Ziggy To Blackstar: How David Bowie Shaped A Generation

When I sat down with Rupert, I found myself returning to a simple truth: David Bowie isn’t just an artist who makes music, he’s someone who rearranges your sense of time. That idea runs through our whole conversation. We start with that first electric jolt of hearing Space Oddity on the radio, and the life‑altering flash of seeing Starman on Top of the Pops. From there, we trace a path from teenage bedrooms and borrowed records to a shared language of style, friendship and risk. Bowie’s songs were never just hooks or textures; they were permission slips. Wear the colour. Change the hair. Try the other door. That sense of permission grew into a habit of curiosity that shaped choices far beyond playlists and posters.

The 1972 eruption of Ziggy felt like a cultural gear change, but what Rupert and I kept circling was Bowie’s restless method. Reinvention wasn’t a stunt; it was a craft. The whole Ziggy cycle showed how character can become a container for ideas, while the American pivot of Young Americans reminded us that influence always runs both ways. Then came the Berlin years, where Low and “Heroes” turned the studio into a kind of laboratory, a place where silence and signal mattered as much as chorus. Those records still sound modern because they carve out space. Eno’s textures, Fripp’s wire, the pulse of Always Crashing in the Same Car — they evoke cities, rail lines, and the mind’s widescreen on cold mornings.

We also talk about how Bowie’s choices seeped into daily life. Station to Station didn’t just play at parties; it edited how we walked into a room. The fashion cues — short hair, a neat shirt, a cigarette with a European name — telegraphed focus. Then came the 80s pivot: Let’s Dance, a clean‑lined pop engine that put him on stadium walls and in living rooms that had never bought a Bowie record. Whether you see those years as peak or compromise, they proved he could command the middle without dulling the edge. And Live Aid compressed that charisma into minutes — a reminder that presence is an instrument.

There’s a tender thread running through all of this, too: the way songs become companions you carry into trains, kitchens and quiet moments. The late works sharpened that intimacy. The Next Day rekindled the spark, but Blackstar is the masterstroke – restless, cryptic, and generous with its final truths. Hearing it on release felt like receiving a coded letter you somehow understood. Mortality glints through Lazarus without melodrama; the band’s jazz angles keep the mind alert while the heart reads between the lines. Bowie’s integrity under pressure – his refusal to trade mystery for ease – remains a model for how to work when time is no longer abstract.

Choosing five tracks is impossible, of course, but the impulse to choose is revealing. People reach for Life on Mars? when they crave wonder, for Rebel Rebel when they need friction, for “Heroes” when they want to stand a little taller. Others dig into the deeper cuts — Joe the Lion, Some Are, Always Crashing in the Same Car — because Bowie rewards attention with new rooms. His catalogue hides these doorways in plain sight, and every return visit redraws the map. That’s the durable gift: a body of work that keeps us curious, honest, and just a bit brave. In the end, we keep coming back because the songs keep finding ways to meet us where we are — and to walk a step ahead.