David Bowie & the Story of Ziggy Stardust Page #4

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Gene Vincent, Vince Tailor.

Vince Taylor, who was the fatal English

rocker who famously took too much LSD

and declared he was Jesus Christ.

I think David took all this and created

this character with an amalgamation

of all the bands we've seen.

When you think about Screaming Lord Such, he

did a great show, when he came out of a coffin.

And there was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and

all these great bands that were theatrical.

You know, great theatre as well as rock

'n' roll. That's what David wanted to do.

He wanted to mix it all up.

Another singer who had taken rock 'n' roll

theatre to a deranged new level was Iggy Pop,

who Bowie had met in New York a few

months prior to recording the album.

Iggy was a big influence and, of course, Iggy

became Ziggy but no-one had gone that extra bit

and made their performance

a piece of concept art.

Part of that concept was

the creation of a new image,

so essential to

the success of Ziggy Stardust.

Bowie began by making the Spiders

from Mars look like a gang.

He took us to see Clockwork Orange and that's basically

where he got a lot of his ideas for the clothes.

We were the droogs.

Freddie Buretti, within a week, had

designed the clothes for Ziggy Stardust.

The sort of mock boiler

suits from clockwork Orange.

I always thought they were great because

they used curtain fabric from Liberty's

and it was very inventive, those little

velvet suits and those great space boots.

They were great. I really liked them.

He called us into his kind of lounge.

He had some drawings that he'd done.

He said, these are the ideas for what we're

going to wear. And, er, we were kind of...

Woody said, I'm not f***ing wearing

that. That was Woody's initial thing.

It took him a while to

convince us.

Especially Mick.

He said to Andrea, you won't get me wearing

that, you know what I mean? I'm a musician.

I've got friends that are going to

watch me!

Also to change was Bowie's long,

Pre-Raphaelite hairstyle.

I said, I think you should cut your hair

off because everyone's has got long hair.

You should do it a different style.

That started...

looking through the magazines.

Me, Angela and David

eventually decided on a combination

of three hairstyles.

That was the original Ziggy cut.

The next day I died it bright red. For

me, that was the day Ziggy was born.

The first single from the Ziggy Stardust album

was Starman, released on 28th April, 1972.

At first it didn't sell, but two months

later he appeared on Top of the Pops.

And that changed everything.

# There's a Starman

waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us

but he thinks he'd blow our minds

# There's a Starman

waiting in the sky

# He told us not to blow it

# Because he knows

it's all worthwhile

# So, let the children lose it

# Let the children use it

# Let all the children boogie... #

Starman was the Eureka

moment in rock 'n' roll.

This creature appears on Top of the Pops and he

was so shocking, so androgynous, so otherwordly.

It was so different. It was like, wow! No-one

had ever seen anything like that before.

# I had to phone someone

so I picked on you-oo-oo #

Let's not forget David's

magic as well.

There's a line in it where he sings, "I

had to phone someone, so I picked on you",

and he looks straight down the barrel of

the lens and I was sure he'd picked on me.

He arrived at a time when there was

a sort of vacuum in popular music.

He had a generation of people who were too

young for the 60s because they were kids

and we were ripe for exploitation.

Then suddenly there was David Bowie.

And we all said, that's what we want.

# There's a Starman waiting in

the sky... #

For any of the older generation who were

watching, it probably hadn't escaped their notice

that the singer in the multi-coloured

jumpsuit might not be entirely heterosexual.

Looking at it now, it looks so tame

but at the time it was a real gesture.

When he put his arm around the

guitarist, it was a very sexual thing.

The arm-draping gesture was even more sexually

provocative to readers of the Melody Maker,

because Bowie had declared he was gay in

the music paper several months earlier.

To go that extra mile and say,

I'm gay, was so outrageous.

Of course, gay men at that time

weren't characters on soap operas on TV.

They weren't outed comedians.

It still was very subversive.

Angela said to him,

the sh*t's hit the fan.

It was the kind of thing a popular

singer didn't say

whether it was true or whether it

wasn't, in those days.

Angela also said to him, look, you

might at least have said, I'm bisexual.

# People stare at the make-up

on his face

No-one had paid any attention when Bowie hung around

the gay scene with Lindsay Kemp several years earlier.

But after the Top of the Pops

performance had made him a household name,

his sexual orientation became

a national talking point.

Bowie probably did make

homosexuality fashionable.

It's not somebody naff saying, I'm gay and

nobody cares. It's somebody who's super-hip.

At the time, people were feeling so repressed

and it was dangerous. They were getting beat up.

So he liberated a lot of people. I

thought he was doing a really good thing.

Whether he was gay or bisexual, at this

point in time Bowie was married with a son

and so the ambiguity gained him

a huge amount of press attention.

It also seemed to make him

even more attractive to women.

David Bowie is hot!

He's gorgeous. Yes, androgynous.

Gorgeous. Physically striking.

I just wanted to have sex with him,

I didn't want him to be gay.

Performing on Top of the Pops gave

Bowie the power to unleash Ziggy Stardust

to 15 million people

in just three minutes.

The single was soon on its way to

number ten in the charts,

Bowie's first hit since Space

Oddity, three years earlier.

Bowie mania happened immediately.

You'd go to school and in, I would say,

in three days people had the haircut.

When you see big, fat, hairy truckers with

short, Ziggy haircuts is, it's quite a revelation!

My goodness me!

To go out to the shop,

you had to go out the back garden

and climb over a wall

and sort of disguise yourself and then walk down

an alleyway because the street was covered in kids.

There was kids everywhere.

We went out shopping and we came

back with all our shopping

and we hadn't spent a penny.

Bowie's was even worse. There were at least 100

kids out there all the time waiting to see him.

When the album smashed into

the top five,

Bowie knew the ghost of the one hit

wonder had finally been laid to rest.

After a decade of attempts,

he'd finally cracked it.

The success of Ziggy Stardust coincided

with the emerging Glam Rock scene

but Bowie was more interested in

creating his own, super-hip clique.

The first part of this plan was to donate a song

to the much-loved, but struggling Mott the Hoople.

It became an even bigger hit

than Starman.

# All the young dudes

# Heh! Dudes! (Carry the news)

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