Welcome to my weekly roundup of Bowie news. There were many stories this week about the Labyrinth 40th Anniversary trailer, which struck me as odd, as they amounted to coverage of what is essentially an advertisement. There were also multiple stories about St. Vincent’s appearance on the Colbert show. In addition, a number of articles covered the death of Anthony Price, most of which mentioned Bowie, even though Bowie was not central to that story. There were also several pieces marking the anniversary week of the release of Hunky Dory, as well as renewed attention to Blackstar as we approach the album’s 10th anniversary. Down in the “week in the blog” section, you can find links to two other shows I was on, a segment of Emm Gryner’s “Daddy Stardust” segment, as well as the Intagify podcast, in both cases talking about Bowie, as well as this week’s featured interview, with none other than Dr. Leah Kardos. As usual, there was much more, too. Read on for summaries of these and many other Bowie-related stories posted this past week, and click on the story names to link to the original articles.

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NEWS

New Trailer for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth 40th Anniversary Re-Release. A newly released trailer announces the 40th-anniversary theatrical return of Labyrinth, spotlighting Bowie’s enduring role as the Goblin King and reaffirming the film’s lasting cultural presence built around his performance.

Berklee Bowie Show announced. The Berklee Performance Center has announced that the fifth installment of its “Music and Meaning in the Works of David Bowie” concert series will take place on Tuesday, May 5, 2026 at 8:00 PM. Organizers also note that this edition of the program will include several notable changes to the format. I attended this show last year and interviewed some of the show’s participating musicians— it’s a fantastic experience. See this if you can get to Boston, MA on the 5th!

Dublin Bowie Festival Unveils Logo. The Dublin Bowie Festival has unveiled its 2026 logo by CartoonBowie and announced that its 11th edition will run from February 24 to March 1, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Station to Station and the 10th anniversary of Blackstar, with subscribers promised an imminent email about a major announcement and presale details.

Mike Garson Presenting Bowie Tribute Shows in 2026. I posted this news last week based on social media, but this links to a story with more details.

St. Vincent Covers David Bowie’s “Young Americans” on Colbert. St. Vincent opened Stephen Colbert’s new segment “Under the Covers” with a performance of Bowie’s “Young Americans,” discussing her history with the song and the artists she hopes might one day reinterpret her own music. Will this be “cover of the week?” Come back tomorrow to find out, but meanwhile this story links to the video of her performance.

RIP Anthony Price. Antony Price, the influential British designer who shaped the visual identities of Roxy Music, David Bowie, and Duran Duran, has died at 80. Considered a visionary “image maker,” he blended fashion, music, and theater to create hyper-glamorous, technically innovative designs that became integral to rock’s most iconic looks.

Ten Years a Starman. A Wexford Arts Centre event marking ten years since Bowie’s death brings local musicians together to perform songs spanning his catalogue, underscoring his continued influence and reputation as a visionary artist.

King George’s Hall to be refurbished. Local officials approved additional funding to restore King George’s Hall, a historic venue that once hosted Bowie, underscoring the effort to preserve a building tied to his early performance history.

THE LIVE AID MUSICAL announces major UK & Ireland Tour. A newly announced UK and Ireland tour of Just For One Day highlights how the Live Aid stage musical tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 1985 concerts using songs by artists who performed that day, including Bowie, whose set remains one of Live Aid’s defining moments.

These Tracks Make Us All Heroes. A creative industry playlist feature highlights Bowie’s “Heroes” as a track celebrated for its sense of possibility and everyday heroism, showing how his work continues to inspire directors and music supervisors who connect the song’s optimism to their own lives and creative communities.

Odeon Richmond’s Glowing Celebration Of David Bowie’s Enduring Spirit. A Melbourne festival called 5 Daze Of Bowie gathers music, artwork, memorabilia, and live performances to honor Bowie’s legacy on the tenth anniversary of his death, including a Blackstar listening event on his birthday and exhibitions tied to his long relationship with Australian fans.

Bowie among most collected artists on vinyl for 2025. Bowie remains one of the most collected artists of 2025 on Discogs, appearing alongside legacy acts like the Beatles and Pink Floyd in a year-end review that highlights how strongly fans continue to seek out and preserve his work on vinyl.

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REFLECTIONS

The story of Hunky Dory. A retrospective on Hunky Dory describes it as the album where Bowie first fully became the artist he would remain for the rest of his career, laying the musical and thematic groundwork that shaped everything from Ziggy Stardust to Blackstar.

How Hunky Dory rebooted Bowie’s career. Hunky Dory is described as the moment Bowie moved from a struggling hopeful to an artist of real stature, with collaborators and producers recalling how his sharpened songwriting, new confidence, and the chemistry of the band transformed expectations and laid the foundation for the breakthrough that followed.

Bowie Gathered The Spiders For Hunky Dory. Bowie assembled Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder, Mick Woodmansey, and Rick Wakeman at Trident Studios to record Hunky Dory, a melodic shift from his earlier hard-rock sound that initially sold poorly due to weak promotion but later became regarded as one of his greatest albums after the success of Ziggy Stardust.

How Bowie’s death became his last great work. This is a paywalled article, which I usually don’t link to, but if you subscribe to The Telegraph and missed it when it first ran, you might want to take a look.

How Bowie kept his 18-month cancer battle secret. Friends, collaborators, and promoters describe Bowie’s concealed battle with cancer during the making of Blackstar, the secrecy surrounding those sessions, and how his late-career performances and recordings—from Glastonbury 2000 to songs like “I Can’t Give Everything Away” and “Lazarus”—revealed both his resilience and his determination to shape his legacy until the end.

This is What Real Friendship Looks Like When Nobody is Watching. Bowie quietly supported Marc Bolan’s son Rolan for seventeen years after Bolan’s death, paying school fees and offering steady personal care without public recognition, revealing a private loyalty and generosity that deepened his legacy beyond music.

Brilliant Photos of Rock Gods and Pop Stars. Photographer Barrie Wentzell’s recollections of shooting rock icons from 1965–75 include a pivotal 1972 session with Bowie in Tony DeFries’ Regent Street office, where Bowie’s casual declaration that he was gay, paired with Wentzell’s striking images, helped generate the publicity that turned him into a star.

The David Bowie Album He Regretted Most. Bowie’s admission that he regretted his album Tonight, which he dismissed as his worst creation and a rushed commercial follow-up to Let’s Dance, illustrates the high artistic standards that shaped his legacy and continue to frame how his work is assessed a decade after his death.

Bowie Wrote This Hit Song in Response to Frank Sinatra’s Public Criticism. Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” grew out of his frustration with Paul Anka transforming the French song Bowie had attempted to adapt into “My Way” for Frank Sinatra, and Bowie responded by writing a grand, surreal counter-anthem that intentionally echoed the earlier song’s chord movement while subverting its triumphal tone.

Bowie’s final and most poignant single saw him turn his own death into art. Bowie’s song and video for “Lazarus” are portrayed as a deliberate, deeply self-aware artistic farewell created while he was dying, using the Blackstar album and the imagery of his final recordings to confront mortality, shape his legacy, and turn his own death into art.

Rockers and the Early Internet. A survey of how rock musicians first navigated the rise of the internet, the piece shows artists from the Rolling Stones to Prince experimenting with webcasts, downloads, and fan communities while also fearing piracy and loss of control, and highlights Bowie as a particular pioneer through BowieNet, the online release of Hours…, and his early warnings that the internet’s transformative power for music and society would be both exhilarating and dangerous.

Heartwarming tale behind David Bowie’s role in Christmas classic The Snowman. Bowie’s live-action introduction for the U.S. broadcast of The Snowman is revealed to have been filmed for no fee except a hand-knitted scarf he requested to give his son, a gesture later rediscovered by Duncan Jones and contrasted with Raymond Briggs’s bemused dislike of the segment, adding another layer to Bowie’s long cultural reach beyond music.

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PROFLIES

Toni Basil. Toni Basil, now 82, reflects on a lifetime in dance and showbusiness that stretches from teaching Elvis and choreographing counterculture films to working with Bowie, Tina Turner, and Talking Heads, creating the street-dance pioneers The Lockers, and unexpectedly becoming a global pop star with “Mickey,” all while still teaching, choreographing, and treating dance as the sustaining force in her life.

Paul Morley on his latest Bowie biography. Paul Morley’s upcoming appearance at the Oundle Festival of Literature highlights his new Bowie biography, which argues that Bowie’s constantly shifting music and ideas remain vital a decade after his death.

Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga expanded Rolling Stone’s “My Life in 10 Songs” into 15 selections, highlighting tracks from jazz, classic rock, alternative, R&B, and theatrical pop — including David Bowie — and explaining how each one shaped her artistic development, from inspiring her use of nonsensical lyrics to influencing the themes and sounds of her own work.

Southside Café. An interview with Southside Café highlights how the duo’s songwriter cites Bowie’s Ziggy-through-Scary Monsters era as a defining influence on his musical identity.

Tom Freston. Tom Freston’s memoir Unplugged traces his unconventional path from gap-year wanderer to MTV chief and beyond, including the moment he helped turn Bowie into an on-air ambassador for the fledgling channel by filming him for the “I want my MTV” campaign.

Tim Curry. Tim Curry marks the 50th anniversary of Rocky Horror by discussing the musical influences that shaped him, singling out Bowie as a transformative creative force whose polymath approach left a lasting imprint on his own artistic life.

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LISTS

18 famous rock star graves. A survey of notable rock star memorials highlights how fans continue to honor musicians across the UK and beyond, including Bowie, whose Brixton mural and Berlin memorial remain central pilgrimage sites.

10 great underrated and “lost” singles by the biggest artists. Bowie’s song “D.J.” is described as an overlooked Lodger single whose portrait of a self-defined performer gained new resonance with the rise of club culture.

The 25 best Classic Rock albums of 1979. The list of notable 1979 rock albums highlights Bowie’s Lodger as a key release of the year, placing him alongside major acts like AC/DC, Pink Floyd, and The Clash and underscoring his continued influence on the decade’s musical landscape.

Rock’s 21 greatest final tracks, ranked. A ranking of rock’s greatest album closers highlights Bowie’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” as one of the most powerful finales ever recorded, emphasizing how it completes the Ziggy narrative with dramatic emotional resolution.

25 times LGBTQ+ artists made music history. A survey of moments when LGBTQ+ artists reshaped music highlights Bowie among the innovators whose boundary-pushing work advanced both artistic experimentation and broader cultural conversations about identity and self-expression.

15 classic songs that didn’t make Christmas Number 1. A roundup of Christmas songs that never reached the UK Christmas Number 1 spot notes that Bowie’s duet with Bing Crosby, “Peace On Earth / Little Drummer Boy,” despite its enduring popularity, peaked only at Number 3 after RCA released it in 1982 as Bowie was preparing to leave the label.

3 Musicians That Had Serious Beef With David Bowie. David Bowie seldom engaged in public feuds, but three notable musicians took issue with him: Axl Rose, who once chased Bowie backstage after Bowie drunkenly flirted with his girlfriend; Gary Numan, who was devastated when Bowie allegedly had him removed from a 1980 TV performance for supposedly copying him; and Keith Richards, who dismissed most of Bowie’s work as “all posing” despite admiring “Changes.”

3 Songs From 1974 That Sent Rock History in Three Very Different Directions. Highlighting how rock was splintering into new forms in 1974, the piece argues that Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” on Diamond Dogs, with its raw riff and anti–guitar-hero attitude after the end of the Spiders From Mars, helped lay the groundwork for punk even as Rush’s “Working Man” and Queen’s “Killer Queen” pushed hard rock toward prog ambition and camp, operatic arena pop.

3 Rappers and Hip-Hop Artists Who Sampled Bowie. Three hip-hop artists—Public Enemy, J Dilla, and El-P—each drew on Bowie’s work by sampling songs like “Fame” and “Soul Love,” showing how Bowie’s music continues to shape new sounds across genres.

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FAR OUT MAGAZINE
Far Out magazine posts multiple Bowie-related stories every week. A handful seem to be products of real journalism and present new information. Some are opinion pieces or lists that reflect an original take on something having to do with Bowie. But most of these stories tend to be recycled anecdotes that have been kicking around for a while, usually given a title designed to leave some mystery for the reader to discover. Both because of their volume and inconsistent reliability as a news source, I list these separately from the others. This week featured:

(1) The band Dave Grohl and David Bowie agreed were the most important of the 1980s
(2) Five songs from 1975 that will be remembered in 100 years time
(3) The differing production styles of new and old David Bowie across 44 years

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THIS WEEK IN THIS BLOG

December 14: Last week’s news

December 15: David Bowie Cover of the Week: Alison Goldfrapp and Lorne Balfe cover “Heroes”
December 16: RIP Rob Reiner
December 17: Revisiting Rob Fleming’s first interview on the origins of KillerStar
December 17: Maggiore on Bowie on Daddy Stardust on Hunky Dory!

December 18: Maggiore on Bowie on Intangify!
December 19: Coming tomorrow: Leah Kardos on Bowie’s Legacy!

December 20: Dr. Leah Kardos on the Legacy of David Bowie

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And with that, “we’ve finished our news…”*
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*“I’ve heard the news today” is Bowie’s adaptation of the Beatles lyric, which is heard in “Young Americans.” **“We’ve finished our news” is a line from, “Oh You Pretty Things”