Why David Jones Changed His Name to David Bowie

The Davy Jones Problem

In the mid-1960s, a young musician named David Jones was attempting to establish himself in the competitive landscape of British popular music. He had released several singles with bands including The King Bees, The Manish Boys, and The Lower Third, under the names Davie Jones and David Jones, but none had achieved significant chart success. His career, while showing promise, had not yet found its distinctive identity.

The situation was complicated considerably in 1965 when another David Jones — Davy Jones, a young actor and singer from Manchester — joined the cast of The Monkees, an American television series about a fictional pop group. The show, which premiered in September 1966, was an immediate and enormous hit, making Davy Jones one of the most recognizable faces in popular entertainment on both sides of the Atlantic. With two David Joneses competing for attention in the British music press, confusion was inevitable, and it was the less famous of the two who needed to adapt.

Choosing a New Name

The decision to adopt a new stage name was driven by practical necessity, but the process of selection reflected the artistic sensibility that would come to define Bowie's career. Rather than choosing an arbitrary or conventionally glamorous name, Jones sought something that carried symbolic weight — a name that would not merely identify him but would begin to construct the mythology he was instinctively drawn to creating.

Bowie's management and record label at the time were clear that a change was essential if he were to develop a career distinct from the Monkees' Davy Jones. The process appears to have been relatively swift: by early 1966, David Jones had become David Bowie, and his first single under the new name — “Can't Help Thinking About Me” — was released in January of that year. For details on his birth identity, see Who Was David Robert Jones?

Jim Bowie and the Symbolism of the Knife

Bowie chose his new surname from Jim Bowie (1796–1836), the American frontiersman, slave trader, land speculator, and folk hero who is most famously associated with the Bowie knife — a large fighting knife that became a legendary weapon of the American frontier. Jim Bowie died at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 and subsequently became a mythologized figure in American popular culture.

Bowie later explained the reasoning behind his choice in several interviews. The knife's association with cutting appealed to him as a metaphor for artistic purpose — the idea of cutting through pretension, cutting new paths, severing connections with the past. The duality of the knife — an object that could serve as both tool and weapon, that could create and destroy — resonated with Bowie's emerging interest in ambiguity and the coexistence of opposites. The frontier associations of the name also carried connotations of exploration and the unknown that aligned with his artistic ambitions.

There is an additional layer of resonance in the fact that Jim Bowie was himself a figure whose reputation was largely constructed through myth and storytelling — a man whose real biography was substantially less glamorous than the legend that grew around him. This parallel between the constructed persona and the underlying reality anticipates the central preoccupation of David Bowie's entire career: the relationship between identity and performance, between the person and the persona.

Other Names Considered

While the details are somewhat fragmentary, Bowie indicated in interviews that he considered several alternative names before settling on Bowie. Among the names reportedly considered was “Tom Jones” — which would, of course, have created precisely the same problem of confusion with the Welsh singer already famous under that name. The fact that Bowie ultimately chose a name derived from an American cultural figure rather than a British one reflected his lifelong fascination with American culture, a fascination that would later manifest in albums such as Young Americans (1975) and the Diamond Dogs (1974) concept rooted in American dystopian fiction.

The Name Change as Artistic Statement

In retrospect, the transition from David Jones to David Bowie can be understood as far more than a pragmatic solution to a commercial problem. It was the founding act of an artistic career built on the principle of perpetual reinvention. By choosing his own name, Bowie established the precedent that identity was not fixed but constructed — a raw material to be shaped and reshaped according to creative imperatives.

This principle would reach its fullest expression in the succession of dramatic personas that Bowie created over the following decades: Ziggy Stardust, the alien rock messiah of 1972–1973; Aladdin Sane, the schizophrenic rock star; the Thin White Duke, the emotionally frozen aristocrat of 1975–1976; and many others. Each of these characters represented a different facet of Bowie's artistic investigation of identity, selfhood, and performance — an investigation that began with the simple, practical act of changing his name from Jones to Bowie. See also What Was Bowie's Real Name?

Legacy of the Decision

The name David Bowie became one of the most recognizable and resonant names in twentieth-century culture. It is a name that now carries associations not merely with a single individual but with an entire approach to art, identity, and creative life. The shy boy from Bromley who had been David Robert Jones constructed, through the act of renaming himself, the foundation upon which one of the most remarkable artistic careers in modern history was built.

The irony, of course, is that the Davy Jones who precipitated the name change has himself faded into relative cultural obscurity, while the David Jones who was forced to change his name became infinitely more famous under his adopted identity. The necessity that produced the name Bowie proved to be, in hindsight, one of the most fortunate accidents in the history of popular music.

Frequently Asked Questions