David Bowie didn’t eat while making music at Rockfield Studios in the 1970s, a child of a staff member has claimed.
The “Starman” singer, who died in 2016, was living at the residential recording studio in rural Wales while producing Iggy Pop’s 1980 album Soldier in 1979.
According to Tiffany Murray, whose mother Joan was the live-in chef at Rockfield, Bowie rarely had any food but frequently asked for a glass of milk instead. “Bowie survived on silver top milk,” Murray said.
Speaking to The Times, Murray described Bowie as a “quiet man with weird eyes who didn’t really eat”.
According to biographer and author of Strange Fascination – David Bowie: The Definitive Story, David Buckley, Bowie’s diet consisted mainly of milk and red and green peppers.
The singer’s strange eating habits allegedly stemmed from his burgeoning cocaine addiction. Bowie weighed around seven stone in the late 1970s, his guitarist Carlos Alomar has claimed.
Bowie died in January 2016 at the age of 69 surrounded by his family following a "courageous 18-month battle with cancer”.
There were rumours within the industry regarding Bowie’s ill health, but the details of his cancer diagnosis were largely kept private.
Bowie was one of many notable musicians who made albums at Rockfield. At the same time he and Pop were making Soldier, the Scottish band Simple Minds were also working and living at Rockfield.
Joan once prepared the group a whole poached Wye Salmon with white wine, lemon, butter and fennel. The musicians, however, reportedly barely ate any of the meal and she took the leftovers to a church in Bodenham.
Although the group rarely consumed the food Joan prepared, they frequently initiated food fights that made her “hit the roof”.
Meanwhile, when Ozzy Osbourne stayed at the residential studio, he terrified Murray, who was a child at the time, when he danced in the neighbouring graveyard.
“Even now, encountering Ozzy Osbourne in a graveyard at night would be the stuff of nightmares,” she said,
To make amends, the rockstar quickly called up the luxury department store Harrods and had them deliver a van load of toys to the recording studio in Wales for Murray, who was a child at the time.
“That episode taught me that rockstars have license to do really big wrong things but also the resources for really big sorrys, too,” she said.
During his time at Rockfield Studios, Osbourne would also appear at the French windows of the property firing a shotgun while Joan Murray cooked in the kitchen, her daughter claimed.
“It was therapy for him,” she said. “I don’t think you could do that now under current health and safety regulations.”
