Bowie - The Man Who Changed The World

On Monday January 11, it was announced that one of the greatest talents music has ever seen was dead. Mark Beaumont celebrates the magnificence of David Bowie.

- Mark Beaumont

When he leaned seductively on the shoulder of Mick Ronson in 1972, waggled his finger down the Top Of The Pops camera lens and cooed: “I had to phone someone so I picked on you,” the teenagers watching at home felt a bolt of pop stardom from his fingertip. When he stood in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and sang: “We could be heroes, just for one day,” in 1987, the new wave generation rallied to his battlements. And when he writhed in a hospital bed in the video for brand new single ‘Lazarus’, none of us knew we were playing a part in his final, provocative performance.

Leader. Visionary. Genius. Icon. Legend. Few musicians deserve such accolades, but David Bowie does. His influence on popular culture, arguably rivalled only by The Beatles, can’t be overstated. From mod to folk to glam, from plastic soul to ambient to avant-garde and beyond, Bowie’s relentless innovation and reinvention was one of the great driving forces of modern music, impacting on fashion, performance art, film and sexual politics too. While his songs inspired countless musicians, his shape-shifting nature – which Bowie put down to restlessness and boredom – laid the blueprint of what a pop star should be: enigmatic, sexy, untouchable.

Born David Robert Jones on January 8 1947 in Brixton, London, Bowie’s talents first emerged at Burnt Ash Junior School at the age of nine, where his interpretive dance was described as “vividly artistic” and “astonishing” by his teachers.