David Bowie/Trivia

• Notable guests/backup performers in Bowie's work (beyond duets and his well-established collaborative efforts with Iggy Pop and Brian Eno) include:
  • Rick Wakeman on piano on Hunky Dory, ladies and gentlemen!
  • In addition to providing backing vocals, Luther Vandross co-wrote a song on Young Americans ("Fascination"). Over a decade later, he contributed to the backing vocals on "Underground"...as did Chaka Khan.
  • Also from Young Americans, John Lennon not only co-wrote "Fame" but provided backing vocals and guitar work on that and Bowie's cover of "Across the Universe".
  • Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar on Let's Dance.
  • Peter Frampton on guitar for both Never Let Me Down and the supporting Glass Spider Tour.
  • Robert Fripp on guitar for "Heroes" and Adrian Belew for Lodger.
  • Pete Townshend, Robert Fripp and Chuck Hammer on guitar for Scary Monsters. Townshend would come back for Heathen.
  • Two of Bowie's biggest hits of The Nineties came via remixes with guest performers -- Pet Shop Boys on "Hallo Spaceboy" (1. Outside) and Nine Inch Nails on "I'm Afraid of Americans" (Earthling).
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Inverted -- he turned down the role of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill because he hated the script and didn't think it would be fun to work on ("I didn't want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs"). Played straight with several of his film roles, which he usually picked over other, more conventional star vehicle offers because he wanted to work with their directors, performers, or simply liked the concepts.
• Creator Backlash: He regrets sticking with the style of Let's Dance for as long as he did. He also wasn't happy with how Just a Gigolo (1978), his first film after The Man Who Fell to Earth, turned out -- "Listen, you were disappointed, and you weren't even in it. Imagine how we felt."
• Dye Hard: His dark blonde locks were dyed very red to help complete Ziggy Stardust's look in 1972; even after he dropped the character he would stick with predominantly red hair until the end of The Thin White Duke's reign in 1976.
• Executive Meddling: A rare positive example of this came with Ziggy Stardust when RCA execs liked it, but also wanted a song that they could push as a single. So Bowie wrote "Starman", which replaced a cover of "Round and Round" on the album and turned out to be the song that made his career.
• Fan Nickname: His crotch has been deified and named The Area by fans. It has its own website and religion.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Played Celibate Hero Nikola Tesla and Hollywood Tone Deaf Thomas Jerome Newton and Jack Celliers.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While most of his music videos have been officially released on various formats, a few slipped through the cracks -- including the handful of videos he made with Tin Machine.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: Despite at times appearing to be insane, he is known to be a very friendly and polite man.
• Name's the Same: He was born David Robert Jones. He changed his name to avoid being confused with Davy Jones of The Monkees.
• One of Us
  • He was the first mainstream artist to release a single for download; his official website also served as an ISP in the early days -- and just as New Media Are Evil was gripping the music industry again.
  • He's something of a Japanophile -- Ziggy Stardust's look owes a lot to kabuki theater -- and has demonstrated surprisingly insightful knowledge of Japanese politics and philosophy in interviews.
  • Much of hours...'s music first appeared in Omikron: The Nomad Soul, in which he plays two different characters.
  • A Bookworm (see his main page for more on this).
• Playing Against Type: He made his Broadway debut as the title character of the play The Elephant Man in 1980. While he didn't use prosthetics (as per the play's instructions, he distorted his body language and voice instead), the gentle grotesque definitely contrasted to his usual bold, sexy image. In Jazzin' for Blue Jean, dorky Vic is also absent Bowie's usual charms, and is deliberately contrasted with Screamin' Lord Byron, a more conventionally Bowie-esque figure, albeit one who's Played for Laughs.
• So My Kids Can Watch: Twice. He narrated a 1978 recording of Peter and The Wolf because his son was a fan of the work. Decades later, his daughter was a SpongeBob SquarePants fan, hence his voicework in the "Atlantis Squarepantis" special as Lord Royal Highness.
• What Could Have Been
  • He was preparing a musical version of 1984 as a post-Ziggy Stardust project, but couldn't get the rights from Orwell's widow; some of the songs he wrote for it were recorded and released on Diamond Dogs. A 1980 New Music Express interview revealed he actually worked on a surreal, partially-animated film based on the album, intending to release it Direct to Video.
  • In 1973, it was announced he was going to play Valentine Michael Smith in a film adaptation of Stranger in A Strange Land.
  • He was announced as a cast member for the 1976 film version of The Blue Bird, but didn't like the script enough to go through with it.
  • He worked on a musical score for The Man Who Fell to Earth with Paul Buckmaster, but it didn't pan out. Aside from a bass part that, played backward, was incorporated into the Low track "Subterraneans", none of this music has been made available.
  • He wanted to be in The Eagle Has Landed but the director went on record as saying his audition wasn't good. Other could-have-been movie projects in the late 1970s included:
    • An adaptation of The Threepenny Opera directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and...
    • Wally, in which he would have played painter Egon Schiele (this came very close to being a reality).
    • Also, director Lina Wertmueller wanted to work with him, but he objected to her politics.
  • David Hemmings, who directed Bowie in Just a Gigolo, also filmed one of his 1978 concerts, but Bowie wasn't happy with the result and it was never released.
  • He planned to tour in 1981 in the wake of Scary Monsters but never did.
  • He bid for the rights to Metropolis in the early '80s, but was outbid by Giorgio Moroder. As the trope page for the film puts it, "God knows what he...scratch that, probably even God doesn't know what Bowie would have done with Metropolis."
  • He was going to play the title character in the Faerie Tale Theatre adaptation of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", but had to drop out (Eric Idle took over the part).
  • As noted above under Awesome, Dear Boy, he was offered the part of Zorin in A View to a Kill but turned it down.
  • His participation in Live Aid was supposed to include a live trans-Atlantic duet with Mick Jagger on "Dancing in the Street", but this proved technologically impossible; instead, they made the infamous video for it that aired during the broadcast. Also, Bowie's set was going to include five songs rather than four, but he chose to give up the time so a montage of video footage of the suffering Ethiopians the concert was benefiting could be aired instead.
  • He was sought for the title role in Hook but turned it down -- he probably came closer to being in a Peter Pan movie than Michael Jackson ever was.
  • 2.Contamination and 3.Africaans, the planned continuations of 1.Outside, were never recorded. (Supposedly some of 2.Contamination was recorded onto tape, but will never see daylight.)
  • A Concept Video was shot for "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" (hours...), with Bowie encountering several of his past personas as "played" by life-sized puppets, but he wasn't happy with the result and it remains unreleased.
  • Toy was intended to be the album between hours... and Heathen and it would've featured newly rearranged versions of his obscure mid-'60s stuff, with a few new tracks tossed in as well. Two of the new songs ("Slip Away" and "Afraid") made it onto Heathen, and a few other tracks appeared in the U.K. or Japan as B-sides. And then in the spring of 2011, the album was leaked online and generated enough press that it was formally reviewed by Classic Rock magazine.
  • He declined to cover one of Peter Gabriel's songs for his Scratch My Back companion project I'll Scratch Yours, where each of the artists he covered covers one of his songs in turn. We got Brian Eno instead.
  • In 2011, rumours of a 2012 Farewell Tour with a reformed Nine Inch Nails surfaced, only to be revealed as an April Fools' Day joke.
  • The world might have come to call him Sir David Bowie, but he turned down the opportunity to be knighted.
• Word of God: 'All The Young Dudes' is not a song celebrating youth according to Bowie but the very opposite.