It was only when I looked into his different-coloured eyes that I realized who it was. Accompanied by the model Vivienne Lynn, he came in and humbly introduced himself as ‘David’. I first met Bowie properly in May 1980 when he popped into Hell, a Covent Garden nightclub that I DJ’d at and ran with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, both of whom had recently appeared in his Ashes to Ashes video.
Consider, also, some of the albums he produced for other artists: The Stooges’ Raw Power, Mott The Hoople’s All The Young Dudes, Lou Reed’s Transformer, Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life ‒ each one a truly seminal album that sounds as good today as it did back then. Apart from about 17 albums (nine albums reached number one in the UK) that don’t include a single bad track, just listen to the brilliance of singles such as Kooks, Aladdin Sane, Life on Mars, and Heroes. Others, such as Miles Davis or James Brown, certainly had the music, but they lacked Bowie’s diversity ‒ and lost the style plot for decades.īowie was style personified and wrote not just the lyrics and the music but sang, played various instruments, and arranged and produced much of his own product. When it comes to music and style, contemporary or otherwise, only one person has dominated both categories during their own lifetime and that is David Bowie.įrank Sinatra was a contender, but then he didn’t write his own songs.
