It’s been almost five years since his passing, and yet, the pain hasn’t gotten any easier.
David Bowie brought creativity, imagination, and dreams to this big world of ours. While his head was often in the clouds, he accomplished a lot rooted down on earth.
Keep reading to learn about this strange, imaginative, wonderful life of his.
1. His real name is David Robert Jones.
He changed it to David Bowie in order to avoid confusion once he started his musical career. That’s because the lead singer of The Monkees was Davy Jones.
Bowie has a better ring to it, anyway!
2. His eyes are the same color.
Yep, they’re both blue! It may not look so, but that’s only because one pupil is permanently dilated .
He sustained this when a school friend punched him over a girl and his fingernail sliced his eye. Ouch!
3. He didn’t have a happy childhood.
This was revealed in a documentary about the star’s life called Five Years .
“My parents were cold emotionally,” Bowie said over clips of his childhood. “There weren’t many hugs. I always craved affection because of that.”
4. He had a falling out with Elton John later in life.
The musicians had become fast friends when they were young, bonding over their love of music. But things changed as they got older.
“David and I were not the best of friends towards the end,” John once said .
Their falling-out had to do with Bowie calling Elton “rock ’n’ roll’s token queen” in an interview with *Rolling Stone*.
“Which I thought was a bit snooty,” Elton said. “He wasn’t my cup of tea. No; I wasn’t his cup of tea.
5. He formed The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men at 17.
This was an organization that was against the treatment that men with long hair received while in London. Here he is advocating for the cause.
6. His first single, “Space Oddity,” was played over BBC coverage of Apollo 11’s lunar landing.
He released the song just nine days before the space event. Talk about amazing timing!
As a result of BBC playing the song, it became his first big hit in the UK.
7. His half-brother, Terry Burns, inspired a few of his songs.
Sadly, Burns, who battled mental health issues all his life, killed himself.
It was later revealed that he reportedly inspired these songs: “Aladdin Sane,” “All the Madmen,” and “Jump They Say.”
8. He met his wife, Iman, at a party in 1990.
It was love at first sight.
“She had a big smile and her and David looked at each other and it was love at first sight, you could feel the electricity, something went off,” the couple’s matchmaker, Teddy Antolin told Sunday People .
While they fell hard for each other, Iman reportedly turned down Bowie’s first proposal.
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and she said, ‘Well he’s not met my family, my mother and father and brothers, and I don’t know his mother’.”
9. His Ziggy Stardust persona caused him to question his sanity.
This might be why he retired the glam rock persona in 1973…
“Ziggy wouldn’t leave me alone for years,” he once revealed . “That was when it all started to go sour.”
“My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity.”
The persona had been created out of his fascination with space travel and science fiction, as already shown in his songs “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars?”
10. He once lived on a diet of peppers and milk.
Once Bowie retired Ziggy Stardust, he adopted his next persona: the Thin White Duke.
In David Buckley’s book, Strange Fascination: David Bowie—The Definitive Story , it was revealed that the singer struggled with drug and emotional issues during this time.
In addition to the strange diet, the author wrote that he exhibited some truly strange behaviors” in 1975 while “living a cocooned existence [in Los Angeles].
This included keeping his urine in his refrigerator so that “no other wizard could use it to enchant him.”
Very strange.
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11. He launched his own internet service provider.
“If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet,” he said at the time.
Clearly, he was ahead of his time, as BowieNet, as he called it, ended up being very successful from 1996 to until 2006.
12. He was the first artist to release a single through internet downloading.
Remember when music downloading was a thing? Well, Bowie surely does, as his single “Telling Lies” made history in September 1996.
It only took 11 minutes back then to download it!
13. He was an avid reader.
During his life, books were something he always turned to. He even carried around a 1,500-volume “mobile bibliotheque” with him when he toured America in the ’70s.
It’s also been said that literary works inspired his creative songs and characters.
After his death, his son carried on his father’s love of books by creating an online-based book club in his honor.
“My dad was a beast of a reader,” he shared on Twitter. “One of his true loves was Peter Ackroyd’s sojourns into the history of Britain & its cities.”
No surprise here: some of Bowie’s faves were science fiction.
14. His widow, Iman, has vowed to never remarry.
The couple’s love was deep. They were married for 24 years and had one daughter, Lexi, together.
“I do feel very lonely,” she admitted to Porter Edit . “But do I want a relationship? I can’t say never, but no, not now.”
