What It Was Really Like To Work With David Bowie According To Celebrities

Bowie first met longtime collaborator Iggy Pop in 1971 and took him under his wing, inviting him on tour with him as a "fly on the wall." As Pop put it, "He resurrected me." Bowie later went on to produce Pop's debut solo album and the pair wrote many songs together. For a time, they lived together in a West Berlin apartment where Pop describes writing "Lust for Life" off the beeps of a television call signal.

Talking to The New York Times, Pop called Bowie the "worldly" one in their relationship, whereas he was "a hick from the sticks at heart." But he says Bowie made a point of visiting Pop's parents, who lived in a trailer in Detroit:

He came to my parents’ trailer, and the neighbors were so frightened of the car and the bodyguard they called the police. My father’s a very wonderful man, and he said, "Thank you for what you’re doing for my son." I thought: Shut up, Dad. You’re making me look uncool. 

In the 1982 version of the classic animated film The Snowman, Bowie makes a brief but memorable appearance to introduce the story, donning the scarf the snowman leaves behind after he melts. In December 2020, Bowie's son, Duncan Zowie Jones, excitedly tweeted that he had found the famous scarf while looking through storage boxes.

One of the film's producers saw the tweet, and shared a warm and fuzzy story of how it ended up there:

The scarf was knitted by the lady in the accounts department of TVC, the production company who made the animation. She came onto the set and presented it to David. When filming was over, David asked very politely if he could keep the scarf to give to his son, Zowie. This was the only fee he charged for the filming and I believe he offered his services for personal reasons. He was charming throughout and totally professional. I am glad that the scarf found its way to the destination he intended: from the dude to another dude.

Accidents happen on set, particularly when you're filming a movie as wild as 1986's Labyrinth. Aside from the many puppet creatures he had to contend with, Bowie's role as the Goblin King involved working with a particularly difficult costar: an infant. In this case, the infant was actually designer Brian Froud's son, Toby. Bowie apparently did some off-camera puppet work to keep baby Toby quiet when needed, but it didn't stop him from peeing on the rock legend.

According to adult Toby:

I had a diaper underneath [my outfit], but the diapers were far too bulky... so they had to create thin-line diapers for me to wear underneath the costume, which didn’t hold liquid. The first time I actually met David Bowie and sat on his lap, I peed all over him.

He was a gentleman about it. He really was. At the time, he was an absolute rockstar and everything, but he was very genuinely nice about the whole situation, and we carried on afterward. We did the scenes together. But yes, I met the man and peed on him pretty quickly, maybe a couple times through the shoot. It was all to do with the diapers.

Bowie seemed to be quite the baby whisperer during the whole shoot. When a different baby wasn't performing the baby gurgle noises it was supposed to for "Magic Dance," Bowie apparently did it himself.

You might think someone with as much of a stage presence as Bowie would always be the center of attention. However, according to Blondie founders Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, who toured with Iggy Pop and Bowie on the US leg of the Idiot World Tour, the opposite was true. As they explained it:

The fact that [David] took a backset to Iggy during that tour was a huge deal because he was a big mega-star then. Bowie was totally gracious...

They were really just concerned with putting on a great show and not about competing with the opening band... This was a new idea for us, but it’s something [we] tried to carry through all these years when putting on shows...

After that tour, we toured with some of our peers and there would be frequently more competition. Just being nice to everybody around was something [we] picked up on from Bowie.

According to Twitter user Philly Byrne, Ranking Roger - vocalist of the English Beat and later of General Public - once detailed a Bowie encounter in an interview. The Beat had supported Bowie at a stadium show in the UK in the mid-1980s. According to Byrne's retelling:

They were in their dressing room before the show, Bowie poked his head around the door and asked if they were all good and ready. Their trombone player, an elderly Jamaican man with no clue who David Bowie was, started complaining that they'd been promised another tray of Red Stripe, his favourite beer.

The band stood dumbstruck as he laid into Bowie about it. Bowie then said "Right," and walked out, leading to an explosion in the room as they shouted at the hapless geezer. A few moments later, Bowie came in, two trays of Red Stripe in his arms, all smiles. Top man.

The two rock icons collaborated just once: for their 1985 cover of "Dancing in the Street" for Live Aid famine relief, recording the track and filming the music video in just one day. But the mold-breaking musicians also shared a close friendship that lasted four decades. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger recalled:

He’d always look at my clothes labels. When he would see me, he’d give me a hug, and I could feel him going up behind the collar of my shirt to see what I was wearing. He used to copy me sometimes, but he’d be very honest about it. If he took one of your moves, he’d say, “That’s one of yours - I just tried it.” I didn’t mind sharing things with him, because he would share so much with me - it was a two-way street.