“Rue David Bowie” will be officially inaugurated in the capital’s 13th district on the left bank of the city.
No former dignitary’s name will need to be removed to make room for Bowie, as the street was created recently as part of a major makeover of the neighbourhood that also includes modernist university library Bibliotheque Francois Mitterrand.
The thoroughfare – around 50m long – was previously known to city planners as VoieDZ/13, a working title that could have appealed to Bowie himself who wrote songs such as “TVC15” or “5:15”.
Bowie, who died on Jan 10, 2016 of liver cancer, would have been 77 on Monday.
Bowie counts as one of the most influential, as well as bestselling, musicians of the 20th century, mostly thanks to his unparalleled ability to reinvent himself artistically throughout his career that took off with hit single “Space Oddity” in 1969.
His landmark songs and albums include “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” and “Aladdin Sane”, and commercial smash hits “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl” as well as gloomily experimental works such as “Low”.
‘Paris or maybe hell’
Paris played less of a prominent role in Bowie’s life than London, Berlin and Los Angeles, but French avant-garde theatrical culture was an influence on his visual style.
He also successfully covered French-language songs “Amsterdam” and “Ma Mort” (“My Death”) by Jacques Brel, who was not actually French but Belgian.
A cryptic line in Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” song refers to “Paris or maybe hell”.
He still has a cult following in France, where fanclubs such as “Bowie France” sell merchandise, organise concerts and Bowie conventions drawing thousands, and where cover band “Bowie Reloaded” fills even large venues with nostalgic fans.
Monday’s unveiling of the plaque is scheduled for 4.15 pm (11.15pm in Malaysia), the mayor of Paris’s 13th district, Jerome Coumet, said on X.
An avowed Bowie fan, Coumet launched the idea for a Bowie street in early 2020 and won Paris city approval later that year, arguing that the star had “a strong link with the city of light”.
There is no record of a David Bowie-named street anywhere else. A Bowie exhibition, also at the mayor’s office, is to run to the end of next week.