Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  The equivalent English Ziggykinder were waiting for him at Charing Cross – the same station where sixty years earlier Holst met Clifford Bax, beginning his astrological odyssey which led to The Planets and, thus, fathered the Starman – many of them ruddy and breathless having sprinted over last minute from Victoria where he’d first been expected. They wept and screamed and risked dying like Anna Karenina as they pelted down the platform heedless of the gap between train and track. He stepped out of his carriage to greet them, a pewter ghoul scarred by nearly eight thousand miles of travel, terror, isolation and alcohol. So beautiful, some of them collapsed.

  An hour later, he was bloody well home in Beckenham, back in the mothership of Haddon Hall, where the following evening his friends gathered to celebrate his return. There was Ronno, his rock, and the Frosts, and fabulous Freddie and Daniella (her hair dyed purple for the occasion), and Ziggy’s producer Ken Scott, and David’s producer Tony Visconti, and dear Lindsay Kemp, and dearer still George Underwood, and Angie dancing as the stereo blasted Iggy And The Stooges, and baby Zowie playing with corks he’d picked off the floor from the endlessly popping champagne bottles. There were toasts and cheers for Ziggy, toasts for ‘Drive-In Saturday’ which had just peaked at number three, cheers for Lou’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, which was finally edging towards the top 40 six months after release, toasts for the Spiders’ upcoming Earls Court show, all eighteen thousand tickets sold out, and the biggest cheer of all for outselling The Beatles.

  The showstopper came courtesy of Ziggy’s snipping saviour, Suzi Fussey. A celebration cake, iced in red and blue lightning flashes. On the top, in delicate piping, ‘Welcome Home, Aladdin Sane.’

  Another cork popped. Music. Laughter. Guzzling. Smoke. Then Ziggy excused himself for a second to go to the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

  He looked at the specimen in the mirror, stood in a red and yellow kimono, the features tired and watery, the hair a ruddy porcupine frazzle. He thought about what he’d said to the reporters the day before on the train from Paris. He wanted to be Ziggy. He didn’t want to be Ziggy. He and David had reached a position which left neither of them a clear mind what to do next. They looked at one another’s reflections. Two faint voices in unison.

  ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

  TEN

  THE DEATH

  HE HAD REACHED the end. He had made his decision.

  ‘It’s all over.’

  His face crumbled.

  ‘The war is lost.’

  His lips trembled.

  ‘I must kill myself.’

  And then he blubbed like a child. A part of David Bowie wanted to blub with him. It was a truly pathetic vision. The once proud visionary who’d wanted to change the world, sobbing in suicidal resignation. But it couldn’t be altered. This was history, as it had been written.

  ‘My Third Reich!’

  Ziggy Stardust sat silent in the flickering gloom of the Empire, Leicester Square, watching the broken dictator as he sank his head in his hands and cried bitter tears of defeat. He and Angie had been invited to the royal charity premiere of Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a new film dramatisation based on eyewitness accounts of life in the Führerbunker starring Alec Guinness. Ziggy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the sad villain with his paintbrush moustache, declaring ‘I’m a genius, but not a messiah’ as he helped himself to a slice of chocolate cake, a gramophone playing Strauss waltzes in an attempt to blot out the closing thunder of Russian shelling in the devastated Berlin streets above. Nor did David, who secretly had to admit the way Adolf staged himself as a politician was more like a rock ’n’ roll star; he’d have to be careful not to tell anyone that.

  ‘The heart of Germany has ceased to beat! The Führer is dead!’

  The credits rolled on Hitler: The Last Ten Days. The audience, including the film’s cast, its director Ennio Di Concini and royal guest Princess Margaret mechanically stroking her barbaric stole, politely applauded. David led Angie through the sycophantic sea of tuxedos, out of the cinema, into a car and home to bed where he awoke the next morning, Tuesday 8 May 1973, calling ‘action!’ on a different yet equally epic tragedy. Ziggy: The Last Fifty-Seven Days.

  Ziggy was a messiah, but not a genius. David was the genius. It was now up to him to convince Ziggy that the Starman had already won. The children had boogied. Life, music, hair and trousers would never be the same again. His death wouldn’t, like Hitler’s, be the last cowardly whimper snuffing a life of destruction but a victorious big bang showstopping a great crusade of creation. A death to ricochet down the ages spawning endless other Starpeople after his image. Just one last tour, one farewell victory lap around the land that first received him into its startled bosom. Then immortality.

  After Japan, the Spiders’ stage show had hit sublime heights of rock ’n’ roll drama. Theirs wasn’t just a concert but a theatrical pop extravaganza. The Clockwork Orange entrance of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’. The two enormous new lightning-bolt insignia flashing at the rear of the stage, blinking like the foolish eyes of young Peggy Burns in her blackshirt swoon, or of a younger Elvis Presley pining ‘Shazam!’ in barefoot poverty. Ziggy’s new exotic Yamamoto costumes and the kuroko wardrobe girls. His modified kabuki make-up, applied with a special set of colours he was given in Tokyo, and the cosmic ‘third eye’ on his forehead. The designated interval, returning to the stage to more Clockwork Orange with the computerised gallop of its ‘William Tell Overture’. The set list, now spoiled for choice with the riches of Ziggy, Aladdin and David’s three previous albums, some sandwiched together as clever medleys. The Spiders themselves, now flexed to maximum strength, the unyielding rhythmic haymaker of Weird and Gilly and the liquid silver fountains of Ronno. The majestic ivories of Garson The Parson and the Stardust support orchestra of brass, backing vocals and Geoff and his congas. The habitual finale of ‘Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide’, fingertips screaming for Ziggy’s touch as he crept along the lip of the stage. And the lights-up Clockwork Orange serenade of ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’, Elgar’s ‘Pomp And Circumstance’. A droog kabuki space opera. The greatest show on Earth.

  Or so it should have been yet the opening night was anything but. With fifty-three days to live, on Saturday 12 May, Ziggy began his last tour in London at Earls Court Exhibition Centre. Exactly a year earlier the Spiders played to a few hundred students five miles down the road in the Polytechnic of Central London. Now they’d packed eighteen thousand kids into the equivalent of an aircraft hangar, the first time Earls Court had been used for a rock concert.

  Outside the doors, on Warwick Road, photographers encouraged the starry young apostles to have their pictures taken, an opportunity to splash their freaky glamour across the bickering breakfast tables of Heath’s haggard hard-done nation. Linda, all darkness and disgrace at 21, hips cocked in her stack-heels and sci-fi shoulder pads, shaved eyebrows arching defiantly. David, just 17 in his dungarees and Aladdin-flash, clutching hands with his 18-year-old girlfriend, glitter in her brow, half-mast turn-ups showing off her wrestling boots. Children dancing to the tune of the god The Sun described as ‘the Pied Piper of the new fun fashion rebellion’. Their faces full of a secret knowing, desire and expectancy.

  They’d be disappointed. Ziggy all but died at Earls Court, an ill-managed first night crippled by naïve technicalities. The stage was so low that those not stood on their seats in the front rows were unable to see. The sound failed to compensate, the band struggling with a PA system normally suited to theatres but a feeble echo in such a vast concrete cave. For Ziggy it marked his first public disaster. Though he was fully aware he’d soon be crucified he’d expected the nails to be bashed in by himself, not by the headline of the following week’s NME: ‘BOWIE FIASCO.’

  Before the gig, DeFries had tentative plans for the tour to return to Earls Court at the end of June for the last hurrah. But there was no way he, or Ziggy, could risk making a similar ‘fiasco’ of that final curtain. Earls Court
was scribbled out of the schedule as a tentative denouement. And so the destiny of the Starman as fate had always intended calcified with geographical certainty.

  They would have to find another gallows.

  IT TOOK SCOTLAND, a country Ziggy had all but neglected till now (bar a fleeting visit in January), to bury the shame of Earls Court and restore him to full lustre. He liked the Scots. There was a lust for life in their frozen bones. Had David only remembered that it was the Scots, the fair maids of Perth, who were the first to clamour at his feet and hoot with fancy all those years ago he’d have dragged Ziggy there more often.

  They arrived by train in Aberdeen, the North Sea air tickling his nostrils as he stepped on to the platform, local Ziggyobites nervously waving pens and records in his face while big Stuey herded him into a waiting Daimler – the kids still following the car on foot for its laughably short journey a hundred yards round the corner to the door of the granite grey Imperial Hotel.

  The city’s Music Hall offered a perfect plinth for Ziggy, the walls of its auditorium decorated with Victorian murals depicting the heroic Orpheus descending into the Underworld. After two shows in one day, Ziggy stayed up into the early hours in his hotel’s basement cabaret bar, The Bestcellar, washing down steak and chips with halves of lager as he entertained the pretty receptionist, two girls who’d travelled all the way from Manchester, and a couple of journalists. They asked him questions which, depending on which frontal lobe the alcohol splashed, he answered as either David or Ziggy. As David he surprised even himself, unravelling about his family. It might have been his steady fracturing away from Ziggy’s possessive grasp, but he found himself thinking more and more about Terry lately. ‘He’s brilliant,’ said David. ‘Perhaps that’s his main problem. Sometimes he gets fed up with the outside world and puts himself in mental homes.’ But Ziggy had the last word. ‘I’m conscious of the dangers,’ he said of his stage act. Then, with a secret smile, ‘You know, one of these days somebody is going to get killed.’

  It almost happened in Glasgow when a screaming starchild tumbled from the balcony of Green’s Playhouse, crushing ribs on the sticky carpet below, their agony tormented by its woven slogan: ‘It’s Good – It’s Green’s.’ The wildest of wild Scottish Ziggyobites uprooted the screwed-in cinema seats from the floor, hurling pieces into the air, delirious with the superpower stirred in their breast by the liberating skirl of The Spiders From Mars. Programme-sellers cowered tight against the wall, police reinforcements huddled together in impotent sweats and Vince Taylor’s primeval demons from the Palais Des Sports came home to wrecking roost. The little monsters of Glasgow were fearless and free, ignobly bold savages, some so ravaged by Ziggy’s cosmic sex rock that they retreated to the back rows, lost in orgiastic abandon and the guiding thrusts of Ronno’s guitar. Sordid eyewitness reports reached Ziggy backstage. ‘They really are animals here and I love them,’ he glowed. ‘As far as I know nobody has ever made it at one of my gigs before. That’s devotion.’

  The momentum of mania followed them back south of the border. More fainting in Norwich. More ambulance panic in Romford. More seat destruction in Brighton, where Ziggy would be banned for life (for what that was now worth). More girls reduced to puddles by the stage door in Bournemouth, sobbing up their spleens over the sight of his ‘smashing legs’. More throwing tea sets out of hotel bedrooms. And more of the same questions from reporters, including the man from BBC TV’s Nationwide, raking the usual old coals about haircuts and make-up.

  ‘I believe in my part all the way down the line,’ said Ziggy. ‘Right the way down.’

  ‘But I do play it for all it’s worth,’ said David, ‘because that’s the way I do my stage thing.’

  ‘That’s part of what Bowie’s supposedly all about,’ said Ziggy.

  ‘I’m an actor.’

  And on it rolled. Ziggy disintegrating one day at a time in the rear of his limo driven by chauffeur ‘Jim the Lim’. The Spiders playing magnetic chess in their tour bus, its only given destination: ‘Superstar’. And still nobody had bothered to warn poor Weird and Gilly.

  THE QUESTION OF where to end the tour and lay Ziggy to rest had become a matter of urgency. Earls Court had gone and announced his return there, as originally planned, on Saturday 30 June and advertised tickets for sale. A furious DeFries informed the press otherwise. But time was ticking fast. Ziggy made his own suggestion of climaxing back at the Friars in Aylesbury where the Spiders played their first gig eighteen months earlier. It had symbolism and poignancy. The closing of a full circle, the retreat back into the womb. But Friars wasn’t big enough and, besides, though Aylesbury wasn’t far it wasn’t London. Ziggy’s big bang simply had to be a capital affair. The search continued.

  Meanwhile, the British pop summer of 1973 caramelised with the sugary heat of Wizzard, 10cc, Sweet and a tiny growling bikerette from Detroit named Suzi Quatro, now the butt of one of Ziggy’s few stage gags when introducing the Spiders: ‘On guitar, no, it’s not Suzi Quatro – Mr Mick Ronson!’ In the gaps between sparkled the Starman’s enduring Midas touch. The cool lips of Warhol superstar Candy Darling in Lou’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ had slunk past the BBC censors to reach number ten. Mott The Hoople, though parted from MainMan, surfed forwards upon the wave of their Dudes-renaissance with the number-twelve-bound ‘Honaloochie Boogie’. Iggy And The Stooges’ Raw Power had finally been released, failing to ignite the charts of ’73 but, like a rock ’n’ roll sleeper cell, waiting to inspire the reckless spirits of a braver tomorrow. And there was Ziggy himself. The impervious Aladdin Sane album towered at number one while his apostles’ hunger for new material prompted an inspired relocation of ‘Life On Mars?’ from the bedroom shade of a Hunky Dory album track to its due limelight as Ziggy’s new single. The RCA budget allowed the early-seventies novelty of a picture sleeve: Ziggy on stage, hands twisted mid-mime as if trying to communicate in some as-yet-undecipherable Martian semaphore. The cover also removed the question mark at the end of the song: on this evidence, ‘Life On Mars?’ was no longer a question. The picture of Ziggy was its own answer.

  Beyond the charts, his triumph was saluted on every British high street. Ziggy had ruffled the fabric, stretched the spectrum, gold-leafed the redbrick and bulldozed down the wall dividing the changing rooms. The defining twenty-one-gun salute rang out through the nation’s teen magazines, now carrying a new advert for the Miners make-up range. A group portrait of a lone girl surrounded by four hairy blokes in sparkly tat, faces caked in elaborate slap, one of them scarred by a Ziggy lightning flash over his eye. ‘Miners – For a night out with the boys.’

  Upwards and onward, The Spiders continued to flesh their swords through England. More super-yobbery in Sheffield. More teenage tears in Manchester. More bouncer bloodlust in Newcastle. Real bone-crunching horrorshow in Liverpool. More mascara on bandages in Leicester. More fans and coppers being ploughed down by his limo in Kilburn. More twisted ankles in Salisbury. More towns painted in thick, shiny coats of indelible Martian red, from Devon to the West Country, from the Midlands to Lincolnshire.

  As Ziggy continued to stoke the home fires of pop and glam with casual dominance, Marc Bolan retreated overseas. The weekend he left for Munich, the headline of Melody Maker yelled: ‘GLAM ROCK IS DEAD! SAYS MARC.’ He’d told them it wasn’t ‘his department’ any more and that he found it ‘very embarrassing’. In the charts, his latest single, a burnt biscuit of cocky grunts and cockier guitars called ‘The Groover’, had done well to reach number four. Marc would never have believed it to be the swansong of T. Rexstasy. He would never have a top ten single again.

  In Germany, the long-suffering Tony Visconti persevered at the recording console in vain. Marc told him he had a daring concept for the new album. It wouldn’t be credited to T. Rex but to a fictitious interstellar cosmic rock band. Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow. The producer’s heart sank to his ankles. In the basement studio of Munich’s Musicland, trying to breathe life into songs which
were as bloated, vain and dead-eyed as their poor, deluded creator, they’d bricked themselves into their own doomed Führerbunker. Visconti could see, even if Marc couldn’t, that it was all over. The war was lost.

  Back in England, Ziggy had been so busy enjoying himself he hadn’t realised that Ziggy: The Last Ten Days had already started ticking down the weekend he played Croydon Fairfield Halls, a show which so ransacked the wits of the local paper they likened the Spiders’ stage presence to the Brooklyn shitkickers of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit To Brooklyn. Extra dates had been added up north while DeFries kept searching for the right closing venue, taking David to his father’s roots in Doncaster and the Spiders agonisingly close to a hometown gig in Hull, just up the coast at Bridlington Spa. With five days to live, Ziggy and the Spiders played a roller disco in Leeds. With four days to live, they played their last gigs outside London, two shows at Newcastle’s City Hall. With three days to live, on Sunday 1 July 1973, he was back in London. Just one day’s rest before the tour’s end. A suitable venue had finally been found.

  Once upon a time people called it ‘West London’s Wonder Cinema’. It was still a working cinema but since the sixties had also proved itself an ideal concert venue. Little Richard, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had all played there. So had Vince Taylor.

  The only downside was the capacity, only three and a half thousand. Demand for Ziggy would mean playing two nights. But the end had been decided. Tuesday 3 July 1973. The Odeon cinema in Hammersmith. The calvary for the cosmic messiah.

  IT WAS A beautiful day to die. The previous night’s show at the Odeon, effectively a dry run for tonight’s hara-kiri, had gone without a hitch. Aladdin Sane was still the number one album while ‘Life On Mars?’ had just reached four. The top-selling single was ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’ by Slade who, ironically, had just played a momentous sell-out show at Earls Court that weekend, a bitter tease of what might have been for Ziggy. By the Tuesday morning the music papers were ready to send that week’s issues to press with Slade on course to grab most of the headlines with their ‘Finest Hour’. It would take a major last-minute pop story – a major pop catastrophe – to knock them off any covers. Ziggy sat in mute amusement as David picked up the telephone and dialled the Covent Garden offices of the NME. ‘Charlie? It’s David Bowie. Listen, about tonight …’