England Famous Musicians Part I

David Bowie (1947-2016)
David Bowie was born on January 8, 1947 in Brixton, England. He was one of the most influential pop musicians of the 1970s and to this day has an important place in the music industry due to his ability to reinvent himself again and again.

Bowie’s career began in the late 1960s. After several commercially unsuccessful years, he achieved his worldwide breakthrough in 1972 with the album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust”.
In the course of his career, Bowie reinvented himself again and again – also in his external appearance.

His music cannot be assigned to a single style, but many successful musicians – Madonna among them – claim to have been significantly influenced by him. Between 1976 and 1978 he lived in Berlin, first in the Bavarian Quarter and then in an old building at 155 Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg. In Berlin he took among other things. his work “Heroes” in the Hansa Studios. Then he went on tour again. His most famous albums include “Hunky Dory” (1971), “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars” (1972), “Station to Station” (1976) and, as mentioned, “Heroes” (1977). In 1987 he gave a concert in front of the Reichstag, which numerous people in the east of the city had also listened to. Bowie died with his family on January 10th in New York City as a result of cancer.

Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976)
Britten was one of the most important contemporary composers in England and is particularly known for his compositions for the Russian cellist Shostakovich.
He also initiated the Aldeburg Music Festival in Snape, East Anglia, in 1948, which has been held annually ever since

William Byrd (c. 1539 – 1623)
Byrd was one of the most important composers of the Elizabethan era and a member of the private religious society “Chapel Royal”.

Eric Patrick Clapton (born 1945)
blues and rock guitarist and singer. Eric Patrick Clapton was born on March 30, 1945 in the county of Surrey in the south of England. With more than 280 million records sold, Clapton is one of the most successful musicians worldwide.

His mother, Patricia Molly Clapton, was only 16 when he was born and his father was a 24-year-old Canadian soldier stationed in England who had left the country when he was born. Clapton lived with his maternal grandparents from the age of two, who made him believe that his mother was his sister. After leaving school, he began studying art at Kingston University in London, but dropped out to join the band – Roosters – in January 1963. The band broke up in August of the same year. He then performed a few times with the group Casey Jones & the Engineers, founded in 1963, in October as guitarist for the rock band TheYardbirds, founded a year earlier, whose biggest hit in 1965 was “For Your Love”. In April 1965 he left the band and joined the Bluesbreakers, founded in 1962.

After a little more than a year he also left the Bluesbreakers and formed the band Cream with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. The group brought out a number of hits. But the differences between Bruce and Baker made it increasingly difficult for the musicians to work together. In December 1968, Clapton appeared with John Lennon, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell as “The Dirty Mac”. In March 1969 he founded the group Blind Faith with Steve Winwood, but they disbanded in the same year.

In 1970 he recorded his first solo album. But at the same time he founded “Derek and the Dominos” together with some band musicians from Delaney & Bonnie, who brought out the album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs”.

The title track of the album Layla was one of the most played rock songs of the 1970s. It was during this time that he became addicted to heroin, which resulted in him collapsing during one of his performances.

But he managed to get rid of drug addiction. He was also able to overcome a later alcohol addiction. In 1973 he appeared at the Rainbow Concert organized by Pete Townshend. Townshend helped him make a comeback through this performance. During a performance in Birmingham in 1976, he cursed people of color as and asked them to leave the hall and the country. He later apologized for making his remarks while under the influence of alcohol. Since the mid-1970s he was in a relationship with Pattie Boyd, whom he married in 1979. In the course of the 1980s he made other records, such as the albums “Behind the Sun” with Phil Collins in 1985 and “August” in 1986. In 1986 he performed with Chuck Berry at his 60th birthday concert in St. Louis up. In 1989 the album Journeyman was released and in the same year he was divorced from Pattie Boyd.

The fatal fall of his four-and-a-half-year-old son Conor in March 1991 from the window of a high-rise building was a terrible stroke of fate. That led to the songs Circus and Tears in Heaven. In 1991 his live album 24 Nights and 194 From the Cradle appeared. In 1996 he released the single Change the World, for which he received three Grammys in 1997. The album Pilgrim was released in 1998. In 2000, Clapton released the studio album Riding with the King and in 2001 the album Reptile was released. In 2002 he married the graphic artist Melia McEnery, whom he had met in 1999. He has three children with her. In November 2006 the album The Road to Escondido was released together with JJ Cale. After a series of concerts with Steve Winwood in February 2008, Clapton completed a tour of the USA and Europe in the summer of 2008, which he continued in Japan and Australia in early 2009.

In the fall of 2009 he returned to the USA for concerts and released the album Live from Madison Square Garden. After the concerts in the USA, he continued his tour in Europe in 2010.
Another world tour ended with the Crossroads Guitar Festival 2010 in the US state of Illinois. In addition to other concerts, he was a guest guitarist with the Rolling Stones in November 2012. In 2014 he released the album The Breeze – An Appreciation of JJ Cale as a homage to JJ Cale, who died in 2013, and in June 2014 he gave his only German concert in the SAP Arena in Mannheim.
In 2015, Clapton entered the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis, Tennessee, along with Little Richard and Tommy Brown

Housemartins
The Housemartins (English house martin = house martin) was a British independent pop band from the northern English city of Kingston upon Hull; it existed from 1983 to 1988. Until the end of 1983 they were initially on the road as street musicians, but expanded to a full band with a drummer.

The band consisted of the singer Paul Heaton, the guitarist Stan Cullimore, the bassist Ted Key and the drummer Chris Lang. They received their first record deal in 1985 with the Go! Discs. But Lang and Key dropped out before the first LP was produced. The songs of the Housemartins came mostly from Heaton and Cullimore and were politically leftist in their content. Which was not surprising since the band members were members of the Communist Party. In 1986 they reached a larger audience with their single Happy Hour and the LP London 0 Hull 4 and also attracted attention beyond England.

Her biggest hit was certainly Caravan of Love, which was also very popular in Germany for a while. After around five years, the band split up in the spring of 1988.