David Bowie – Space Oddity

David Bowie (born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947 in Brixton, London) is an iconic english rock musician. Active in five decades of popular music and frequently reinventing his music and image, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He has been cited as an influence by many musicians and is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth of his work.

As a multi-instrumentalist, he is famous for playing the guitar, piano and saxophone; but also plays the harmonica, drums, cello, marimba, bass guitar, koto, and stylophone. He rose to fame with the heady 1969 folk rock single Space Oddity and became a glam rock icon with the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972). Subsequent albums have explored blue-eyed soul, electronica and new wave, often predating these genres’ popularity or even the point at which they were defined as genres.

Bowie is one of the most influential rock musicians from the 1970s to the present. He has sold an estimated 136 million albums in his career and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Due to his wide spread into different genres, it could be said that he influences most modern bands at least on an indirect level (i.e. Bowie influenced a band who influenced them).