David Bowie: Finding Fame (2019) on Netflix

NR20191h 34mDocumentary Music

Before Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie was a young singer still billed as David Jones. Collaborators and girlfriends recall his bands, his auditions and the rejection of his mid-1960s years.

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Netflix4.3/5
IMDb7.2/10926 votes
Rotten Tomatoes100%

Plot summary

David Bowie spends the years before Ziggy Stardust trying to make it, changing his name from David Jones and moving through one band after another. Bandmates, friends, a cousin and two former girlfriends describe those days, and Bowie himself speaks in archive interviews. A member of The Lower Third remembers the audition the group played for the BBC in 1965: Out of Sight, Baby That's a Promise and Chim Chim Cher-ee. The panel's report called the singer out of tune and the band ordinary. Before that came the King Bees, whose first single, Liza Jane, was a flop.

Cast

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about David Bowie: Finding Fame (2019)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

Bowie's mismatched eyes came from a punch by his childhood friend and bandmate George Underwood: in 1962 Underwood was angry that Bowie sabotaged a date with a girl they both fancied and then bragged about his "conquest on a bus" with her, so he hit him.
Bowie's debut of his Ziggy Stardust character, on the ITV series Lift Off with Ayshea, was long thought erased; a fan's recording was found, and the degraded tape had to be gradually "baked" in a special apparatus before it could be restored for playback.
Bowie said he wrote "Starman" in about 15 minutes, using every cliched phrase he could think of to do with star men and people in space, and "let the children boogie", then shoving it in: "three minutes and on a nice tune".
The BBC's Mark Savage called Bowie's 1972 Top of the Pops performance of "Starman" a watershed moment in musical history: when Bowie put his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson, it shocked viewers and ushered in an era of glamor and androgyny.
British television used "Space Oddity" as background music for the 1969 moon landing, and Bowie said he was overjoyed they did, joking that "nobody had the heart to tell them: Um, but he gets stranded in space".
A demo of "Space Oddity" had different lyrics from the released version: "blast-off" instead of "lift-off", and "Can I please get back inside now, if I may?" replacing "I'm floating in a most peculiar way".
Among the film's interviewees was Lindsay Kemp, and it turned out to be his last interview: he was recorded just ten days before he died.