David Bowie

Bowie treated his videos the way he treated his albums: every era got a new collaborator, and most of them came from outside the video business.

The first of them was a photographer. Mick Rock filmed The Jean Genie in San Francisco with Cyrinda Foxe in 1972, Life on Mars? in a London studio the following year — and even Space Oddity, the oldest song here: the clip is not from 1969 but from late 1972, when Rock shot Bowie in New York miming to the old recording for the single's American reissue.

From 1979 it was a television director. David Mallet met Bowie on The Kenny Everett Video Show, shot the Lodger clips, and in 1980 co-directed Ashes to Ashes with him — Bowie's first directing credit, and at a reported £250,000 the most expensive music video made up to then. Mallet came back for China Girl in 1983, and Bowie shared the credit with him again on Let's Dance.

In the mid-eighties he turned to filmmakers. Julien Temple, who had made the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, stretched Blue Jean into a short film, Jazzin' for Blue Jean, and then directed the Absolute Beginners film and the video for its title song. Steve Barron made the two Labyrinth clips. In 1990 Gus Van Sant, a year after Drugstore Cowboy, made Fame 90; in 1993 Mark Romanek made Jump They Say, a song about Bowie's half-brother Terry.

The last video on this page closes the circle. Where Are We Now? came out on his 66th birthday in January 2013, his first new song in ten years, in a video by the artist Tony Oursler that looks back at Berlin, where Bowie had lived in the late seventies. The constant across four decades was not a director but a method: find the person whose world matched the record, and let them in.

See also: David Bowie — Sista akten on SVT Play.