![]() Leaving a Cream concert after becoming dizzy, Terry changed. Unless he didn’t show up for a while, replaced instead by whispers about “seizures” that saw him gone for short periods.īefore returning, every bit as hip as before, smiling and larger than life. Terry came from worlds others didn’t know. All a magical mashup in the mind of young David Jones. Instead, the older half-brother became a true brother by taking the sensitive boy under his wing, opening up an even stranger world of American culture, jazz music, and beat poetry.Īlong with tales of adventures, fights, and exotic, magical experiences in distant, foreign lands.Įxpanding Rock ‘n Roll into potent new areas of art, entertainment, and mystery. Listening as David played tea-chest bass, saxophone, and ukulele to skiffle and, later, the rock ‘n roll that changed his world and then to his group, the ‘Konrads’. Watching as he won praise at his all-boys’ tech school as a performer and dancer, with teachers gushing about his “vividly artistic interpretations” and “astonishing” poise. Showbiz, self-promotion, glitter and glam, ambition over benevolence, seduction over sense. And he could easily have resented his ‘legitimate’ and molly-coddled brother.Įspecially when David’s doting dad took him to meet and greet stars backstage at Barnardo’s benefit gigs. One, a sister, long gone – given up for adoption – the other, Terry Burns, unwanted but always turning up.Īt least for the duration of the one shake of the dice life gave him.Ī decade older than David and discharged from the RAF, where he had been a keen boxer, Terry knew he wasn’t wanted. Still, labels of schizophrenia and lobotomies were handed out liberally then, projecting often unwarranted fear of hereditary illness into the future.ĭavid’s mother had two children before marrying David’s father. A third aunt was treated for ‘bad nerves’ by being given a lobotomy.Īnother of the sisters was Peggy, David’s mother, who also, apparently, exhibited signs of ‘borderline schizophrenia’. One died in her thirties, after years spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals.Ī second was a diagnosed schizophrenic. ![]() Three aunts on his mother’s side had suffered mental issues. I want to be a superhuman.’” And he was.Although Bowie’s father had risen to the cushy level of promotion’s officer at children’s charity Barnardo’s, David Jones belonged to a family of missing and half-missing people. “I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human,” he said. ![]() Those otherworldly eyes became, like so many things along the way, a part of who David Bowie was. Underwood went on to perform countless collaborations with Bowie, who reportedly thanked his friend for the injury. This tricks your brain into perceiving the iris as being darker as well. In fact, the same thing happened to my uncle, as seen in the photo below.īecause the pupil is fixed in the open position, the injured eye as a whole appears much darker than the unaffected eye. As story has it, the damage was caused by friend George Underwood, who socked Bowie during an adolescent show of bravado back in 1962. Just how much of this is true, we’ll never know, but trauma like this can certainly cause anisocoria if the muscles that contract the iris are damaged. The structures consist mostly of smooth muscle, which can contract and relax to control how much light enters the pupil, like a camera’s aperture. If you shine a light into your eyes, you’ll see this happen – the iris contracts, the pupil closes, and as a result, you aren’t blinded by the change in brightness.īowie’s left eye, however, was unable to react in this way. Your irises do more than lend color to your eyes. The left eye, rather, had a permanently dilated pupil, the mark of a condition known as anisocoria. His eyes weren’t different colors at all. Chances are, you’ve seen this before in a husky or house cat, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that Bowie’s ocular anomaly was something else entirely. Most people assume Bowie to be among the few with complete heterochromia, a rare condition by which a person (or, more commonly, a non-human animal) has different-colored irises. The left, a moody green – as if they too, hailed from different planets. Like most everything about the man who fell to Earth, Bowie’s eyes were at odds. ![]() But at the center of the final chapter, Bowie placed a feature which many of us have come to remember him by: his eyes. Backstar is, in many ways, the mark of a new Bowie, the latest incarnation of our favorite eccentric. As he disappeared into the night this week, he did so far from quietly, leaving behind his final opus. From Duke to Stardust, the many faces of David Bowie birthed movements in musical culture – each one different from the last. ![]()
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