David Bowie Changes

In the spring of 1971, when David Bowie wrote the now classic line ‘Turn and face the strange’, he created a mission statement for the next decade of his career.

At the age of 24, seven years into that career, three albums and ‘a million dead end streets’ behind him, Bowie had been brooding on the sidelines as friendly rivals Marc Bolan and Elton John started to find stardom. Determined not to be left behind, he pooled his creative strengths and began writing songs that were “more immediate”.

“In the early seventies it really started to all come together for me as to what it was that I liked doing,” Bowie told me in 2003. “After I came back from my first trip to America, I had a new perception of songwriting, and it