David Bowie: legendary rock star dies of cancer aged 69 – latest updates

Kendrick Lamar, whose album To Pimp A Butterfly was said to have influenced Blackstar, has been tweeting about Bowie’s death.

If people are on the look out for a good Bowie-themed film to watch you could to worse than C.R.A.Z.Y from 2005:

More from Beckenham and Hannah Ellis Petersen, who reports on a shrine that’s been set up:

A small shrine has been set up in the bandstand in the Beckenham recreation park where Bowie staged his Arts Lab festival in August 1969, performing alongside Tony Visconti. The park is going to be kept open all night so fans can come pay their tributes.

Standing on the Beckenham park bandstand next to the Bowie shrine, local Nigel Goodge said: “I came here because it feels nice to stand on the spot where he played when he was just 22, way back in 1969. I was 14 when I saw him do Starman on Top of the Pops – my dad was horrified but it was hugely influential on me. He was this ordinary guy filled with an extraordinary creative spirit. I’ve been reeling since I heard the news this morning, I’m still in shock. But in Bowie style, he went out with a great performance. And we are so incredibly proud that Beckenham, us, has a place in the Bowie story. That such an influential giant of a man started out in this dull suburban town.”

Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker has been talking to BBC 6 Music about the impact Bowie had on young people around the world who were inspired by his do-what-you-like, wear-what-you-like approach to life.

A picture from Brixton Academy, which is paying tribute to Bowie, and a dispatch from Beckenham, where Hannah Ellis-Petersen reports:

Rows of flowers were also laid in tribute by fans in Beckenham, outside the restaurant which was once home to the Three Tuns pub. It was here, in 1969 and before the release of Space Oddity, that Bowie would play most Sunday nights, hosting a night that eventually became the Beckenham Arts Lab.

Lin Davis, 62, who came to lay flowers at the former pub, recalled coming every Sunday to watch Bowie play when she was 15.

‘In the summer of 1969 we would come to the Arts Lab every Sunday night,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t famous at all then and often it would be David Bowie taking the money on the door himself. I’ll always remember, he once stood on my foot and I never wanted to wash the shoe. He had the most gorgeous golden curls at that time, he was like an Adonis and we all fancied him. It was an open mike night so lots of people would play – it was all part of a scene he was trying to create here in Beckenham to emulate what what was happening in New York. It’s hard to believe now but in 1969 there was such a buzz in Beckenham.’ She added: ‘Bowie’s in my blood. I went to go and see the Bowie show at the V&A six times.’

Jessica Glenza is en route to speak to people in New York who have gathered by Bowie’s Soho residence. More on that shortly.

Here’s an extended tribute from Brian Eno, who previously tweeted his condolences. It is very touching indeed.

Lots of David Bowie’s former band mates are commenting now. Here are a few and a classic anecdote from Robert Fripp who famously came up with the guitar line for Heroes. He describes himself as “a little guitarist from Dorset,” which doesn’t quite cover it.

Tributes are pouring in from around the world with El Pais saying Bowie was the world’s most eclectic pop star; meanwhile Yoko Ono has released this statement:

John and David respected each other. They were well matched in intellect and talent. As John and I had very few friends we felt David was as close as family.

After John died David was always there for Sean and me. When Sean was at boarding school in Switzerland David would pick him up and take him on trips to museums and let Sean hang out at his recording studio in Geneva.

For Sean this is losing another father figure. It will be hard for him, I know. But we have some sweet memories which will stay with us forever.

yoko ono lennon

Bowie’s jukebox musical, Lazarus, is currently playing in New York. It’s directed by Ivo van Hove and co-written by Enda Walsh, and our own Alexis Soloski struggled with it but ultimately found the talent on stage pulled it through:

At moments apposite or otherwise, the band strike up a Bowie song, familiar, obscure or brand new. There’s a synthpop version of The Man Who Sold the World, an anguished take on Changes, a prettily stripped down “Heroes”. These are inarguably marvellous songs, but few of them are integrated into the script, which can give the play the feeling of a downbeat and occasionally alarming karaoke party. Songs that would seem to be relevant, such as Starman or Rock’n’Roll Suicide, are ignored in favour of All the Young Dudes and This Is Not America.

This should be a terrible show. It seems unlikely that it is what its collaborators imagined, and what they have created makes perilously little sense. But those collaborators are so extravagantly talented and the performers undertake what’s asked of them – writhing lasciviously against a refrigerator, slipping and sliding in a pool of milk, popping dozens of black balloons – with such dedication and verve that it’s nearly impossible not to be persuaded and baffled and at least a little thrilled.

As previously mentioned a lot of people have been dissecting Bowie’s lyrics from Blackstar to see if he was offering clues about his illness. The album is looking like it could dominate the charts after Bowie’s death and would see - arguably - his most challenging work find its way into millions of people’s record collections. Here are Alexis Petridis’s opening remarks in his lead album review for Blackstar:

As he reaches his 69th birthday, David Bowie finds himself in a rarefied position, even by the standards of the rock aristocracy. He does not give interviews, make himself available to promote new releases, or explain himself in any way. He does not tour the world playing his hits. In fact, he doesn’t do anything that rock stars are supposed to do. It’s behaviour that theoretically means a one-way ticket to oblivion, with no one but diehard fans for company. But since his re-emergence from a decade-long sabbatical with 2013’s The Next Day, it’s proved a quite astonishing recipe for success. Bowie’s scant public pronouncements are treated as hugely significant. His releases are pored over in a way they haven’t been since the days when his army of devotees would turn up at Victoria station to greet him off the boat train, a state of affairs abetted by the fact that, since his return, Bowie has reverted to writing the kind of elusive, elliptical lyrics that were once his stock in trade. Dense with mysterious references, the words on The Next Day and its follow-up alike have far more in common with the impenetrable mass of signifiers that made up Station to Station’s title track than, say, the Dad-misses-you-write-soon message to his adult son of 2002’s Everyone Says Hi.

On his blog, Squeeze co-founder Chris Difford has recounted Bowie’s huge influence on himself, another south Londoner with an urge to write songs.

A few years ago i received some tapes recorded in 1971 by a friend of mine who lived down the block from me – these were my first demos. When I listen to them now I can hear how much I leant on David Bowie’s inspiration, even the voice, I was South London with a slight dash of Anthony Newley.

David Bowie gave the me the lyrically voice that started me on my way. I saw Bowie play at Eltham Collage in 1972, the audience were sat on the floor and during the show he came out and shared his guitar with us, we reached out strumming at his blue 12 string.

After the show i walked home with a friend, whatever Bowie had i wanted some too, but like his guitar it all seemed out of reach. One afternoon i stood outside his house in Beckenham, just to see him and to have a chance maybe to say hello. It was a wasted journey, he never showed up, maybe we had the wrong house.

Elsewhere we’re running the thoughts of artist Grayson Perry, who stresses the impact of Bowie in allowing men and boys of the 1970s to feel they could dress flamboyantly.

At exactly the same time I was experimenting with dressing up, and it felt like Bowie was giving me and a whole generation of kids permission to explore the dressing-up box. The sheer danger of it was what made it extraordinary. I would call it social bungee jumping. Terrifying but thrilling.

Bowie made a great woman – later on, I remember seeing him in the video for Boys Keep Swinging. He looked amazing with long red hair, lipstick and high cheekbones. As a young proto-transvestite I felt very jealous. All I wanted to do at that point was look like a pretty girl and of course Bowie managed it effortlessly.

Another lovely contribution from our Guardian Witness callout – a 1970s Bowie-themed bedroom.

From another shrine: a video of people leaving tributes in Heddon Street, central London, where the famous Ziggy Stardust album cover shoot took place.

Our research team have uncovered this gem from our archives: a 1982 review by the estimable Nancy Banks-Smith of Bowie starring in a BBC adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, possibly the only time in print he was compared to George Formby (the role involved playing a banjo).

She wrote:

David Bowie seems like a nice boy, though people kept calling him ugly and fat (one wonders if Brecht had someone rather different in mind). He has a powerful presence, a voice sandpapered perfectly flat, and he made everyone else look as if they were acting.

You can even watch the complete production.

Brett Anderson of Suede, a singer himself not averse to a touch of androgyny or dressing up, has paid this tribute to David Bowie:

I had the pleasure of meeting David several times and he was always so charming and warm. To say he was a great artist is a lumpen understatement; his songs became the furniture of mine and so many people’s lives and helped write the book of pop music itself. We are all far poorer without him.

Here’s a video tribute to David Bowie by various Guardian culture and music writers. I particularly appreciate the confession by Michael Hann that, while growing up in the 1980s, it could be tricky to correlate the genius talked of in such hushed, reverential tones with the man in the raincoat and mini-mullet prancing around with Mick Jagger on Dancing in the Street. Very true.

Another space-related tribute, this time from the Twitter feed of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe.

The tributes – and media – are starting to mass at the Bowie mural in Brixton, south London, where he was born.

In not entirely unexpected news, Bowie’s newly-released final album looks set to go to number one. This from the Press Association:

David Bowie’s new album Blackstar has charged into the number one spot following news of his death.

The singer’s 25th studio album was released on Friday to coincide with his 69th birthday and had already taken an early lead.

Blackstar has combined sales of more than 43,000, which puts Bowie 25,000 ahead of his closest competitor, Elvis Presley, and almost guarantees a number one when the charts are announced on Friday, according to the Official Charts Company.

If it achieves the feat, Blackstar will be Bowie’s 10th chart-topping album.

A woman is comforted next to a book of condolences at the Groninger Museum in Groningen, Netherlands, which is currently showing items from the V&A’s Bowie exhibition. The museum is usually closed on Monday but opened specially.

Two more reasons why Bowie was such an innovator:

BowieNet and online music

As my colleague Keith Stuart recounts, Bowie not only set up his own internet service provider in 1998, he was the first major artist to distribute a song online-only.

Bowie Bonds

In a hugely innovative 1997 scheme, Bowie sold the rights to future royalties to his songs in the form of securitised bonds. The FT has more here.

Here’s David Cameron giving his tribute to David Bowie. Asked for a favourite track he slightly wimps out and opts for a whole album – Hunky Dory. But to be fair Cameron is a politician who, as his Desert Island Discs appearance showed, has some grasp of and interest in popular music.

Further to my précis below of David Bowie’s film career, the far better-informed Peter Bradshaw has penned his own tribute of Bowie’s life in acting. Bradshaw notes:

Pop singers from Sinatra to Elvis to Madonna have dabbled in the movies, with varying results, but David Bowie always convinced his public that every role he accepted was an artistic decision and an artistic experiment, governed by his own idealism.

Finally, the story you’ve all been waiting for, via Guardian Witness and the efforts of my colleague, Elena Cresci: how a Guardian reader’s mother cooked David Bowie a Fray Bentos pie in 1969. And he didn’t eat it. This collection of photos might help overseas readers understand why perhaps he didn’t.

As several people have pointed out on social media, Bowie’s acting career was strictly a sideline, and yet he still worked with a pretty impressive range of directors. These included Martin Scorcese (The Last Temptation of Christ), Nagisa Oshima (Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence), Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth), David Lynch (Twin Peaks), Julian Schnabel (Basquiat), Jim Henson (Labyrinth), and Tony Scott (The Hunger).

Oh yes, and he was in Spongebob Squarepants.

Time for some more music from the great man. As mentioned below, for all the (merited) attention on some of Bowie’s other periods, I’ve got a huge soft spot for his brief, unexpected and astonishing mid-70s foray into soul. Here’s Fame, part-written by none other than John Lennon.

The Royal Albert Hall (or more accurately someone working there) has tweeted to say they believe it was the venue for Bowie’s last-ever UK live appearance, in May 2006, when he sang guest vocals on Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb during a show by the band’s David Gilmour.

Here’s a video of the song.

Some more great submissions to our Guardian Witness page for readers’ memories of Bowie.

Yet another Bowie shrine – floral tributes left beneath the plaque in Heddon Street, the small central London road where the famous cover shot for the Ziggy Stardust album was taken in 1972.

The latest in today’s series of unusual co-habitués of a live blog panel: Nato’s secretary general and the Rolling Stones.

Our Guardian Witness page for your memories and thoughts is gathering some very touching personal stories about what David Bowie meant to people.

We mentioned below (see here) how on re-listening to Bowie’s final single, Lazarus, after his death the lyrics hinted strongly at his imminent demise. My colleague Tim Jonze has revisited Blackstar, the album from which the song comes, to assess if the singer was saying goodbye.

My colleague David Taylor has directed me to a website which chronicles the set lists of concerts. For David Bowie, it spans 118 pages from a July 1966 gig at the Lion Hotel in Warrington to his final appearance, in New York in November 2006.

David (Taylor) says news of Bowie’s death sent him reminiscing about this 1983 show he attended with an older cousin.

Among his minor achievements, Bowie also produced possibly the most stylish police mugshot ever taken, after his arrest on drug-related charges in New York state in 1976.

Another slightly less obvious tribute, from the Arsenal manager, Arsène Wenger.

If you’ve not yet seen it, here is our main news story about Bowie’s death.

The tributes are growing at the David Bowie mural in Brixton, south London.

Bowie played at the Glastonbury festival twice, with something of a gap – in 1971 and then in 2000. The founder of the festival, Michael Eavis, told the BBC about the first appearance:

He had lovely, long, flowing hair, a right hippie-looking lad. Fantastically beautiful he looked, actually.

Nobody knew who he was, he played at 4 in the morning, at sunrise, songs we’d never heard before.

He’s one of the three greatest in the world, ever – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and David Bowie. There’s no one else even close.

Eavis said the festival organisers had tried to book the star again after 2000, but were told to “stop ringing” several years ago because he had retired from performing.

Eavis’s daughter, Emily, who co-runs the festival, paid her tribute:

A photo of Bowie from 1977.

Here’s a lovely piece from Suzanne Moore about the sheer immensity and breadth of what David Bowie could mean to you growing up.

From a small town and what my teachers called “a broken home” Bowie would guide us. We could give up trying to be normal now that we entrusted ourselves to him. He sang of space and drugs and floating above the world. He could be so tender (Letter to Hermione) and then swagger like a brute. He was tapped right into something mystical that we recognised but could not grasp as we were too busy preening and dancing and wanting.

But all the time he was passing on secret knowledge. I would learn about Burroughs, Kemp, Crowley, Berlin, Sakamoto, Roeg and so many others through him. I would have my first proper boyfriend because of him – working-class lads started wearing eyeliner and nail varnish because he did, which made them vaguely interesting.

Another lovely tribute in Brixton, where Bowie was born, from the local Ritzy cinema.

Now this is a tribute:

Our Guardian Witness callout for your David Bowie memories is getting some fantastic contributions. Did you know Bowie was a big fan of A Country Practice? Well, you do now.

The BBC broadcaster Bob Harris – who has met more or less everyone in the rock music world – has shared some reminiscences of Bowie on BBC Radio 5 Live. I have taken the transcribed quotes from the BBC website’s excellent rolling update of Bowie tributes.

I first met David in 1967. He was part of a mixed media group called Feathers. David was very into his mime expression at that moment. He was hugely influenced singing-wise by Anthony Newley...

There’s something quintessentially English about his music as well, isn’t there, particularly the early days. You know that some artists are going to be very, very special indeed and you just knew that about David. He had a great sense of PR as well. He knew how to get himself noticed.

But he could back it up with just sensational music. I think one of the moments that propelled him – that made possible the phenomenal success that he had – also was his partnership with Mick Ronson. Mick was the rock ‘n’ roll expression of the ideas David had in his head.

A tribute from another close Bowie collaborator, Iggy Pop. Bowie co-produced the album Raw Power by Pop’s band, The Stooges, before helping resurrect Pop’s career by co-writing and co-producing his solo albums The Idiot and Lust for Life.

The contributions are coming in on our Guardian Witness page for your thoughts and memories about Bowie.

These are being shared a fair bit on Twitter – the isolated vocal tracks to two of Bowie’s most celebrated songs, Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust. A fantastic listen, both of them.

Our obituary is now up. You can read it in full here. This is an extract:

Until the last, David Bowie, who has died of cancer, was still capable of springing surprises. His latest album Blackstar appeared on his 69th birthday on 8 January, and proved that his gift for making dramatic statements as well as challenging, disturbing music hadn’t deserted him.

Throughout the 1970s, Bowie was a trailblazer of musical trends and pop fashion. Having been a late-60s mime and cabaret entertainer, he evolved into a singer-songwriter, a pioneer of glam-rock, then veered into what he called “plastic soul”, before moving to Berlin to create innovative electronic music.

In subsequent decades his influence became less pervasive, but he remained creatively restless and constantly innovative across a variety of media. His capacity for mixing brilliant changes of sound and image underpinned by a genuine intellectual curiosity is rivalled by few in pop history. Blackstar was proof that this curiosity had not diminished in his later career.

The best David Bowie anecdote thus far spotted today on Twitter.

Even football clubs are paying tribute.

Yet another place of pilgrimage is Bowie’s former home in Berlin.

Bowie did not leave Beckenham the moment he achieved fame. This wonderful 1971 photo shows the singer at his home there, Haddon Hall.

The now-demolished Victorian pile was where Bowie wrote songs for The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust.

There are many places of pilgrimage for Bowie fans today. As well as Brixton and New York there is Beckenham, the south-east London suburb where he grew up from the age of six. The first floral tributes have already been laid outside what was the Three Tuns pub – now a branch of the pizza chain Zizzi – where the singer set up the self-styled Beckenham Arts Lab in the late 1960s.

By coincidence, two days ago the BBC ran an interview with Bowie’s former landlady and lover in Beckenham, Mary Finnigan.

Another set of tributes from people who rarely feature together in a story, Madonna and Jeremy Corbyn.

The leader of the Labour party told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

As soon as I heard of his death, very, very sad, Life On Mars comes flowing back into my mind. Wonderful song, wonderful guy.

This blog is so far a bit short on music. Here’s Heroes, from 1977, chosen as it’s one of the David Bowie tracks many people might have been exposed to recently, given its heavy use during the 2012 London Olympics. And it’s a fantastic song, featuring Robert Fripp’s famous sustained guitar motif.

In 2009 the Letters of Note website ran a 1967 letter written by the then-20-year-old Bowie in response to his first piece of fan mail from the US, via a 14-year-old in New Mexico. Bowie wrote:

In answer to your questions, my real name is David Jones and I don’t have to tell you why I changed it. “Nobody’s going to make a monkey out of you,” said my manager. My birthday is January 8th and I guess I’m 5’10”. There is a Fan Club here in England, but if things go well in the States then we’ll have one there I suppose. It’s a little early to even think about it.

I hope one day to get to America. My manager tells me lots about it as he has been there many times with other acts he manages.

Hundreds of people on Twitter are sharing this animated montage of the many looks and incarnations of David Bowie.

It’s based on these pictures by the illustrator Helen Green.

Tributes have come in from two close collaborators of Bowie, Tony Visconti and Brian Eno.

Visconti, who produced a series of Bowie’s albums, including Young Americans and his seminal ‘Berlin trilogy’ of Low, Heroes and Lodger, wrote this on his Facebook page:

He always did what he wanted to do. And he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was no different from his life – a work of art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be. I wasn’t, however, prepared for it. He was an extraordinary man, full of love and life. He will always be with us. For now, it is appropriate to cry.

Eno, who collaborated with Bowie on the Berlin albums, was equally heartfelt if more brief.

UPDATE 12.39pm: We have been told @dark_shark is not an official Twitter account of Brian Eno, but an account that follows news about him. So the above tribute is from that account, not from Eno himself.

Tony Blair, who once harboured his own ambitions of a career in the music industry, has released a statement in tribute:

I am so sorry to hear the news of David Bowie’s death. I was a huge fan. From the time I saw his Ziggy Stardust concert as a student, I thought he was a brilliant artist and an exciting and interesting human being.

It was a great privilege when I got to meet him later in life. My thoughts are with his family and friends. He will be deeply mourned.

My colleagues on the photo desk have compiled this collection of some of the more famous images of Bowie.

Also worth a read is this profile of the singer we ran just over a week ago, to coincide with the release of what was to be his final album, Blackstar.

Bowie was also an occasional actor, even if his renown in that field was arguably more mixed than as a musician. Here he is in perhaps his greatest film role, in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth.

It’s not just the English-speaking world who are reeling from the news.

Yet more tributes, this time featuring a Briton actually in space (rather than composing era-defining songs about it), and a more modern musical self-reinventer.

You could ask 100 people and get 100 different answers, but in 2014 our music website took on the onerous task of condensing Bowie’s music for our “10 of the best” series. It includes All the Young Dudes, which the singer famously gave to Mott the Hoople, one of a series of fellow acts whose careers he revived.

It also features Young Americans, from Bowie’s sometimes less focused-on but utterly remarkable “plastic soul” (as he called it) period.

On our politics live blog, my colleague Andrew Sparrow has rounded up various UK politicians’ reactions to the death.

Yet more tributes, this time from two actors and an archbishop.

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he too was a fan of the singer:

I’m very, very saddened to hear of his death. I remember sitting listening to his songs endlessly in the ‘70s particularly and always really relishing what he was, what he did, the impact he had. Extraordinary person.

Can we just get one thing straight before we go on? It’s pronounced Bowie as in “oh”, not as in “ow”. There’s plenty of footage of him saying his own name, as here. This wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d remained David Jones, but the singer changed his name to avoid being confused with the newly famous Davy Jones of the Monkees.

Bowie was born on 8 January 1947, in Brixton, south London. A mural of the musician in his Ziggy Stardust guise was unveiled in central Brixton in 2013.

Some tributes have already begun to appear at the mural.

The tributes are coming thick and fast.

Three days ago, Bowie’s official YouTube channel released the video to a song from his new album, Blackstar. It is called Lazarus – the biblical character who was raised from the dead – and begins with Bowie, lying prone and bandaged in a hospital bed, singing, “Look up here, I’m in heaven.”

The singer was such an enigmatic and perennially reinventing figure that the first reaction of some people was to hope the news of his death was not true. Reuters was quick to confirm that this was definitely not the case. “It’s not a hoax,” Steve Martin, from Bowie’s publicity company, told the news agency.

This file photo from 2005 shows Bowie with his wife of 23 years, Iman.

Much of social media right now (at least in the anglophonic world) is devoted to this one piece of news. And the tributes could hardly be more varied. Here are two of the newer ones, from 80s pop star-turned torch song exponent Marc Almond, and the EU’s trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrőm.

This is Peter Walker in London taking over from Martin, with the latest reaction to the death of David Bowie.

There will be endless tributes today, many of which will stress the sheer range of Bowie’s incarnations, and career stages. As one way to emphasise this, let’s remember that when, in 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London staged an exhibition charting the visual scope of his career, including some of his most famous outfits, it became the museum’s fastest-selling attraction ever.

Bowie will be remembered for any number of looks and styles in his 50 years in the music business. We’ve already posted a couple of pictures from his 70s and 80s styles.

Here are some more to remember him by.

This picture below is from 1969. Our archive caption says he is called ‘David Robert Jones, but he is also known as David Bowie’ and that he is a musician, actor and record producer.

It’s an eclectic mix of tributes coming in, from the broadcaster Jon Snow to the prime minister, David Cameron, who said on Twitter how he grew up listening to the great man.

The singer had had cancer for 18 months, according to the official Twitter confirmation of his death.

He had released a new album, Blackstar, only last week, which was hailed as a return to form by the Guardian’s rock critic Alexis Pretidis. His review described it as “ambiguous and spellbinding”.

Here is the official Twitter confirmation of David Bowie’s death. There are now dozens of tributes on social media.

We have just launched a news story here but the tributes are already starting to be made to someone who changed the face of music.

Reports are coming in that David Bowie, the rock star whose career has spanned six decades, has died.

The death of the British musician, whose real name was David Jones, was confirmed on his son Duncan Jones’s Twitter account.

More to follow.