David Bowie

Pye Records let Bowie go in September 1966 after a string of singles that failed to chart. His soon-to-be manager Kenneth Pitt paid for a session, and Decca’s progressive pop label Deram signed him on the strength of its acetates: an album deal before a hit single, which the biographer Nicholas Pegg calls rare for the time. Recording ran from November 1966 to March 1967 in London with Mike Vernon producing. Bowie could not read music, so he and his former Buzz bandmate Derek Fearnley wrote the orchestral charts from a musical guidebook, Freda Dinn’s Observer’s Guide to Music; some of the players were members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and they threw back charts they could not play.

The sound is baroque pop and music hall, led by brass and woodwind rather than guitar, and shaped by Anthony Newley, whose influence Bowie’s own producer and engineer both noticed. Every one of the 14 songs is Bowie’s, many of them third-person story songs. It came out the same day as Sgt. Pepper, drew a few warm reviews and flopped, partly for lack of promotion from Deram. Bowie recorded more tracks for the label, all rejected, and left in May 1968. In later decades he downplayed the period and called it “cringey” in 1990.

After his debut flopped, Bowie wrote “Space Oddity”, a tale of a fictional astronaut inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the promotional film Love You till Tuesday. It won him a contract with Mercury Records and its UK arm Philips, and the finances for a second album. Tony Visconti saw the song as a “novelty record” and passed it to Gus Dudgeon, who produced it; it was recorded at Trident Studios on 20 June 1969, with Rick Wakeman on Mellotron and an orchestra arranged by Paul Buckmaster, and released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch. It reached number five in the UK, Bowie’s first hit.

The rest of the album, recorded through the summer and autumn, left the music hall of the debut for folk rock and psychedelic rock. It carried events from his life: he wrote “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” after his father died on 5 August, and “Memory of a Free Festival” remembers the Beckenham arts festival he organised that month. Released with little promotion, it sold barely over 5,000 copies by March 1970. It was issued in the UK under the same title as his debut, which the biographer Paul Trynka calls “bizarre”, and in the US as Man of Words/Man of Music. RCA reissued it as Space Oddity in 1972 after Ziggy Stardust, and that version reached number 17 in the UK and number 16 in the US.

By 1970 the attention “Space Oddity” had won had faded and its follow-up single, “The Prettiest Star”, failed to chart. Bowie formed a band, Hype, with the bassist Tony Visconti and the guitarist Mick Ronson, whom he had met in February, and the drummer Mick Woodmansey joined; by April the four were living at Haddon Hall in Beckenham. The album was recorded in London from April to May 1970. Bowie was busy with his new wife Angie and with managerial disputes, so the music was largely arranged by Ronson and Visconti. Visconti later said the songs were written by all four of them, jamming in a basement; Bowie said in 1998 that he objected to the impression that he did not write them.

It left the folk of the last record for hard rock and blues rock, with lyrics about insanity, religion, technology and war. It was meant to be called Metrobolist, a play on the film Metropolis, but Mercury changed the title without asking him. It sold only 1,395 copies in the US by the end of June 1971. After Ziggy Stardust, RCA reissued it in November 1972 with a photograph of Bowie as Ziggy on the front, and it reached number 24 in the UK. Critics now call it the start of his “classic period”. Visconti, who left Bowie after the sessions, still rated it his best work with him until Scary Monsters.

After a quiet year Bowie sat down to write on piano rather than guitar, and the American trip of February 1971 gave him songs for three icons: Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. “Oh! You Pretty Things”, the first, was recorded by Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits and reached number 12 in the UK in April. Bowie’s manager Tony Defries pried him out of his Mercury contract, and RCA signed him to a three-record deal on 9 September 1971, his label for the rest of the decade. He recorded the album at Trident Studios from June to August with Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey, soon to be the Spiders from Mars, and Rick Wakeman on piano; Ken Scott co-produced and said almost everything was done in one take.

After the hard rock of The Man Who Sold the World it was warmer, piano-led art pop. “Changes” is about the compulsion to reinvent oneself, and “Kooks” was written for his newborn son Duncan. RCA gave it little promotion, wary that Bowie would change his image again, and it failed to chart at first; it barely sold 5,000 copies in its first quarter. After Ziggy Stardust broke in mid-1972 it climbed to number three in the UK and stayed on the chart for 69 weeks. “Life on Mars?”, released as a single in 1973, also reached number three.

Hunky Dory had few songs the band could play live, so Bowie, Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey followed it almost at once with a rock record. Sessions began at Trident on 8 November 1971 and most of the tracks were cut almost entirely live; Ken Scott said 95 percent of the vocals on the four albums he produced for Bowie were first takes. It was not conceived as a concept album: most of the story of Ziggy, a bisexual alien rock star sent to Earth as a saviour who falls to his own ego, was written after the songs were recorded. When RCA’s Dennis Katz complained that it had no single, Bowie wrote “Starman”, which replaced a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” at the last minute.

It reached the UK top five. The turn came when Bowie performed “Starman” on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972, in a rainbow jumpsuit with red hair and an arm around Ronson’s shoulder; Buckley writes that many fans date their conversion to that night. The album stayed on the chart for two years and has sold an estimated 7.5 million copies worldwide, his second best after Let’s Dance. Reviews at the time were mostly lukewarm. It is now often called his masterpiece, was voted his greatest album in a 2013 Rolling Stone readers’ poll, and in 2017 was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

It was the first album Bowie wrote and released from a position of stardom, and most of it was written on the road in the US in late 1972, shaped by his view of the country; the biographer Christopher Sandford says he was “simultaneously appalled and fixated by America”. Bowie called it “Ziggy goes to America”, and its title is a pun on “A Lad Insane”. It was recorded between tour legs, from “The Jean Genie” in New York on 6 October 1972 to sessions at Trident in London that ended on 24 January 1973, with the pianist Mike Garson joining the Spiders from Mars. The tour and side projects, among them co-producing Lou Reed’s Transformer and mixing the Stooges’ Raw Power, were taking a toll on his mental health.

The sound is harder, rawer glam rock, with songs influenced by the Rolling Stones and a cover of theirs, “Let’s Spend the Night Together”. “The Jean Genie” reached number two and “Drive-In Saturday” number three in the UK. With a purported 100,000 copies ordered in advance, the album went to number one in the UK, where it stayed five weeks, and number 17 in the US, his biggest in both countries so far. It is estimated to have sold 4.6 million copies. Many critics found it a weaker Ziggy; Pegg calls it “one of the most urgent, compelling and essential of Bowie’s albums”.

Ziggy was an androgynous alien rock star who comes to a dying Earth with a message of hope, is worshipped as a prophet, and is torn apart by his own fame. Bowie said he wanted to “define the archetype messiah rockstar”, using “the trappings of kabuki theatre, mime technique, fringe New York music”. Sources included the singer Vince Taylor, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. The red mullet was cut and dyed by the hairdresser Suzi Fussey from images in Vogue and a model Bowie had seen wearing Kansai Yamamoto, who went on to design seven of Ziggy’s stage costumes, many of them tear-away outfits borrowed from kabuki. Crowds at the time were likened to Beatlemania, and the period called “Ziggymania”.

Playing Ziggy for 18 months wore on him. Bowie said the character “wouldn’t leave me alone for years”, and that he began having doubts about his sanity; RCA also refused to finance a third big US tour after management overspent by more than $300,000. At the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 3 July 1973, in front of 3,500 fans and with Jeff Beck joining for a medley of “The Jean Genie” and “Love Me Do”, he announced before the final song, “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”, that it was “the last show that we’ll ever do”. Fans and press took it to mean he was retiring entirely; it meant only Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars. D. A. Pennebaker filmed it, and the film premiered in 1979.

RCA wanted a new album by Christmas, and Bowie, exhausted from touring and with his manager negotiating over royalties and advising him not to record new songs, made a covers record as a “stopgap”. It is a tribute to bands he heard at the Marquee between 1964 and 1967: the Pretty Things, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, Them. He picked the tracks from a stack of 45s in his rooms at the Hyde Park Hotel and recorded them in three weeks, July to August 1973, at the Château d’Hérouville in France, with the arrangements close to the originals but played as glam and proto-punk.

The Spiders from Mars were falling apart. Bowie’s announcement at the last Ziggy show had driven a wedge between him and Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey, and Woodmansey had been fired; the session drummer Aynsley Dunbar replaced him. Biographer Chris O’Leary describes Bowie as “increasingly remote and truculent” in the studio, and it was Ken Scott’s last album with him. Critics at the time mostly judged the songs inferior to the originals, but the single “Sorrow” reached number three and the album topped the UK chart for five weeks, selling 30,000 copies a week by Christmas.

With the Spiders from Mars disbanded and producer Ken Scott gone, Bowie was unsure where to take his career and produced the record himself, playing lead guitar in Mick Ronson’s absence. It came from several half-built projects: a Ziggy Stardust musical that fell through, from which he rescued “Rebel Rebel” and “Rock ’n’ Roll with Me”; a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Orwell’s widow Sonia refused him the rights to; and a post-apocalyptic city drawn from the writing of William S. Burroughs. The title track introduces a new persona, Halloween Jack, who “lives on top of Manhattan Chase”. Tony Visconti returned for strings and mixing, after four years apart, and worked with Bowie for the rest of the decade.

It was his last album in the glam rock genre, though some songs lean toward funk and soul. “Rebel Rebel” reached number five in the UK and the album number one in the UK and number five in the US, helped by a $400,000 advertising campaign. Reviews were mixed. The Diamond Dogs Tour followed, with set-pieces costing $250,000 and a design influenced by Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; its second leg, nicknamed the Soul Tour, carried songs from the next record. Alan Yentob’s documentary Cracked Actor, filmed on the tour, shows Bowie’s mental state declining under a growing cocaine addiction, and after an early screening the director Nicolas Roeg called Bowie about The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Bowie had tired of the Diamond Dogs Tour’s lavish sets and was ready to embrace soul music. In Philadelphia he cut the record at Sigma Sound Studios, the home of Philadelphia soul, starting on 11 August 1974 and finishing in about two weeks, mostly live with the whole band including his vocals; Tony Visconti said it is about 85 percent live. Carlos Alomar, a funk guitarist who had played with James Brown, became his guide to American black music and a collaborator for almost 15 years. A then-unknown Luther Vandross sang backing vocals. Bowie called the sound “plastic soul”, and it alienated many British fans.

In January 1975 at Electric Lady Studios in New York he recorded with John Lennon, a cover of Lennon’s Beatles song “Across the Universe” and “Fame”, a funk rock song about the troubles of stardom. Alomar had developed its riff for another cover, and Lennon, who sang the falsetto “Fame”, got a writing credit. They replaced three of Visconti’s Philadelphia tracks. “Fame” reached number one in the US, his first, though Bowie said he “didn’t have a clue” about commercial singles. The album reached number nine in the US and number two in the UK, with mixed reviews. Bowie, who first called it “the phoniest R&B I’ve ever heard”, said in 1990 that it was “pretty good white, blue-eyed soul”.

After the success of Young Americans Bowie had room to take his time. He moved to Los Angeles to shoot Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which he played the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, and recorded the album at Cherokee Studios from late September or early October to late November 1975. He arrived with fragments of songs and built them in the studio with Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis, the rhythm section he used for the rest of the decade, plus Earl Slick and Bruce Springsteen’s pianist Roy Bittan. He was deep in a cocaine addiction and said he remembered “only flashes” of making it.

The ten-minute title track introduces the Thin White Duke, a character drawn from Newton, in a white shirt, black trousers and waistcoat, who sings of romance while feeling nothing. Its lyrics draw on Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, the Kabbalah and Christianity. The music extends the funk and soul of Young Americans with the influence of German krautrock, particularly Neu! and Kraftwerk, and it is the clearest foretaste of the Berlin albums. It reached number three in the US, his highest there until The Next Day, and number five in the UK. On the Isolar Tour in 1976 Bowie was quoted as saying Britain could benefit from a fascist leader and was photographed in what some alleged was a Nazi salute; he said the photographer caught him mid-wave, blamed his addictions and the Duke, and later apologised.

By 1976 Bowie’s cocaine addiction had worsened for two years, and he said he remembered almost nothing of recording Station to Station. When the Isolar Tour ended on 18 May he moved to Switzerland, then, with Iggy Pop, who was also trying to get sober, to a studio in France and in August 1976 on to West Berlin. Bowie wrote and produced Pop’s debut solo album, The Idiot, and developed a three-phase way of working that he used for the rest of his career: backing tracks first, then overdubs, with lyrics and vocals last. A meeting with Brian Eno backstage in London in May 1976 added a conceptualist who listened to krautrock, Tangerine Dream, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Harmonia, and made ambient records of his own.

The three albums he made with Eno and the producer Tony Visconti, Low and “Heroes” in 1977 and Lodger in 1979, became known as the Berlin Trilogy, a name Bowie began using around the time of Lodger. Only “Heroes” was recorded entirely in the city: Low was made mostly in France, and Lodger in Switzerland and New York. The first two split into songs on side one and instrumentals on side two; Lodger returned to conventional songs and a mix of styles. They sold less than his earlier records and drew mixed reviews at first, then became some of his most admired and influential work. Bowie later called the trilogy’s music his “DNA”.

Sessions began on 1 September 1976 at the Château d’Hérouville in France, right after Bowie and Iggy Pop recorded Pop’s The Idiot, and ended in October at Hansa Studios in West Berlin. Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis returned from Station to Station, Tony Visconti co-produced, and Brian Eno, who was not a co-producer, contributed sound textures. They ran through backing tracks quickly and added overdubs later. Bowie said it was largely drug-free; he was scared his creativity might be bound up with drugs. Visconti made the drum sound with an Eventide H910 Harmonizer, the first commercial pitch-shifting device; he told Bowie it “fucks with the fabric of time”, and the sound was copied for years.

Side one is short, direct song fragments; side two is longer, mostly instrumental pieces such as “Warszawa”, named for the city Bowie visited in April 1976. RCA was shocked, sent Bowie a letter urging a record more like Young Americans, and delayed the release for months. Bowie kept the letter on his wall. Reviews were divided, and Bowie did not promote it, touring instead as Iggy Pop’s keyboardist. It nonetheless reached number two in the UK and number 11 in the US, and “Sound and Vision” was a UK number three. It has influenced post-punk and later bands, and Joy Division, originally called Warsaw, took their name from “Warszawa”.

After finishing Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in June 1977, Bowie and Brian Eno spent a few weeks devising ideas before Tony Visconti joined them at Hansa Studio 2, a former concert hall by the Berlin Wall, which Bowie called “the hall by the wall”. It is the only album of the trilogy recorded entirely in Berlin. Robert Fripp of King Crimson, recruited at Eno’s suggestion, flew in and recorded his lead guitar parts for tracks he had never heard in three days. Most of the music was composed in the studio and Bowie improvised lyrics at the microphone, as he had seen Pop do. Bowie was in a far healthier state than for Low, and the mood was brighter.

Eno co-wrote four of the ten songs and used his Oblique Strategies cards on the instrumentals. The title track, with a lyric inspired by a kiss at the foot of the Wall between Visconti and the singer Antonia Maass, reached only number 24 in the UK and did not chart in the US; it became one of his best-known songs, helped by his Live Aid performance in 1985. RCA marketed the album with the line “There’s Old Wave. There’s New Wave. And there’s David Bowie.” It reached number three in the UK and number 35 in the US, and NME and Melody Maker named it their album of the year, though critics have since mostly preferred Low.

The third record with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti was made in two parts: three weeks at Mountain Studios in Montreux in September 1978, during a break in the Isolar II tour, and a week at the Record Plant in New York in March 1979. The guitarist Adrian Belew, whom Bowie had “poached” from Frank Zappa’s tour, played over tracks he was not allowed to hear first and was told to “play accidentally”. Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards led to musicians swapping instruments on “Boys Keep Swinging”, and to “Move On”, built from the chords of “All the Young Dudes” played backwards. Eno felt the trilogy had “petered out” by Lodger, and Visconti said he did not think Bowie’s heart was in it.

It dropped the electronic side two for conventional songs, mixing new wave, reggae, krautrock and Middle Eastern sounds, with side one on travel and side two on critiques of Western society. Bowie went to Kenya with his son Duncan between the sessions, and the trip inspired “African Night Flight”. Reviews were mixed and many called it the weakest of the three, but it reached number four in the UK and number 20 in the US, with “Boys Keep Swinging” a UK number seven. It is now widely considered among his most underrated albums. Visconti remixed it in 2015 with Bowie’s approval, for the 2017 box set A New Career in a New Town.

The Berlin Trilogy had been a critical success and a commercial disappointment, and Gary Numan, who followed its sound, outsold Bowie in 1979. Bowie told Tony Visconti before they began at the Power Station in New York in February 1980 that this one would be more commercial. Eno was gone, Robert Fripp came back, and Chuck Hammer added guitar synthesiser; it was the last album with the core band of Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar and George Murray who had played together since Station to Station, and only Alomar worked with Bowie again. Instead of improvising, Bowie took time to write the lyrics and melodies before the band added to them. Pete Townshend played on “Because You’re Young”.

“Ashes to Ashes” revisits Major Tom from “Space Oddity”, now described as a “junkie”. Its £250,000 video by David Mallet, with Bowie in a Pierrot costume and filled with New Romantic regulars he recruited from the Blitz club, was the most expensive music video made up to then, and the single went to number one in the UK, dethroning ABBA. The album topped the UK chart, his first since Diamond Dogs, reached number 12 in the US and got universal praise. It was Bowie’s last studio record for RCA and his last with Visconti for over 20 years; critics for decades called later albums “the best since Scary Monsters”.

Bowie left RCA for EMI America for an estimated $17 million, and wanted a commercial sound and a new producer. He chose Nile Rodgers of Chic, and told him: “I really want you to make hits.” He did not tell Tony Visconti, who learned of it through Bowie’s assistant and was deeply hurt; they did not make a studio album together again until Heathen in 2002. In December 1982 they recorded for 17 days at the Power Station, with players from Chic, and, as lead guitarist, an unknown Texas blues player Bowie had seen at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was the first album on which Bowie played no instrument; he sang everything in two days.

It was an enormous success. “Let’s Dance” went to number one in the UK and the US, “China Girl” and “Modern Love” to number two in the UK, and the videos for the first two, filmed in Australia, were in heavy rotation on MTV. The album went to number one in the UK and number four in the US, and has sold 10.7 million copies worldwide, his best seller. His older albums charted again, and by July he had ten in the UK top 100. Reviews were mixed. The Serious Moonlight Tour was the biggest of 1983, though Bowie later said it made him an artist who appealed to “people who bought Phil Collins albums”, and called the following years his “Phil Collins years”.

After the Serious Moonlight Tour Bowie found himself, in his words, with no new ideas and no sense of his new audience. He took a holiday in Bali and Java with Iggy Pop, felt ill-prepared and proposed a live album, but the label wanted a follow-up and he went into Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Canada, in May 1984, less than five months after the tour. He arrived with eight of the nine songs, which surprised Carlos Alomar, who said it was the first time in eleven years that Bowie had brought in anything. Only two songs, “Loving the Alien” and “Blue Jean”, were his alone; five were covers, three of them Pop songs, among them a duet on the title track with Tina Turner. As on Let’s Dance he played no instruments and gave the musicians little direction.

The sessions were troublesome: the engineer Hugh Padgham said there was a falling out with the co-producer Derek Bramble and he took over, and he disliked the pop songs and preferred the more left-field ones left off. The record reached number one in the UK and number 11 in the US, and “Blue Jean” was a top-ten hit. Critics were mostly negative and it is generally counted among his weakest, though some defenders point to “Loving the Alien”. Bowie did not tour it, later said it contained “great material that got simmered down to product level”, and in 1993 said he had “let everyone tell [him] what to do”.

Bowie’s goal was to record differently after Tonight. He spent mid-1986 in Switzerland writing with Iggy Pop and made elaborate home demos with the Turkish multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kızılçay, then recorded from September to November 1986 at Mountain Studios in Montreux and the Power Station in New York, co-producing with David Richards. His old schoolmate Peter Frampton played lead guitar on most tracks, and Bowie played keyboards and rhythm guitar for the first time since Scary Monsters. “Never Let Me Down”, the title track, about his longtime assistant Coco Schwab, was written and recorded in one day in the last week of mixing. The actor Mickey Rourke rapped on “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love)”.

It reached number six in the UK and its three singles all made the UK top 40, but fans and critics disliked it, most calling the production “overblown”. The Glass Spider Tour, his biggest and most theatrical so far and seen by as many as six million people, was a financial success and critically panned. Bowie later called the record “such an awful album” and his “nadir”, and by 1993 a “bitter disappointment”; he asked for “Too Dizzy” to be left off reissues, and BowieNet’s 1998 biography omitted it, the only studio album left out. The failure of album and tour sent him looking for a new way to motivate himself, and he formed Tin Machine.

After Never Let Me Down and the Glass Spider Tour Bowie was at what he called an artistic low point and wanted to make music for himself rather than the audience he had gained with Let’s Dance. He parted with Carlos Alomar and began working with the guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who had given him a demo tape, and then reunited with the bassist Tony Fox Sales and the drummer Hunt Sales, who had played on Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life tour. The four insisted it was a band, with equal input and profits split four ways. Bowie said Gabrels’s advice was simply “Stop doing it”, meaning the hits, and he later called the Tin Machine years a “lifeline”.

The first album was recorded live and raw, mostly in single takes with improvised lyrics, in Montreux in August 1988 and at Compass Point in the Bahamas in spring 1989: 35 songs in six weeks. Released on 22 May 1989 it reached number three in the UK, then sales fell off; critics were mixed, with some later hearing proto-grunge. Tin Machine II followed on 2 September 1991, on a new label, Victory Music, after EMI refused to market another Tin Machine record; it was his first album in nearly 20 years to miss the UK top 20, peaking at number 23. The live album Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby, in 1992, did badly, and the band dissolved. Bowie said only that personal problems in the band made it physically impossible to continue.

Months after ending Tin Machine, Bowie reconnected with Nile Rodgers, and they made “Real Cool World” for the film Cool World, which foreshadowed his first solo record in six years. He had met the model Iman in October 1990 and they married in Lausanne on 24 April 1992; five days later they flew to Los Angeles on the day the riots began and watched them from their hotel. He wrote the title track after the riots, and the album is divided between racial harmony and his marriage. It was recorded from April to November 1992 in Montreux, Los Angeles and New York, with more of his saxophone than on any other album and the trumpeter Lester Bowie, as well as Mick Ronson on “I Feel Free” and Mike Garson on “Looking for Lester”. Ronson died of cancer shortly after the album came out.

It brought together soul, hip-hop, jazz and electronica, with covers of Cream, Morrissey and Scott Walker. Rodgers later called it “an exercise in futility” and Reeves Gabrels said Bowie felt pushed to hire him for a Let’s Dance sequel. Reviews were favourable, praising its experiments but not its cohesion, and some called it his best since Scary Monsters. It entered the UK chart at number one, displacing Suede’s debut, and “Jump They Say” was a number nine single. In the US the label, Savage, went bankrupt soon after release and the record became a rarity. Bowie did not tour it; he made a film instead. It is seen as the start of his commercial and critical revival.

While promoting Black Tie White Noise Bowie spoke with the novelist Hanif Kureishi, who wanted to use some of his older material in a BBC adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia. Bowie, who said the book reminded him of his own youth, agreed to write the music instead, and had about 40 pieces by early summer 1993. After Kureishi suggested revisions he turned it into a full album, or in Chris O’Leary’s words a “quasi-soundtrack”. He recorded it at Mountain Studios in Montreux with the Turkish musician Erdal Kızılçay, in six days of writing and recording and fifteen of mixing; Mike Garson overdubbed piano in a single three-hour session in Burbank.

Only the title track appears in the TV serial. The music is short motifs on guitar, synthesiser, trumpet and sitar, with echoes of his 1970s work, and Bowie listed influences from Pet Sounds to Kraftwerk and Eno. Arista marketed it as a soundtrack, not a David Bowie album, with a sleeve that hid his face and name, and he did almost nothing to promote it. It flopped at number 87 in the UK, appeared in the US only in October 1995 with new artwork, and stayed obscure until a 2007 reissue. British critics liked it and it has since been called his “lost great album”. In 2003 Bowie named it his favourite album.

Brian Eno came to Bowie’s wedding in 1992 and said he wanted to work together again; after he heard The Buddha of Suburbia they agreed. In January 1994 they visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital near Vienna, whose patients are known for “outsider art”, which gave the album its title. They recorded from March 1994 at Mountain Studios in Montreux with Reeves Gabrels, Erdal Kızılçay, Mike Garson and the drummer Sterling Campbell, composing mostly on the spot and using Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. Bowie ran cut-up words through a Macintosh program for lyrics, and spent much of the early sessions painting. About 25 to 30 hours of material became an “improvised opera” called Leon, which labels resisted and which was then bootlegged.

Bowie reworked it after writing a diary for Q magazine: the album follows the detective Nathan Adler, who investigates a fictional “art-ritual murder” in Oxford Town, New Jersey, told in a non-linear way with spoken segues and a story printed in the CD booklet, and ends on a “to be continued”. Further sessions at the Hit Factory in New York in January and February 1995 added more conventional songs. Released at the height of Britpop it reached number eight in the UK and number 21 in the US, and critics split: most praised the music, some found the concept pretentious, and many called it his best since Scary Monsters. The sequels he planned never came, and he took ideas from it into Earthling.

The stripped-down band from the Outside Tour, with Reeves Gabrels, Mike Garson, Gail Ann Dorsey and Zack Alford, was, Bowie told Alan Yentob, the most enjoyable he had worked with since the Spiders. He began “Telling Lies” alone at Mountain Studios in April 1996, his last time there, and used it as a blueprint. The album was recorded from August to October 1996 at Philip Glass’s Looking Glass Studios in New York, mostly self-produced, with the engineer Mark Plati, entirely on hard disk. “We were cranking [songs] out one per day,” Plati recalled, and most of Bowie’s vocals were one take. The title was chosen by fans at a Roseland show in September 1996, when he asked whether it should be Earthling or Earthlings.

It builds on Outside with industrial, techno and drum and bass, though Plati and Marc Spitz argue it is simply a Bowie record that passed through a style, and only three or four tracks are drum and bass. “Telling Lies” was released on the internet in September 1996, making Bowie the first artist to release a downloadable track through the internet. The album reached number six in the UK and number 39 in the US, and “Little Wonder” was a UK number 14. Trent Reznor remixed “I’m Afraid of Americans” and starred in its video; it became his biggest US hit since 1987. Most reviews were positive and later ones mixed, some finding him late to the drum and bass craze.

It began as music for the video game Omikron: The Nomad Soul, for which Bowie, Reeves Gabrels and Gail Ann Dorsey also appeared as an in-game band. In late 1998 and early 1999 he and Gabrels built a stack of songs, some for the game and some for a Gabrels solo album, written in a more conventional style than his experimental 1990s records. Recording began in April 1999 at Seaview Studios in Bermuda, where Bowie now lived, and wrapped up in New York. A contest on his website BowieNet let a fan, Alex Grant, finish the lyrics for “What’s Really Happening?” and sing backing vocals, in a session broadcast live online.

The tone is quieter and looks back, with songs about relationships ending and memory, and Christian imagery that carried into the cover, inspired by the Pietà, in which a long-haired Bowie holds a short-haired one. Bowie said it was not autobiographical but about “a man looking back over his life”. On 21 September 1999 Hours went online for download on BowieNet, making him the first major artist to release a complete album that way, a move some retailers objected to. It reached number five in the UK and number 47 in the US, his first studio album since Ziggy Stardust to miss the US top 40. Reviews were mixed. It was his last work with Gabrels, who left after a VH1 Storytellers show, afraid he was running out of ideas for him.

Bowie had made Toy, a set of remakes of his 1960s songs, but it was shelved when his label EMI/Virgin lost interest, so he turned to new songs with Tony Visconti, who had not worked on a full album with him since Scary Monsters; they had reconciled in 1998 after almost 20 years of silence. Bowie wrote alone at Looking Glass Studios in New York in spring 2001, shaken by his mother’s death in April and his friend Freddie Burretti’s a month later, and by the birth of his daughter Alexandria in August 2000. They chose Allaire Studios in the Catskills, where a view of the Ashokan Reservoir pushed him to the lyrics; recording began in August 2001. Bowie played more instruments than on any album since Diamond Dogs or Low. Dave Grohl and Pete Townshend guested.

Themes of spiritual doubt, ageing and hope for his daughter’s future ran through it, and commentators heard a response to the September 11 attacks, though Bowie said the songs were written beforehand. It was the first release on his own label, ISO Records, with a deal with Columbia. It reached number five in the UK and number 14 in the US, his highest there since 1984, and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Reviewers called it a return to form, his best since Scary Monsters, and on the Heathen Tour in 2002 he played Low and Heathen in their entirety at several shows.

Bowie began writing as soon as the Heathen Tour ended in October 2002 and brought Tony Visconti back. Because the tour had rekindled his appetite for the road, they set out to make songs that could be played live. They recorded from early January 2003 at Looking Glass Studios in New York, in its smaller Studio B for a “real tight New York sound”, in eight-hour days, five days a week, with most of his touring band: Earl Slick, Gerry Leonard, Mark Plati, Mike Garson and Sterling Campbell. Carlos Alomar’s overdubs on “Fly” were his last work with Bowie. “Fall Dog Bombs the Moon” was written in 30 minutes, while “Bring Me the Disco King” dated back to 1992. Visconti said Bowie’s voice had regained “at least five semitones” since he quit smoking.

It is a more direct rock record than Heathen, with a main theme of ageing and a cast of diminished characters, and covers of the Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso” and George Harrison’s “Try Some, Buy Some”. It reached number three in the UK and number 29 in the US, and reviews were largely positive. There were no conventional singles. A Reality Tour in 2003 and 2004 was his biggest and last, and it ended early when he was treated for a blocked artery in Germany in June 2004; 14 dates were cancelled. He then largely withdrew from public life, his last public performance coming in November 2006, and made no album of original material for ten years.

Bowie’s last live concert tour ended abruptly in June 2004 when he had angioplasty for a blocked artery, and he largely withdrew from view; his final public performance came in November 2006. Rumours of poor health grew when he declined invitations to play at the 2012 London Olympics. In November 2010 he sought out Tony Visconti, and they made demos in Manhattan with the guitarist Gerry Leonard and the drummer Sterling Campbell. Recording began on 2 May 2011 at the Magic Shop on Crosby Street and ran sporadically until October 2012, in secret: everyone signed non-disclosure agreements, the studio ran a skeleton crew on his days, and Bowie’s label did not know until October 2012. Of 29 songs recorded, 22 were released in 2013.

On 8 January 2013, his 66th birthday, his website announced the album and released “Where Are We Now?”, a song about his Berlin years, with no warning. It went to number six in the UK. The Next Day debuted at number one in the UK, his first since 1993, and at number two in the US, his best placing there to that date. Critics called it his best in decades, praising the performances and its bleak, allusive lyrics drawn from his reading of English and Russian history; a few found it overlong. Bowie did no interviews and played no shows for it. Nicholas Pegg wrote that “the greatest trick that David Bowie ever pulled was convincing the world that he’d retired.”

After The Next Day Bowie was more active in the studio. In 2014 he made the jazz track “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” with Maria Schneider, and heard the saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s quartet at a Greenwich Village club, where, bassist Tim Lefebvre said, “he heard how electric and aggressive we were”. He hired them: McCaslin, the pianist Jason Lindner, Lefebvre and the drummer Mark Guiliana, apart from Tony Visconti the first completely new set of musicians since Tin Machine. Visconti said using rock people playing jazz would not have worked, and that having jazz players play rock music “turns it upside down”. Recording began in the first week of 2015 at the Magic Shop, again in secret, in blocks of four to six days, with the vocals done at Human Worldwide Studios in April and May. Each musician signed a confidentiality clause.

Bowie had been diagnosed with liver cancer in the summer of 2014 and was in chemotherapy when the sessions began; he kept it private, and Visconti learned of it when Bowie came straight from a treatment. By summer 2015 he was in remission, but in November he told Visconti the cancer had returned and was terminal. The album, made of art rock, jazz and some hip-hop and electronic influences, with many songs told from the viewpoint of the dead or dying, came out on his 69th birthday. He died two days later. It topped charts in 24 countries and was his only album to top the Billboard 200. Critics acclaimed it as his most challenging in decades, and after his death reread the lyrics, title and artwork for signs of his death. Visconti called it a “parting gift”.