David Bowie

Fire takes four of his ten planets, earth three, air two and a single one water, with four of the ten cardinal and four fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Mars fill nine degrees of Capricorn, built on competence and on having actually done the thing. The record calls Bowie the shape-shifting rock star whose personas redefined popular music, and says he died in New York two days after releasing his final album.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Venus at twelve hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, which is taste slightly out of step with self worth, and conjunct Mars at just over half a degree, which puts the self and the will in one place. Venus also sits in that same friction with Mars at four tenths, attraction and drive disagreeing. So identity, taste and drive are tied to each other three ways inside three fifths of a degree, with the taste contact the uncomfortable one. In a singer whose record is a sequence of invented selves, a Sun permanently slightly out of step with what it values is the contact worth having.

Jupiter sits at twenty two degrees of Scorpio and Neptune at eleven of Libra, and the Sun sits at an awkward angle to Uranus at just over a degree and a third. His Moon sits on the sixth degree of Leo at noon and may have reached Cancer, which costs this chart its Moon to Saturn conjunction, so that is left out along with the Leo group it would have made. Saturn, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. In a singer the record describes as a sequence of invented selves, a Moon that cannot be placed is a real loss, because the personas were the part a reader most wants a feeling account of.

He died in New York on 10 January 2016, at sixty nine. Uranus stood square his natal Mars at sixteen hundredths of a degree that day, with Saturn in easy contact with his natal Pluto at under three fifths and Neptune sixty degrees from his natal Mercury at the same orb. The Moon was new and one per cent lit, the phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them, which for a man who released a record two days earlier is the phase the record would have chosen.