David Bowie

There's no doubt that David Bowie operated as a singular figure in the music industry. The icon was chameleonic in his appearance and utterly dedicated in ...

One notable moment sees him accurately describe the music of Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars “a British view of American street energy.” The song ‘Sweet Jane’ stands as a marker of this energy. During that run of songs was a classic from The Velvet Underground: “The first single that I heard when I first went to American on the first day that I got there was in New York. I was taken over to a writer’s apartment that he had. He played me an album that had just come out, and he was very excited by this track, and so was I. So I expect you were when you heard it as well. One of them was the use of cacophony as background noise and to create an ambience that had been unknown in rock I think.” He said, ‘I don’t know why he’s doing music, this music is as bad as his painting’, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna like this.’ I’d never heard anything quite like it; it was a revelation to me.” This early introduction would see Bowie perform perhaps the earliest Velvet Underground cover in British history. He was a star that was more than happy to appreciate the constellation he found himself in.