The Beatles and The Rolling Stones aside, you’d be hard-pressed to find a British musician as indispensable to the Western cultural fabric as David Bowie. The quintessential restless creative, an innovator until the end, and a figure who understood the power of blurring fact and fiction, his story is one of great strife, success, and practically everything in between.
Bowie’s colossal reputation precedes him. However, there was a time when this was nothing more than a pipedream of yet another teenager longing to escape the suburban ennui of South London. Since his early years, Bowie had yearned to become a musical star like the great rock ‘n’ rollers of the 1950s, who had opened his mind to a technicolour future far removed from Beckenham’s humdrum monotony. Famously, it was in Little Richard’s boundary-pushing 1955 anthem, ‘Tutti Frutti’ that Bowie “heard God”.
Bowie’s effort to escape suburbia’s clutches encountered numerous obstacles before his first taste of success, 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’. One of those was that his birth name, David Robert Jones, wasn’t conducive to a life of rock ‘n’ roll celebrity. It just didn’t have the same otherworldly ring as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, or even John Lennon.
He was acutely aware of this. As he made his first foray into music, he went by Davy or Davie Jones. However, this name would provide its own issues. In another frustrating twist, the frontman of the world-famous American answer to The Beatles, The Monkees, was none other than Davy Jones. Before long, his unknown South London namesake was forced to change his name again.
Bowie then went by Tom Jones for a short time, but bizarrely, a Welsh icon emerged with the same name when he released ‘It’s Not Unusual’ in 1965. That was the final straw for the future Starman, and he changed his name to David Bowie in late 1965.
So, where did he get the name David Bowie from? Having a lifelong fascination with American culture, according to author John Lyons, the 1960 war film, The Alamo, provided the inspiration. In America in the British Imagination: 1945 to the Present, Lyons states it was taken in homage to the Texan freedom fighter, Jim Bowie, a central character played by Richard Widmark.
In a 1967 letter to his first American fan – who had stumbled across his debut album, David Bowie, after her uncle’s radio station rejected it – the musician, who rarely spoke in public about his name change, explained the business reasons for it. “In answer to your questions, my real name is David Jones and I don’t have to tell you why I changed it,” the icon started, before acquiescing, “‘Nobody’s going to make a monkey out of you’ said my manager.”
His first release using the moniker was January 1966’s ‘Can’t Help Thinking About Me’. Recorded with his band The Lower Third, it was a flop like every previous song the new David Bowie had released. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
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