Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  The Phoenix show was pitifully under-attended. Afterwards, Ziggy numbed his dismay with alcohol. He wept, he screamed, he scratched, he thrashed and moaned himself unconscious convoluted in the rubbish of his bleakest nightmares. And when he woke up the next morning with his brain tight and putrid like a cold, dark blob of melted plastic welded to the inside of his skull, he looked in the mirror and saw that he only had one eyebrow.

  Ziggy squinted at the face. It now looked like two halves of two different faces, the expressive and the expressionless, as if soldered together by an invisible lightning flash from his left temple down to his right chin. He found the guilty razor on the edge of the sink, its shiny blade silently chuckling at his headache. In a few delicate strokes he evened the picture. The chalky, sun-shy albino visage ogling back at him looked more unearthly than ever. His trembling fingers stroked the hairless ridges. It was like a painting by Edvard Munch cursed to life, blinking back at him.

  ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

  A face he knew as that of Aladdin Sane.

  WHILE ZIGGY WAS adjusting to life without eyebrows in the mental ache and physical shake of an Arizonan hangover, five thousand miles away his friends The New York Dolls were adjusting to the impulse to murder Lou Reed.

  The Dolls’ world had changed dramatically in the few weeks since they’d dragged Ziggy round the Bowery. Still unsigned, after exciting UK press interest they’d been invited over for a handful of shows in England, hoping to grab a record deal while they were there. One of those shows was support to Lou at the Liverpool Stadium, or it would have been had Lou not sent a flunky to their dressing room moments before they were due on stage. Justifiably fearing they may blow him out of the water, Lou played his bitchy ace and sent word they weren’t going on. The Dolls were furious but, sadly, powerless.

  With a few days to kill before their next date supporting Roxy Music in Manchester they returned to their hotel in London. On the evening of Tuesday 7 November, drummer Billy Murcia was invited to a party by a girl he’d met in a nightclub the week before. The others were too whacked to join him. And so Billy went alone to the flat only a few minutes’ walk down from Imperial College on the junction with Exhibition and Cromwell Road. The same flat where he took too many Quaaludes and drank too much red wine and eventually passed out. The hosts panicked, trying to wake him in a cold bath while forcing hot coffee down his throat. Billy Doll choked to death on his own regurgitations, his spirit slipping away into the sacred South Kensington ether of H. G. Wells, Gustav Holst, dinosaur bones, meteorites and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Dolls had flown to London as five. They’d return to New York as four.

  OVER IN MAIDA Vale, Marc Bolan was also in mourning. Not for Billy Doll, but for Boink, his pet mouse. He’d returned from his disappointing tour of America and all its attendant lukewarm press to find Boink seriously ill. He’d tried calling a vet to come for a home visit but none would help. Until Marc awoke one morning to find Boink lying stiff on his back with his legs sticking up, a tiny trace of blood around his white furry mouth. He buried him in his back garden.

  Marc’s grief for Boink still did nothing to temper his ego in the press. Asked his thoughts on David Cassidy: ‘I prefer Hopalong. He turns me on far more.’

  And Ziggy?

  ‘He’s still very much a one-hit wonder I’m afraid.’

  BACK IN AMERICA, the alleged one-hit wonder was learning about fear: staring death in the face on the streets of Houston, Texas, when a truck driver stuck a shotgun out of the window of his vehicle. ‘If it wasn’t against the law,’ he spat at Ziggy, ‘I’d blow your fucking head off.’

  It reignited all the old horrors about being murdered on stage. Death now waited in the wings of every destination, looming like Father Time on the clock outside Mercury’s offices in Chicago, its scythe ready to swipe as soon as the last grains trickled through the hourglass. The news about Billy Doll only amplified his fears. When he reached New Orleans, Ziggy turned his morbidity into melody and finished another new song. He called it ‘Time’.

  He could still just about suppress his anxiety on stage, converting, perverting and teaching the lost boys and girls of Nixon’s America his masonic Stardust rituals: the way he’d turn his hands upside down like goggles over his face to create a mask, or wave his fingers on his head like ‘a cow’ during the line in ‘Life On Mars?’. The older, been-round-the-blockers like Christine, the 21-year-old cat-faced girl there to see Ziggy’s return to Cleveland in late November, also noted the in-joke of his latest Freddie spacesuit covered with random tartan number patches, a deliberate ‘69’ slapbang over the crotch.

  The familiar faces of Mott The Hoople were waiting to meet Ziggy at the tour’s end in Philadelphia, where they were booked to play the same venue the night before. After hiring a cab for the three-hundred-mile journey from his penultimate stop in Pittsburgh, Ziggy arrived just in time to join them on stage at the Tower Theatre for an encore of ‘All The Young Dudes’. Ian Hunter couldn’t help but fret about Ziggy. Ghostly thin, underfed and shorn of eyebrows, he was more apparition than artist. And even though he laughed and smiled there was a private glint of sadness glowing dimly in his strange, dissimilar eyes.

  The real sadness was all that Ziggy had seen in the three months he’d scoured this vast, hectic, ridiculous, contradictory, insane nation. Back in New York, he held a farewell press conference. ‘I feel the American is the loneliest person in the world,’ he surmised. ‘I get an awful feeling of insecurity and a need for warmth in people here. It’s very, very sad.’

  It seemed an appropriate frame of mind to revisit the isolation of Major Tom. On his last day before heading home to England, by request of RCA America, Ziggy filmed a new promo for ‘Space Oddity’ with Mick Rock, sat strumming an acoustic guitar alone in a recording studio, his face devoid of emotion, looking as if he really were many thousand light years from home.

  In early December, Ziggy boarded the luxury liner R.H.M.S. Ellinis (‘Greek Lady’) for the week-long voyage home. His American odyssey had so far given him six new songs. ‘Watch That Man’, ‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Panic In Detroit’, ‘Cracked Actor’, ‘Drive-In Saturday’ and ‘Time’. The return passage would give him a sublime seventh.

  Ziggy had with him his guitar and a copy of Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh’s satire about the rich and idle ‘Bright Young People’ caught between the wars in late-twenties London. He thought about Waugh’s battle cries, champagne and the suicide of the novel’s gossip columnist ‘Chatterbox’. He thought about the First World War, and the Second, which David’s parents had survived, and the possible third he believed could happen at any point in the next five years. He looked through his porthole at the endless icy grave of the Atlantic Ocean. He called the song ‘Aladdin Sane (1913–1938–197?)’.

  And so Ziggy sailed back towards England, in mourning for America, lost in chords and choruses of dead roses, sad remains and a sliver of himself called Aladdin Sane. Unaware that as New York vanished into the mist, somewhere in its overpopulated human zoo his old flame Cyrinda Foxe had just aborted the child of her union with the one they called the Starman.

  SEVEN

  THE BREAK

  MOTT THE HOOPLE had only been away for a month but to Ian Hunter it had felt like years. He returned from America on Christmas Eve, looking forward to a quiet week of well-earned festive sloth with his wife at their Northampton home. The comfort and joy of food, drink, The Morecambe & Wise Show and taking the piss out of Little Jimmy Osmond on Top Of The Pops as he yelped through that year’s Yuletide number one ‘Long Haired Lover From Liverpool’. Peace on Earth. Pa-rup-up-um-pum. Until Boxing Day, when the phone rang.

  Hunter answered, thinking it might be family. It wasn’t. It was Ziggy calling from Haddon Hall. He was abnormally excited, his tone twitchy, his words rushed. He had things he needed to tell Hunter. ‘Important’ things. ‘Great’ things. ‘Big’ things for Mott The Hoople in 1973. ‘Urgent’ things he needed to tell Hu
nter in person.

  There were times during the two-hour drive on a bitter Boxing Day’s evening from Northampton down to Beckenham that Hunter wondered why he’d said ‘yes’. They’d seen each other only a couple of weeks ago in America. Ziggy had played Hunter a new song called ‘Drive-In Saturday’ which he thought Mott should record. Hunter wasn’t so keen and, now he thought about it, maybe this whole emergency meeting was a ruse to try to force him to reconsider.

  But then again it was Ziggy. Nine months ago Mott almost broke up. It was Ziggy who had saved them and, thanks to ‘All The Young Dudes’, practically made them. If anyone was worth the bother of driving eighty miles on Boxing Day, it was their starry saviour.

  Southend Road was empty when Hunter finally parked the car outside Haddon Hall; too cold and too late for the otherwise regular clumps of swooning Ziggyites patiently hovering along the street, hiding in the bushes opposite for a glimpse of their god, some like twelve-year-old George from Woolwich plucking up the nerve to waltz over and ring flat seven’s doorbell in the hope of having his day made by being told to ‘fuck off!’ by Angie through the window.

  The muted scene which greeted Hunter once Angie beckoned him inside wasn’t the welcome he’d been expecting. There was Ziggy in the corner of the sofa, a recoiling imp much too preoccupied with pulling stupid faces at Hunter from behind a cushion to volunteer anything so civilised as ‘hello’. Freddie lay beside him, giggling numbly. Maybe he was too sober and they were too stoned but Hunter could sense a pin-pricking awkwardness. He waited to hear about the important things, the great things, the big things. Ziggy fondled his cushion, jaws locked half-open in his broken-zipped grin like the dummy of a drunk ventriloquist, eyes twitching like newts in a jam jar begging for release. Then he excused himself to go to the bathroom. He returned in the short flush of a toilet chain, speaking in a funny voice. A minute passed and he went back to the bathroom. He returned again speaking in a different, equally funny voice. And so it continued.

  Hunter had been genuinely concerned about Ziggy when they’d met in America and seen the poor, atomic husk he’d become. Now he wished he hadn’t bothered. It was like Hunter didn’t know Ziggy any more. At least not this pain-in-the-arse manifestation. Maybe because Ziggy no longer knew himself.

  ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

  He was stood in the bathroom: Hunter had made his excuses and left, driving away not only from Haddon Hall but from the orbit of the Starman for ever. He looked at the being before him. The head of red hair, the bleached, eyebrow-less expression. He was Ziggy Stardust. He was Aladdin Sane. But he was still David Bowie.

  And he was still David Jones, son of John Jones of Dr Barnardo’s. Just before Christmas he’d played two homecoming shows back at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. The posters instructed fans to ‘Please bring a toy with you – it will be given to a children’s home’. He ended up sending Barnardo’s a whole truckload. It was Ziggy playing at being Father Christmas only to discover he was just a chip off Father Jones.

  Marc Bolan was right when he’d said he didn’t know who he was. It was true. He did steal identities. One year ago he’d stood before this same mirror and told himself he was going to be Ziggy Stardust. He wondered what he would have said had he been able to look into the future and see himself today, his grand mission of 1972 accomplished. And what would he be able to see another year from now? Ziggy Stardust? Aladdin Sane? Or some other Starman? He shut his eyes and rubbed his temples as if trying to tune the transistor of his mind and find the future frequency of 1974. But there was nothing. Silence. Emptiness. Deadness.

  He opened his eyes and looked into those of the sad, scared reflection staring back at him. A cold breeze blew the shutters at the back of his mind and a lonely guitar strummed the opening chord of a song he recognised as ‘My Death’.

  TWO DAYS AFTER burning his bridges with Mott, the Spiders were in Manchester to play their last concerts of 1972, back at the Hardrock. On the first night, Ziggy began the set, for a change, sat behind a Moog synthesizer, his fingers tapping out the melody of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’. Stood in the crowd of lipsticked lurex lookalikes was a thirteen-year-old peculiarity with a determined chin called Steven, who lived within walking distance of the venue just a few streets away in Stretford; the loneliest of lonely planet boys who took from Ziggy the guts to one day illuminate the drabness of a dole age to come.

  While up north, Ziggy held an end of year press conference to announce the title of his next album, Love Aladdin Vein. It was probably a bit too druggy, a bit too obvious and a bit too Lou but, as he’d said before, ‘I’m just a Photostat machine. I just put out what has already been fed in.’ And just in case Britain had forgotten in his absence that he was the one, true cosmic messiah, he chose the moment to remind them. ‘Space travel is on my mind,’ said Ziggy, cold and matter-of-factly. ‘Because it is necessary for our own survival that we build a bridge between us and the peoples not of our universe.’

  While Ziggy was in Manchester talking to the stars, Marc Bolan spent the last days of 1972 brooding on the ground beneath his feet. He’d given one of his last interviews of the year to Mirabelle, who’d asked his plans for old age. ‘I just can’t imagine myself as being old,’ he admitted. ‘I feel that I shall be gone before I ever reach that stage.’

  Of more immediate worry to Marc was the critical bludgeoning of Born To Boogie, the T. Rex documentary he’d made with Ringo Starr, released in cinemas just before Christmas and dismissed by the press as a failed vanity project. Now there were rumours of a T. Rex cartoon series (Ziggy had been considering a similar idea based on drawings by David’s best friend George but, ever several leaps ahead, had already abandoned the idea). One year on, Marc’s fabled ‘cosmic messiah’ film had still to materialise but occasionally crept back into conversation between his separate delight at being asked to write a script for Federico Fellini. Which was news to everyone, especially Federico Fellini.

  The undiscussable reality was that six months ago he’d been UK pop’s number one ‘Metal Guru’, but now his glimmer was starting to rust. T. Rex’s latest single, the hi-speed faceslapper ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’, ended the year at number three, unable to smack higher than Chuck Berry singing about his penis, and the nine-year-old Osmond child. No more the main man, Marc’s only consolation, if any, was that he could still outsell Ziggy, lagging behind at sixteen with ‘The Jean Genie’.

  So the planet spun, and clocks struck, and corks popped, and Sunday night became Monday morning and 1972 irreversibly slid into 1973. In the first week of January, T. Rex had risen to two. Marc had slain Chuck and his ‘Ding-A-Ling’ but resilient ‘Little’ Jimmy was still invincible. The following week, T. Rex fell back to three again and with it the unthinkable pop ignominy he’d always dreaded came to pass. ‘The Jean Genie’ glided to two. Ziggy had physically knocked Marc off his lofty pop perch.

  Marc had only himself to blame. He’d made the fatal error of going on holiday, spending early January on a beach in Barbados with his wife while Ziggy reaped the dividends on the road in Scotland and the north, canvassing for chart glory, wrapping his arms around the glam-greedy kids of Glasgow and Preston, swooping them towards his chest like a card shark embracing his winnings from the centre of the poker table.

  ‘The Jean Genie’ had also returned the Spiders to the studios of Top Of The Pops, playing the song live to show off the tour-tightened might of Ronno, Weird and Gilly, blasting every BBC audio metre trembling into the red. This time Ziggy was no benign colourful Starman but a silvery, skeletal, auburn vampire, a solitary earring swinging dramatically before his jugular, eyes electric with sex, bony fingers cupping a harmonica which grunted along to its rhythm in punchy, metallic gasps. Between those gasps he blew a kiss back through history with the steely wail of ‘Love Me Do’, The Beatles’ debut single which had reached its peak of number 17 exactly ten years ago that month in January 1963. A marker of how far he, and pop, had come. From always be tr
ue and someone to love to strung out on lasers and slash-back blazers. From the boy in Bromley Technical College to the alien sex monster on Top Of The Pops.

  Ziggy still couldn’t quite reach number one, despite the best efforts of Melody Maker to cook the books of their own singles rundown and leapfrog ‘The Jean Genie’ over the otherwise unshiftable Osmond child. The easily amused would also note the irony that a few weeks later glam pick ’n’ mixers The Sweet would top the chart with ‘Blockbuster’, their own sherbet-dip-dabbing of the same Yardbirds/Bo Diddley riff. But by then Ziggy’s mind was elsewhere, speeding far over heroic new horizons, giddy on the scent of his next epic as he applied its final varnish back at Trident.

  The short-lived Love Aladdin Vein became the simpler Aladdin Sane, its vertebrae born of the seven songs he’d written in America. To those he added a ballad he’d finished on his return, the femme-fatalistic beauty ‘Lady Grinning Soul’, and a cover of The Rolling Stones’ 1967 hit ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’, a song the Spiders had just added to their live set, chopped up by Ziggy with broken bits of The Shangri-Las’ ‘Dressed In Black’ and some symbolic old in-out from Ronno. He also resuscitated ‘The Prettiest Star’, David’s flop follow-up to ‘Space Oddity’ as sabotaged by Marc, now polished into a fresh diamond of interstellar doo-wop. There was also another crack at ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, louder, sassier and with extra saxophone, sadly cursed never to make the final running order. Other casualties were the half-finished ‘Zion’, a shapeshifting epic of soft atmospheric piano and juggernaut punk, and a stab at something called ‘1984’. The latter was a troublesome cuckoo in the nest. Even though Ziggy had written it, it felt foreign, like it didn’t fully belong to him but to somebody else with designs on a future musical of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And so he brushed the song aside, his muse knocked askew, quietly praying that would be the last anybody would ever hear of it.