David Robert Jones, known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer, songwriter and actor. He was a figure in popular music for over five decades, regarded by critics and musicians as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, his music and stage craft significantly influencing popular music. During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world's best-selling music artists. In the UK, he was awarded nine platinum album certifications, eleven gold and eight silver, releasing eleven number one albums. In the US, he received five platinum and seven gold certifications. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Born in Brixton, South London, Bowie developed an interest in music as a child, eventually studying art, music and design before embarking on a professional career as a musician in 1963. Space Oddity became his first top five entry on the UK Singles Chart after its release in July 1969. After a period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the Glam Rock era with his flamboyant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The character was spearheaded by the success of his single starman and album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which won him widespread popularity. In 1975, Bowie's style shifted radically towards a sound he characterised as plastic soul, initially alienating many of his UK devotees but garnering him his first major US crossover success with the number one single fame and the album Young Americans. In 1976, Bowie starred in the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth and released Station to Station. The following year, he further confounded musical expectations with the electronic inflected album Low, 1977, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno that would come to be known as the Berlin Trilogy. Heroes, 1977, and Lodger, 1979, followed. Each album reached the UK top five and received lasting critical praise. After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single Ashes to Ashes, its parent album Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, and Under Pressure, a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He then reached his commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance, with its title track topping both UK and US charts. Throughout the 1990s and 20s hundreds, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles including industrial and jungle. He also continued acting, his roles included major cellars in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, 1983, the Goblin King Jareth in Labyrinth, 1986, Pontius Pilot in The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988, and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, 2006, among other film and television appearances and cameos. He stopped concert touring after 2004, and his last live performance was at a charity event in 2006. In 2013, Bowie returned from a decade-long recording hiatus with the release of The Next Day. He remained musically active until he died of liver cancer two days after the release of his final album, Blackstar, 2016. Early Life David Robert Jones was born on January 8, 1947, in Brixton, south London, England. His mother, Margaret Mary Peggy, Nae Burns, 1913-2001, was born in Kent, and had Irish ancestry, she worked as a waitress. His father, Haywood Stanton John Jones, 1912-1969, Rahm Yorkshire, was a promotions officer for the children's charity Barnardos. The family lived at Forty Stansfield Road near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell. Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child and a defiant brawler. In 1953, Bowie moved with his family to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later, he started attending Burnt Ash Junior School. His voice was considered adequate by the school choir, and he demonstrated above-average abilities in playing the recorder. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative. Teachers called his interpretations vividly artistic and his poise astonishing for a child.The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including the teenagers, the platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard.Upon listening to Little Richard's song 2D Frutti, Bowie would later say, I had heard God. Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic, I saw a cousin of mine dance to.  It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that. By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukulele and t-chest bass, began to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano. Meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists to his local Wolf Cub group was described as mesmerizing, like someone from another planet. After taking his 11-plus exam at the conclusion of his burnt-ash junior education, Bowie went to Bromley Technical High School. It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford wrote. Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961, he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician. Bowie received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. After a series of operations during a four-month hospitalization, his doctors determined that the damage could not be fully repaired and Bowie was left with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil, which gave a false impression of a change in the iris color. Despite their altercation, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums. Career 1962-1967, early career to debut album. In 1962 Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Conrads had a varying lineup of between four and eight members, Underwood among them. When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his bandmate's limited aspirations, Bowie left the Conrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles and make another million. Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract. Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, Liza Jane, credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Disatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon Blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manage Boys, another Blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger. Bowie was to recall their cover of Bobby Bland's I Pity the Fool was no more successful than Liza Jane, and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a Blues trio strongly influenced by The Who. You've got a habit of leaving fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract, declaring that he would exit the pop world to study Mime at Sadler's Wells, Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, The Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, Do Anything You Say. While with The Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad, their recordings, which included a Bowie number and the Velvet underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager. Disatisfied with his stage name as Davey, and Davey, Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davey Jones of the Monkees, Bowie renamed himself after the 19th century American pioneer James Bowie and the knife he had popularized. His April 1967 solo single, The Laughing Gnome, using speeded-up thus high-pitched vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, David Bowie, an amalgam of pop, psychedelia and music hall, met the same fate. It was his last release for two years. 1968-1971, Space Audity to Hunkidori. Bowie met dancer Lindsey Kemp in 1967 and enrolled in his dance class at the London Dance Centre. He commented in 1972 that meeting Kemp was when his interest in image really blossomed. He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus. Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to Comedia dell'art, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personi to present to the world. Saturizing life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie penned over the wall we go became a 1967 single for Oscar, another Bowie composition, Silly Boy Blue, was released by Billy Fury the following year. In January 1968, Kemp choreographed a dance scene for a BBC play The Pistol Shot in the theatre 625 series, and used Bowie with a dancer, Hermione Farthengale, the pair began dating, and moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, Farthengale formed a group with Bowie and guitarist John Hutchinson. Between September 1968 and early 1969 the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merzabeet, Poetry and Mime. Bowie and Farthengale broke up in early 1969 when she went to Norway to take part in a film, Song of Norway, this affected him, and several songs, such as Letter to Hermione and Life on Mars, reference her, and for the video accompanying Where Are We Now, he wore a t-shirt with the words MS Song of Norway. They were last together in January 1969 for the filming of Love You Till Tuesday, a 30-minute film that was not released until 1984, intended as a promotional vehicle, it featured performances from Bowie's repertoire, including Space Oddity, which had not been released when the film was made. After the break-up with Farthengale, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnegan as her lodger. During this period he appeared in a lion's-made ice cream commercial, and was rejected for another by Kit Kott. In February and March 1969, he undertook a short tour with Mark Bolen's duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, as third on the bill, performing a Mime Act. On July 11, 1969, Space Oddity was released five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, and reached the top five in the UK.Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthengale, Bowie joined forces with Finnegan, Christina Ostrom and Barry Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tons Pub in Beckenham High Street. Influenced by the Arts Lab movement, this developed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, the subject of his song Memory of a Free Festival. Bowie's second album followed in November, originally issued in the UK as David Bowie, it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled Man of Words Man of Music, it was reissued internationally in 1972 by RCA Records as Space Oddity. Featuring philosophical post-Hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release. Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They married within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving manager Ken Pitt with limited influence which he found frustrating. Having established himself as a solo artist with Space Oddity, Bowie began to sense a lacking, a full-time band for gigs and recording people he could relate to personally.The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Mark Bolin, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist. A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. Known as The Hype, the bandmates created characters for themselves and wore elaborate costumes that prefigured the glam style of the Spiders from Mars. After a disastrous opening gig at the London Roundhouse, they reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist.Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style.  Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Wood Mansy. Not long after, the singer fired his manager and replaced him with Tony DeFries. This resulted in years of litigation that concluded with Bowie having to pay pit compensation. The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, The Man Who Sold the World, 1970, which contained references to schizophrenia, paranoia and delusion. Characterized by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by Space Audity. To promote it in the U.S., Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour across America in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later depicted the singer wearing a dress, taking the garment with him. He wore it during interviews to the approval of critics, including Rolling Stones John Mendelson who described him as ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to kiss.  During the tour, Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that eventually found form in the Ziggy Stardust character, a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing the ultimate pop idol.A girlfriend recalled his scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy, and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character who looks like he's landed from Mars.The Stardust surname was a tribute to the legendary Stardust cowboy, whose record he was given during the tour. Bowie would later cover I Took a Trip on a Gemini spaceship on 2002's Heathen. Hunkidori, 1971, found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles by Ken Scott and Trevor Boulder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the Faye Pop singer of Space Oddity, with light fare such as Cooke's, a song written for his son, Duncan Zawi Heywood Jones, born on May 30th. His parents chose his Cooke name he was known as Zawi for the next 12 years after the Greek word Zoey, life. Elsewhere, the album explored more serious subjects, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with song for Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and Queen Bitch, a velvet underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time. 1972-1974, Ziggy Stardust Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed reddish-brown, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars Ronson, Boulder and Wood Mansy at the Toby Jug Pub in Tolworth on February 10, 1972.The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the next six months and creating, as described by Buckley, a cult of Bowie that was unique. Its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom. The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972, combining the hard rock elements of The Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock and pop of Hunkidori, was released in June. Starman, issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough, both single and album charted rapidly following his July top-of-the-pops performance of the song. The album, which remained in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old Hunkidori. At the same time the non-album single John, I'm Only Dancing, and All the Young Dudes, a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, were successful in the UK. The Ziggy Stardust tour continued to the United States. Bowie contributed backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough transformer, C.O. producing the album with Mick Ronson. His own Aladdin Sane, 1973, topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as Ziggy Goes to America, it contained songs he wrote while traveling to and across the US during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. Aladdin Sane spawned the UK top five singles The Gene Genie and In Saturday. Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. Offstage I'm a Robot. On stage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David. With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties, acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust and, later, the thin white duke from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour. My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity. His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt onstage retirement at London's Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973. Footage from the final show was released the same year for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought after, the man who sold the world had been re-released in 1972 along with Space Oddity. Life on Mars, from Hunkidori, was released in June 1973 and peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, the laughing gnome, reached number six. Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favorites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in his version of the McCoy's Sorrow in itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums concurrently on the UK chart to six. 1974-1976, Plastic Soul and the Thin White Duke. Bowie moved to the U.S. in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. Diamond Dogs, 1974, parts of which found him heading towards Soul and Funk, was the product of two distinct ideas, a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music. The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits Rebel Rebel and Diamond Dogs, and number five in the U.S. To promote it, Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Tony Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, Cracked Actor, featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie, the tour coincided with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems. He later commented that the accompanying live album, David Live, ought to have been titled David Bowie is alive and well and living only in theory. David Live nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the U.S. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in Bowie's cover of Eddie Floyd's Knock on Wood. After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on Soul. The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was Young Americans, 1975. Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black by extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now. The album's sound, which the singer identified as plastic soul, constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. Young Americans yielded Bowie's first U.S. number one, Fame, co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon called Bowie's work great, but it's just rock and roll with lipstick on. Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the U.S. variety show Soul Train, Bowie mimed Fame, as well as Golden Years, his November single, which was originally offered to Elvis Presley, who declined it. Young Americans was a commercial success in both the U.S. and the UK, and a reissue of the 1969 single, Space Oddity, became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after Fame achieved the same in the U.S. Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of Sandford, for all his record sales, over a million copies of Ziggy Stardust alone, existed essentially on loose change. In 1975, in a move echoing Ken Pitt's acrimonious dismissal five years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing month's long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered in what were uniquely generous terms for defrees, then shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door. Michael Lipman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager, Lipman in turn was awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year. Station to Station, 1976, introduced a new Bowie persona, the thin white duke of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth the same year. Developing the funk and soul of young Americans, Station to Station's synthesizer heavy arrangements prefigured the crowd-truck influenced music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Hardy interviewed the singer for his London Weekend television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish government to put out a live news feed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing lengthy conversation with Hardy, Bowie was incoherent and looked disconnected. His sanity by his own later admission had become twisted from cocaine, he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.Owee's positive comments about Adolf Hitler, and Eric Clapton's about immigration restrictions in 1976, led to the establishment of rock against racism. Station to Station's January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-one-half-month-long concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set, the iSolar 1976 tour highlighted songs from the album, including the dramatic and lengthy title track, The Ballad's Wild is the Wind and Word on a Wing, and the funkier TVC 15 and Stay. The core band that coalesced to produce this album and tour rhythm guitarist Carlos Alamar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis continued as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader, and was detained by customs on the Russian-Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the Eviktoria station incident. Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, Bowie waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in NME. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave. He later blamed his pro-fascism comments and his behavior during the period on his addictions and the character of the thin white duke. I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology, that whole thing about Hitler and rightism. I'd discovered King Arthur. According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in The Times, he was indeed deranged. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs. Bowie's cocaine addiction, which had caused these controversies, had much to do with his time living in Los Angeles, a city which alienated him hugely. Discussing his flirtations with fascism in a 1980 interview with NME, Bowie explained that Los Angeles was where it had all happened.  To be anything to do with rock and roll and go and live in Los Angeles is, I think, just heading for disaster. It really is. 1976-1979, Berlin era. Bowie moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use decreased and he found time for other pursuits outside his musical career. He devoted more time to his painting, and produced a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Bruck Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art, locked in Kloss des Messages he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography. Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. There he was often seen riding a bicycle between his apartment on Hauptstrasse in Sköneberg and Hansa-Ton studio, the recording studio he used, located on Kothinerstrasse in Kruisburg, near the Berlin Wall. While working with Brian Eno and sharing an apartment with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, C.O. produced with Tony Visconti, that became known as his Berlin trilogy. During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a C.O. writer and musician, completed his solo album debut The Idiot and its follow-up Lust for Life, touring the UK, Europe and the US in March and April 1977. The album Low, 1977, partly influenced by the crowd rock sound of Kraftwerk and New, evinced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriter to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. Although he completed the album in November 1976, it took his unsettled record company another three months to release it.It received considerable negative criticism upon its release a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's former manager, Tony Defriese, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, Low yielded the UK number three single sound and vision, and its own performance surpassed that of station-to-station in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described Low as a work of genius in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his symphony number one Low. Subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 symphony number four heroes. Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces. Echoing Low's minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, Heroes, 1977, incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Frib. Like Low, Heroes evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolized by the divided city of Berlin. Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers, and coteau, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French. Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Mark Bolin's television show Mark, and again two days later for Bing Crosby's final CBS television Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in peace on Earth Little Drummer Boy, a version of the Little Drummer Boy with the new contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet proved a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982. After completing Low and Heroes, Bowie spent much of 1978 on the I Solar 2 World Tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction, biographer David Buckley writes that I Solar 2 was Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not on ice-thetaced himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends. Recordings from the tour made up the live album stage, released the same year. The final piece in what Bowie called his triptych, lodger, 1979, eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of new wave and world music, in places incorporating high jazz non-western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmitt's oblique Strategies Cards, boys keep swinging in tailed band members swapping instruments, move on used the chords from Bowie's early composition All the Young Dudes Played Backwards, and Red Money took backing tracks from Sister Midnight, a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop. The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Elberman stated, it would be fair to call it Bowie's Sargent Pepper, a concept album that portrays the lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology. As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, the record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end for 15 years of Bowie's partnership with Eno. Lodger reached number four in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles Boys Keep Swinging and DJ. Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angie initiated Divorce Proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980. 1980-1988, New Romantic and Pop Era. Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, 1980, produced the number one hit Ashes to Ashes, featuring the textural work of guitar synthesis Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom From Space Oddity. The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club Blitz the main New Romantic hangout to recruit several of the regulars, including Steve Strange of the band Visage, to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time. While Scary Monsters used principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Robert Fripp, Chuck Hammer and Pete Townsend. As Ashes to Ashes hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway on September 24, starring in The Elephant Man. Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, under pressure. The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1982 televised adaptation of Bertolt Breck's play Bale. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as David Bowie and Bertolt Breck's Bale. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film Cat People came out, Bowie's title song, Cat People, Putting Out Fire, was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30. Bowie reached his peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with Let's Dance. Co produced by Sheik's Niall Rogers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top 20 hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. Modern Love and China Girl each made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of absorbing promotional videos that biographer David Buckley said activated key archetypes in the pop world. Let's Dance, with its little narrative surrounding the young aborigine couple, targeted youth and China Girl, with its bare bummed and later partially censored, beach love making scene, a homage to the film from here to eternity, was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. Stevie Ray Vaughn was guest guitarist playing solo on Let's Dance, although the video depicts Bowie miming this part. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. Let's Dance was followed by the Sirius Moonlight tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Sims. The world tour lasted six months and was extremely popular. At the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards Bowie received two awards including the inaugural Video Vanguard Award. Tonight, 1984, another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit God Only Knows. The album bore the transatlantic top-ten hit Blue Gene, itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short-Form Music Video, Jasmine for Blue Gene. Bowie performed at Wembley Stadium in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premiered, Bowie's duet with Mick Jagger. Dancing in the street quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Methany group to record This Is Not America for the soundtrack of The Falcon and the Snowman. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US. Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners. It was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song, also named Absolute Beginners, rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial techno dance edge. Peeking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits Day In, Day Out, his sixtieth single, Time Will Crawl and Never Let Me Down. Bowie later described it as his nadir, calling it an awful album. Supporting Never Let Me Down, and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86 concert Glass Spider tour commenced on May 30. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing. 1989-1991, Tin Machine. Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, whom Bowie had known since the late 1970s for their contribution on bass and drums respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust for Life. Although he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriter and in decision-making. The band's album debut, Tin Machine, 1989, was initially popular, though its politicized lyrics did not find universal approval. Bowie described one song as a simplistic, naive, radical, laying it down about the emergence of neo-Nazis. In the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, it took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV, in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book. Emmy complained of lyrics that preach as well as repetitive tunes and minimalist or no production. The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK. Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance among fans and critics alike to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member. A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with Emmy, left the label. Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band. Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month sound and vision tour, he found commercial success in acclaim once again. In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angie, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, I was naming the children the night we met, it was absolutely immediate. They married in 1992. Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. Tin Machine 2's arrival was marked by a widely publicized and ill-timed conflict over the cover art, after production had begun. The new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of four ancient nude Karoa statues, judged by Bowie to be an exquisite taste, a show of wrong, obscene images, requiring airbrushing and patching to render the figures sexless. Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album Tin Machine Live, Ove, Baby, failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabriel's, resumed his solo career. 1992-1998, electronic period. On April 20, 1992, Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, following the Queen singer's death the previous year. As well as performing heroes and all the young dudes, he was joined on under pressure by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part, during his appearance, Bowie knelt and recited the Lord's Prayer at Wembley Stadium. Four days later, Bowie and Eman were married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew, the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead. In 1993, Bowie released his first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure. The soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced black-tie white noise. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Niall Rogers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 single jump they say. Bowie explored new directions on the Buddha of Suburbia, 1993, ostensibly a soundtrack album of his music composed for the BBC television adaptation of Hanif Kouraishi's novel. Only the title track had been used in the television adaptation, although some of his themes for it were also present on the album. It contained some of the new elements introduced in black-tie white noise, and also signaled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts. Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial outside, 1995, was originally conceived as the first volume in a nonlinear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved UK and US chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles. In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose nine inch nails as his tour partner for the outside tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February 1996, the tour saw the return of Gabrolls as Bowie's guitarist. On January 7, 1997, Bowie celebrated his half-century with a 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden, New York, at which he was joined in playing his songs and those of his guests, Lou Reed, Dave Groll and the Foo Fighters, Robert Smith of the Cure, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Black Francis of the Pixies and Sonic Youth. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 17, 1996. Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum and bass, Earthling, 1997, was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song I'm Afraid of Americans from the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Trent Reznor, contributed to the song's 16 weeks day in the US Billboard Hot 100. The Earthling tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997. In November 1997, Bowie performed on the BBC's Children in Need charity single Perfect Day, which reached number one in the UK. Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record Safe in This, Skylife for the Rugrats movie. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it was later re-recorded and released as Safe on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single Everyone Says Hi. The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited edition single release version of Placebo's track Without You I'm Nothing, co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonized vocal added to the original recording. Bowie Bonds Bowie Bonds, an early example of celebrity bonds, were asset-backed securities of current and future revenues of the 25 albums, 287 songs, that Bowie recorded before 1990. Bowie Bonds were pioneered by rock and roll investment banker David Pullman. Issued in 1997, the bonds were bought for US$55 million by the Prudential Insurance Company of America. The bonds paid an interest rate of 7.9% and had an average life of 10 years, a higher rate of return than a 10-year treasury note, at the time, 6.37%. Royalties from the 25 albums generated the cash flow that secured the bonds' interest payments. Prudential also received guarantees from Bowie's label, Emmy Records, which had recently signed a $30 million deal with Bowie.By forfeiting 10 years worth of royalties, Bowie received a payment of US$55 million up front. Bowie used this income to buy songs owned by his former manager.Bowie's combined catalog of albums covered by this agreement sold more than 1 million copies annually at the time of the agreement.By March 2004, Moody's Investors Service lowered the bonds from an A3 rating, the seventh highest rating, to BAA3, one notch above junk status. The downgrade was prompted by lower than expected revenue due to weakness in sales for recorded music and that an unnamed company guaranteed the issue. Nonetheless, the bonds liquidated in 2007 as originally planned, without default, and the rights to the income from the songs reverted to Bowie. In September 1998, Bowie launched his own internet service provider, BowieNet, developed in conjunction with Robert Goodale and Ron Roy. Subscribers to the dial-up service were offered exclusive content, as well as a BowieNet email address and internet access.The service was closed by 2006. 1999-2012, Neoclassicist Bowie. Bowie created the soundtrack for Omicron, a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omicron, his album Hours featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his Cyber Song Contest Internet Competition, Alex Grant. Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from Heavy Electronica. Sessions for the planned album toy, intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead, the result of the sessions was the 2002 album Heathen. On June 25, 2000, Bowie made his second appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in England, playing 30 years after his first. On June 27, Bowie performed a concert at BBC Radio Theatre in London, which was released in the compilation album Bowie at the Beebe, which also featured BBC recording sessions from 1968 to 1972. Bowie and Iman's daughter was born on August 15. In October 2001, Bowie opened the concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with the minimalist performance of Simon and Garfunkel's America, followed by a full-band performance of Heroes. 2002 saw the release of Heathen, and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen tour. Taking place in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual Meltdown Festival, for which Bowie was that year-appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and the Dandy Warhalls. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's Low Era. Reality, 2003, followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. On stage in Oslo, Norway, on June 18, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan, a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Schiesel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked coronary artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled. That same year, his interest in Buddhism led him to support the Debetten cause by performing at a concert to support the New York Debetthouse. In the years following his recuperation from the heart attack, Bowie reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1971 song Changes with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film Shrek II. During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song, She Can, Do That, C.O. written with Brian Tran C.O., for the film Stealth. He returned to the stage on September 8, 2005, appearing with arcade fire for the U.S. nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon. He contributed backing vocals on TV on the radio's Song Province for their album Return to Cookie Mountain, made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio and joined with Lou Reed on Danish Alt Rockers Kashmir's 2005 album No Balance Palace. Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on February 8, 2006. In April, he announced, �I�m taking a year off no touring, no albums.� He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour�s May 29 concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released. He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive, a performance marking the last time Bowie performed his music on stage. Bowie was chosen to cure at the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event, including electronic pop duo Air, surrealist photographer Claude Kuhn and English comedian Ricky Gervais. Bowie performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits Covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head. On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with Space Audity Emmy released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix. A Reality Tour, a double-album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010. In late March 2011, Toy, Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the Internet, containing material used for Heathen and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard-new versions of his early-backed catalog. 2013-2016, Final Years On January 8, 2013, his 66th birthday, his website announced a new album, to be titled The Next Day and scheduled for release March 8 for Australia, March 12 for the United States and 11 March for the rest of the world. Bowie's first studio album in a decade, The Next Day contains 14 songs plus three bonus tracks. His website acknowledged the length of his hiatus.Record producer Tony Visconti said 29 tracks were recorded for the album, some of which could appear on Bowie's Next Record, which he might start work on later in 2013. The announcement was accompanied by the immediate release of a single, Where Are We Now, written and recorded by Bowie in New York and produced by longtime collaborator Visconti. A music video for Where Are We Now, was released onto Vimeo the same day, directed by New York artist Tony Osler.The single topped the UK iTunes chart within hours of its release, and debuted it in the UK Singles Chart at number six, his first single to enter the top ten for two decades, since Jump They Say in 1993. A second video, The Stars, Are Out Tonight, was released February 25. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, it stars Bowie and Tilda Swinton as a married couple. On March 1, the album was made available to stream for free through iTunes. The next day debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, was his first album to achieve that position since Black Tie White Noise, 1993, and was the fastest selling album of 2013 at the time. The music video for the song The Next Day created some controversy, initially being removed from YouTube for terms of service violation, then restored with a warning recommending viewing only by those 18 or over. According to the Times, Bowie ruled out ever giving an interview again. An exhibition of Bowie artifacts, called David Bowie Is, was organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and shown there in 2013. The London exhibit was visited by 311,956 people, making it one of the most successful exhibitions ever staged at the museum. Later that year the exhibition began a world tour, starting in Toronto and including stops in Chicago, Paris, Melbourne and Groningen. Bowie was featured in a cameo vocal in the arcade fire song Reflector. A poll carried out by BBC History Magazine, in October 2013, named Bowie as the best dressed Britain in history. At the 2014 Brit Awards on February 19, Bowie became the oldest recipient of a Brit award in the ceremony's history when he won the award for best British male, which was collected on his behalf by Kate Moss. His speech read, I'm completely delighted to have a Brit for being the best male but I am, aren't I Kate? Yes. I think it's a great way to end the day. Thank you very, very much, and Scotland stay with us. Bowie's reference to the forthcoming September 2014 Scottish independence referendum garnered a significant reaction throughout the UK on social media. On July 18, Bowie indicated that future music would be forthcoming, though he was vague about details. New information was released in September 2014 regarding his next compilation album, Nothing Has Changed, which was released in November. The album featured rare tracks and old material from his catalogue in addition to a new song titled Sue, or In A Season of Crime. In May 2015, Let's Dance was announced to be reissued as a yellow vinyl single on July 16, 2015 in conjunction with the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, Australia. In August 2015, it was announced that Bowie was writing songs for a Broadway musical based on the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon series. Bowie wrote and recorded the opening title song to the television series The Last Panthers, which aired in November 2015. The theme that was used for The Last Panthers was also the title track for his January 2016 release Blackstar which is said to take cues from his earlier crowd rock-influenced work. According to The Times, Blackstar may be the oddest work yet from Bowie. On December 7, 2015, Bowie's musical Lazarus debuted in New York. His last public appearance was at opening night of the production. Blackstar was released on January 8, 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday, and was met with critical acclaim. Following his death on January 10, producer Tony Visconti revealed that Bowie had planned the album to be his swan song, and a parting gift for his fans before his death. Several reporters and critics subsequently noted that most of the lyrics on the album seem to revolve around his impending death, with CNN noting that the album reveals a man who appears to be grappling with his own mortality.Visconti later said that Bowie had been planning a post-Blackstar album, and had written and recorded demo versions of five songs in his final weeks, suggesting that Bowie believed he had a few months left. The day following his death, online viewing of Bowie's music skyrocketed, breaking the record for Vivo's most viewed artist in a single day. On January 15, Blackstar debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, 19 of his albums were in the UK Top 100 Albums Chart, and 13 singles were in the UK Top 100 Singles Chart. Blackstar also debuted at number one on album charts around the world, including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the US Billboard 200. At the 59th annual Grammy Awards, Bowie won all five nominated awards, Best Rock Performance, Best Alternative Music Album, Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, Best Recording Package, and Best Rock Song. The wins marked Bowie's first ever in musical categories. As of January 11, 2016, more than 1.3 million people had visited the David Bowie is exhibition, making it the most successful exhibition ever staged by the Victoria and Albert Museum in terms of worldwide attendance. The museum stated that the exhibition would continue to tour, with confirmed travel to Japan in 2017. An EP, No Plan, was released on January 8, 2017, which would have been Bowie's 70th birthday. The EP includes three songs that Bowie had recorded during the Blackstar sessions, but were left off the album and subsequently appeared on the soundtrack album for the Lazarus Musical in October 2016. A music video for the title track was also released. Acting Career The beginnings of Bowie's acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Claude in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, later made into the 1970 television film The Looking Glass Murders. In the black and white short The Image, 1969, he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him. The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel The Virgin Soldiers saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra dot in 1976 he earned acclaim for his first major film role, portraying Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien from a dying planet, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nicholas Rogue. Just a jiggolo, 1979, an Anglo-German co-production directed by David Hemmings, saw Bowie in the lead role as Prussian officer Paul von Persigotsky, who, returning from World War I, is discovered by a baroness, Marlena Dietrich, and put into her jiggolo stable. Bowie played Joseph Merrick in the Broadway Theatre production The Elephant Man, which he undertook wearing no-stage makeup, and which earned high praise for his expressive performance. He played the part 157 times between 1980 and 1981. Christiane F. We Children from Bonhoff Zoo, a 1981 biographical film focusing on a young girl's drug addiction in West Berlin, featured Bowie in a cameo appearance as himself at a concert in Germany. Its soundtrack album, Christiane F., 1981, featured much material from his Berlin trilogy albums. Bowie starred in The Hunger, 1983, with Katharine De Nouve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film The Same Year, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, based on Laurence Van Der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, Bowie played Major Jack Selliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Bowie had a cameo in Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film Into the Night. He declined to play the villain Max Zoran in the James Bond film A View to a Kill, 1985. Absolute Beginners, 1986, a rock musical film adapted from Colin McInnes' book of the same name about life in late 1950s London, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy labyrinth found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins. Two years later, he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in The Linguine Incident, 1991, and the mysterious FBI agent Philip Jeffries and David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, 1992. He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist-director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Varanissi's Spaghetti Western Ilmio West, 1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005, as the most feared gunfighter in the region. He played the aging gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine, 1999, and appeared in the television horror series of The Hunger. In M. R. Rice's Secret, 2000, he played the title role as the neighbor of a terminally ill 12-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in Zoolander. Bowie portrayed physicist Nikola Tesla in Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige, 2006, which was about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the late 19th century. In the same year, he voice-acted in the animated film Arthur and the Invisibles as the powerful villain Maltesered and appeared as himself in an episode of the Ricky Gervais television series Extras. In 2007, he lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePanty's television film. In the 2008 film August, directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvy, alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Musicianship From the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, Bowie employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced by rock and rollers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley, and also the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theater singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Nulli, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his 1967 debut release, David Bowie, to the disgust of Nulli himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher. Bowie's music hall fascination continued to surface sporadically alongside such diverse styles as hard rock and heavy metal, soul, psychedelic folk and pop. Musicologist James Perrone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in his commercial breakthrough single, Space Oddity, and later in the song Heroes, to dramatic effect, Perrone notes that in the lowest part of his vocal register, his voice has an almost crooner-like richness. Voice instructor Joe Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as particularly deliberate and distinctive. Skinder and Schwartz call him a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect. Here, too, as in his stage craft and songwriter, the singer's role playing is evident, historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them. His voice changes dramatically from section to section. In a 2014 analysis of 77 top artists' vocal ranges, Bowie was eighth, just behind Christina Aguilera and just ahead of Paul McCartney. In addition to the guitar, Bowie also played keyboards, harmonica, saxophone, stylophone, viola, cello, cotto, thumb piano, drums and percussion. Painter and Art Collector Bowie was also a painter. One of his paintings sold at auction in late 1990 for $500, and the cover for his 1995 album Outside is a close-up of a self-portrait, from a series of five, he painted that same year. He was invited to join the editorial board of the journal Modern Painters in 1998, and participated in the Nat Tate Art Hokes later that year. In 1998 during an interview with Michael Kimmelman for the New York Times he said art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own, subsequently in 1999, in an interview for the BBC, he said the only thing I buy obsessively and addictively is art. His art collection, which included works by Damian Hurst, Frank Auerbach, Henry Moore and Jean-Michel Basquiat among others, was valued at over 10 million pounds in mid-2016. After his death his family decided to sell most of the collection because they didn't have the space to store it.On 10 and November 11 three auctions were held at Sotheby's in London, first with 47 lots and second with 208 paintings, drawing and sculptures, third with 100 design lots. The items on sale represented about 65% of the collection. Exhibition of the works in the auction attracted 51.470 visitors, the auction itself was attended by 1,750 bidders, with over 1,000 more bidding online. The auctions has overall sale total 32.9 million pounds, ap 41.5 million dollars, while the highest selling item was Jean-Michel Basquiat's graffiti inspired painting Air Power, sold for 7.09 million pounds. Personal Life Family Bowie married Mary Angela Barnett on March 19, 1970 at Bromley Register office in Bromley, London. Their son Duncan, born on May 30, 1971, was at first known as Zowie. Bowie and Angela divorced on February 8, 1980 in Switzerland. On April 24, 1992, Bowie married the Somali-American model Iman in a private ceremony in Lausanne. The wedding was later solemnised on June 6 in Florence. They had one daughter, Alexandria Lexie Zara-Jones, born in August 2000. The couple resided primarily in New York City and London, as well as owning an apartment in Sydney's Elizabeth Bay. Bowie's grandson from his son Duncan was born July 10, 2016, exactly six months after Bowie's death. Sexuality Bowie declared himself gay in an interview with Michael Watts for a 1972 issue of Melody Maker, coinciding with his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust. According to Buckley, if Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality. In a September 1976 interview with Playboy, Bowie said, It's true I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me. According to his first wife, Angie, Bowie had a relationship with Mick Jagger. In a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone, Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was the biggest mistake I ever made and I was always a closet heterosexual. On other occasions, he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than of his own feelings. Blender asked Bowie in 2002 whether he still believed his public declaration was his biggest mistake. After a long pause, he said, I don't think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners nor be a representative of any group of people. Bowie said he wanted to be a songwriter and performer rather than a headline for his bisexuality, and in Puritanical America, I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do. Buckley wrote that Bowie mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock, and was probably never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual, instead experimenting out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the transgressional. Biographer Christopher Sandford said, according to Mary Finnegan with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969 the singer and his first wife Angie created their bisexual fantasy.   That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women.The BBC's Mark Easton wrote in 2016 that Britain was far more tolerant of difference and that gay rights, such as same-sex marriage and gender equality would not have enjoyed the broad support they do today without Bowie's androgynous challenge all those years ago. Spirituality and Religion Over the years, Bowie made numerous references to religions and to his evolving spirituality. Beginning in 1967, he showed an interest in Buddhism. After a few months study at Tibet House in London, he was told by a llama, you don't want to be Buddhist. You should follow music. By 1975 Bowie admitted, I felt totally, absolutely alone. And I probably was alone because I pretty much had abandoned God. After Bowie married Iman in a private ceremony in 1992, he said they knew that their real marriage, sanctified by God, had to happen in a church in Florence. Earlier that year, he knelt on stage at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert and recited the Lord's Prayer before a television audience of up to one billion people. Per source, with the potential to reach one billion viewers, asked why he knelt and prayed, Bowie said he had a friend who was dying of AIDS. He was just dropping into a coma that day. And just before I went on stage something just told me to say the Lord's Prayer. The great irony is that he died two days after the show. In 1993, Bowie said he had an undying belief in the unquestionable existence of God.Interviewed in 2005, Bowie said whether God exists is not a question that can be answered. I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on, well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months. I've nearly got it right. In his will, Bowie stipulated that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in Bali in accordance with the Buddhist rituals. Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to Bowie's songwriter. Station to station is very much concerned with the stations of the cross, the song specifically references Kabbalah. Bowie called the album extremely dark, the nearest album to a magic treatise that I've written. Earthling showed the abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism. What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise. Released shortly before his death, Lazarus from his final album, Blackstar began with the words, Look up here, I'm in heaven. Politics In 1976, speaking as the thin white Duke, Bowie's persona at the time, and at least partially tongue-in-cheek, he made statements that expressed support for fascism and perceived admiration for Adolf Hitler in interviews with Playboy, NME and a Swedish publication. Bowie was quoted as saying, Britain is ready for a fascist leader. I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism. I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. He was also quoted as saying, Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars and you've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. Bowie later retracted these comments in an interview with Melody Maker in October 1977, blaming them on mental instability caused by his drug problems at the time, saying, I was out of my mind, totally, completely crazed. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bowie's public statements shifted sharply towards anti-racism and anti-fascism. In an interview with MTV in 1983, Bowie criticized the channel for not providing enough coverage of black musicians, and the music videos for China Girl and Let's Dance were described by Bowie as a very simple, very direct statement against racism. The album Tin Machine took a more direct stance against fascism and neo-nazism, and was criticized for being too preachy. In 2016, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore said he had wanted to use Panic in Detroit for his 1998 documentary The Big One, denied at first, he was given the rights after calling Bowie personally. I've read stuff since his death saying that he wasn't that political and he stayed away from politics. But that wasn't the conversation that I had with him. DEATH On January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of the album Blackstar, Bowie died from liver cancer in his New York City apartment. He had been diagnosed 18 months earlier but had not made the news of his illness public. The Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove, who had worked with the singer on his off-Broadway musical Lazarus, explained that Bowie was unable to attend rehearsals due to the progression of the disease. He noted that Bowie had kept working during the illness. Bowie's producer Tony Visconti wrote, Following Bowie's death, fans gathered at impromptu street shrines. At the mural of Bowie in his birthplace of Brixton, south London, which shows him in his Aladdin-sane character, fans laid flowers and sang his songs. Other memorial sites included Berlin, Los Angeles and outside his apartment in New York. After news of his death, sales of his albums and singles soared. Bowie had insisted that he did not want a funeral, and according to his death certificate he was cremated in New Jersey on January 12. LEGACY AND INFLUENCE Bowie's songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. Bowie was a pioneer of glam rock, according to music historians Skinder and Schwartz, who credited Mark Bolin and Bowie with creating the genre. At the same time, he inspired the innovators of the punk rock music movement. When punk musicians were noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance, biographer David Buckley wrote that Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation. Bowie's record company promoted his unique status in popular music with the slogan, there's old wave, there's new wave, and there's David Bowie. Musicologist James Perron credited him with having brought sophistication to rock music, and critical reviews frequently acknowledged the intellectual depth of his work and influence.Human League founder Martin Ware remarked on the depth of his pervasive artistry that he had lived his life as though he were an art installation. As described by John Peel, the one distinguishing feature about early 70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change. Buckley called the era bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied, then Bowie subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star. Buckley called Bowie both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced, has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. His influence has been unique in popular culture he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure. Through continual reinvention, his influence broadened and extended. Biographer Thomas forget added, because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie. In 2000, Bowie was voted by other music stars as the most influential artist of all time in a poll by NME. Alexis Petretis of The Guardian wrote that Bowie was confirmed by 1980 to be the most important and influential artist since the Beatles. Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph stated that Bowie had one of the supreme careers in popular music, art and culture of the 20th century and he was too inventive, too mercurial, too strange for all but his most devoted fans to keep up with. The BBC's Mark Easton argued that Bowie provided fuel for the creative powerhouse that Britain has become by challenging future generations to aim high, to be ambitious and provocative, to take risks. Easton concluded that Bowie had changed the way the world sees Britain. and the way Britain sees itself.Annie Zaleski of Alternative Press wrote, Every band or solo artist who's decided to rip up their playbook and start again owes a debt to Bowie. Numerous figures from the music industry whose careers Bowie had influenced paid tribute to him following his death, Panagerix on Twitter, tweets about him peaked at 20,000 a minute an hour after his death, also came from outside the entertainment industry and pop culture, such as those from the Vatican, namely Cardinal Gianfranco Ravici, who quoted Space Audity, and the Federal Foreign Office, which thanked Bowie for his part in the fall of the Berlin Wall and referenced heroes. On January 7, 2017 the BBC broadcast the 90-minute documentary David Bowie, The Last Five Years, taking a detailed look at Bowie's last albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, and his play Lazarus. On January 8, 2017, which would have been Bowie's 70th birthday, a charity concert in his birthplace of Brixton was hosted by the actor Gary Oldman, a close friend. A David Bowie walking tour through Brixton was also launched, and other events marking his birthday weekend included concerts in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and Tokyo. Awards and Recognition Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, The Song's Space Audity, won him an Ivernavello special award for originality. For his performance in the 1976 science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the ensuing decades he was honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, seven Grammy awards and four Brit Awards winning Best British Male Artist twice, the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 1996, and the Brit's Icon Award for his lasting impact on British culture, given posthumously in 2016. In 1999, Bowie was made a commander of the Audra des Arts et de Letra by the French government. He received an honorary doctorate from Berkeley College of Music the same year. He declined the royal honour of commander of the Order of the British Empire, CBE, in 2000, and turned down a knighthood in 2003. Bowie later stated I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for. Throughout his career he sold an estimated 140 million records worldwide. In the United Kingdom, he was awarded 9 platinum, 11 gold and 8 silver albums, and in the United States 5 platinum and 7 gold. Five of Bowie's studio albums appear on Rolling Stones list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, he was ranked 29. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 17, 1996. A&E named a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in June 2013. In 2016, Rolling Stone proclaimed Bowie the greatest rock star ever. In 2008, the spider heteropoda David Bowie was named in his honour. On January 5, 2015, a main belt asteroid was named 342,843 David Bowie. On January 13, 2016, Belgian amateur astronomers at My Republic Observatory created a Bowie asterism of seven stars which had been in the vicinity of Mars at the time of Bowie's death. The constellation forms the lightning bolt on Bowie's face from the cover of his Aladdin Sane album.


She's suddenly very emotional about giving the guy the code, and I gave him the code all my fault because I gave him our code to fix the carpet. And she wasn't earlier. I gave him our code to get in. She was going to go fix it. I mean, my now is she's suddenly emotional that she gave her a code. I don't get that part number one. Number two, she's not, there's no horror as she gets home. No horror at all. She's still got the romance or she's got heart eye contact. Those spot welded elbows now have turned into T rex. So now we're seeing her hands do all this kind of stuff until at one point she gets up and does that dance from the 60s to swim.  There's still no horror. This is, it would be funny if it were not for a fact this is a child has been murdered and this person's tied into it.


Thank you very much for that kind introduction it's a great pleasure to have the opportunity to speak to you today as your impressive list of former and future speakers demonstrates the IIEA is established as Ireland's preeminent think-tack on European and international affairs as a time when Europe in particular faces such immense economic problems a'i ddweud bod ni'n nefyddog iaith a'r cyfnodau yn diweddol, y gallai yn ei cadw ein bod canthal addysg ychydig yn gandwch y ffordd nhu wledgesenol i gyd yn gweithio cymdeithasol iaith.  Fe ddim yn gweithio bydd y ddweud iawn o'r ddweud a'r ddweud i'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Ac ydych chi, dyma'r ddweud i'n golygu i'r dyfanyddio yma i'r ddweud i'r cyflwythrath dda i'r odd, ond nid o'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, ond i'r ddweud yng Nghymru, ar y cyfrifau o'r Rhywun Ieisiaidio, a i'r teniw ddysgwysu'r ddysgu sy'n Ffraudfa yng Nghymru o'r rhan o Gweithgofynol ac yn ystod o'ch gyflym ymddangos eu rhai ddweud yn rhaid o bob i McDonough. Oedon nhw'n cwestiynau o'r Rhywun Ieisiaidio ar y Prifysgol yng Nghymru, ddiddor i'r llifon i'r ddau'r ddweud o'r prifysgol o'r Prifysgol i'r Rhywun Ieisiaidio. I would like to emphasise how close cooperation on Northern Ireland Affairs over the past two decades has contributed to the very positive UK-Irish relationship, best exemplified by the visit of Her Majesty the Queen here last year. Finally, I shall explain why it's now time to move on beyond the politics of the peace process in Northern Ireland towards greater normalisation and, crucially, the politics of delivery by the Stormont Executive. The United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland have a unique relationship, linked by history, politics, geography, business, culture, sport, travel and family. Even when Ireland left the Commonwealth and became a republic in 1948, she was given a unique status. Today, British and Irish citizens can vote in each other's elections. We maintain a common travel area, something which in opposition I fought strongly to retain and to which the UK government is firmly committed because it benefits both our countries. 2009, Ireland had over three million visitors from the UK, spending over one billion euros, while nearly three million visits took place from Ireland to the UK, making Ireland the UK's second largest source of tourists. Through family ties, we remain indelibly linked. There are around six million people living in Britain who have an Irish grandparents. Here in Ireland, around 100,000 people were actually born in Britain. It's estimated there are 40,000 Irish people serving on the boards of UK companies. The UK remains the largest market for Irish goods, while Ireland is the UK's fifth largest export market. Until recently, we exported more to the Republic of Ireland than to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. As the T-shirt pointed out in March, something like one billion pounds worth of trade takes place between our two countries every single week. So it's no exaggeration at all to say that the prosperity of both UK and Ireland remained highly interdependent. The UK government recognised that in late 2010 when the scale of the crisis in the Irish banking system became apparent. The Chancellor George Osborne asked for my advice, and we agreed immediately that it was massively in the UK's national interest to help ensure that the economy in the Republic of Ireland grows. That's why we had no hesitation in offering substantial bilateral assistance in addition to that provided by the EU and the IMF. We also recognised the crucial importance of enabling the Republic to trade out of its difficulties. So we have robustly defended your right to set your own corporate tax rates, which were coming under attack from elements within the EU. We did this as a close friend, partner and ally. The blunt truth is that we both need stable, successful financial sectors and we need to reduce burdens on business and barriers to trade if we are to return to sustainable growth. On what I've said out is a relationship in which the fortunes of our two countries are inextricably linked. Britain needs a successful Ireland and Ireland needs a successful Britain. Today, the relationship has never been stronger and two events bear testimony to that. First, the visit of Her Majesty the Queen in May 2011, the first state visit of a reining British monarch since Ireland gained her independence 90 years before. If ever there was a landmark event in the history of Britain and Ireland, it was surely this. Who will forget the dignity and respect demonstrated by both Her Majesty and the former president as they attended sensitive memorials at Ireland Bridge and the Garden of Remembrance? Who wasn't taken aback by the respect that Her Majesty showed for the Irish language in her speech at Dublin Castle? Who couldn't have been moved by her expression of sympathy for those who have lost loved ones in the past and the words in that speech that resonated across these islands? With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all. Her Majesty was greeted with genuine affection and enthusiasm all the way from Dublin to Castle and Cork. I, myself, saw at first hand Her Majesty's real joy at being here when she came to the national stud at Kildare. The visit was in the words of the Prime Minister, one of those quote magical moments in the relationship between our two countries. And I think it was remarkable what was achieved through that visit and the great warmth that everyone who was there felt. Speaking to our recently appointed ambassador here in Dublin, I know just how much goodwill from the visit still reverberates over one year on. The visit moved what were already good relations onto a whole new level and it was something on which we were able to build last month with Her Majesty's hugely successful Diamond Jubilee visit to Northern Ireland. Second, there was the joint statement made by David Cameron and Ender Kenny in Downing Street in March this year. This was the first genuinely post peace process declaration between our two countries. And I say that because while Northern Ireland formed an important part of it, the vast bulk of the statement covered the economy, trade, jobs, energy policy, possible joint approaches to some EU matters and how we might tackle other global issues. The joint statement sets out an agenda for cooperation over the next decade. It has the potential to produce significant benefits for our peoples and both the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach are committed to meet annually in order to review progress. In addition, the UK looks forward to working closely with you in delivering a successful EU presidency in 2013. Regressibly, the relationship between our two countries hasn't always been like this. All of us acknowledge that Britain and Ireland have had a troubled past. And the fact that we stand here today able to celebrate the strength of the British Irish relationship is in very large part down to the progress that we've made working together on Northern Ireland over the past two decades. And I'm very clear that without our two countries' close cooperation supported when necessary by successive administrations in the United States, such progress would never have happened. So I pay tribute to all of those, some departed, some retired, some still active, who worked so tirelessly to make a reality of what we see in Northern Ireland today. The UK-Irish relationship will prosper even when on occasion we might disagree. Both our countries have a vital shared interest in ensuring that the small number of people on this island who reject democracy will never succeed in setting back the progress we have made. And these people do pose a very real threat, as has been demonstrated by a number of recent attacks, including the vile murder of PC Ronan Kerr last year. So I am immensely grateful to the government here and the guarder commissioner for the unprecedented levels of security cooperation that exists between us. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this and it has undoubtedly saved lives. We're also working very closely with the Irish government on the decade of centenaries, serious events which obviously did so much to define the relationship between Britain and Ireland. In March, the Tishock attended the opening of an exhibition in Westminster Hall to mark the anniversary of the third home rule bill. In May that exhibition travelled to Leinster House where I attended the opening and it will be located at Stormont throughout the summer. My ministerial colleague Hugo Swire was in Dublin on Tuesday to discuss commemorations with Jimmy Dinham. In April they both attended and spoke at the Redmond Lecture in Waterford and shortly afterwards shared a platform at an event to mark the Ulster Covenant organised by the Presbyterian Church in Belfar City Hall. Our joint approach to each of these anniversaries is to try and encourage greater understanding of often very divisive events. We want to demonstrate that one can be generous and respectful towards other traditions without in any way undermining one's own beliefs. Of course the foundation stone of the political settlement we see today was the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 and I shall return to that shortly. I would however like to reiterate the importance of an earlier document, the joint declaration between John Major and Albert Reynolds in December 1993. This helped to launch what became the peace process and set out the parameters for a political settlement. It made clear that only parties committed to exclusively peaceful and democratic means could be admitted to inclusive negotiations and it set out the fundamental principles that the future of Northern Ireland would only ever be determined by democracy and consent and never by violence. With the British and Irish governments so clearly committed to those principles backed by the overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland it became increasingly clear that those who remained wedi at a violence, Republican loyalists, had literally nowhere to go. It was the joint declaration that led first to the paramilitary ceasefires and then the inclusive political negotiations that culminated in the 1998 agreement. We should never forget that the agreement and the arrangements it set out were backed overwhelmingly across the island. 71% in the north and 94% here. It clearly represents the will of the people in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Since the election in 2010 the coalition government has shown that it will faithfully uphold the Belfast agreement and its successes. We will never take risks with the hard-won progress of the past two decades. And today politics in Northern Ireland is more stable than at any time in over a generation. There is a fully functioning inclusive executive and assembly at Stormont. Relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic have never been better. And the great constitutional issues that divide us for so long are now clearly settled on the basis of consent. As the Belfast agreement makes clear, all the parties accept, quote, legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status. And as all recent polls confirm, Northern Ireland remains freely and legitimately part of the United Kingdom. So there is no ambiguity about the constitutional position. Naturally as conservatives that's something that the Prime Minister and I welcome. We believe in the United Kingdom, we want it to endure and we will never be neutral in expressing our support for it. We believe that together we are the greater than some of all our parts. Of course should the view of the people of Northern Ireland change, the UK government is committed through the agreement and constitutional legislation to give effect to their democratic wishes. The constitutional future is entirely a matter for the people of Northern Ireland to decide. And the same is true about how the devolved institutions themselves might evolve. I hope shortly to publish a consultation paper covering a number of areas which might be covered by legislation in the current parliament. These include the size of the assembly, the length of assembly terms and ending dual mandates. We will also be asking whether it's desirable in principle for the institutions to move to a more normal system of government and opposition. And if so, how this might be achieved. As former T-shirt Bertie Hernd said in 2008, there will come a time when that system will suffer because there is no natural opposition. There will come a time where people will say you need an opposition, you need an us and them. Both the Prime Minister and I have said that we would like to see this happen over time. But we are clear that any changes must first command widespread support across the community and be consistent with inclusive government at the heart of the agreement. Northern Ireland's constitutional political stability provides us with an opportunity to move on beyond the politics of the peace process to the issues that really matter to people in their daily lives. We need to focus on the future rather than remain caught in the politics of the past. We need to move from the politics of identity to the politics of delivery. Party politics in Northern Ireland needs to move into the mainstream to focus on predominantly economic and social concerns as they do in Great Britain and here in the Republic of Ireland. How in Northern Ireland do we tackle division and sectarianism that comes at such a high economic and social cost? How against the background of the crisis and the eurozone do we generate wealth, promote jobs, create the wealth that pays for our public services? How do we build a welfare system that is fair to taxpayers, protects the vulnerable and yet rewards work and ends the cycle of poverty and benefits dependency that is far too common in society? These are the kinds of issues that people want to see their politicians addressing. Otherwise, there is a real danger that public confidence in the institutions will decline and voter turnout continue to fall. As the Prime Minister made clear in the Northern Ireland Assembly last year, there are some things that are matters for the UK government alone, some areas that are for the Northern Ireland executive and other issues where we can work together. On the economy, we are working very closely with the executive ministers to pursue our shared objective of ending Northern Ireland's over dependence on public spending and boosting the private sector. At the end of last year, we established a ministerial working group to examine in detail some of the practical issues surrounding the possible devolution of corporation tax. Work will continue through into the autumn before we can decide next steps. The executive itself has an impressive record of attracting new inward investment projects into Northern Ireland. Unemployment remains low and well below the UK national average that we are far from complacent and realise that much more needs to be done if we achieve our objective of rebalancing the economy. In other areas, local politicians face huge challenges and I want to touch briefly on one of them. It is profoundly disappointing that we are still awaiting publication of the cohesion, sharing and integration strategy from the executive. For all the progress in recent years, Northern Ireland remains at many levels a deeply divided society. For example, some 94% of children are educated separately, while separate provision has contributed to a state of affairs in which there are more than 85,000 empty school places. Over 90% of public housing is segregated. The number of so-called peace walls has actually increased since the 2006 National's Agreement. As I've acknowledged many times, given the history of Northern Ireland, this is not an easy issue. Overcoming the legacy of division will take time. Much of this is devolved, but it has to be a priority. A start has to be made and we will support the devolved administration when they have to take difficult decisions. So I welcome the local education ministers announcement only yesterday of a shared education advisory group. We cannot have a Northern Ireland in which everything is carved up on sectarian grounds. In the Prime Minister's words last summer, we need a shared future, not a shared out future. There is a real window of opportunity here. The coalition government has maintained public spending in Northern Ireland. In fact, it's 25% higher per head than in England. In the 2010 spending review, Northern Ireland faced reductions of only 6.9% over four years, as opposed to an average 19% across most of Whitehall. But against a backdrop of the continuing need to bring down the record deficit we inherited and unprecedented pressures on public finances across Europe, I cannot predict what future settlements will bring. So the executive does have a real incentive and a self-interest in getting on with it and I urge them to seize the opportunity. Chairman, after recent months we've witnessed some spectacularly successful events in Northern Ireland. I've already referred to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee visit. In addition we've had the Olympic torch relay, which exceptionally crossed the border to come here to Dublin. The Irish Open at Port Rush, the opening of the new Titanic signature building. The new visitor centre, Giant's Causeway, has also just opened. Next year, Derry, London Derry, or give it its new name, legendary, will be the first UK city of culture. Belfast is the second city in the UK for attracting foreign direct investment. And we've had some economic good news in the past few days with new orders for our largest company, Bombardier, that will boost local jobs. All of this has highlighted a positive new Northern Ireland that is moving forward. UK Government, working closely with the local executive, is determined to maintain that momentum. Nobody is under any illusions that we have a long way to go to build a Northern Ireland that is eased with itself. But with the constitutional and political stability we now enjoy, we have the opportunity to make a significant progress. And the relationship between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, so much strengthened in recent years, will be important in delivering it. But today the UK Irish relationship goes way beyond Northern Ireland. And as the Prime Minister made clear when launching the joint statement of the Taoiseach in March, it's because of stability in Northern Ireland that our relationship has moved onto a whole new level. And the friendship between our two peoples and our two countries are at long last able to reach their fullest extent. Thank you very much.