Hello David Bowie fans, do you want to learn more about David Bowie, here we listed some interesting and less known facts about David Bowie
1. When David Bowie heard Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World”, he said he was “blown away” by the fact that Kurt Cobain liked his work, and said “it would have been nice to have worked with him, but just talking with him would have been real cool.” – Source
2. “Under Pressure” was written by David Bowie and Queen during a 24-hour wine and cocaine marathon. – Source
3- In 1970 when Bowie briefly formed The Hype (originally called Harry the Butcher and then David Bowie’s Imagination), everyone in the band dressed up as superheroes. They were ridiculed and booed out of everywhere they played, literally.
4. An unknown Freddie Mercury, at that time a London shoe stall assistant, fitted David Bowie for a pair of boots, over 10 years before “Under Pressure” was recorded. – Source
5. Queen’s collaboration with David Bowie on ‘Under Pressure’ wasn’t planned. Bowie just happened to be by the studio while Queen were recording the song. – Source
6- Bowie learnt to tap dance for his role in the 1986 Julien Temple film Absolute Beginners.
7- Even though an Englishman, he had an extreme tea phobia due to a “horrible incident” (as he described it) with a cup of tea when he was five. After this incident he never drank tea again.
8. After David Bowie released his album ‘Low’, Nick Lowe responded by releasing an album named ‘Bowi.’ – Source
9- In 1970 David Bowie bought a pair of suede boots from a Kensington Market stall. He would later write a hit song with the stallholder – Freddie Mercury (and his band Queen) recorded “Under Pressure” with Bowie in Montreux in 1981.
10- Freddie Mercury was also in the audience for the first unveiling of Ziggy Stardust at Buckinghamshire venue Friars Aylesbury in January 1972. A number of London fans took the 60 kilometre trip out of town to see the show.
11- It cost 75p for a ticket to the Rainbow to see the first London Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars show in August 1972.
12- In 1995 Bowie released his own range of Laura Ashley wallpaper.
13- David Bowie also took a place 23th in Rolling Stones 100 Greatest Singers List Every great Bowie song has a specific persona behind it. His chameleonic transformations aren’t just in his appearance but also in his voice, from the androgynous curlicues at the edges of his Ziggy Stardust vocals to the Philly-soul affectations of Young Americans to the hard-boiled crooning of his Eighties arena-rock period. Bowie always keeps his cool, but as anyone who’s ever crashed and burned trying to sing “Ashes to Ashes” at karaoke can tell you, he’s a phenomenally agile singer — as his longtime collaborator Carlos Alomar said, “This dude can wail.” Source : Rollingstones.com
14- Before he become one of the biggest-selling male R&B singers of all time, Luther Vandross sang backup for Bowie’s 1975 album Young Americans.
15- Despite battling cancer, Bowie was still incredibly busy with his career. He had just released an album called “Blackstar” on his birthday and had a show, “Lazarus,” on Broadway. Jon Pareles reviewed Blackstar in The New York Times and referred to it as a “strange, daring, ultimately rewarding” album. Blackstar was his 27th album and the very first album that didn’t include a picture of the artist on the cover,
16- “The idea of watching birds walking down a catwalk never appealed to me”, Bowie exclaimed in 2003. He did, however, appear in the 2001 film Zoolander scene where male models Hansel and Zoolander stage a showdown on the catwalk.
17- Bowie was asked to play a Doctor Who bad guy named Sharaz Jek in 1983, but Serious Moonlight tour dates prevented him taking up the opportunity.
18- Bowie purchased a unit in the Kincoppal apartment complex, Elizabeth Bay Road, Elizabeth Bay in Sydney in 1983, around the time he also filmed the videos “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl” in New South Wales. He sold the apartment in 1992.
19- it was a heart attack requiring emergency surgery in july 2004 that caused David Bowie to cancel the remaining 15 dates of what had been his biggest – and best-received world tour in years. Since then, his live appearances have been sporadic.
20- Bowie initially asked comedian and actor Dudley Moore to play piano on 1971’s Hunky Dory album.
21- Bowie was hit in the eye by a lollipop while on stage in Oslo, Norway, in 2004. In typical Bowie fashion, and despite his understandable initial anger, he made light of the incident and continued to sing.
22- His first television appearance was in 1964, at the age of 17, he was interviewed on a BBC program as the founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men.
23- Before making his Hollywood breakthrough with the films Alien and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott directed David Bowie in a Lyons Maid Luv ice cream ad in 196
24- Space Oddity’ gave Bowie his big break. This now-famous track was used by the BBC in its coverage of the moon landing in 1969. Bowie was practically unknown back then – the song became his first UK hit. The fictional astronaut “Major Tom” has appeared in three of Bowie’s songs: “Space Oddity” (1969), “Ashes To Ashes” (1980) and “Hallo Spaceboy” (1996). His hit song “Fame”, was co-written by John Lennon, who also sang backing vocals. “Fame” was David’s first number No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, as well as his first to break the top 10.
25 Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos was overwhelmed upon meeting his idol in 2004. “There’s no actor who’ll ever come close to influencing me as much as Bowie,” he said.
26- Bowie co-produced tracks on Lou Reed’s legendary second studio album Transformer. He was a keen artist in his spare time and drew, painted, sculpted and wrote. Some of his favourite artists included Picasso, Michael Ray Charles and Tintoretto.
27- In a 1997 story in The Big Issue commissioned by guest editor Damien Hirst, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker conducted a whole interview with David Bowie on the topic of smoking.
28. David Bowie once performed at the Berlin Wall, while East Germans gathered to listen behind. He said “And we would hear them cheering and singing along from the other side. God, even now I get choked up. It was breaking my heart. I’d never done anything like that in my life, and I guess I never will again.” – Source
29. Guitarist Slash’s mom, while Slash was just a kid, worked at one point as a costume designer for David Bowie. Eventually they developed a relationship and Slash walked in on them once. – Source
30. David Bowie refused Knighthood in 2003, which would have made him Sir David Bowie. He said, “I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don’t know what it’s for. It’s not what I spent my life working for.” – Source
31- 2003’s Reality track “Never Get Old” was used for a Vittel Water TV ad featuring Bowie living with his previous incarnations.
32. While making ‘Station To Station,’ his diet consisted of only red peppers, milk and cocaine. He said that he doesn’t even remember the recording sessions because he was so coked out – Source
33. David Bowie once kept a four-foot-deep, fur-covered bed nicknamed “the pit” in his living room for orgies with famous friends.- Source
34- A blue plaque now marks the location where the Ziggy cover photograph was taken outside 23 Heddon Street. The prominent K West sign in the background of the hand-tinted photograph advertised a furriers. Solicitors representing the business wrote to RCA in disgust at being linked to the rock star.
35- Bowie has had various alter egos, the most famous of which is Ziggy Stardust. Other alter egos he’s had over the years include: Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, Tao Jones, Halloween Jack, and John Merrick.
36- The Elephant Man with Bowie in the title role, was a hit on Broadway in 1980.
37- Bowie was ever the innovator and released ‘Telling Lies’ via his website in 1996. He was the first major artist to take this step. It would have taken around 11 minuets to download on the old dial-up speed!
38- in 1988, Bowie played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.
39- In 1996, Bowie released the single “Telling Lies” exclusively on his website, it was the first-ever downloadable single by a major artist.
40- Bowie has turned down two big British honors: Commander (CBE) in 2000, and knighthood in 2003.
41- Bowie voiced the character of Lord Royal Highness on an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants in 2007.
42- Bowie married Somali-American supermodel Iman in 1992, after meeting on a blind date organised by a friend. They have a daughter Alexandria Zahra Jones, who was born in 2000.
43- He set up BowieNet in 1998 and it kept going until 2012. Becoming a member cost £10 a month, and each user was given a free 20MB to make their own homepage. How the hell didn’t I know about this!? I would have most definitely joined…
44- Bowie’s last film role was in The Prestige, a 2006 thriller about rival magicians. Adopting a truly terrible European accent, he played the role of Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. When Bowie was working on the film Prestige, producers made sure he traveled in a blue helicopter. They’d heard that he would refuse to travel in anything else. However, upon seeing the helicopter’s customised décor, he told them he didn’t really give a shit.
45- David Bowie has influenced countless musicians. To pick just one, here’s Brandon Flowers on his idol: “I didn’t get into him until I was around 19 or 20, but ‘Hunky Dory’ changed my life. He pushed the envelope while remaining accessible
46- David was 5ft 10in (1.78m) tall, according to most sources.
47. Many people think Bowie has two different colored eyes. In reality, they are both blue. What you’re seeing is his permanently dilated pupil. When he was about 15, Bowie got into a fight with a good friend whose fingernail sliced into his eye just so as he got clocked. Doctors were concerned that he would lose his sight entirely in that eye but ended up being able to restore it (albeit with some depth perception and dilation problems). But, Bowie didn’t hold grudges. His sparring partner later did some of the artwork for his album sleeves. – Source
48- He declined the CBE in 2000 and a knighthood in 2003.
49 David Bowie’s Pepsi allegiance in the 1980s saw him rehash his 1983 hit “Modern Love” as a duet with Tina Turner. Pepsi, Mr Bowie suggested, “puts the choice in my hand”.
50- in an interview with The Guardian, Bowie revealed that two of his favorite bands were the Canadian rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the alt-rock group Arcade Fire. He also said, “I have a thing about Chinese folk music, OK?” when asked why “Embroidering Pouch” by Peng Liyuan was on his iPod.
51. When David Bowie played his song “Andy Warhol” to Andy Warhol, he did not like it. When the song had finished playing, Warhol and Bowie reportedly just stared at each other for a while until Warhol said “I like your shoes” and the pair then had a conversation about shoes. – Source
52- Bowie used the late Andy Warhol’s real wig when starring as his former associate in the 1996 film Basquiat.
53- Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother Terry killed himself in 1985.
54. The baby noises heard in “Magic Dance” in The Labyrinth were dubbed over by David Bowie himself because he felt the actual baby didn’t perform as required. – Source
55. David Bowie was next on a hit list of targets of John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman. – Source
56. The Moonwalk pre-dates Michael Jackson by at least 50 years, having been performed by James Brown, David Bowie, d*ck Van Dyke and Cab Calloway. – Source
57- Bowie and friend George Underwood fought over a girl so much, his pal punched him in the eye resulting in a permanently dilated left pupil.
58 -Bowie plays just about every instrument on ‘Diamond Dogs’ – including the famous guitar riff on ‘Rebel Rebel’.
59- Bowie has played Glastonbury twice. His first appearance was in 1971, when he played at 5am. His second, in 2000, has gone down in Glastonbury lore as one of the greatest sets the festival has seen. Persistent rumours Bowie might be playing the 2010 bash proved to be unfounded.
60- When Bowie was 17, he was the founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men after complaining “it’s not nice when people call you darling and that.”
61- Bowie is a big fan of Placebo, citing them as one of his favourite bands. He also enjoyed Oasis, before they split.
62 Almost a decade before The Cocteau Twins popularised the approach, Bowie sang in a completely self-invented language on the 1977 Low album track, Subterraneans.
63 Nine years older than David, Terry was the inspiration for songs including Aladdin Sane, All The Madmen, The Bewlay Brothers and Jump They Say.
64 George Underwood, whose playground scuffle with Bowie led to his permanently dilated pupil and lifelong issue with poor depth perception, also performed with Bowie in The King Bees. An Underwood illustration was used in the artwork of Bowie’s Space Oddity album.
65 His image appears on every single one of his album covers – except the UK release of The Buddha Of Suburbia and his final album, Blackstar.
66 When Bowie was a boy, his parents took him on a boat trip down the Thames. He was given a traditional cuppa that had been stewing for seven hours. He has not touched a drop of good old English Breakfast since, but is apparently partial to a Japanese Green.
67 Bowie drew, painted, sculpted and wrote in his spare time. His favourite artists were Tintoretto, John Bellany, Erich Heckel, Picasso and Michael Ray Charles.
68 Rock guitarist Peter Frampton was Bowie’s friend at school – his dad was head of the art department. He’s gone on to play guitar with Bowie many times during his career.
69 The opening sequence of the 2009 film Watchmen shows actors portraying David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and Mick Jagger from The Rolling Stones outside New York’s legendary nightclub Studio
70 Lazarus, a song from the stage show, was released as a single on 17 December 2015. It also featured on Bowie’s last album, Blackstar.
71 Rumour has it, Bowie had a phobia of tea and hasn’t drunk it since he had a ‘horrible incident’ with a cuppa when he was 5 years old.
72 David Bowie was immortalised in stone by artist Ed Chapman, 40, who created a tile mosaic of the Starman to celebrate his 65th birthday.
73 He found fame in the US with 1972 glam-rock album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie’s music moved with the times and he performed in various other genres, including disco, punk and electronica. Bowie got the idea for the Ziggy Stardust persona after a chance encounter in London’s Carnaby Street with washed-up pop star and acid freak Vince Taylor. Interestingly, the album cover (pictured) was shot just round the corner, on Haddon Street.
74 Who recognises Bowie’s voice as the character Lord Royal Highness in Spongebob Squarepants?
75 . Bowie was known as a multi-instrumentalist. In addition to his playing of guitar, keyboards, harmonica and saxophone, he played stylophone, viola, cello, koto, thumb piano, drums, and percussion. – Source
76. William Boyd and David Bowie created a fictional (hoax) artist called Nat Tate with an aim to expose the pretensions of the art world. – Source
77 A heart attack put paid to Bowie’s plans to tour the world in 2004.
78- His 50th birthday party was widely televised; his son was one of the camera crew.
79- . Bowie was the first sexually ambiguous British pop star, declaring himself bisexual in 1972 (before contemporaries such as Freddie Mercury and Elton John made similar declarations) and only five years since male homosexuality had been decriminalized in the UK. In a magazine interview, he stated that he met his first wife when they were in a relationship with the same man.
80- Bowie was estimated to have sold over 140 million albums throughout his career.
81- Space Oddity was also recorded in Italian. It was called ‘Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Solo’ which means ‘Lonely Boy, Lonely Girl’.
82- Bing Crosby’s last ever single was a duet of Little Drummer Boy with David Bowie in 1977. Bowie *hated* the song so much, he outright refused to sing it and requested Peace on Earth instead.
83. His real name was David Jones. He even recorded his first single “Liza Jane” under the name Davie Jones. He later changed his name to not be confused with Davy Jones, the lead singer of the Monkees, who was already famous in the United States. – Source
84 In 1967, Bowie thought of becoming a Buddhist monk. He stayed briefly in Scotland at the Buddhist retreat Eskdalemuir.
85- Theories abound about Bowie’s eyes. Many say it was a playground fight at school that led to them being different colours – his eye was scratched with a fingernail (or stabbed with a compass in some versions), which caused a paralysed pupil. Others say he has a condition known as heterochromia, which enlarges one of the pupils.
86- His children are Duncan Jones – once Zowie, born 1971 – who is a filmmaker and whose first feature film was entitled Moon (2009) and won a BAFTA; and Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, who was born in 2000.
87- Bowie is pronounced to rhyme with Joey
88. David Bowie was the First major artist to release a downloadable single in 1996. – Source
89- His chosen name references the bowie knife, named after Jim Bowie – an American frontiersman and adventurer.
90- David Bowie might have totally owned the campy role of Jareth The Goblin King in Jim Henson’s film Labyrinth, but there were multiple other rock stars on the film’s shortlist. Henson named Michael Jackson, Prince, Freddie Mercury, Sting, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Roger Daltrey, David Lee Roth and Ted Nugent as alternative options for the Jareth role.
91. David Bowie asked his fans to vote for which songs he should play for his 1990 world tour. They voted for “The Laughing Gnome” which is arguably Bowie’s worst song. Bowie did not play the song at the world tour. – Source
92 Bowie’s band The Manish Boys had a recording session with the famed, erratic producer Joe Meek in 1964, however the results – featuring Bowie’s vocal and saxophone additions – have never been commercially released.
93- iman has a Bowie knife tattooed on her ankle as tribute to her husband
94- Bowie wrote the song “Safe” for 1998’s The Rugrats Movie, but it was cut from the film. It later appeared as a Heathen B-side.
95- His children are Duncan Jones – once Zowie, born 1971 – and Alexandria “Lexi” Zahra Jones, who was born in 2000.
96- . David Bowie was briefly banned from SNL in 1997 for playing a song that reminded Lorne Michaels too much of the time when he was a heavy coke user. – Source
97- Bowie suggested in an Australian radio interview he only learnt to swim in 1978.
98. The late great Stevie Ray Vaughn got his ‘mainstream’ start playing with Bowie, playing on his studio album “Let’s Dance.” Stevie was one of the best blues guitarists ever, and if it weren’t for his time in Bowie’s band, who knows if we’d know who he was. – Source
99. There is a spider named after David Bowie, the ‘Heteropoda davidbowie.’ – Source
100. David Bowie recorded ‘China Girl’ to pull Iggy Pop from financial ruin. – Source
101- Film roles Bowie turned down include Captain Hook in Hook (the role eventually going to Dustin Hoffman), The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman (picked up with unhinged delight by Jack Nicholson) and Bond villain Max Zorin in A View To A Kill (instead played by Christopher Walken).
102 – Bowie started playing sax as a teenager, at secondary school.
Mary Hopkin, Low producer Tony Visconti’s wife, performed backing vocals on the track “Sound and Vision”. Hopkin had formerly been signed to The Beatles’ Apple label and had a number one hit in 1968 with “Those Were The Days”.
103 – He has a spier species named after him called Heteropoda Davidbowie. It was first discovered in Malaysia in 2009.
104- 1995 album Outside’s over-arching theme of murder as conceptual art began as a short story Bowie wrote for the 100th issue of Q magazine.
105- David Bowie planned to produce Akron art rockers Devo’s debut in 1978, but ended up being too busy. He instead arranged for producer Brian Eno to work on Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! and assisted in the group’s signing to Warner.
sources :
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/75798997/12-facts-about-david-bowie
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-20944291
https://www.luckyvoicekaraoke.com/blog/26-rare-facts-about-david-bowie-you-didnt-know/
https://www.theherald.com.au/story/3657581/did-you-know-20-facts-about-david-bowie/?cs=2452
https://list25.com/25-compelling-facts-you-should-know-about-david-bowie/5/
https://ilikeyouroldstuff.com/blog/david-bowie-70-years-70-amazing-facts
