David Bowie invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie renamed himself after the 19th-century American pioneer James Bowie and the knife he had popularised. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", using speeded-up thus high-pitched vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, "David Bowie", an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It was his last release for two years. Bowie met dancer Lindsay Kemp in 1967 and enrolled in his dance class at the London Dance Centre. He commented in 1972 that meeting Kemp was when his interest in image
David Bowie discography to the UK Albums Chart with "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" (1972), which peaked at number five. Following the success of "Ziggy Stardust", sales of "Hunky Dory" improved and it eventually peaked at number three in the UK. RCA re-released the 1969" David Bowie" under the title Space Oddity (with an updated Ziggy Stardust-era photo) and "The Man Who Sold the World", which reached numbers 17 and 26 in the UK respectively. Bowie released nine more studio albums with RCA, all of which reached the top five of the UK Albums Chart, of