A few days earlier in Bradford he’d bragged to the local Argus that he’d definitely be meeting The King in person. But, as was custom, Elvis had already ‘left the building’ before the curtain fell. Ziggy returned to his hotel with Angie and DeFries, slightly deflated and privately tormented by the imaginary conversation they might have had; running away with boyish fantasies of Elvis one day singing his songs and hearing those luscious lips murmur, ‘Time takeshashigarette.’
But then maybe it was for the best they hadn’t met. The risk of disappointment. The fear of facing the reality. As he’d soon tell a US reporter, he expected Elvis wasn’t anything like he’d dreamed. He imagined Elvis to be ‘a very nice, uncomplicated kind of guy’.
‘And I didn’t want to meet that,’ smiled Ziggy. ‘I wanted to meet the image.’
FOUR
THE BROADCAST
SHE THOUGHT SHE’D seen the last of extraterrestrials. Her work as a radar operative for the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation had finished over a year ago. No more would she have to spend her days monitoring radar screens for the next blip of a flying saucer, her senses prickling to the occasional lingering glance from her base commander, secretly entranced by her beauty: the soft Asian face, the cascade of inky black hair, the ever-so-kinky tan knee-boots and slinky cream catsuit distinguished from those of her co-workers by the initial ‘A’ swinging on a chain below her slender bosom. A for Ayshea. As she’d joke, pronounced like a sneeze. ‘Eye-sha.’
She was permanently Ayshea, on screen and off: her name in real life and the name of her SHADO operative in the Gerry Anderson sci-fi series UFO. Adding to the enigma, in the programme’s credits, she was listed without a surname. Ayshea, the actress, was simply ‘Ayshea’, as exotic and space-queeny as that sounded. The part hadn’t demanded much. Ayshea was under no illusion she was there for any reason other than to look sexy and pipe up ‘red alert!’ whenever the script dictated. But it gave her the mildly thrilling experience of acting beside the show’s American star Ed Bishop, who’d had a fleeting role in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey which, by coincidence, had been shot in the same Borehamwood studios used for much of the series.
Ayshea was already months into filming UFO in late 1969 when she took another job as co-presenter of a new children’s pop show beside a puppet owl named Ollie Beak. With young minds raving about the recent Apollo moon landing, and a song about rockets called ‘Space Oddity’ still in the top ten, the producers had settled on the title Lift Off.
Three years later, Ollie Beak had been replaced by a puppet dog, Fred Barker, while Ayshea had been elevated to its star draw. Lift Off With Ayshea.
She’d also been trying to launch her own pop career, sometimes singing on the show but yet to pester the same chart heights as her guests. A keen spiritualist, she nevertheless remained optimistic. At the start of 1972, Ayshea was asked by a magazine to list her hopes for the next twelve months. She predicted Americans would ‘definitely land on Mars’ before the end of the year. She’d be proved wrong. But, if it was any consolation, Ayshea would get to meet a genuine band of Martians soon enough.
Ziggy Stardust hadn’t long returned home from New York when he was given the good news he’d been offered a chance to promote ‘Starman’ on Lift Off With Ayshea. It meant cancelling a gig in Coventry in order to be at the scheduled taping at Granada TV up in Manchester. An easy sacrifice to make considering the target audience: kids looking for teatime pop kicks after a midsummer’s day perishing in the classroom. This particular week, those kicks were a hairy man from South Africa with an unpronounceable name warbling about his ‘Sweet Marie’, a failure of teenagers called Hello feebly squeaking ‘ooh-ooh’ over some fuzzy guitars, and a beige-faced club singer in tux and bow-tie moaning about divorce. Nothing much to talk about in the playground the next day.
Apart from Ziggy. In six months he had now achieved televisual perfection. His hair, a rusty orangutanish scream. His clothes, a new Freddie quilted droog suit of jacket and trousers in rich reds, blues and golds, looking like they’d been cut from a sultan’s duvet, and a pair of shiny scarlet wrestling boots; moving on from Russell & Bromley but keeping it local, made by the firm Greenway & Sons in glamorous Penge.
Ronno was his usual glimmering golden self while even Weird had embraced the spirit of cosmic glamour by spraying his long dangling sideboards white so he looked like a lunar Santa Claus. The Spiders played for Ayshea against a black backdrop dotted with large, spiky silver and red stars. When it came to the chorus, Ziggy and Ronno crowded towards the same microphone. Ziggy slung his acoustic guitar to his right hip and flopped a left arm around Ronno in a tender embrace of Martian brotherhood. In the eyes of Ayshea, and the kids who’d soon be watching at home, they looked every fibre a pop group from outer space: a Flash Gordon Fab Four fronted by a pale, thin Venus Presley.
The programme was broadcast a week later, at 4.55 p.m. on Wednesday 21 June. Television sets blared, eyes glistened, blood rushed, lips trembled, chewing stopped, comics dropped, homework curled neglected in satchels, chip-pans sizzled, dogs whimpered, cutlery clattered, mothers shouted ‘tea!’ in vain; and the unseen stars in the summer sky above shone with fierce pride for one of their own. The next day on buses, in bedrooms, by school gates, outside sweetshops, in back gardens, on grassy commons, in dirty playgrounds with rusting slides and paint-chipped swings, hardly a word was said about Hello, or the unpronounceable Emil Dean Zoghby, or Tony Christie begging ‘Don’t Go Down To Reno’, or Fred Barker, or even that much about the ravishing Ayshea herself. But everyone wanted to talk about Ziggy. The sound, the hair, the clothes and the warm invitation he’d extended to their hungry hearts just weeks before the summer holiday kicked off.
Yes sir, Starman. They would boogie.
TWO DAYS AFTER singing for Ayshea and her captive audience of innocents, Ziggy was sinking his teeth into Ronno’s nether regions on stage in Oxford Town Hall. He’d been secretly toying with the stunt for a while, praying that Ronno wouldn’t shirk away and embarrass him when he went for it. Towards the end of the set, during ‘Suffragette City’, Ziggy stooped between Ronno’s legs in front of his guitar and began pranging the strings with his mouth. Luckily, Ronno didn’t shirk. He kept his left hand tapping out frantic fretboard mutations, his right hand raising the guitar to Ziggy’s head so he could bite the strings Jimi Hendrix fashion. Behind them in the wings was Ziggy’s photographer friend, Mick Rock. From where Mick was stood pointing his camera, the guitar between Ziggy’s head and Ronno’s crotch was irrelevant. It was one geezer from Mars orally pleasuring another.
Click.
The ‘Martian blow job’ became a regular manœuvre over the coming weeks as the Spiders’ provincial campaign trail grew ever more rumbustious. In Croydon, demand outstripped supply when a thousand kids quaking in awe after the Ayshea broadcast had to be turned away from the sold-out venue. Ziggy could hear them screaming his name beyond the walls from inside his dressing room where somebody had left that week’s copy of the NME lying around. The headline immediately caught Ziggy’s eye. ‘BOLAN TO QUIT TOURS?’
There’d been an especially violent T. Rex gig in Manchester, the crowd driven so berserk that in the aftermath Marc was now considering retirement from the stage. Ziggy read with wonder, trying to imagine what that must feel like. To pull the plug. To stop playing. To cease to be. But he couldn’t. He could only puzzle over Marc’s so-sudden surrender and wet his lips with the taste of imminent victory.
When it came, the taste of victory was that of the BBC canteen. The Ayshea broadcast had worked its magic, pushing ‘Starman’ safely inside the top 40. Which meant that the first Wednesday in July, Ziggy and the Spiders were called to Television Centre to seize the prize of Top Of The Pops.
Number one that week was ‘Puppy Love’ by Donny Osmond, the new teen heartthrob weakening the knees of Jackie and Mirabelle readers, who had to make do with watching him on film rather than in the BBC studio. As well as The Sweet
, Lulu and the house dancers Pan’s People, the one other live act there on the day was Gary Glitter doing some serious Osmond-nudging at number two with his rhythmic war cry ‘Rock And Roll Part 2’.
Ziggy and Gary may have had very different objectives but they shared the same umbrella management company and a spookily parallel ancestry. Many years ago, when he was still teenager Paul Gadd, Gary gravitated to the 2 I’s coffee bar in Soho, weaving and bobbing between the young Mark Feld, where he met the person who changed his life. A rock ’n’ roll singer who passed on a piece of priceless advice: ‘Never let the public see you as your real self because you’d never appear special to them again.’ The singer’s name was Vince Taylor.
It took Paul Gadd another ten years to follow Taylor’s advice by hiding his real self and settling on a pseudonym: for a painful split second he was very nearly Terry Tinsel. Gary Glitter was, as that name betrayed, a bacofoil buffoon with no sense of style, but Ziggy was charitable enough to talk to him when cornered. Gary wanted to know where Ziggy bought his clothes. ‘Alkasura on the King’s Road,’ lied Ziggy. Alkasura was the hip boutique where Chelita Secunda liked to drag Marc Bolan for most of his clothes. Ziggy had only said it thinking it would be a scream if one day Marc turned on the telly and saw Gary Glitter prancing about in his T. Rex wardrobe. All being fair in glam and war.
By late afternoon, after a full dress rehearsal, the Spiders were suited, booted and pleasantly giddy on cheap wine and beer from the BBC bar, giggling at the starched collars and tweed sophistos casting funny glances at their shiny Martian rags. They were wearing the same outfits they’d worn for Ayshea, the only difference being Gilly’s hair, since bleached lighter. Ziggy had also decided to use his bright blue acoustic guitar. If ever a time had come to prove to the world he’d rather be a colour television set than a radio, this was it. For this was the moment. The cylinder crashing on Horsell Common. The alien monolith at the dawn of man. The point of contact beyond the infinite. Four minutes to change the history of the human race. As specially introduced by Tony Blackburn.
The Studio 8 audience encircled the stage, a plucky chosen few standing just feet behind the Spiders, where a strange but eager boy in a grey striped tank top danced jogging on the spot in a vain bid for the camera’s attention. Gilly had been placed down in front, Weird, Ziggy and Ronno on the platform behind him. When the music started, Ziggy fixed his stare into the camera lens. A nervous laugh. A lightheaded sensation like he was Kubrick’s Star-Child, floating through space, braced to fall through Earth’s atmosphere.
‘Hey, now, now.’
And down he fell. He could sense his face, his hair, his clothes, his flesh, his bones, his red boots and his blue guitar slowly atomised in a neon sandstorm, sucked like stardust into the cathode tubes of a million households, transmitted through the very electromagnetic waves crackling with the radiation of the big bang. He’d sung the words dozens of times before, but only now did their prophecy make sense. He wasn’t singing a song, he was singing his life. He was the Starman. This was his message to the people of Earth. When he sang ‘picked on you’, by ‘you’ he meant all, waggling a finger directly into the lens with a knowing lasers-to-stun smile. And just as they had for Ayshea, when it came to the chorus, Ziggy flopped an arm around Ronno’s shoulders. Martian brothers. Maybe even Martian lovers.
The episode was broadcast the next evening: Thursday 6 July 1972, at 7.25 p.m. on BBC1 between the day’s play at Wimbledon and a repeat episode of The Goodies. Those who didn’t turn over to watch continued tennis coverage on BBC2 or succumb to the lure of the film on ITV – The Silent Enemy with Laurence Harvey, Little Red Monkey with Richard Conte, Rogues’ Regiment with Dick Powell, or The Midnight Story with Tony Curtis depending on which region – would, somewhere between The Who, The Sweet, The New Seekers, Lulu, Love Unlimited, Dr Hook, Pan’s People, Gary Glitter, Donny Osmond and Tony Blackburn, have been blessed with the vision of Ziggy and the sound of ‘Starman’. Curtains drew wide and windows hinged open in the warm summer’s evening as stardust echoes vibrated redbrick, pebbledash, lamppost, railing, milk crate, bicycle wheel and radial tyre. Young minds, which at 7.25 p.m. clung to the stem of smooth, well-ordered, stabilised lives, had, by eight o’clock, been blown free like dandelion seeds to the far corners of the universe. Ziggy had ripped ‘Over The Rainbow’ and, in turn, ripped Britain from a gutter-grey council house Kansas to a vibrant, debauched rock ’n’ roll Oz. Out of the dark, out of the night, into the sun, into the light. The Spiders From Mars had stolen the nation’s children while publicly declaring war on the straight, the dour, the bigoted, the ugly, the colourless, the safe, the cowardly and the rule-makers. And nobody, not the Ministry of Defence, not Professor Quatermass, not even Marc Bolan, could stop them.
While the rest of the country slowly adjusted to extraterrestrial invasion, in Haddon Hall Ronno watched the programme back in conspicuous silence. He’d been stewing over that week’s issue of Melody Maker, carrying a full page ad with a handwritten message. ‘Thanx to all our people for making ZIGGY. I love you.’ It wasn’t the words that bothered him, it was the image. The ‘Martian blow job’ photo from the recent Oxford gig. Ronno’s family up in Hull would regularly read the Maker to follow his progress. They weren’t going to like that any more than they were seeing ‘their Mick’ tonight on national TV singing with Ziggy’s arm wrapped lovingly around his shoulders. Just as he feared, a few days later he had to suffer the sound of his mother crying down the Haddon Hall phone receiver. Some vandal had thrown paint over the new car he’d bought her, as she’d since discovered, in retribution for her Mick being ‘a queer’.
Yet Ziggy, forgivably, was as oblivious to Ronno’s grievances as he was to anyone and anything else that night, hopelessly intoxicated on his own televisual glory. Humanity would remember this date for ever, he reckoned. The sixth of July, 1972. The day their Starman ceremonially fell to Earth on Top Of The Pops. The sixth day of the seventh month. He made a mental note of it for next year.
Not for a blink of a trice of a nanosecond did he, or anybody else, consider that by then he might already be dead.
FIVE
THE GLORY
‘HERE HE IS, the second greatest thing next to God …’
It was only two days after Top Of The Pops and already Ziggy was being introduced on stage as the new Jesus.
The man doing the introducing was DJ Kenny Everett, the compère for a ‘Save The Whale’ benefit organised by Friends of the Earth at London’s Royal Festival Hall, where Ziggy was headlining. The last time the cold cadaver of David Bowie was on the same stage he’d been booed by Tyrannosaurus Rex hippies while he mimed his Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet. Four years later, the electrified pulse of ‘Ode To Joy’ rattling the modernist foundations, he was second only to God. The true cosmic messiah. Let Beethoven sing for him! ‘We approach, drunk with fire, thy sacred shrine!’ Or something similar in robotic German.
He sang hoping the eyes of God might really be watching, knowing if they were it would give the Almighty cause for celestial concern that, if he wasn’t careful, tomorrow morning in pulpits across the land there’d be snivelling vicars apologetically praising ‘God, the second greatest thing next to Ziggy.’ Looking up at the balcony boxes he saw a distressed damsel nearly fall over the ledge waving a homemade ‘Ziggy’ banner. Another girl ran towards the stage sobbing and clutching flowers. When he reached down to take them she squeezed him around the neck, planting frantic kisses on his cheeks, exactly as he’d seen done to Elvis Presley in New York. The journalists in the audience stared and scribbled and staggered home starry-eyed to buff and polish his ego in frenzied typewriter clatters. He was ‘Garbo from Mars’, ‘a real star, incorporating the things that made people like Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and The Beatles so special’ and – Ziggy’s personal favourite – ‘the thinking man’s (or woman’s) Marc Bolan’. Their only criticism was his choice of special guest. ‘A mere mortal next to our hero.’
Mortal or not, Lou Reed was a hero to Ziggy. It was his idea to invite Lou over from New York especially for the benefit, allowing himself the honour of presenting the former singer of his favourite band for his first appearance on a British stage. Lou was happy to agree, happy to get out of his gourd backstage on booze and Mandrax, and even happier to just about survive joining Ziggy for three of his own songs – ‘White Light/ White Heat’, ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’ and ‘Sweet Jane’ – without falling over. Dressed in a black velvet suit with rhinestone trimming, his ashen face smudged with mascara and black lipstick, beside The Spiders From Mars he looked more like a Cockroach From Mongo.
But in Ziggy’s eyes, Lou could do no wrong. He’d already encouraged Mott The Hoople to cover ‘Sweet Jane’ for their album, bringing Lou to the studio to help Ian Hunter with a guide vocal. Lou would tell everyone who’d listen how ‘wonderful’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘beautiful’ Ziggy was. Ziggy, in turn, vowed that once he’d finished with Mott he’d move on to produce Lou’s next album. And when Mott played Lou their ‘All The Young Dudes’, he just about popped.
‘It’s the most brilliant single I’ve heard in my life!’ flapped Lou. ‘It’s a Gay Anthem! A rallying call to the young dudes to come out in the streets and show that they were beautiful and gay and proud of it.’
Ziggy was overcome with pride. Mott were simply overcome, exchanging catatonic stares in mortified, slackjaw, penny-drop silence.
Ziggyology Page 21
