Do we like David Bowie?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Real good (anti-racism calls, famine and AIDS fundraising) sits against 1976 fascism remarks he later disowned and an unresolved allegation from the early 70s.
David Jones was born in Brixton in 1947. His half-brother introduced him at 15 to rock and roll, jazz, Buddhism and Kerouac. He took the name Bowie in 1966, and Space Oddity in 1969 got a run on BBC moon landing coverage. Then came Ziggy, the Thin White Duke, Berlin, and Let's Dance in 1983.
For LGBTQ+ fans he's complicated. He told Melody Maker in 1972 that he was gay, told Playboy in 1976 that he was bisexual, and later called coming out as bisexual the “biggest mistake I ever made”. Ziggy was an androgynous alien rock star who became a gay icon, but the man himself kept backpedalling. That stings a bit if you're bi.
The ugly bit is 1976. He told a Stockholm press conference that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader, and told Playboy he believed in fascism. Nazi memorabilia was found in his luggage at the Polish border, and a Nazi salute was alleged at Victoria Station, which his camp disputed. By 1980 he told NME he'd been “out of my mind totally, completely crazed”, and the Thin White Duke was retired in 1977.
He spent the rest of his career on the other side of it. On MTV in 1983 he turned the interview on VJ Mark Goodman and asked why so few Black artists were played. He called it a “solid enterprise” but was blunt about who was missing. That's a famous act of using his platform for other people.
Now the allegation. A woman told Thrillist in 2015 that she had a sexual relationship with Bowie in the early 1970s when she was about 15, which she alleged happened in California, where the age of consent was 18. The article we read reports no response from Bowie or his representatives, and he was never charged. Separately, a woman accused him in 1987 of forcing himself on her. He denied it, calling it a “ploy for attention”, and a grand jury declined to indict.
So where do we land? On harm, the 1976 comments are a real stain, but he disowned them and showed in action he'd changed. On nice, the record is mostly good, though the early-70s allegation is serious and untested, and we've found no reply from him. Nothing recent has changed that picture, and the Bowie80 celebrations will keep him in the spotlight through 2027.