David Bowie’s complicated relationship with ex-wife Angie
The rock and roll lifestyle is where most relationships go to die. When you have to choose between spending time with your significant other and your job, it gets a little complicated when you have to travel all over the world and play up rock and roll excess. Rock and roll relationships might not be the healthiest, but David Bowie found love on the road when working with his girlfriend, Angie.
When Bowie was first getting started in the late 1960s, he had met Angie through a record executive. Though they eventually married in 1970, Angie stated that it wasn’t for the purest of intentions at first (via Evening Standard): “We got married so that I could work. I didn’t think it would last, and David said, before we got married, ‘I’m not really in love with you’, and I thought that’s probably a good thing.”
Outside of music, Angie had already been getting her career off the ground in the arts, often appearing on talk shows and making music of her own. As the Starman’s career started going into orbit, things started to take a different turn.
Bowie was still smitten with his wife all through the ’70s, having Duncan Jones in 1971 and writing the song ‘The Prettiest Star’ about her. Though the song was written back when Bowie was honing his craft, it didn’t eventually get released until he was in full glam rock mode on Aladdin Sane.
Amid all of the mystery surrounding Bowie’s sexuality, Angie insisted that they had an open relationship. As the ’70s wore on, Angie had mentioned one instance when a certain rock icon got in between their marriage. When returning home one morning, Angie was warned by her assistant that Mick Jagger had spent the night and was sleeping in her bed. When she walked upstairs, she mentioned seeing the two legends in bed together, saying, “I walked into the bedroom, and David was there with all these pillows and duvets on top of him and on the other side of the bed was Mick’s leg sticking out”.
Despite Angie’s insistence that nothing too strange went on behind closed doors, she did claim that the Rolling Stones’ classic ‘Angie’ was in reference to this incident, almost as a way for Jagger to apologize to her. Though the ’70s were wild, it wasn’t a decade that David and Angie’s relationship would survive intact.
After a lengthy divorce procedure in 1980, Angie was awarded £500,000 and left her son in his father’s custody. Understandably, this caused an emotional fracture between Bowie and his old flame, calling her a corrosive part of his life as he moved on to the next phase of his musical metamorphosis.
Though Angie went on to have a blossoming career of her own, she has insisted that she married Bowie solely to make him a star (via AmoMama): “I wouldn’t have gotten involved if it hadn’t been a lifelong commitment to making him an international phenomenon”.
Outside of her relationship with Bowie, the most damaged relationship came between Angie and her son, who has been estranged from his mother for years. Angie had held out hope to reunite but has said that any type of peace between them isn’t going to happen any time soon (via The Guardian): “He is nearly 40, and if he didn’t bother to find me till now, it’s a bit late. There is nothing to say”.
While Bowie’s first marriage may have started with hope for the future, the rock and roll lifestyle led both of them in two opposite directions. Then again, if Bowie had never gotten together with her in the first place, rock fans would have lost out on classics from both the Starman and the Stones.