Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  Before Ziggy’s second American tour was over the rumours were already in print. He’d been cast, reports claimed, as the lead role in the film adaptation of Stranger In A Strange Land, described as a sci-fi film ‘about life after America has established its first lunar colony’. The word from MainMan sources was that as well as acting he’d also be composing the soundtrack. Stranger In A Strange Land goes pop. Ziggy Stardust as Valentine Michael Smith. It was a stroke of casting genius. Or it would have been if it were true.

  DeFries had made it up as the first morsel of press bait in his next manœuvre: ‘Ziggy goes to Hollywood.’ The important thing was it sounded true. Even Ziggy started believing it, telling friends and journalists he was about to make his big-screen debut. Yet, as with Bolan’s crazy Fellini fantasies, there’d be no Stranger In A Strange Land for Ziggy. At least not in the cinematic sense. Only in the destination that awaited Ziggy after sailing on from California for the next leg of the tour. The strange land of the strange ones, Japan.

  He was glad to be back at sea with Geoff: Oscar and Bosie reunited, stumbling from bar to bar, laughing at the old dears in the hair salons and the tattiness of the ship which they nicknamed ‘the Old Rancid’. It gave him a few days to forget about being Ziggy, Aladdin, Valentine Michael Smith or whoever he’d been telling the outside world he was these past few weeks.

  By Sunday 25 March, they were miles from land, way out across the Pacific, heading towards Hawaii. Below deck, the two friends relaxed in the crew quarters listening to some salsa records they’d bought in New York and trying to teach each other Japanese from a pocket phrase book. They were quite, quite happy, nor had any reason not to be. Since neither could possibly have known Ziggy Stardust had only one hundred days to live.

  NINE

  THE BOMB

  FRED HOYLE DIDN’T believe in the Big Bang. Nor did he want to have anything to do with the big atomic bang he saw as inevitable at the outbreak of the Second World War. By 1939 his fellow physicists were cracking the secrets of nuclear fission. The thought occurred to Hoyle that if a bomb could be made, these fools would make it. ‘Even then,’ he’d later reflect, ‘I saw the road that was going to lead to Hiroshima.’

  At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, the American Air Force Superfortress Enola Gay dropped the first uranium atomic bomb, named ‘Little Boy’, upon the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. The ten-foot A-bomb destroyed an area of nearly five square miles. An estimated seventy thousand civilians were killed instantly, their bodies vaporised, their insides boiled, their bones scorched to charcoal by a fireball of 4000 degrees centigrade; over nine times the surface temperature of Venus, the hottest planet in the solar system. Thousands left behind no physical remains, just burnt silhouettes on walls and concrete. Of those who survived the blast, the same number died of radiation in the weeks and months that followed; those who lived beyond were named the Hibakusha – the ‘explosion people’.

  Nearly seventy per cent of the city’s buildings were decimated. Homes, schools, hospitals, temples and kabuki theatres vanishing in a flood of white flame. A rare exception was the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall at the epicentre of the blast. The bomb had killed everyone inside but somehow left the building’s structure and the skeleton of its domed roof intact, a permanent shrine to Armageddon.

  When Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist in charge of the bomb’s development, was told of the successful deployment of his creation, he quoted from an ancient Hindu script. It was one of the same Sanskrit texts which had earlier fascinated Holst, the Bhagavad-Gītā.

  ‘I am become death. The destroyer of worlds …’

  ZIGGY STARDUST STARED out of his hotel window at the dome of what was once Hiroshima’s Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, now preserved as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Genbaku domu. The A-bomb dome. A monument to the end of the world which, to Ziggy, at that moment, came to pass.

  It could have been coincidence but it felt like cruel, calculated timing. To come to Hiroshima, to stay in a suite overlooking the A-bomb dome where DeFries chose the moment to drop his own bomb. To become Ziggy’s death. The destroyer of The Spiders From Mars.

  They’d been in Japan for just over a week, Ziggy and Geoff disembarking the ‘Old Rancid’ at Yokohama where officials handed them immigration papers addressed, ‘To an alien who has entered Japan.’ But Japan didn’t feel so alien to a real alien like Ziggy, his veins pulsing with the ancient strut and swish of the kabukimono. A part of the Starman had finally come home.

  In Tokyo, he caught a performance by the famous kabuki star Tamasaboru Bando, Japan’s most celebrated onnagata. After the play, Ziggy was granted his own audience with Tamasaboru, who demonstrated some of the secrets of his art and make-up. ‘When I am in a role,’ said the actor, ‘I am aware – intensely aware – of playing a part. Not of being that part.’ Ziggy listened, but it was David who understood.

  Kansai Yamamoto, the designer whose kabuki-inspired fashions had first pulled Ziggy’s sartorial trigger, was also there to welcome him with a new set of specially designed stage clothes: a one-legged knitted bodysuit, a space samurai outfit, a black vinyl costume titled ‘Spring Rain’ and a silky kimono and cape combo marked with Japanese characters spelling out the name ‘David Bowie’. Yamamoto’s wardrobe threw more thrilling tricks into the live show: capes and hidden panels torn away by Ziggy’s wardrobe girls, creeping on and off stage dressed in black like the silent kuroko of traditional Japanese theatre. Even Weird got in on the act, tying his hair in a topknot like a samurai warrior.

  The Tokyo teens wheezed, yammered and bawled themselves breathless. For ‘Zeegee!’ and for his gorgeous guitarist, ‘Ricky Monsoon’. The Japan Times described him as ‘the most exciting thing’ since The Beatles and ‘possibly the most interesting performer ever in the pop music genre’. And then came Hiroshima.

  The date was Saturday 14 April 1973. In England, Gilbert O’Sullivan was number one with ‘Get Down’. ‘Get off on “Drive-In Saturday”’ was the message in press ads for Ziggy’s new single, which charted that week at number sixteen. In London, the espionage thriller When Eight Bells Toll wheeled through the Hammersmith Odeon projector at twenty-four frames per second. And five thousand miles away in a hotel room overlooking the Hiroshima A-bomb dome, Tony DeFries held a private meeting with Ziggy and Ronno where he told them The Spiders From Mars were finished.

  DeFries had seen the end when they’d been in New York. He’d successfully shielded the Spiders from the financial reality of how little he’d been paying them compared to everybody else, including the crew. Until Garson The Parson had accidentally blabbed that he was earning ten times what they were on.

  The Spiders had mutinied, threatening to leave and sign their own management deal. For the sake of the tour, DeFries placated them, offering them a wage increase and a promise to invest in their future as a separate band. That never happened.

  There was also pressure from RCA to commit Ziggy to another lengthy tour of America in the autumn, this time minus the champagne expense account. So DeFries mulled, and plotted, his mind weighing up the bold prospect of cutting Starman supply to increase David demand until he arrived at the perfect solution. The UK tour already in place for May and June would be their last. Ziggy would have to be ‘retired’.

  There’d already been omens in the music press. Back in February, a reporter from Melody Maker had interviewed DeFries in New York and returned to London with the cover headline ‘BOWIE’S LAST TOUR?’

  Such melodramatic pop blusters were common. Marc Bolan had cried the same wolf to the NME the year before but had failed to bow out as promised. Only DeFries meant it, as he now told Ziggy in his Hiroshima hotel suite. They’d make some announcement that summer and that would be the end of it. Ronno was there to hear the bombshell and to be assured that DeFries had his own plans to launch the guitarist’s solo career. They’d both be taken care of, he promised, but they had to keep silent. Until the final curtain was decided, the sh
ow must go on. Weird and Gilly must never know. David listened, but this time it was Ziggy who understood.

  He lit a cigarette, stood up and walked over to the window. Outside it was the Japanese spring. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. Tiny people with golden limbs poking out of tiny sleeves were gliding along the pavements, going about their lives in infinite complacency. And there, above their heads, was the memorial dome of human annihilation. Haunting, mocking, whispering to all who dared to listen.

  ‘I am become death …’

  TO THE SECURITY staff at the Shibuya Kokaido it looked like the apocalypse. Bodies drowning in a sea of bodies, the ground beneath them sagging like a rip in the Earth’s crust, hands groping at thin air, splintered wood, necks twisted, faces wet with terror and ecstasy. A swarm of teenage kamikazes conducted by devil’s music in a foreign tongue, a chaos of flesh circling around a chalk white demon with hair of fire, naked except for a pair of pink underpants with rhinestone scatter pins down the crotch. And what words it screeched: ‘We love you! We love you! You’re wonderful!’

  So ended Ziggy’s last night in Japan, returning to Tokyo where he tossed his clothes into the audience, stripped down to his knickers, misguidedly believing it made him look like a sumo wrestler even though his body wasn’t even the size of a sumo’s toothpick. A howl of ‘Zee-gee!’ and the front rows hurled themselves at the stage with such force the floor collapsed, fans and furniture squashed into a bruised human jam made worse when the security clambered in and began bopping the half-alive casualties with batons.

  The damage to the Shibuya Kokaido was serious enough for the Tokyo police to issue arrest warrants. Ziggy had awoken the old ghosts of an ancient ‘national disturbance’, the youthful bark of the Chinese Dogs, the pricking passions of the Thorny Gangs and the depraved spirit of Okuni’s wanton riverbed queens. The police sent an alert to the airport authorities to intercept Ziggy should he attempt to escape to America. They watched and they waited. And they were still watching and waiting at the airport when Ziggy waved sayonara to Japan at the port of Yokohama from the deck of the ship Felix Dzerzhinsky, bound for the USSR.

  He was back at sea with Geoff, aboard a Russian liner named after a Soviet secret police chief – ‘Iron Felix’ – its hull groaning with the wretched ghosts of the prisoners it used to ferry to Stalin’s Gulags. The crew staged a cabaret night with traditional Russian folk songs and dancing. Ziggy brought out his acoustic guitar and, with Geoff on bongos, sang ‘Space Oddity’ and Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’. He drank Japanese beer, laughed with the sailors and tried not to think about death, even when the ship grazed dangerously close to an iceberg. By the time they reached port at Nakhodka he’d spent nearly three days without worrying about being Ziggy Stardust. The grip was loosening.

  They disembarked to a boat train, an exquisite wood-panelled Victorian relic with velvet upholstery, gold-plating and giltwood framed mirrors, straight from the pen of an Agatha Christie thriller. Until, at Khabarovsk near the Chinese border, they were transferred to the vibeless canister of the main Trans-Siberian Express for their epic journey towards home, travelling the longest train ride in the world, nearly five and a half thousand miles from the far east to the capital of Moscow, riding with the tourist elite in ‘soft class’.

  For much of the journey Ziggy stayed in his compartment, never changing out of his kimono, anaesthetising his thoughts with cheap Riesling wine while staring out across the Siberian tundra. Mile after mile of silver birches. Frozen rivers. A distant log cabin. The occasional speck of humanity on horseback. A hawk in flight. A wolf sprinting beside the tracks. But mostly an endless loneliness of white. As vast and empty as outer space. Even the place names sounded like planets: Mogzon, Zima, Zavod. Everything was so suffocatingly alien there was no need for pretence. He could be Ziggy but he might as well be David. Both were equally strangers, vulnerable and adrift in a freaky, frightening Cloud-cuckoo-land.

  There were ninety-two stops to Moscow; in each station a statue of Lenin and a handful of local housewives selling ‘snacks on tracks’, homemade ice cream and yoghurt (Ziggy especially loved the yoghurt) as a welcome change from the train’s boiled chicken or schnitzel and semolina. Men with faces like golems, reeking of lugers and cellblocks, would watch suspiciously as he took tourist films with his cine camera, poised for any excuse to cast him into the nearest Gulag; in Sverdlovsk, the city where Tsar Nicholas II and his family was executed, they almost did.

  Sometimes he and Geoff would wander the train, where vodka-veined zhuliks would grunt at his stack heels and crimson wisps poking beneath his cap and make silent gestures of slitting his throat. But he could always count on the female porters, Donya and Nelya. He would serenade the girls on his guitar, inserting their names into old sixties pop tunes by Dion & The Belmonts. They didn’t understand English but swooned to hear themselves glorified in song. ‘Donya! Donya! The prima donna!’

  A week is a long time to kill on a train through Siberia. Siberia sex. Russki sex. The permutations were endless.

  BY THE FIRST of May they’d arrived in Moscow. The end of the Trans-Siberian Express but still over a thousand miles from home. If home even existed. For home was now the grave, and every inch of rail track a spade in the soil to prepare it.

  DeFries had made it sound like a rational decision. Cut the supply, increase the demand. It made sense to the wan light slowly reigniting at the back of Ziggy’s head: the flame called David Bowie now flickering back to life at the promise of change.

  But what about the Starman?

  He couldn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He’d always known it. The nightmares, the suspicions, the inner foreboding and every clanging chord of ‘My Death’. It was unavoidable. It always had been. He’d played the part of Ziggy Stardust so well he’d almost run away with the script. It had taken DeFries to remind him of the last act, as was written from the start. The Starman shall come, see and conquer but must pay the ultimate price. The song spelled it out. When – not ‘if’ – the kids had killed the man. Every messiah, cosmic or otherwise, must be crucified.

  A condemned man who is told on a Monday he will be hanged that Friday finds poignancy in every tick of the clock, crossing off his last Tuesday morning, his last Wednesday lunchtime, his last Thursday evening with measured dread. So it was with Ziggy Stardust as he crept ever homewards to the shores of England, the shores of his doom. He knew he’d already played his last concert in America, and Japan. He knew he would never again ride the Trans-Siberian Express. That in Moscow, as he watched the cold warrior convoy of Soviet tanks trundle through the city as part of the May Day parade, they’d be the last Soviet tanks he’d probably ever see. That when he and Geoff caught their next train to Paris from Belorussky Station it would be the last train he’d ever board at Belorussky Station. That in Poland when guards stormed the train and threatened to arrest them for not having the right visas it would be the last time he’d probably ever stare down the barrel of a Polish rifle. That in West Berlin, when he peered out of the carriage window to be cheered by a cluster of two dozen or so ecstatic German Ziggykinder – paint and glitter on their faces, feather boas fluttering down their backs, in skimpy clothes and clunky heels – they would be the last German Ziggykinder he’d ever wave to. And that when the train pulled in to its final destination, Jacques Brel hollering ‘La Mort’ in his ears, it would be the last time he’d ever step off a train in Paris.

  His wife Angie and MainMan chaperone Cherry Vanilla were already waiting for him at the luxurious Hotel George V. They had good news. Ziggy and The Spiders were officially bigger than The Beatles. Aladdin Sane was the UK’s number one album, outselling the two new Fab Four Red and Blue best-of compilations. He’d been second only to God but now the gods were second only to him. Ziggy smiled feebly, but it was David who spoke.

  ‘I just want to bloody well go home to Beckenham and watch the telly.’

  And so the next day he bloody well went home, taking the train to Calais accompanied
by a couple of faithful reporters from the British press. Ziggy drank steadily the whole journey, looking out at the flat farmlands of France, spilling out answers to questions which may not have been those that were asked. He said that after travelling through Russia he now knew who was controlling the world and he’d never been so damned scared in his life. He said he believed he was ill and felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. He said his ego used to be Ziggy but now it was David. He called Ziggy a dear creature and said that he loved him. He said he felt like Dr Frankenstein.

  ‘I don’t think I’m Ziggy any more,’ said David.

  ‘I just want to be Ziggy,’ said Ziggy.

  ‘We’ve reached this position,’ said both, ‘and it doesn’t leave one with a clear mind as what to do next.’

  At Calais, he was told he’d be crossing the channel by hovercraft. Technically this meant ‘flying’, even if was only a couple of inches above the surface of the water. He started shaking. Ziggy didn’t ‘fly’. Angie pleaded and petted and finally coaxed him aboard where he spent the whole passage in petrified silence, swirling down mental plugholes of the Ryde-to-Southsea hovercraft disaster he’d witnessed fourteen months earlier and a nine-year-old girl pirouetting to her ocean grave. Landing at Dover an old Scottish woman asked him for an autograph. He scribbled a name. ‘Edmund Gross.’

  In Dover railway station he pecked at a sausage roll and sloshed down a tea before clambering aboard the last train to London and ripping open another can of lager. It had been three months since he’d last seen, smelled or tasted England. The houses, the trees, the hedgerows rushed by in streaks of long-missed greens and browns, so pretty and familiar that Ziggy clean forgot each brick, each branch was another nail tap, tap, tapping in his coffin lid.