of this song, complete with some Faux Yay between him and guitarist Mick Ronson, is as fondly recalled as a superstar-making moment as Michael Jackson's performance of "Billie Jean" on Motown 25 is everywhere else. The 1973 reissue of "Space Oddity" was his U.S. breakthrough (with "Fame" proving his staying power by topping the charts two years later).
• Bury Your Art:
  • While Bowie expressed open regret for much of his output during the '80s, he reserved his strongest, yet least-vocalized vitriol for the Never Let Me Down track "Too Dizzy", banning it from ever seeing the light of day again after the album's original 1987 release. This had the effect of ruling out any attempts to improve the song on the 2018 Remix Album for Never Let Me Down, which redid the songs' instrumentation to fulfill Bowie's years-old desire to redo the album. Bowie's labels and his estate have adhered to his request to this day, not even including it in the otherwise comprehensive Boxed Set Loving the Alien (1983-1988), which includes both the original version of the album and the Remix Album, the latter of which was specifically made for the boxed set. Bowie himself dismissed "Too Dizzy" as a throwaway song and described it as his least favorite track on his least favorite album, while biographer Nicholas Pegg attributes the self-imposed ban to the song's unintentionally creepy lyrics, being a jealousy song that accidentally came off as a stalker anthem.
  • A big factor in Bowie's departure from RCA Records was his belief that they were "milking" his back-catalog, which included several compilation albums that were put out without his consent (both before and after his Channel Hop to EMI America Records). When Bowie reclaimed the rights to his old material at the tail end of the '80s, he had all of RCA's compilations withdrawn and put out Changesbowie in 1990 as a replacement. The album combined songs from Changesonebowie & Changestwobowie, which were made with his permission, plus some of his EMI America hits. In turn, Changesbowie would be deleted in 1999 in favor of various other greatest hits albums. While Changesonebowie and Changestwobowie eventually went back into circulation following Bowie's death in 2016, the other RCA compilations remain out of print.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: While he stopped touring back in 2004, didn't release any new material until The Next Day nearly a decade later, and died just three years after that, the bulk of his back catalog is still in print and often receives elaborate reissues (particularly his Glam Rock works), there's a good deal of merchandising surrounding him, and new documentaries and/or books about his career (especially the latter) come along every year. The David Bowie Is retrospective of costumes and other memorabilia from his personal archive smashed attendance records at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2013 and toured the world's premier museums well into 2016.
• Channel Hop: One of the most well-known examples with a solo artist. The sheer amount of labels Bowie operated under is fairly staggering, to the point where it's made his back-catalog the source of quite a few legal quandaries over the years (most notably with his pre-Space Oddity material, as illustrated with the infamous 20-year shelving of Toy). In order, Bowie operated under the following record labels:
  • Vocalion Pop (1964)^note A sublabel of British Decca that released Bowie's first single, credited to "Davie Jones with the King Bees"
  • Parlophone Records (1964-1965)^note Parlophone also inherited the rights to Bowie's catalog following the dissolution of EMI
  • Pye Records (1966)
  • Warner (Bros.) Records (1966)^note Bowie's first American release came when Warner licensed his Pye single "Can't Help Thinking 'Bout Me" for the US market, but the label dropped him when the record didn't sell; Bowie's 1992 single "Real Cool World" was also distributed via Warner Bros. Records.
  • Deram Records (1966-1967)
  • Mercury Records (1969-1971)^note Space Oddity was originally released through Mercury's parent label, Philips Records, in the UK and several other countries, but the contract was under Mercury. Bowie was dropped from the label in 1971 at the request of his manager, Tony Defries, who disliked the way that they were handling Bowie's finances. Mercury gave up the rights to the recordings Bowie made under them after Defries paid off his debts to the label.
  • B&C Records (1971)^note One single released under the pseudonym "Arnold Corns," during Bowie's attempts to get out of his Mercury contract
  • RCA Records (1971-1982)^note RCA also reissued Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World worldwide, being granted legal ownership of them once Bowie signed onto the label; RCA's rights to Bowie's 1969-1982 catalog would expire in 1988. Bowie left the label due to a mix of Creative Differences, a perception that RCA was "milking" his catalog, and the expiration of a costly, lopsided legal agreement with his ex-manager. He would later make amends with RCA, leading them to be given UK distribution rights for Bowie's 90's albums as well as for The Next Day and ★.
  • EMI (1983-2001)^note Most of Bowie's material during this era was released under various EMI sublabels; Tin Machine and its associated singles, meanwhile, were released through EMI alone. Bowie officially split from EMI as his main label in 1990 due to their reservations towards Tin Machine, but allowed them to release his music internationally until 2001.
    • EMI America Records (1983-1987)
    • Virgin Records (1993-2001)^note Various single releases and albums from 1993-1997 were released through Virgin outside of the UK; Virgin also distributed remastered reissues of his 1983-1988 backlog in 1995 and his 1969-1989 backlog in 1999. 'hours...' was released exclusively through Virgin. Bowie eventually left the label in 2001 due to the initial shelving of Toy.
  • Rykodisc (1989-1992)^note Remastered reissues of 1969-1981 backlog, plus the Sound+Vision Boxed Set and "Fame '90" single
  • Victory Music (1991)^note Singles from this period released through Victory's parent label, London Records
  • Arista Records (1993-1997)^note Black Tie White Noise was specifically released through Arista's sublabel Savage Records
  • Columbia Records (2002-2017)^note Also gained ownership of Outside, Earthling, and 'hours...' until Bowie's death in 2016, after which they were given to Parlophone.
• Corpsing:
  • Towards the end of "The Laughing Gnome", Bowie starts cracking up.
  • He also starts giggling a little while singing "Hey, that's far out" in "Starman", and while singing "And you can be mean" in "Heroes".
• Creator Backlash:
  • Bowie disavowed his 1967 debut album, scarcely bringing up after its release and never reclaiming the rights to it. The only song from it that he ever revisited was "Silly Boy Blue", which was re-recorded for Toy and appeared on the 2014 retrospective compilation Nothing Has Changed.
  • Bowie never spoke kindly of "The Laughing Gnome", a non-album single recorded during his brief stint on Deram Records. The label's reissue of it after his UK breakthrough with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars gave him no shortage of grief, and when he opened a fan poll to select songs for his 1990 Sound + Vision tour, NME rigged it to inflate the vote count for "The Laughing Gnome" specifically because he hated it. When Bowie found out what happened, he scrapped the poll altogether. He even went as far as performing a Stylistic Suck joke song, "Requiem for the Laughing Gnome", for Red Nose Day 1999 to highlight his hatred.
  • Whenever Bowie looked back on his first Live Album, David Live, he never did so fondly, describing it as "the final death of Ziggy [Stardust]" and joking that it should've been called David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only in Theory.
  • Bowie held Tonight in much disdain in the years after his release, holding reservations even towards its bigger highlights (i.e. viewing "Loving the Alien" as overproduced and "Blue Jean" as flat-out sexist). His distaste for the album would even influence his (ultimately failed) attempts at returning to his rock roots with Never Let Me Down.
  • Bowie had hardly a kind word to say about Never Let Me Down in the years following its release. Songs from it were left off of Changesbowie (though they would appear on later Greatest Hits Albums), none of its material was performed live after the Glass Spider Tour wrapped up, and even his official website initially omitted it from his discography. In particular, Bowie's distaste for the album's penultimate track, "Too Dizzy", has become the stuff of legends among his fans, to the point where he banned it from reissues.
  • He wasn't happy with how Just a Gigolo (1978), his first film after The Man Who Fell to Earth, turned out — "Listen, you were disappointed, and you weren't even in it. Imagine how we felt." Bowie also described the film as "my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one."
  • The Thin White Duke period was this in some ways due to his flirtation with fascism during the period, which he later disowned. He doesn't seem to have had a negative opinion of the music of Station to Station itself though, despite not remembering much about its recording process.
  • Bowie was displeased with his performance as Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, citing how rushed it was thanks to his tight schedule at the time. According to Bowie, he shot his part in "four or five days" because he was also in the middle of rehearsing for Tin Machine's second (and final) tour.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • Low was written and recorded while Bowie was starting to wean himself off cocaine, and while his marriage to Angela was showing fissures that would soon lead to divorce. That set the tone for both the album and its title.
  • And this was the album where Bowie was recovering (it has been described, not inaccurately, as "a cocaine come down put to music"). His previous album, Station to Station, was recorded in Los Angeles while Bowie was suffering a full-blown cocaine-induced psychotic breakdown. He claimed in interviews that he remembered nothing about the recording other than describing the guitar sound he wanted on the title track to the session musician, but there are many stories about his behaviour at the time.
• Content Leak: The then-unreleased Toy album was leaked online in 2011, with the leaked version's track list differing from the official version released a decade later.
• Died During Production: In January 2016 of liver cancer, causing a worldwide outpouring of grief. Despite originally intending ★ to be his final album, Bowie changed his mind after recording it and made demo recordings of five new songs for what he intended to be its follow-up, but he died before he could complete it.
• Doing It for the Art: Bowie cited this as his main reason for making music once he'd moved out of his self-described "Phil Collins years" in the 1980s. Having previously considered retiring after the stress of trying to appeal to not only longtime fans and critics, but also and especially the Newbie Boom that Let's Dance brought him, some advice from collaborator Reeves Gabrels motivated him to stop trying to "play to the gallery" as he put it, instead focusing on whether or not his music appealed to himself.
  "Never play to the gallery ... never work for other people at what you do, always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other peoples expectations, I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that."
• Dye Hard: His dark blonde locks were dyed very red to help complete Ziggy Stardust's look in 1972; even after he dropped the character he would stick with predominantly red hair until the end of The Thin White Duke's reign in 1976. He would briefly return to being a redhead during the Earthling era before reverting back to dark blonde.
• Executive Meddling:
  • With The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, RCA Records execs liked it, but also wanted a song that they could push as a single. So Bowie wrote "Starman", which replaced a cover of Chuck Berry's "Around and Around" on the album and turned out to be the song that made his career.
  • Part of the reason why Tonight and Never Let Me Down continued to try and appeal more to fans of the pop rock-oriented Let's Dance was because of pressure from EMI Records following Let's Dance's runaway success. Never Let Me Down is an especially bad case in the sense that Bowie wanted to return to his rock roots for the album after the poor reception of Tonight, but his indifferent attitude towards the production gave EMI free reign to stuff in as much flourish as they desired. The end result was an album widely seen as unnecessarily bombastic, overproduced, artificial (even more so that Tonight), and conspicuously dated-sounding. To the day he died, Bowie regarded Never Let Me Down as one of the biggest mistakes of his career, and longed to get a chance to redo it (which eventually came true in the form of Never Let Me Down 2018, albeit over two years after his death).
  • The original version of 1. Outside was roundly rejected for being a collage of electronic experimentation, free jazz and wounded singing that went on for stretches of up 20 minutes per song. The only section that seemed to survive the original sessions was "Segue: Ramona A. Stone/I Am with Name", which was edited down from the lengthiest jam.
  • Bowie's 2015 single "★" was cut down from "over 11 minutes" to a length of 9:57, as Apple's iTunes Music Store did not allow singles over 10 minutes in length. Bowie was adamant that that song had to be the lead single from the album of the same name; he still could have used the full version for the album, but he thought having two versions of the song would be "confusing". Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer, called Apple's policy "total bullshit."
• Flip-Flop of God: Bowie was famously inconsistent on pretty much everything he thought about regarding himself and his work; he once stated in an interview that "I change my mind like I change hats; I fluctuate between one opinion and another continually."
• Irony as She Is Cast: Played Celibate Hero Nikola Tesla and Hollywood Tone-Deaf Thomas Jerome Newton and Jack Celliers.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Just a Gigolo never had a DVD release beyond Germany, and VHS copies date back to The '80s and are tough to find. It would eventually be re-released by Prime Video.
  • The BBC production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal he toplined in 1982 has never been released on video anywhere, and the tie-in EP never had a standalone CD release. However, two of the five songs can be found on official best-of sets, and the entire EP is available on the Re:Call 3 compilation CD included with the A New Career in a New Town [1977-1982] Boxed Set.
  • No reissue of Never Let Me Down includes "Too Dizzy", at Bowie's personal request. The song also does not appear on the Loving the Alien box set which otherwise features his complete recordings from 1983 to 1989, including a non-album tracks set. Bowie historian Nicholas Pegg theorizes in The Complete David Bowie that Bowie dismissed it since it's a Silly Love Song that can be interpreted as a rapist's monologue: she's reluctant and already has a lover, but the singer is determined to make her his...
  • While most of his music videos have been officially released on various formats, a few slipped through the cracks — including the handful of videos he made with Tin Machine. The videos from the first album can be seen legally on YouTube via VEVO, since EMI uploaded them, but since Bowie and co. did Tin Machine II on another label, those videos are MIA.
  • Tin Machine II itself received little to no reissues after its initial release in 1991 because that the label it was released on, Victory Records, went defunct in 1994; the commercial disappointment of the album seems to have demotivated any other labels from trying to put it out again. The only re-releases Tin Machine II saw were not only few and far-between, but also exclusive to Japan and Russia for whatever reason. This was finally alleviated on July 17, 2020, when the album was given its first major reissue on both silver vinyl and CD via sister reissue labels Music on Vinyl and Music on CD, respectively.
  • The original RCA Records CDs tend to be coveted by audiophile Bowie fans for having the best sound quality of any Bowie CD releases, yet to this day only one of them has ever been re-pressed: the 1984 West German CD for Station to Station, as part of the 2010 deluxe edition. The situation gets tougher when accounting for how variable the sound quality is per region and per album, plus the fact that the discs went out of print after Bowie regained the rights to his RCA catalog at the end of the '80s.
  • Rykodisc's 1990-1992 remasters of Bowie's catalog were never reissued after 1999, but no subsequent remasters of the affected albums include the bonus tracks that were present on Ryko's CDs. While many of them reappeared on later compilations and live albums, plenty others remain AWOL; consequently, the only legal way to hear them is to scour secondhand stores for the Ryko CDs.
• Limey Goes to Hollywood: Bowie moved to the U.S., ultimately settling down in Los Angeles, after the release of Diamond Dogs to work on courting American audiences (the Ziggy Stardust period was merely a cult success there); the Diamond Dogs Tour solely toured North America. During this period he recorded Young Americans and Station to Station and filmed The Man Who Fell to Earth (a British production shot in the U.S.)... the downside was his Creator Breakdown unfolding during all this; he didn't think well of L.A. for a long time afterward.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Several of his albums have received this treatment, but none more so than Station to Station in 2010 — the Special Edition included an additional two discs containing his much-bootlegged Nassau Coliseum concert from '76. The Deluxe Edition...oh my...all for an album that has a less than 40-minute run-time and six songs.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Bowie's entire career is rife with this, with the songs he wrote for art generally not as well known as those he wrote for commerce (though there are exceptions: "'Heroes'" may not have been a hit when it was new but is now a candidate for his Signature Song). Among other examples:
  • The first and biggest example for him would be a little song he slapped together out of boredom... he was actually embarrassed by it. "Space Oddity", his first hit — and still popular to this day. His personal favorite songs of his, meanwhile, were included on the 2008 compilation iSelect. While "Life on Mars?" aligns well with popular consensus, the rest of the tracklist is much different, featuring songs such as "Some Are" (an obscure outtake otherwise exclusive to the 1991 reissue of Low), "Time Will Crawl" (from Never Let Me Down, an album that fans, critics, and Bowie himself otherwise loathed), and "Teenage Wildlife" (a deep cut from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)).
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is widely considered Bowie's best album by fans and critics alike. However, in a 2003 interview, Bowie instead said that his favorite album of his was The Buddha of Suburbia, an obscure release that was mis-marketed as a soundtrack album before being quickly removed from print due to low sales.
  • To this day, "Under Pressure" is one of his most popular songs/collaborations, both for himself and Queen. But he was reportedly dissatisfied with much of his work on Hot Space itself, requesting that many of his contributions be removed.
• Missing Episode: Toy was originally planned to be released after 'hours...'. It wouldn't be Saved from Development Hell until two decades later.
• Money, Dear Boy:
  • Bowie was pretty open that the purpose of Let's Dance was "to have hits". Although a big seller in the 1970s, a disastrous deal with his manager meant he saw very little of the money.
  • With regard to Let's Dance, consider the Cover Version of "China Girl", a track off of Iggy Pop's album The Idiot that was written by both Bowie and Iggy. It was a hit single, which was most likely a calculated move on Bowie's part, because Iggy was having severe financial troubles. And Bowie's next two albums included at least one Iggy Pop cover apiece...
• Multi-Disc Work:
  • The sole double-album in his studio career was the vinyl release of The Next Day, which took the form of two LPs with a few bonus tracks added at the end to fill up all four sides. This configuration would also be used for the single-disc deluxe edition CD.
  • When Rykodisc released the first round of remasters of Bowie's catalog in the early '90s, each album included several bonus tracks appended to the end. When Ryko released Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on vinyl, they were each made sesquialbums, with the third side containing the bonus tracks. EMI's international LP releases of the remasters and Ryko's LP releases of the post-Ziggy albums simply bumped some of the songs from side two up to side one to make space for the bonus tracks.
  • Due to their lengths making it difficult to include them on just one LP each, the vinyl releases of Black Tie White Noise, The Buddha of Suburbia, Outside (which initially appeared on LP as the truncated, single-disc Excerpts from Outside), and Earthling would all be released across two discs each when they were remastered in 2021. The comparatively short length of Earthling meant that it only occupied three sides, with the fourth featuring an etching of the Kirlian photograph used to represent "Little Wonder" in the liner notes.
  • The 2014 retrospective compilation Nothing Has Changed was released as both double-CD and triple-CD sets. The former organizes tracks from throughout his decades-long career in chronological order, while the latter features them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the new track "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" (later re-recorded for ★) and ending with his debut single from 1964, "Liza Jane". A modified version of the two-CD set would later be released as Bowie Legacy to cash in on his Posthumous Popularity Potential after his death in 2016.
  • The 2018 remix of Never Let Me Down, included exclusively as part of the Boxed Set Loving the Alien (1983-1988), is a three-sided double-LP, with the fourth side featuring an etching of the "David Bowie" logo on the front cover.
  • The posthumous album Toy (initially recorded in 2000 and held on The Shelf of Movie Languishment for 21 years) would first see a single-CD release as part of the 2021 Boxed Set Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) before seeing a three-CD Boxed Set of its own the following January as Toy:Box, with the second and third discs featuring alternate mixes. A later standalone release, divorced from both boxes, would eventually come out seven months later. The album itself, both in Brilliant Adventure and as a standalone release, appears on vinyl as a three-sided double-LP, with the fourth side featuring an etching of the front cover's logo.
• No Budget: The video for "Love Is Lost" cost only $12.99 according to the official press release! The life-sized puppets? They were actually created for an unreleased 1999 video (see What Could Have Been below) and taken out of mothballs in 2013. The three-person crew included himself!
• One for the Money; One for the Art: He did the Pepsi ad in 1987 because he needed the money to help fund his Glass Spider tour; indeed, he said it's probably the only reason anyone would do an ad.
• Playing Against Type: He made his Broadway debut as the title character of the play The Elephant Man in 1980. While he didn't use prosthetics (as per the play's instructions, he distorted his body language and voice instead), the gentle grotesque definitely contrasted to his usual bold, sexy image. In Jazzin' for Blue Jean, dorky Vic is also absent Bowie's usual charms, and is deliberately contrasted with Screamin' Lord Byron, a more conventionally Bowie-esque figure, albeit one who's Played for Laughs.
• Promoted Fanboy
  • As stated in a 2022 interview, Tony Sales was a big fan of Bowie prior to collaborating with him as a fellow touring musician on the supporting tour for Iggy Pop's The Idiot, as a session player on Lust for Life (which Bowie co-produced), and especially as a bandmate in Tin Machine.
  • Tilda Swinton has been an avowed Bowie fan ever since she saw The Man Who Fell to Earth, and in the 2013 video for "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" she got to play his wife.
  • Bowie himself was a big fan of the Velvet Underground since before their first album even came out, and ended up producing frontman Lou Reed's solo album Transformer.
  • Likewise with Devo, Bowie became a near-instant fan of them from hearing their demo tapes in 1977, and ended up providing additional production on Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! alongside Brian Eno; Bowie also contributed backing vocals to the album, but these went unused (Mark Mothersbaugh still has Bowie's recordings on-hand though, alongside production embellishments by Eno that also went unused).
  • Obviously Trent Reznor, Bowie being Reznor's idol, and the two of them toured in 1995. Reznor even credited Bowie with inspiring him to get sober.
  • A mutual instance for TV on the Radio; Bowie was one of the band's earliest boosters, having fallen in love with their 2003 Young Liars EP, which had been passed along to him by a mutual friend. Bowie took to the band, gave them advice on the mixing for their debut album Desperate Youths, Blood Thirsty Babes and appeared as a backing vocalist on their 2006 single "Province". Dave Sitek, the band's guitarist and producer, once quipped about his appearance on "Province" that "I never expected to be in a situation where I’m at a mixing board asking David Bowie to enunciate a consonant."
• Rarely Performed Song:
  • All of Bowie's pre-Space Oddity material disappeared from Bowie's setlists once his career took off in the early '70s, owed to a mix of its Early-Installment Weirdness and his Creator Backlash towards it. Bowie eventually incorporated "Can't Help Thinking About Me" into his setlist during the supporting tour for 'hours...' in 1999 and featured "I Dig Everything" and "The London Boys" in the Mini Tour the following summer. This revisiting of his early material led to the making of the re-recordings album Toy in 2000 (though the album went unreleased until 2021).
  • After the Glass Spider Tour in 1987, material from Tonight mostly vanished from Bowie's setlists, while material from Never Let Me Down completely vanished, owed to Bowie's fierce Creator Backlash towards both albums. The most representation Tonight got post-1987 consisted of "Blue Jean" reappearing during the Sound + Vision tour and both it and "Loving the Alien" appearing in the supporting tour for Reality.
  • Bowie deliberately sought to invoke this with his 1990 Sound + Vision tour, done to promote Rykodisc's remasters of his back-catalog. Not wanting to become a legacy act, the idea behind the tour was that he would perform all his greatest hits (plus the recent Adrian Belew collaboration "Pretty Pink Rose") for one last run before permanently retiring them from his setlists. The plan mostly fell through during the supporting tour for Outside, where his unwillingness to play old songs drew staunch criticism and forced him to renege on his idea, but he still deprioritized them in favor of post-1990 material, and six tracks featured on the Sound + Vision tour did indeed disappear from Bowie's setlists for good: "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "John, I'm Only Dancing", "Amsterdam", "Young Americans", "TVC 15", and "Pretty Pink Rose". Additionally, Space Oddity would only be performed a handful of times after the tour.
• Reclusive Artist: He was once so accessible that he regularly communicated with his fanbase via his official website at the Turn of the Millennium. But then he slowly became this. He had not released a new album since 2003, his last tour — one cut short by a heart attack that required multiple bypass surgeries — was in 2004, and his last live performance was in 2006. A few film/TV roles and guest appearances on other artists' albums later, and that was all. He only seemed to surface for the odd premiere or charity fundraiser, and didn't grant interviews. In The New '10s, it was generally accepted by fans and the music press that he quietly retired to raise his family, preserve his health, indulge in his hobbies (he painted, sculpted, and was an avowed Book Worm), and enjoy the fruits of his labors... which made January 8, 2013 something of a Wham Episode for everybody when the website was relaunched, a new album announced, and a video for its first single released. The Next Day was a huge hit, but he still would not grant interviews — longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti has said Bowie ruled out the possibility completely — and would not be going on tour to support any new releases. His only guest appearance afterwards was as a backing vocalist on the Title Track of Arcade Fire's Reflektor in 2013, and public appearances were nonexistent (with even his attendance of the premiere of Lazarus only becoming known after people noticed him there first). Any chances of this changing ended with his death three years later.
• Renamed to Avoid Association: David Jones took the stage name David Bowie to avoid confusing with Davy Jones of The Monkees.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Bowie's sponsorship deal with Pepsi was cut off after he was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Dallas, Texas (he would later be acquitted by a grand jury), cutting off plans to take the Glass Spider Tour to Russia and South America.
• Saved from Development Hell: Toy, an album consisting of rerecorded versions of older songs as well as some new material, was intended to be released in 2001. It remained unreleased until late 2021, two decades after its original release date and half a decade after Bowie's death.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment:
  • Low was completed in November of 1976 but was put on hold by RCA Records and ex-manager Tony Defries (who still held partial ownership of Bowie's output) until January 1977, due to their reservations about the album's commercial viability.
  • The Concert Film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was filmed over the course of Bowie's final tour as Ziggy Stardust in 1973 and was given a few private screenings at college towns in the proceeding years, but it wouldn't make its public debut until the 1979 Edinburgh Film Festival, owed to Bowie's desire to distance himself from his stage persona. Its worldwide release, meanwhile, wouldn't occur until 1983 off the heels of Bowie's smash success with Let's Dance; Bowie and regular collaborator Tony Visconti remixed the film's audio in 1981 in preparation for this, knowing that Bowie's contract with RCA Records was due to expire in 1982.
  • Toy was completed in late 2000 and planned for a surprise release in 2001, but a mix of logistical difficulties and financial troubles from Virgin Records led to it being shelved. Two songs recorded for the album, "Uncle Floyd and "Afraid", would be re-recorded for Heathen (the former being renamed "Slip Away"), various other songs would appear as B-sides, bonus tracks, and the Nothing Has Changed compilation, and an early version of the album would leak in 2011 (with Classic Rock magazine even formally reviewing it) before a completed version of the full album released in 2021.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact:
  • Bowie's band Tin Machine. They were only active for roughly four years (1988-1992) and put out just two studio albums and a live record within that time before dissolving, with Bowie returning to his solo career afterwards. However, in hindsight, the band has been noted for being a major influence on 1990's Alternative Rock and especially grunge; an account from Tin Machine producer Tim Palmer attests that when he was working with Pearl Jam as the mixer for Ten, he walked into the studio one day to find the group listening to "Heaven's in Here". This retrospective realization has been credited as a major catalyst in the band becoming Vindicated by History, having gone from receiving lukewarm responses from fans and critics to being considered one of the most important bands of the late 80's.
  • Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" phase only lasted for around a year, covering around three albums at most. However, it's considered Bowie's most famous persona with a major influence on Glam Rock, Punk Rock, Glam Metal, and rock music history as a whole.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • Bowie's song "Fascination" is unrelated to The Human League's song of the same name.
  • Both Bowie and Peter Gabriel have songs named "Modern Love", though Bowie's song is more famous than Gabriel's. Similarly, the Gabriel song's parent album includes a song named "Slowburn", which is similar in name to the Bowie song on Heathen.
  • In the music world alone, Toy shares its name with albums by Yello, A Giant Dog, Funkadelic, Uri Cane, and the band Toy, as well as songs by Spandau Ballet and Netta Barzilai.
• So My Kids Can Watch:
  • Twice. He narrated Peter and the Wolf in 1978 because his son was a fan of the work. Decades later, his daughter was a SpongeBob SquarePants fan, hence his voicework in the "Atlantis Squarepantis" special as Lord Royal Highness. Bowie would additionally give Nickelodeon permission to use a modified version of "No Control" for The SpongeBob Musical.
  • He performed on Bing Crosby's last Christmas special partly because his mother was a fan.
• Throw It In!: While recording the title track for "Heroes", Bowie, Tony Visconti, and Brian Eno had Robert Fripp record three separate takes of the song's iconic guitar line. Just for the hell of it, they tried playing the three takes together, liked the way it sounded, and the rest is history.
• Troubled Production: Being an artist who always had a heavy amount of ambition, it's only inevitable that it would sometimes result in him biting off more than he could chew and paying the price for it.
  • The first leg of the Diamond Dogs Tour in 1974 was rough going for him. It was an early example of Scenery Porn in rock tours with its colossal, skyscraper-dominated "Hunger City" set — which obscured his band and backup singers, who were not happy at being marginalized for most of the show and would sneak out from behind the buildings as he performed. Beyond the big budget the show required, those backing performers weren't getting their checks on time, a symptom of larger problems Bowie was having with his spendthrift management, whom he would soon part ways with, but not without litigation that lasted him the rest of The '70s. All the while, Bowie's problems with illicit substances firmly took hold of him. A memorable incident at one show had the cherry picker arm that carried him in a chair over the audience for "Space Oddity" get stuck, leaving him to crawl down it to get back to the stage while audience members grabbed at him (according to producer Tony Visconti, who witnessed it firsthand). On another occasion, the show's staff outright forgot to lower the cherry picker at the end, leaving him stuck up there, alone, for a good while after the concert had already finished, before his team remembered about him and sheepishly returned to a very cross, very snarky Bowie. Tellingly, the second leg of the tour dropped the set altogether, and his next two tours took far more minimalist approaches to staging. The BBC documentary Cracked Actor followed him on this tour, and is legendary not only for being the only source of good-quality footage of the tour, but also for vividly capturing Bowie's frantic state of mind during this period.
  • David Live, recorded near the end of the first leg of the Diamond Dogs tour, had some additional troubles of its own:
    • Bowie's backup band learned of the intent to record the shows at Philadelphia's Tower Theatre only a few hours before the first one. Since recording a live album had not been provided for by their contracts, they threatened to walk out, and stuck to their guns when Bowie's initial offer was too low. Finally, after he promised them $5,000 each, they agreed to play. However, the bad taste the whole experience had left in their mouth affected their performances to an extent that is audible on the album.
    • But at least those performances were audible. As the album's notes admit, some of the backing vocals had to be overdubbed after recording since the singers were often too far from the microphone, and later it was divulged that this issue had affected some of the sax parts as well.
    • Many critics have also taken issue with Bowie's new arrangements of his songs, and his heavily strained singing (probably a result of the already-stressful tour combined with the effects of cocaine abuse). Bowie admitted in retrospect that the cover image makes him look dead. Despite these shortcomings, the album is still essential listening as it captures Bowie as he transitioned from the Ziggy Stardust^note He has since described this album as the "final death" of Ziggy sound and persona of his Glam Rock period to the more soul-influenced sound of Young Americans.
  • Bowie was in much better shape mentally and financially come 1987, thanks to the huge success of the mainstream-appealing Let's Dance and the Serious Moonlight Tour of '83. But according to Paolo Hewitt's retrospective Album by Album, EMI America wanted the money train to keep rolling (1985-86 had him focus on film work following the tepid reception of Tonight, itself the result of Bowie feeling pressured to follow up Let's Dance ASAP) and in 1987 pressured him into recording and touring again, resulting in the infamously reviled Never Let Me Down. For the Glass Spider Tour meant to support that album, Bowie took another shot at Spectacle, with Scenery Porn and a small troupe of dancers who interacted with him throughout in colorful vignettes. The giant set turned out to be problematic at outdoor venues, particularly in Europe: unusually rainy weather hurt the English and Spanish shows, and venues that decreed that the show was obligated to start before sundown made the lighting effects hard to appreciate. Among the many incidents on the tour:
    • A lighting engineer fell to his death from the scaffolding before the Florence, Italy show.
    • At Ireland's Slane Castle, a fan died trying to swim the River Boyne to get backstage.
    • Fans who couldn't get into the stadium in Milan, Italy rioted, though this was resolved peacefully.
    • In Dallas, Texas, Bowie was accused of sexually assaulting a fan at his hotel; while he was cleared of the charges, an ad he did for tour sponsor Pepsi was pulled.
    • All along, audiences in seats further out from the stage could hardly see what Bowie and his troupe were doing. The tour was his most highly-attended yet, but he put up with bad reviews (especially in his native England) that called it overblown, as if the poor response to Never Let Me Down weren't enough for him (the few good reviews the tour did get were from writers who attended the rare nighttime show, when the visual effects could actually work as intended). What's more, he was frustrated that the audience he was trying to appeal to didn't understand/appreciate his artistic flourishes and older/less-popular songs closer to his heart. Tellingly, over the course of the tour, several of the new songs were cut. Exhausted by the end, he considered giving up on music altogether. But guitarist Reeves Gabrels convinced him to create only for himself again — leading to Bowie's Hard Rock period with the group Tin Machine.
    • The Glass Spider Tour is still joked about by fans who regard the bulk of The '80s as a colossal Audience-Alienating Era for him, though (thanks in part to the official video of the Sydney, Australia shows, which shows his work in the best light) there are those who regard it fondly. It was rumored for years that Bowie and his crew destroyed the Glass Spider set by lighting it on fire in a field after the final show in New Zealand (as a means to relieve to the stress the tour had provided). It took until 2016 for that rumor to be refuted: the set was just placed in storage in an Auckland warehouse.
• Typecasting: Most of his roles, be they goodies or baddies, human or inhuman, are linked by a cool, mysterious aura — the trailer for The Hunger referred to this as "cruel elegance."
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bowie's Channel Hopping over the years could've taken different paths at various points in his career:
    • In the leadup to Space Oddity, manager Kenneth Pitt was scouting a number of labels at the same time as Bowie's talks with Mercury Records, unaware that they were happening. Of the ones Pitt looked at, Atlantic Records is the only one named in any official sources.
    • Mercury Records were willing to renegotiate Bowie's contract for the release of Hunky Dory, but manager Tony Defries forced the label to drop Bowie instead out of disdain towards their handling of his finances.
    • As shown in the Boxed Set Divine Symmetry, Bowie signed to the publishing arm of Chrysalis Records on October 23, 1970, and he wrote the material for both Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars up to the end of 1971; the main label even pressed a test 7" of the demos that he recorded for Hunky Dory. Additionally, The Beatles' vanity label, Apple Records, manufactured a test pressing of Hunky Dory for promotional purposes. However, Tony Defries' label-scouting in the US would ultimately bring Bowie under the arm of RCA Records.
    • RCA Records were willing to renegotiate Bowie's contract when it was due to expire in 1982, but Bowie turned the offer down, feeling that they were "milking" his backlog too much. Geffen Records and Columbia Records also expressed interest in signing Bowie, but he turned down both of them in favor of signing with EMI America Records; he'd eventually move to Columbia anyways in 2002.
    • Bowie's contract with Savage Records in the early '90s was intended to last three albums, but he was let go following the label's bankruptcy and a subsequent legal dispute over the underperformance of Black Tie White Noise.
  • He was preparing a musical version of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a post-Ziggy Stardust project, but couldn't get the rights from Orwell's widow; some of the songs he wrote for it were recorded and released on Diamond Dogs. A 1980 New Music Express interview revealed he actually worked on a surreal, partially-animated film based on the album, intending to release it Direct to Video.
  • In 1973, it was announced he was going to play Valentine Michael Smith in a film adaptation of Stranger in a Strange Land.
  • He was announced as a cast member for the 1976 film version of The Blue Bird (perhaps as Fire — the only major role fit for someone his age), but didn't like the script enough to go through with it.
  • "Golden Years" was written for RCA Records labelmate Elvis Presley, but he turned it down, which explains its uncharacteristically doo-wop sound compared to the rest of Station to Station (fun fact: Presley and Bowie were both born on January 8).
  • He worked on a musical score for The Man Who Fell to Earth with Paul Buckmaster, but it didn't pan out. Aside from a bass part that, played backward, was incorporated into the Low track "Subterraneans", none of this music has been made available. It would have included a song called "Wheels" (referencing the train imagery in the film).
  • He wanted to be in The Eagle Has Landed but the director went on record as saying his audition wasn't good. Other could-have-been movie projects in the late 1970s included:
    • An adaptation of The Threepenny Opera directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and...
    • Wally, in which he would have played painter Egon Schiele (this came very close to being a reality).
    • Director Lina Wertmueller wanted to work with him, but he didn't want to work with her.
    • Martin Scorsese who cast Bowie as Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, planned to work with him in a movie about George Gershwin, where Bowie would have played... Fred Astaire. Indeed, Scorsese discussed the project with Astaire in his final years and Astaire gave Bowie Approval of God.
  • David Hemmings, who directed Bowie in Just a Gigolo, also filmed one of his 1978 concerts, but Bowie wasn't happy with the result and it was never released.
  • There is evidence that Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, considered murdering Bowie, who was also in New York City at the end of 1980 (performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway). He apparently made a choice between killing Bowie or Lennon— what if he'd gone with the former? Or much worse, decided to kill both men?
  • Related to the above, he planned to tour in 1981 in the wake of Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), but pulled the plug after Lennon's assassination and the discovery that he was also on Chapman's hitlist.
  • He bid for the rights to Metropolis in the early '80s, but was outbid by Giorgio Moroder. As the trope page for the film puts it, "God knows what he...scratch that, probably even God doesn't know what Bowie would have done with Metropolis."
  • His busy schedule in The '80s not only forced him to drop out of the title role in the Faerie Tale Theatre adaptation of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Eric Idle took over the part), but also kept the Doctor Who producers from casting him as Sharaz Jek in "The Caves of Androzani" (the Fifth Doctor's final serial) and the DJ in "Revelation of the Daleks".
  • During the making of the Doctor Who TV movie, Bowie was one of many actors considered for the role of the Master.
  • As noted above under Awesome, Dear Boy, he was offered the part of Zorin in A View to a Kill but turned it down.
  • His participation in Live Aid was supposed to include a live trans-Atlantic duet with Mick Jagger on "Dancing in the Street", but this proved technologically impossible; instead, they made the infamous video for it that aired during the broadcast. Also, Bowie's set was going to include five songs rather than four, but he chose to give up the time so a montage of video footage of the suffering Ethiopians the concert was benefiting could be aired instead.
  • Was the original choice to play Lawrence Jamieson in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which was initially conceived as a vehicle for him and Jagger to reteam. Bowie had to back out due to him being signed onto The Last Temptation of Christ at around the same time, while Jagger was already committed to Running Out of Luck.
  • Bowie was one of many actors considered for the role of Jack Napier/the Joker in Batman (1989) prior to the casting of Jack Nicholson.
  • He was sought for the title role in Hook but turned it down — he probably came closer to being in a Peter Pan movie than Michael Jackson ever was.
  • Shortly after the release of Never Let Me Down, Bowie expressed interest in making a follow-up more in the vein of his Berlin Trilogy. However, these plans were dropped as a result of the immense critical and fan backlash to both Never Let Me Down and its associated Glass Spider tour, which instead led to the creation of Tin Machine as a means of breaking Bowie out of his artistic slump. Supposedly, the tracks "Lucy Can't Dance" & "Pretty Pink Rose" and a cover of "Like a Rolling Stone" were originally planned for inclusion on this aborted album, but were eventually repurposed in different forms on later projects.^note "Lucy Can't Dance was re-recorded in an acid jazz style as a bonus track on initial CD releases of Black Tie White Noise in 1993; "Pretty Pink Rose" was re-recorded as a duet with King Crimson frontman Adrian Belew for the latter's 1990 solo album Young Lions; the "Like a Rolling Stone" cover was recorded with former Spiders from Mars member Mick Ronson on guitar and included on the latter's 1994 posthumous album Heaven and Hull. Bowie would eventually make a Spiritual Successor to the Berlin trilogy in the form of 1993's The Buddha of Suburbia, but the one that was intended to follow Never Let Me Down never really came to fruition.
  • 2. Contamination and 3. Africaans, the planned continuations of 1. Outside, were never recorded (supposedly some of 2. Contamination was recorded onto tape, but will never see daylight).
  • A Concept Video was shot for "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" (hours...), with Bowie encountering several of his past personas as "played" by life-sized puppets, but he wasn't happy with the result and it remains unreleased. Two of the puppets— the Thin White Duke and Pierrot— got their closeups in 2013, when he reused them for the "Love Is Lost" video.
  • In the lead up to the 30th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust in 2002, he considered such ideas as a stage musical about the character or outright reviving him on the concert stage, none of which came to pass.
  • He declined to cover one of Peter Gabriel's songs for his Scratch My Back companion project I'll Scratch Yours, where each of the artists he covered covers one of his songs in turn. We got Brian Eno instead.
  • In 2011, rumours of a 2012 Farewell Tour with a reformed Nine Inch Nails surfaced, only to be revealed as an April Fools joke.
  • The world might have come to call him Sir David Bowie, but he turned down the opportunity to be knighted.
  • He was asked to perform at the 2012 Olympic Games, but declined. That didn't stop ""Heroes"" from serving as the unofficial theme song of the British athletes, and several of his other songs were incorporated into the opening and closing ceremonies.
  • In the late '70s and The '80s, he frequently expressed a desire to direct movies as well as act in them. Although he did receive co-director credit on several of his videos, he never would direct a feature. (His son Duncan Jones, on the other hand...)
  • The creators of The Venture Brothers tried to get Bowie to voice himself, but never heard back from him/his agent.
  • Chris Martin of Coldplay asked Bowie to sing backing vocals on one of their songs, but was turned down because it "wasn't one of his best."
  • Just before Bowie died of cancer in 2016, James Gunn and Kevin Feige were planning to ask him to cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
  • As mentioned above, the Title Track of ★ was initially planned to be over eleven minutes long, but was cut for release because of iTunes' limitations on the length of a single, and Bowie did not want to confuse listeners by releasing two versions of the song.
  • While the album was already a pretty big What Could Have Been due to being the start of an Orphaned Series, Brian Eno revealed that towards the end of his life, Bowie was talking with him about 1. Outside and considering revisiting the album (and, we might infer, possibly resuming work on its abandoned sequels). One can only imagine what he might have come up with had he lived long enough to do so.
  • Prior to Bowie's death, Bryan Fuller said that he was considering to cast him as Robert Lecter in NBC's Hannibal.
  • After his death, Tony Visconti said that Bowie was at the time demoing a follow-up to ★ during his last months. He recorded five demo tracks for it, and it's possible they'll eventually see release, but even if we hear them, we'll only be able to guess what the finished product would have sounded like. Given what a radical reinvention Blackstar was, there's hardly any question that it would have been amazing.
  • In a Reddit AMA posted after Bowie's death, Harmonix said that they created an avatar based on him for Amplitude, but the avatar was removed from the final product due to technical issues.
  • Shortly after his death, Dominic Monaghan confirmed the long-standing rumor that he'd auditioned for a role in The Lord of the Rings. The most popular speculation is that he wanted to play Elrond.
  • At one point Bowie was asked to appear As Himself for the Flight of the Conchords series episode "Bowie", but turned it down due to already appearing as himself elsewhere around that same time. The role eventually ended up being filled in by Jemaine Clement himself, which oddly enough worked in his favor for later roles.
  • Bowie had long teased writing an autobiography, and apparently made several attempts throughout his career. One such project was David Bowie: Object, in which he would have told his life story through 100 objects. The project ultimately fell through, but found a spiritual successor in the David Bowie Is... exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Bowie was not involved with that project, but did allow its curators access to his extensive personal archives, and apparently most of the items that Bowie had set aside for Object wound up being selected for the exhibit.
  • He was set to reprise his role from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as Phillip Jeffries in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks, but his death prevented it from happening. However, prior to his death, he gave his blessing to allow David Lynch to reuse footage of his character but on one condition: To have him being redubbed by Nathan Frizzell.
  • He was offered a role in Atomic Blonde as one of the interrogators in the framing story, but turned it down, likely not wanting to risk dying before all his scenes were filmed.
  • He was considered to play Neander Wallace in Blade Runner 2049, but died before he would accept it. Jared Leto eventually played the character.
  • He offered Rick Wakeman a permanent spot in his backing band, but Wakeman decided to join Yes instead. Tony Kaye, the man Wakeman replaced, played keyboards on Bowie's 1976 Isolar tour.
  • An early version of "I'm Afraid Of Americans", recorded late into the sessions for 1. Outside, was almost submitted to the soundtrack of Johnny Mnemonic, but Brian Eno convinced Bowie to withdraw it because he was dubious about the quality of the film. This same version ended up being used in Showgirls instead - ironically, both movies ended up being Box Office Bombs.
  • After Rykodisc's rights to Bowie's 1969-1980 catalog lapsed in 1998, EMI and Capitol Records made plans to keep them in print, briefly reissuing Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, David Live, and Young Americans under the EMI-Capitol Entertainment Properties and EMI-Capitol Music Special Markets imprints. However, these plans were scrapped when Virgin Records put together their own in-house remasters in 1999, which included not only the studio albums in Rykodisc's series, but also Let's Dance, Tonight, Never Let Me Down, and Tin Machine. Since then, the Rykodisc CDs have never been reissued.
  • When Tin Machine first formed, Reeves Gabrels suggested naming the band White Noise. Bowie, however, shot the idea down, fearing that it would make them sound like a white power group. "Leather Weasel" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" were also brought up as possible band names.
  • According to The Criterion Collection's liner notes for the 1984 film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bowie was originally tapped to provide the film's soundtrack, but was ultimately let go. Sources vary on why, with some claiming that he asked for too much money and others claiming that he wanted an "organic" soundtrack that clashed with Virgin Films' desire for a youth-oriented rock score. Regardless, the final score would ultimately be done by Eurythmics.
• Word of God: "All the Young Dudes" is not a song celebrating youth according to Bowie but the very opposite.
• Working Title: For his albums:
  • Metrobolist for The Man Who Sold the World (later repurposed for its 50th anniversary remix)
  • A Lad Insane and Love Aladdin Vein for Aladdin Sane
  • We Are the Dead for Diamond Dogs
  • Dancin', Somebody Up There Likes Me, One Damned Song, The Gouster, Shilling the Rubes and Fascination for Young Americans
  • The Return of the Thin White Duke and Golden Years for Station to Station
  • New Music: Night and Day for Low
  • Planned Accidents for Lodger, which explains why Bowie appears as a car wreck victim on the cover art. Another one was Despite Straight Lines.
  • Vampires and Human Flesh for Let's Dance
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: On many albums, Bowie went into the studio with a few chord changes and wrote the songs on the hoof ("Heroes" was being written as it was recorded).

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