David Bowie

It's been 50 years since Bowie performed as his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The film, Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, has recently been reissued. Originally broadcast in 2002.

It's been more than 40 years since David Bowie created the gender-bending Ziggy Stardust and released the now-classic album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. With it, Bowie helped invent glam-rock. In conversation with Fresh Air's Terry Gross from 2002, Bowie was in the midst of making the following year's Reality, and here talks about leaving characters in his songs, his love of Tibetan horns, and his childhood desire to write musicals and play saxophone in Little Richard's band.

In his new memoir, The Uncool, Crowe reflects on his adventures and misadventures as a teenage music journalist. He also writes about what life was like in his family, and how he convinced his parents to allow him to go on the road before he'd even graduated high school.

The icon's new album plays like a collection of discreet singles, with each performed in a different style, genre and mood. In this way, the album isn't a return to form, in part because David Bowie never took one form to begin with.

His new book is Picture This: Debby Harry and Blondie. Rock photographed many musicians before they were famous. The British-born photographer took pictures of Lou Reed, Brian Eno and Ziggy Stardust (aka David Bowie) when he was just a cult figure in London. His book Blood and Glitter is about the Glam Rock era.