Tom Dunne: A history of David Bowie in six albums

It's not an easy selection, particularly as I'm omitting a few biggies, but these are my favourite albums from the master 

David Bowie performs on stage on his Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour in London, 1973. (Picture: Michael Putland/Getty Images)

The much loved Dublin Bowie festival returns to live action, at last, in mid-April. As part of it I will be talking to Dana Gillespie at the NCH on April 24th. She was Bowie’s first girlfriend, he wrote Andy Warhol for her and she sang on Ziggy Stardust, the album that turns 50 in June.

I didn’t actually see her boyfriend’s earth-shattering Starman appearance on Top of The Pops in July, 1972. Our family, unlike that of Boy George, Adam Ant, Mick Jones, Gary Kemp, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Bono, and Siouxsie Sioux – whose lives were changed by seeing it - didn’t have, “the channels.” Instead it took a copy of Ziggy, slipped to me by a friend, to make me see the light. I listened compulsively before announcing, with utter confidence, to my older siblings that whatever they were listening to, was the ‘wrong’ music.