Glenn Frey

Glenn Frey, who has died aged 67, was a founding member, singer, guitarist and driving force of the 1970s Californian country-rock band the Eagles, co-writing most of their biggest hits and taking part in a journey which saw a group of smiling young troubadours morph into drug-addled superstar burn-outs, before reuniting in later life as seasoned old pros.

The Eagles were founded in Los Angeles in 1971 by Frey and his songwriting partner, the drummer and singer Don Henley. Over the next decade they became the most popular group in the world, Frey and Henley turning out hits, often with Frey as lead singer, including Tequila Sunrise, Lyin’ Eyes, Heartache Tonight and Hotel California.

Their Greatest Hits became the biggest-selling album of all time (29 million copies in its original 1975 form plus 11 million when it was repackaged in 1982 to include later hits), above even Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Altogether the Eagles sold more than 120 million albums worldwide while Frey won six Grammy Awards, and five American Music Awards.

The band’s success was built on recording techniques which smoothed out any grit, producing a sort of shiny, all-American homogeneity. Even their darkest material was full of easy-on-the-ear harmonies, leading critics to accuse them of killing rock and roll with synthetic kitsch and creating a template for singer-songwriters such as Elton John. “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them,” wrote the rock critic Robert Christgau in 1972.

Yet as Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph observed in 2007, one reason that they endured was that their songs were “well formed and often deceptively subtle and nuanced”.

Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh (right) of the Eagles perform  

Another reason was Frey’s obsessive perfectionism. “Glenn, I think, took three days in the studio on the word 'city’ at the beginning of Lyin’ Eyes,” the guitarist Don Felder, who joined the band in the mid-1970s, recalled . “It would either be a little early, or a little late, or the “T” would be too sharp. It literally took a long time to get that word-perfect – maybe to an extreme.”

Behind the scenes, however, the Eagles conformed to a more traditional rock and roll stereotype. The title track of their classic 1976 album, HOTEL CALIFORNIA, evoked a musty, claustrophobic decadence: “Last thing I remember I was running for the door / I had to find the passage back to the place I was before / 'Relax,’ said the night man, 'We are programmed to receive / You can check out any time you like but you can never leave’. ”

Frey once described their career in the 1970s as “got crazy, got drunk, got high, had girls, played music and made money’’. He might have added “fought like cats and dogs”. “The Eagles talked about breaking up from the day I met them,” as their manager, Irving Azoff, recalled.

Of their original four-man line-up, guitarist Bernie Leadon and bassist Randy Meisner departed, in 1975 and 1977 respectively, after disagreements with Frey, Leadon famously announcing his departure by pouring a can of beer over Frey’s head.

Relations among the replacement line-up of Frey and Henley, with Don Felder, Timothy Schmit and Joe Walsh, deteriorated during the making of their 1979 album The Long Run, which took 18 months to produce.

Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles, pictured in LA in 1975  

In 1978 Walsh caused $20,000 worth of damage to a chicago hotel roomCHICAGO HOTEL ROOM with a chainsaw. The following year Henley was arrested after a naked 16-year-old prostitute suffered a drug overdose during a party at his home in Los Angeles. Police seized cocaine, marijuana and Quaaludes and Henley was subsequently charged for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, fined and put on probation.

The last straw came at their final concert, a Democratic Party funraiser in July 1980 at the Long Beach Arena. During an evening later referred to as “Long Night at Wrong Beach”, the Eagles broke up in drug-fuelled rancour, with band members threatening to beat each other up.

“As the night progressed, we … grew angrier and began hissing at each other,” Don Felder recalled in his book Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles (2008). “The sound technicians feared the audience might hear our outbursts, so they lowered Glenn’s microphone until he had to sing. He approached me after every song to rant, rave, curse – and let me know how many songs remained before our fight.”

Glenn Frey, Randy Meisner, Bernie Leadon, Don Henley, 1973

Although Frey played his part in the hellraising, he was always the most businesslike of the group. After the break-up, he went on to forge a successful solo career, his debut solo album, No Fun Aloud (1982, in part a collaboration with the songwriter Jack Tempchin), going gold and spawning several hit singles, including The One You Love. His single The Heat Is On went reached No 2 in the Billboard charts (No 12 in Britain) after it featured as a soundtrack in the 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop.

Frey also embarked on a career as an actor, becoming the first rock star to appear (as a drug dealer) on Miami Vice (for which he wrote and performed the song You Belong to the City, which reached No 2 in the US charts), doing a Pepsi commercial, starring with Robert Duvall and Gary Busey in the film Let’s Get Harry (1986) and taking a small role in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire.

In the mid-1980s he embarked on a self-administered “detox” programme, which was so successful that in 1989 the Health and Tennis Corporation of America signed him up as a spokesman.

After the Eagles’ break-up Frey ruled out the possibility of reuniting “for a Lost Youth and Greed tour”, while Don Henley claimed that the group would only get back together again “when hell freezes over”.

Fourteen years later, however, in 1994 they came together for a massively successful “Hell Freezes Over” tour, and they continued to perform together until last year, releasing five compilation albums, a live album and, in 2007, Long Road Out of Eden, the first Eagles album of new material since The Long Run in 1979.

The following year they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Glenn Frey in 1973

In 2013 they embarked on a “History of the Eagles” concert tour, at the end of which they topped the music rich list compiled by Forbes magazine after raking in an estimated $100 million (£63 million) in 12 months. “An audience who grew up on this music abandoned themselves to its nostalgic glories, even daring to stand and sing along, despite a stern pre–show instruction to remain seated,” wrote Neil McCormick of their June 2014 concert at the O2 Arena.

Later, McCormick wrote, “Frey relented: 'If you want to move around and express yourself then as long as you’re not disturbing your neighbour we have no problem with that.’ He is a rock star with all the charisma of a train station announcer.”

Glenn Lewis Frey was born in Detroit on November 6 1948 to parents who worked in the car industry, and grew up in the suburb of Royal Oak. He took piano lessons from the age of five but switched to acoustic guitar after seeing the Beatles perform live in Detroit.

While still at Dondero High School, he began playing with bands in and around Detroit, before moving to Southern California where he met the country-folk rocker Jackson Browne (with whom he wrote what would become the Eagles’ first hit, Take It Easy) and Don Henley.

^{The Eagles perform 'Take It Easy' in 1977}

The original line-up of the band came together in the late 1960s when the producer John Boylan assembled them as Linda Ronstadt’s backing group. After touring to support her 1970 album Silk Purse, they launched themselves as the Eagles, recording their eponymous first album with the producer Glyn Johns in Britain.

Released in 1972, Eagles yielded three Top 40 singles, including Take It Easy, with Frey taking lead vocal duties, which reached No 12 in the Billboard charts and propelled the band to stardom.

Frey had a long history of intestinal problems, which he blamed on his earlier use of drugs and alcohol. He died from complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis and pneumonia.

In 1990 he married Cindy Millican, a dance choreographer, who survives him with their daughter and two sons.

Glenn Frey, born November 6 1948, died January 18 2016

Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman 

Alan Rickman, the actor and director, who has died aged 69, took sneering screen villainy to new levels as (among others) the scheming chaplain Obadiah Slope in the BBC’s television adaptation of Trollope’s The Barchester Chronicles (1982), the German terrorist kingpin Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988), the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films.

In a profile of the actor in The Daily Telegraph last year, Robbie Collin attributed Rickman’s reputation as “cinema’s greatest silver-tongued devil” to his compelling voice – “honey-smooth and homely but still flecked with threat”, but often sounding “as though he’s caressing a claw hammer through a silk pillowcase”. One “wisp”, Collin observed, “can capture any room, office, castle or witchcraft and wizardry class in which it’s heard”.

Rickman became such a familiar figure that the American cartoon show Family Guy once depicted him calling his own answering machine, reminding himself to perform mundane household tasks before ending with the chilling warning: ''Do not disappoint me.” Peter Mandelson said that he would like Rickman to portray him in any biopic, because ''he’s not afraid to play the hard guy’’.

In fact Rickman did not always play baddies, and his voice was equally effective when he was Colonel Brandon, Kate Winslet’s crumpled suitor in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), or King Louis XIV in A Little Chaos (2014, he also directed the film), set in the court of the Sun King, and also starring Kate Winslet.

Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and Michael Maloney in 'Truly Madly Deeply'  

To a younger generation Rickman was best known as Severus Snape, Hogwarts’ lank-haired resident master of the dark arts, a role he took on in 2001 at a time when only three books in J K Rowling’s series had been written. Hardly anyone except the actor, who had been let into the secret by J K Rowling, had any idea how the character would develop. He went on to play Snape in all eight Harry Potter films, gradually evolving his portrayal from the coldly sarcastic and controlled teacher of the early films to a more complex and enigmatic character. In the final two films, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pt I (2010) and Pt II (2011), Snape was revealed as the hero of the hour.

This was perhaps just as well; Rickman claimed to dislike being typecast as the villain, although he grudgingly accepted that it was for his portrayal of unsympathetic characters that he was best known. “Being an actor is not about judging the characters you play,” he said. “You don’t think of yourself as good or bad – just another human being who has certain needs. And you get on with being that person.”

Alan Rickman in 'Die Hard' 

Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born on February 21 1946 on a council estate in Acton, west London. “My mother was Welsh and my father was Irish and I can speak both accents like a native, yet in my whole career I have never been asked to,” he later recalled. His father, a factory worker, died when Alan was eight, leaving his mother to bring up her four children. She did remarry, but divorced their stepfather three years later.

An artistic child, Alan won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, where he acquired his languid and studied vocal delivery in order to master a speech impediment which prevented him from moving his jaw properly. He appeared in several plays at school, but did not regard studying drama as “a sensible thing to do at 18”. Instead he went to Chelsea Art School followed by the Royal College of Art, where he studied graphic design.

He went on to open a design business, but after three years decided to audition for a place at Rada, which he attended from 1972 to 1974. While he was there he supported himself by working as a dresser for Nigel Hawthorne and Ralph Richardson. “I would watch [Richardson] from the wings every night,” Rickman recalled. “He was a magical force on stage.”

Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman in 'Sense And Sensibility'  

After drama school Rickman toured with regional repertory companies and in 1976 he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in the John Barnes adaptation of Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass. By 1978, he had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company but found their traditional structure too claustrophobic. He left a year later and started making inroads into television, in a BBC production of Thérèse Raquin.

In 1982 he won the role of Obadiah Slope in The Barchester Chronicles, in which he found himself acting opposite the likes of Donald Pleasence, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne. “It was very daunting, because I was nobody,” he said.

His big breakthrough came in 1985 when he was cast as the sexy but manipulative and cruel Vicomte de Valmont in an RSC production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. “I knew I had to seduce 200 people in the audience as well as the women in the play,” Rickman recalled. That he was successful was evident in his co-star Lindsay Duncan’s observation after the play’s first night: “A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex. And most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.”

Alan Rickman as Severus Snape in 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1'  

When the production transferred to Broadway, his performance drew the attention of the Hollywood director John McTiernan, who invited him to play the villain opposite Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Rickman admitted that he initially viewed the invitation with disdain: “I didn’t know anything about LA. I didn’t know anything about the film business … I’d never made a film before, but I was extremely cheap.” After reading the script, he thought: “What the hell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.”

In the event, as Hans Gruber, Rickman upstaged Bruce Willis and became an international star, confirming in the process the widely held belief that British actors make the best villains.

He won a Bafta with a memorably over-the-top performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which produced the most quoted line of Rickman’s career: ''Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings – and call off Christmas!”

While he continued to play unsympathetic roles, including a cold, snarling Éamon de Valera in Neil Jordan’s biopic of Michael Collins (1996), Rickman always sought to understand the complexities of the characters he played. He bridled when Jordan asked during an early stage of the production: ''So, do you hate him [de Valera] yet?”

''That made me put on such a pair of boxing gloves, because you can’t judge your characters,” Rickman recalled.

Alan Rickman signs autographs as he arrives for the North American premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 at Lincoln Center in New York

In 2003 he co-starred with Emma Thompson in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually, playing a couple whose rocky marriage defied the film’s otherwise sugary tone.

Away from the world of blockbusters, Rickman assembled a much more varied and subtle body of work than his reputation as a screen villain might suggest, and he appeared in many low-budget, independent productions. He was a cello-playing ghost in Anthony Minghella’s debut film Truly Madly Deeply (1991), a cuckolded husband in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes (1991) and a politicalcampaign manager in Tim Robbins’s satire, Bob Roberts (1992).

Later he would forge a close relationship with the director Tim Burton, playing the predatory Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd (2007) and voicing the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland (2010).

He famously turned down the chance to play a Bond villain opposite Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye (1995), a role for which most people thought he was perfect casting. Instead, he moved behind the camera to direct The Winter Guest, an art house production that won several awards at international film festivals.

His other acting credits included The January Man (1989), Quigley Down Under (1990) and Galaxy Quest (1999). On stage, he reunited with Lindsay Duncan for Noel Coward’s Private Lives (2002), which transferred to Broadway, played Mark Antony opposite Helen Mirren’s Cleopatra at the Olivier Theatre, and (with Lindsay Duncan again) the title role in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (2010), a production which transferred to New York. In 2011 he starred as a creative writing professor in a Broadway production of Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar.

Alan Rickman with his wife Rima Horton at the Goodwood Festival in 2015 

Although regarded as one of the best British actors of his generation, Rickman seemed uncomfortable in the media spotlight. His political views were well to the Left of New Labour, and in 2000 there were rumours that he would stand against the former Conservative minister Michael Portillo in a parliamentary by-election, but they proved unfounded.

As a student at the Chelsea School of Art, he began dating Rima Horton, a fellow student. They lived together for half a century in London, where she became an economics lecturer, a Labour councillor and, in her partner’s words, “possibly a candidate for sainthood”. They finally married last year. “It was great because no-one was there,” Rickman told the German newspaper Bild. “After the wedding in New York, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and ate lunch.” Rickman gave his wife aGOLD band which, he noted, “she never wears”.

Alan Rickman, born February 21 1946, died January 14 2016

David Bowie

David Bowie, who has died of cancer a few days after turning 69, was a rock musician of rare originality and talent; he was also, variously, a producer, painter, film actor, art critic, the progenitor of bisexual chic, a family man and an astute multi-millionaire.

Endlessly manipulating his public identity, Bowie was once rumoured to be an alien from outer space, and suggested in the mid-1970s that Britain needed a fascist prime minister. “I am an actor,” he said. “My whole professional life is an act.”

Although he drew heavily on other artists for his inspiration, he had a wealth of new ideas of his own and wrote some of the most quirky and poignant songs of the 1970s and 1980s: Space Oddity, Changes, Fame, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Aladdin Sane.

Jangling and melancholy, his music matched imagistic lyrics with his rich, British-accented singing style and tunes that owed as much to white opera as to black soul, and to the simple pop of the Beatles as to the drugged edginess of the Velvet Underground.

David Bowie in July 1973 is seen off at the station by his first wife Angie. They married in 1970 and divorced 10 years later He was frank about the synthetic quality of much of his work. “I’m really knocked out that people actually dance to my records,” he said. “Let’s be honest; my rhythm and blues are thoroughly plastic.”

He had a protean personality to match. A supermodel before the era of supermodels, Bowie was eel-thin with the face of a starved child and the teeth of a pike. He certainly looked like a changeling or alien, and had an extraordinary left eye, green with a dilated pupil; and rumours, which he did not discourage, spread that it was a sign of his extraterrestrial origins.

Bowie's childhood friend George Underwood punched him in the left eye during an an argument over a girl  

It was in fact an injury sustained in a playground scuffle in the days when he was plain David Jones from Bromley, south London.

In the early 1970s he played upon the science fiction theme, creating the persona of Ziggy Stardust, a rock star from outer space whose music drove audiences to kill and himself to suicide. The character was a loose tribute to Vince Taylor, an early rock 'n’ roll singer and friend of Bowie’s who had gone mad. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (1972) was accompanied by a stage show for which Bowie dyed his hair orange, painted his face white and donned a multicoloured jumpsuit while his backing group, The Spiders, dressed in gold lamé.

David Bowie in 1973

This was no more than glam rock, perhaps; but the weird aura around Bowie was boosted by his role as a marooned alien in Nicolas Roeg’s film, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), and even after he ditched science-fiction, his subsequent pronouncements continued to smack of other-worldliness.

In the mid-1970s, when he had metamorphosed into the Thin White Duke, a combination of Nietzschean superman and degenerate European aristocrat, Bowie offered his services to the nation. “There is no politician like me,” he observed. “As I see it, I am the only alternative for premier in England. Britain would benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism.”

His nationalism had roots in the occult, of which he had become a devotee. (He said that his 1976 album, Station to Station, was a trip through the Kabbala; like many of his intellectual touches, this went unobserved by his fans.) “As King Arthur of England,” said the Thin White Duke, “I guarded the Divine Articles of Joseph of Arimathea. I will be Xeros, Emperor of Isolar and last existing antibody from Reality to survive the Metabloc War 'A’ in which neutrons will bombard and implode within our perceived solar system. I will be very lonely.”

It was difficult to know how much Bowie believed in what he said, since one of his main preoccupations was to provoke. Many of his lyrics, and thoughts, owed their composition to the “cut-up” techniques of the junkie poet William Burroughs. Another object of admiration was Andy Warhol, the doyen of the New York avant-garde, for whom he wrote a song:

ANDY WARHOL LOOKS A SCREAM
HANG HIM ON MY WALL
Andy Warhol silver screen
Can’t tell them apart at all.

Bowie had for many years a passionate interest in Warhol. He secured an introduction to him in 1971, when he visited the Factory, and played Warhol his tribute. Warhol was upset by the lines: “He’ll think about paint and he’ll think about glue/What a jolly boring thing to do” – and left the room, returning only to kneel and take a photograph of Bowie’s yellow shoes. Bowie never again penetrated the inner circle.

Drugs made a significant contribution to his creative output. “I did nearly kill myself a number of times,” recalled Bowie. “Once I blew my nose and half my brain fell out.” In the late 1970s his cocaine habit was so bad that he took himself off to hide in Berlin. There he could be found in cafés, banging his head on the table and saying: “Please help me.” The Thin White Duke was very lonely indeed.

David Bowie  

Latterly, when he was, in the words of Noel Gallagher, “an old git”, Bowie mellowed into an affable, discursive teetotaller. His consumption of cigarettes was vast, but his only other excess took the form of intellectual name-dropping and a liking for bewildering obfuscation. Talking about his work (from 1988) with his own rock group Tin Machine – a lurch into heavy guitar and pounding drums that coincided with the growth of “grunge” – he said: “That hard-lined Apollonian thing around me had broken down and I was cosmically disorganised.”

His enthusiasm for the occult was replaced by a somewhat pompous scepticism. After going on a tour of Arthurian Britain, he observed of Tintagel’s connection with the legends: “It’s a good myth, but groundless, I suspect, because Tintagel was too late to have been Arthurian.”

He joined the board of the art magazine Modern Painters, for which he wrote himself, and began to develop a critic’s eye for trends. “There’s a big Post-Modernist shake-up,” he noted. “I think the emphasis on narrative form in song is going to disappear completely and that will be replaced by visual form. It has a lot to do with the rise of the Post-Modernist trend; but I suppose it’s a more defined version of Sartre’s existentialism.”

• Bowie's life and career in pictures

Although he was latterly a happy man, the best of Bowie’s music always had a cold, alienated quality with which the young identified. Despite his posing and horseplay, there was a great deal of genuine fear in his music, reflecting the strain of madness in his family and his shock at the suicide of his half-brother, Terry, who had schizophrenia and for whom he wrote the song Five Years.

Bowie himself suggested that it was through invoking a multiplicity of personalities that he could stay one step ahead of madness; by being madder than mad, he would escape being himself, who was insane.

David Bowie (circled) as a pupil at Burnt Ash Primary School in Bromley  

DAVID ROBERT JONES WAS BORN AT BRIXTON ON JANUARY 8 1947. In early interviews he played up the brutality of his upbringing – the rough streets “like Harlem”, brawls, his drunken,gambling father and his “nutty” family who, he claimed, were “all illegitimate”.

It was not as bad as that. When he was a child the family moved to suburban Bromley, and his upbringing was dull rather than dangerous. He studied commercial drawing at Bromley Technical College, but was taken with the lifestyle evoked in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and resolved to drop out to “become a superman”.

After toying with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk – as a teenager he studied under Chime Rinpoche, one of the first Tibetan lamas to come to Britain – he set his heart on rock music, learnt the saxophone and put his first bands together: David (or Davie) Jones and the Lower Third, David Bowie and the Buzz. He also trained in mime under Lindsay Kemp, establishing a troupe called Feathers.

DAVID JONES IN 1964

At the time he was living with his parents but he soon moved as a lodger into a flat owned by Mary Finnigan, a journalist, in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham. She introduced herself with: “I’m Mary. Would you like a cup of tea and some tincture of cannabis?” The two became lovers and set up an “arts lab” at the Three Tuns pub. According to her book Psychedelic Suburbia (2016), their relationship ended after he began seeing (among others) Angela “Angie” Barnett, an American model whom he would later marry.

• Neil McCormick: A one-man melting pot of ideas

“Angela and I knew each other because we were both going out with the same man,” he recalled. It was through Angie that he secured his first record deal. She cajoled another boyfriend who worked for Mercury records into signing up Bowie.

One of his early singles, released in 1967, was a humorous Anthony Newley pastiche called The Laughing Gnome, which was later a source of mild embarrassment to Bowie. His first No 1 was Space Oddity in 1969, a melancholy poem about an astronaut who decides to stay in orbit. It was popular with teenagers, many of whom were to remain fans of Bowie for life.

The cover of Bowie's Space Oddity, released in 1969

“On stage he is quite devastatingly beautiful,” wrote an American critic at an early concert. “With his loofah hair and blue eyes, he pads around like every schoolgirl’s wonder movie star. He smiles; you melt. He winks; you disintegrate.”

His first album, David Bowie (1967), was uncharacteristic and in the Anthony Newley vein of music-hall whimsy; it was the 1969 release, also called David Bowie and soon retitled Space Oddity, which many enthusiasts considered the first “proper” Bowie album.

His next record, The Man Who Sold The World (1970), had a sleeve for its British version on which Bowie posed in woman’s clothing in a parody of a Rossetti portrait. The reference was lost on the critics, who fixed on Bowie’s ambiguous sexuality. “I said, 'fine’,” he recalled. “I’ll do anything to break me through.” The album’s supernatural tone and fragmented content earned Bowie a reputation as a “dangerous loony”.

Bowie’s relatively few hit singles were tasters for his albums, which were in themselves only a part of whatever persona he was investigating at the time. This was quickly understood by a core of devoted fans, who collected each album and adopted each persona as they might have bought the clothes of a favourite designer.

After The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie produced the more tuneful Hunky Dory (1971), which contained Changes, an enduring, catchy reflection on time and ageing, consistent themes in his work and appropriate for a decade as clapped-out as the 1970s. This was followed by Ziggy Stardust in 1972, then, the next year, Aladdin Sane (a pun on the madness he feared) and Pin Ups.

On the cover of Diamond Dogs (1974) Bowie appeared as half-man, half-whippet. The album was a vision of urban apocalypse and was promoted with an extravagant stage show with $200,000 of lighting effects. “It’s all so negative, your s---,” observed his friend John Lennon. “All this Diamond Dogs mutant crap.”

ANGIE AND DAVID BOWIE WITH THEIR SON ZOWIE IN 1974

For the stage show to accompany Station to Station (1976), Bowie included a showing of Luis Bunuel’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou and a taped performance of the German robot-rock band Kraftwerk. Otherwise, the Thin White Duke was alone on stage, singing snatches of Brecht and some of his own classics, such as Jean Genie and Suffragette City.

In the latter half of the 1970s Bowie was all but destroyed by cocaine, but he found time for a peculiar appearance on Bing Crosby’s 1977 Christmas show to perform a duet (Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy) which became a huge hit.

He settled in Berlin towards the end of 1976, and from that  period emerged three sombre, paranoid albums: Heroes, Low (both 1977) and Lodger (1979). Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) the following year (“Scary monsters and super creeps/ keep me running/ running scared”) produced a British No 1 single (and groundbreaking pop video) in Ashes to Ashes. After that he pulled himself back from the brink and moved to Switzerland in 1981. There he learnt to ski and masterminded a comeback with Let’s Dance (1983), posing as a grim-faced Yuppie-bopper.

The album sold six million copies. This depressed him, as did the success of the Serious Moonlight tour; he was expected to end his days as a disco diva. There were more No 1 singles, upbeat and poppy, during that decade: Under Pressure, with Queen, Let’s Dance, and Dancing in the Streets with Mick Jagger. With his financial future assured, he finally broke with his adolescent desire to be a rock-suicide and instead set off in new, perverse directions, “moving into areas I feel uncomfortable in”, collaborating with the musician Brian Eno, employing new computer technology to “randomise” his writing, and spending more time painting and acting.

Bowie as Andy Warhol with Jeffrey Wright in the 1996 movie Basquiat

He had an exhibition of his Gauguin-esque paintings in London in 1995, and earned praise for his performances in such films as The Hunger, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (both 1983) and Basquiat (1996), in which he revenged himself on Andy Warhol, giving a squeaky, mincing performance as the artist.

In later years, although the gaps between albums and tours became longer, the appetite for musical experimentation was re-invigorated; adventurous albums such as Heathen (2002), delightfully offbeat and with a characteristic smattering of baffling lyrics, showed that he was uninterested in the conservative late-career reputation-consolidation favoured by other rock grandees.

• Bowie in numbers

He released several accomplished singles during this period: Everybody Says Hi, from Heathen, ruefully contemplated his son’s growing up, and (10 years later) Where Are We Now? from the album The Next Day (2013) – elegiac, witty and with an amusing accompanying video – which was acclaimed by Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph as “the most surprising, perfect and welcome comeback in rock history”.

Always curious about what other musicians were doing, in 2013 Bowie recorded guest vocals on the song Reflektor by the Canadian band Arcade Fire, and for his final, genre-mixing album, Blackstar (2016), he was accompanied by a New York jazz group he had discovered.

A major development in David Bowie’s life was the priority he gave to his friendships. “I remember to phone them up,” he said. With age he also stopped worrying about his identity and was satisfied that his interests were challenging and his appetites “sane ones”.

A major factor in his happiness was his separation from Angie Bowie, whom he had married in 1970. Their wedding was immediately preceded by a “three-in-a-bed-romp”; and in her kiss-and-tell memoirs, Backstage Passes (1993), Angie Bowie alleged that both of them had enjoyed a string of lovers of both sexes and that she had once discovered her husband in bed with Mick Jagger. They had an acrimonious divorce and it was said that they never spoke again.

After a bitter custody battle, Bowie won custody of his son, Zowie, whom he sent to Gordonstoun – where the boy changed his name to Joe; he is now the acclaimed film director Duncan Jones.

DAVID BOWIE AND IMAN IN 2011

Bowie married secondly, in 1992, Iman Abdulmajid, a Somalian-born former model who ran a successful cosmetics business. In a telling acknowledgement of changed priorities, the wedding was celebrated with a few friends, and a handful of photographers from Hello! magazine.

He is survived by his wife, their daughter Alexandria, and his son Duncan Jones.

David Bowie, born January 8 1947, died January 10 2016

Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart, DJ

Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart in 1973 

Ed "Stewpot" Stewart, who has died aged 74, was one of the first presenters on Radio 1 when it launched in 1967 and for 12 years was the host of Junior Choice, the popular children’s request show broadcast on Saturday and Sunday mornings on both Radios 1 and 2.

Like Derek McCulloch (“Uncle Mac”) on Children’s Favourites (1954-67), the much-loved programme it replaced, Ed Stewart made Junior Choice his own, commanding an enormous audience of some 16 million listeners a week. The format mixed pop favourites with comedy and novelty numbers, among them Benny Hill’s Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West), Clive Dunn’s Grandad and Max Bygraves’s You’re a Pink Toothbrush.

Among his on-air trademarks were a short clip of a young Cockney lad saying “’Ello darling!” followed by a brief burst of laughter, and Stewart’s cheerful sign-off “By-ee!”

Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart, dressed in true 1960s style, pictured on the phone in 1967  

He was the first radio disc jockey to play a request on the air for Royalty, after he and a group of other radio personalities took afternoon tea with Princess Margaret in the BBC governors’ dining room in 1968. The record chosen was Alan Price’s Don’t Stop The Carnival, which Stewart dedicated to the princess’s daughter, Sarah, on her fourth birthday.

The Queen Mother had told him she never missed Junior Choice while taking her Sunday morning bath, and to mark her 80th birthday he played for her Car 67 by the group Driver 67, about a minicab driver who had been asked to pick up a fare but had refused because she had jilted him. Princess Margaret, who telephoned him at home with this surprising request, explained that her mother had chosen it because “she thinks it such a touching story about real human life”.

By then, Stewart had left Junior Choice to present a daily afternoon show on Radio 2. In 1981 he made unwelcome headlines when he accidentally read out the names of four soldiers serving in Northern Ireland who, he said, had asked to hear Danny Boy.

Stewart was mortified when he realised that they were four of the five soldiers murdered by the IRA the previous week in an attack in South Armagh.

4th September 1967: Ex-pirate radio disc jockeys, lining up to join the BBC. Left to right: - Pete Drummond, Mike Raven, Tony Blackburn, Dave Cash, Chris Denning, Duncan Johnson, Ed Stewart, Mike Ahern, John Peel, Emperor Rosko, Mike Lennox, and kneeling in front - Kenny Everett 

The BBC said Stewart had mistaken a memo warning that the names should not be inadvertently read out for a record request slip, and described the error as “unforgivable”. Both Stewart and the BBC apologised to the soldiers’ families. Stewart was dropped by Radio 2 two years later.

Often described as a gentle teddy bear of a man, with a self-effacing manner, Stewart failed to conform to type as a disc-jockey, and cheerfully admitted to a lack of self-assertion and financial acumen.

The son of a Treasury solicitor, he was born Edward Stewart Mainwaring in Exmouth, Devon, on April 23 1941. Brought up in Wimbledon and educated at St Edward’s School, Oxford, he excelled at music and sport (he was a lifelong Everton football fan) and played double bass in youth orchestras and sang in choirs.

Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart, 1941-2016: a life in pictures

Arriving in Hong Kong as bass player with a jazz group in 1961, he found the planned tour had been cancelled, and talked his way into a job on a local radio station, first as a sports commentator, then as an announcer, film critic and, finally, as a disc jockey. Four years later he returned to Britain and in July 1965 became a DJ on the pirate station Radio London, changing his name from Eddie Mainwaring to Ed Stewart.

From a rusting minesweeper anchored in the North Sea, he moved to the new BBC pop network Radio 1 in 1967, presenting Happening Sunday and What’s New before taking over the weekend morning Junior Choice show in 1968. In his autobiography Out of the Stewpot (2005) he claimed he was offered a bribe to play a particular record on the show, with a promise of an encounter with a leading beauty queen thrown in, but turned it down.

On television he became a regular host on Top of the Pops and a presenter on the children’s series Crackerjack. In 1980 Stewart moved to Radio 2, presenting Family Favourites and the weekday afternoon programme from 2pm to 4pm before being dropped from the Radio 2 line-up in 1983. He moved to the commercial radio station Radio Mercury (now Mercury FM), but was fired in 1990 after being told that they could no longer afford him.

Ed Stewart with his daughter Francesca in 1995

Stewart rejoined the BBC the following year, presenting a Saturday afternoon show on Radio 2 before being reinstated on weekday afternoons.

After eight successful years in his old slot, he was fired again, this time on the grounds that he was old-fashioned and out-of-date. As a consolation prize, he was given a two-hour show on Sunday afternoons. Post-millennium he returned to the network every Christmas until 2014 to present a special edition of Junior Choice.

“I still play the old favourites,” he explained, “because those who were kids then are now parents and they want their kids to know what they were listening to all those years ago. They’ll say: 'Do you remember playing this song for my little Johnnie? Well, he’s now 40 …’ So it’s lovely to have that reaction to the show.”

Ed Stewart married Chiara Henney in 1974. The marriage was later dissolved and he is survived by their two children.

Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, born April 23 1941, died January 9 2016

Lemmy, Motörhead frontman

Motörhead frontman whose amped-up heavy metal sound was fuelled by a prodigious appetite for drugs, sex and booze

Lemmy fronting Motörhead in 2011 

Lemmy, who has died aged 70, was the founder and, for some 40 years, bassist and frontman of Motörhead, the heavy metal band which took pride in its reputation for playing, and living, louder, faster and harder than anyone else; “If we moved in next door to you, your lawn would die,” he once claimed.

Lemmy (real name Ian Kilmister) began climbing the ranks as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix. In 1971 he joined Hawkwind, the psychedelic band which specialised in trying to induce fits in their audience through the use of ultra-low frequency soundwaves. Unfortunately LSD was the band’s drug of choice, while Lemmy preferred amphetamines. By his account this pharmaceutical difference of opinion was the reason why he was kicked out of the band after being busted for possession on the US-Canadian border in 1975.

The last known picture of Lemmy taken December 16, 2015 

The same year he founded a new band with guitarist Larry Wallis and drummer Lucas Fox, replacing them (respectively) within a year with “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor. Originally christened “Bastard” they changed their name to Motörhead after being persuaded that the original name would prevent them appearing on Top Of The Pops. Motörhead recorded an album for United Artists which deemed it unreleasable (though when the band became successful, they released it as On Parole).

They were about to break up when Ted Carroll of the indie label Chiswick Records offered them recording time, during which the band completed their debut album, Motörhead – issued in 1977. The album did well enough to persuade them to stay together, but it would be their next album, Overkill (1979) that marked their real breakthrough.

Lemmy getting to know the fans in the 1980s  

Motörhead came to be cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the loudest band ever, and they were proud of their reputation for ear-splitting noise and general amped-up excess. Lemmy himself set the standard, claiming to have abused his body with industrial quantities of drugs and alcohol and slept with hundreds if not thousands of women. “There was a magazine in England who said I screwed 2,000 women and I didn’t,” he recalled. “I said 1,000. When you think about it, it isn’t that unreasonable.”

On one occasion the band was said to have got their paws on what they thought was a jar labelled amphetamine sulphate, which turned out to be atropine sulphate – the deadly poison belladonna. They came to in hospital where a doctor informed them that had they been brought in an hour later they would all be dead. Lemmy liked telling the story of another doctor who once told his handlers: “Don’t let him give any blood transfusions. It’d kill normal people.”

Their often drug-addled state did not stop Motörhead becoming one of the biggest bands in Britain, their sheer raw energy helping to establish a rabid fanbase through their live shows. At their peak they sold some 300,000 copies of each album, including the seminal concert recording No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith, (1981) which went straight to No 1 in the album charts.

Motörhead - Lemmy, Eddie Clarke and Phil Taylor in 1982

Motörhead toured not just Europe and the US, but South America, Japan and Australasia, while their most successful single, Ace of Spades (1980), became a staple in student bars across the country.

Over the years as guitarists and drummers passed through Motörhead’s line up, Lemmy remained the grizzled heart of the machine. His bronchial rasp – directed into a towering microphone tilted down into his weather-beaten face - was one of the most recognisable voices in rock, while his Rickenbacker guitar recast the bass as an overpowered, distorted rhythmic rumble.

The group went through lean times in the early 1990s, when the craze for heavy metal waned. At one point, their fan club dwindled to just 200; their live gigs could barely fill a village hall and they were unable to mount a tour. For a time Lemmy moved to Los Angeles in the hope of relaunching his career.

But within a few years he found himself back in vogue, riding on the back of fellow heavy metal star Ozzy Osbourne’s rise to television stardom to win a new generation of fans. He never settled down, telling the Independent in 2010: “This is how my life was always meant to take place: in the back of a tour bus somewhere, a girl I’ve never met before in my lap, and who will be gone by morning. It’s how I live. It suits me.”

Motorhead - Lemmy, Philthy Animal Taylor and Eddie Clarke at the Music Machine, London in the 1970s  

Ian Fraser Kilmister was born at Stoke-on-Trent on Christmas Eve 1945 and brought up by his mother and stepfather on a farm in north Wales after his biological father, a vicar, ran off three months after his birth. He became known as Lemmy, it was said, after he constantly pestered people to “lemme a fiver”. He met his real father only once, in a pizza restaurant when he was 25.

“He was this little a--hole with a bald head and glasses who was trying to clear his conscience,” he recalled. “I told him that ... he should give me £1,000 and we would call it quits. He said he couldn’t do that, but he offered me driving lessons so that I could become a travelling salesman. I told him he was lucky the pizza hadn’t arrived yet or he would be wearing it, and I walked out.”

In the mid 1960s he moved to London where he worked as a roadie for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, “I used to score acid for him,” Lemmy said. “He’d take seven and give me three. I got to know him very well. He was a great human being.” In 1972 he joined Hawkwind as bassist and occasional vocalist. Within months he was fronting their No 3 single Silver Machine.

Lemmy was not, as one interviewer put it, “the person you would want your daughter to bring home”, but he was surprisingly bright and reflective, with an interest in the Anglo-Saxon kings and Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland. As Oliver Poole discovered when he interviewed him for The Daily Telegraph in 2002, Lemmy , a man whose song titles included Die You Bastard, was a convinced Thatcherite who confessed that one of his favourite bands was Abba and that he was “addicted” to PG Wodehouse.

In 2005 Motörhead celebrated their 30th anniversary, by which time they had acquired a status verging on celebrity. That year they triumphantly carried off an award at the Grammys and made their first UK festival appearance in many years, while Lemmy was presented with Classic Rock magazine’s first Living Legend award. He appeared alongside Gary Lineker in a television ad for Walkers Crisps and in 2004 the band performed at the Royal Opera House as part of a tourism promotion campaign.

An avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, Lemmy was at pains to emphasise that he was no Nazi sympathiser, “but the bad guys always have the best uniforms.”

Lemmy never married “because I never met one woman who would stop me looking at all the rest”. He had two sons by different mothers, one of whom became a session guitarist, based in Los Angeles; the other was given up for adoption at birth because Lemmy was only 17 and the mother 15 at the time he was born.

Lemmy was predeceased by his bandmate Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, who died in November.

“People don’t become better when they’re dead; you just talk about them as if they are,” reflected Lemmy in his autobiography White Line Fever (2002). “But it’s not true! People are still a--holes, they’re just dead a--holes!”

“I didn’t have a really important life,” he admitted, “but at least it’s been funny.”

Lemmy, born December 24 1945, died December 28 2015