On this day in 1972, at a London concert hall, singer David Bowie appears for the first time as alter ego Ziggy Stardust. Intended as a satiric parody of larger-than-life rock stars, Ziggy was actually taken seriously by many rock critics and fans, and Bowie-as-Ziggy became a major star.

David Bowie, born David Jones, attended high school in London but dropped out to play music with a series of bands. He became interested in theater and art movements in the mid-1960s, studying mime and Japanese Kabuki theater. He formed his own mime company while recording several albums. His first album, The World of David Bowie, was released in 1967. Like his next few albums, it presented Bowie as a singer-songwriter a la Bob Dylan.

Bowie’s intense interest in theater ultimately led to the creation of the glamorous, androgynous Ziggy Stardust character, introduced in the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). Bowie toured England and the United States before retiring the Ziggy persona in July 1973. He continued to win fans with his later albums Diamond Dogs and Young Americans and reinvented himself as a mainstream pop singer in the 1980s, with Let’s Dance. In 1989, he released an album with his new band, Tin Machine.

Meanwhile, he also launched an acting career on stage and screen and became one of the earliest artists to take an interest in the Internet and new media–his concert staff was using email in the early 1980s. He launched the first artist newsgroup on the Internet in 1988, and he was the first artist to release an Internet-only single: “Telling Lies” in 1997. The same year, he allowed investors to participate in his financial future by issuing “Bowie Bonds,” a 10-year security paying investors 7.9 percent. He raised some $55 million through the bond issue. The following year, he launched his own Internet service provider, BowieNet.