He began the new decade with his blankest slate since his pre-fame days in the '60s. On top of it all, Bowie separated from his wife of ten years, Angela, with their divorce set to be finalized in February of 1980. For the restlessly forward-looking Bowie, this reprise of "Space Oddity" seemed tainted with an odd nostalgia, and it felt like a loop being closed. At the end of the year, he recorded a new version of "Space Oddity" for British television, and it was an eerie resurrection of the character that had put him on the map: Major Tom, the lost astronaut cast adrift in space, an existentialist casualty of humankind's quest to conquer the heavens. Lodger, as excellent as it was, felt anticlimactic. His 1979 album, Lodger, wrapped up a groundbreaking, three-album collaboration with Brian Eno that had yielded his most acclaimed work to date, including the full-lengths Low and "Heroes." But the final installment of this Berlin Trilogy also exhausted Bowie and Eno's partnership. And that persona hinged on "Ashes To Ashes." Instead, he absorbed them all into a single if mercurial persona, one known simply as David Bowie. By the end of the '70s, however, he dispensed with such alter egos. After launching himself to stardom in 1969 with his first hit single, " Space Oddity," he spent a decade morphing from Major Tom to Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane to Halloween Jack to The Thin White Duke - a series of characters that also emblemized radically different approaches to rock music, from sci-fi glam to stark experimentalism. In 1980, David Bowie was in the middle of a new kind of transformation. A new box set collects all of Bowie's albums released between 19.
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