David Bowie Biography

His mother Margaret Burns and father Heywood Stenton Jones married on September 12, 1947. He has a half brother Terry and a half sister Annette, from their respective marriages.

When David was eight he and Terry left poor bombed-out Brixton, for their uncle's old farmhouse in the English countryside of Yorkshire. They returned two years later to their parent's house in a much then nicer suburb of Plaistow Grove, Bromley, Kent.

Bowie attended Bromley Technical High School; he began playing the saxophone during his teenage years at school and asked the well-known jazz musician Ronnie Ross if he could teach him how to play the instrument. By David's mid-teens he had mastered the saxophone and got involved in various school bands and musicals. His high-school years also contributed to his future pop star career in a more bizarre way as a result of a playground fight over a girl, which left the singer with a paralysed right pupil (being stabbed in the right eye, with a maths compass). Consequently, he ended up with two different coloured eyes an accident that later enhanced his image.

One of the great enigmas of popular music and certainly the most mercurial, Bowie underwent a veritable odyssey of career moves and minor crisis, before establishing himself as a major performer.

In the early 60's, however, his style was decidedly orthodox, all mod clothes and R&B riffs. Over the next few years, he went through a succession of backing groups including the 'King Bees', the 'Manish Boys', the 'Lower Third and the Buzz'. Travelling often they just sleep in the back of the ambulance. In the late 1966, he changed his surname owing to the imminent emergence of Davy Jones lead singer of 'The Monkees'. During the same period, he became under the wing of manager Kenneth Pitt, whom nurtured Bowie's career for the remainder of the decade-to stardom!

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