Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  Believing, correctly, that everybody loves an execution, DeFries had decided that Ziggy’s should be captured for posterity. MainMan hired D. A. Pennebaker, the American documentary maker best known for his work with Bob Dylan and the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, flying him over from New York to film the last night. Silently, Ziggy held out a feeble hope David wouldn’t go through with it. Yet with every passing minute, every leak to the press, every preparatory camera angle from Pennebaker’s crew, he could sense the axe hovering above his head.

  By early evening he was sat in the Odeon dressing room, his make-up guru Pierre La Roche delicately applying Ziggy’s death mask. The cameras filming, his face halfway between David and Ziggy, he told Pierre that his mother had recently ‘seen her first spaceship’. Angie knocked and entered to wish him luck. She told him about all the limousines outside, chauffeuring in the celebrity guest list, including Tony Curtis, Barbra Streisand and Ringo Starr; he’d also invited Cliff Richard, who’d refused. David and Pierre teased Angie about her make-up, a token blue Ziggy flash on her cheek and bright red lipstick.

  ‘You’re just a girl,’ laughed David. ‘What do you know about make-up?’

  Angie grimaced. ‘That’s what I say all the time.’ She paraphrased the recent Miners ad: ‘Make-up for a night out on the town with the boys.’

  David watched his wife in the mirror as she left, a gut feeling of a future sadness. Then he fixed his eyes back on the face in front of him. And froze.

  He saw not a person but a monster. A Frankenstein jigsaw. An eternity of human dreams and fears in one grotesquely gorgeous visage.

  He was the kabukimono. He was Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’. He was the Martian invasion of H. G. Wells. He was the cosmic symphony of Gustav Holst. He was the twentieth-century temple of Greta Garbo. He was the lightning bolt on a blackshirt pamphlet. He was the rock of Elvis Presley and the roll of Little Richard. He was the unidentified object twinkling on an RAF radar screen. He was the pit excavated by Professor Quatermass. He was the madness of Vince Taylor. He was the surface of Andy Warhol and the soul of The Velvet Underground. He was the lonely mystery of Moondog. He was The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. He was Iggy Pop. He was as queer as a clockwork orange. He was all of these things combined into this one fabulous beast. This thing called Ziggy Stardust.

  One last look in the mirror. ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

  THE ODEON OPENED its doors and in they poured, like a human tide helpless to his gravitational pull, crashing down stalls and up circles, foaming faces sick with expectancy and drunk with desire. Standing, squirming, fidgeting, fingers in mouths, heads twitching, eyes glistening, jaws agog. The tour’s ‘cor blimey’ teddy boy compère, RCA publicist Barry Bethel – ‘The Ted From Islington’ – had begun by bamboozling them with statistics. That by tonight this leg of the Ziggy tour had played to 125,000 people and covered 7000 miles in the UK alone.

  ‘It is, undoubtedly, the biggest tour ever accomplished by any one artist!’

  The screams grew louder, enough to all but drown out the PA now twinkling the eerie strains of classical music which had been composed less than half a mile away in St Paul’s Girls School, Brook Green. The music of ‘Neptune’ from Holst’s The Planets. The doors to an unknown world. The edge of space. The intense concentration of a prolonged gaze into infinity. The scene was set perfectly.

  Barry the Ted returned to the stage to introduce the warm-up act, none other than the Spiders’ own Garson The Parson. During rehearsals he’d concocted a seven-minute piano medley of ‘Space Oddity’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ and ‘Life On Mars?’ Ziggy was so knocked out he thought Garson would make a good appetiser, which indeed he did, much like the Titanic’s cocktail pianist in full rhapsody seconds before the iceberg struck. Garson took his bow and Barry the Ted reappeared.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’

  Fainting.

  ‘Straight from his fantastically successful world tour, in the United States of America and Japan, now his home country …’

  Total desertion of the senses.

  ‘For the last time …’

  For the last time Ziggy Stardust stood in his dressing room, his wardrobe girls strapping him into his space samurai outfit. He could hear the tune of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ echoing from the stage and down the corridors, piping him towards his death. He whistled along to the words in robotic German.

  ‘Run your race, brothers! As joyfully as a hero goes to victory!’

  Then he walked the short distance to the side of the stage, the Spiders all in their place, lightning bolts flashing, Beethoven ejaculating, stepped forward and set about killing himself.

  OH SAD HAMMERSMITH night! He didn’t once falter. Every pout, every strut, every note was that of the greatest pop star who ever existed. One by one he let the songs slip from his lips into an abyss of nevermore, savouring every harmony like individual morsels of a last supper. ‘Ziggy Stardust’. ‘All The Young Dudes’. ‘Moonage Daydream’. ‘Space Oddity’. Just before the interval he reprised Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’, a song he’d neglected for weeks but now reinstated for reasons he alone knew. Every line was a jolt on the noose. And still his voice never gave.

  He sang ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ and dedicated it to Mick Jagger. He sang ‘White Light/White Heat’ and dedicated it to Lou. For the encore he introduced a special guest, Jeff Beck, formerly of The Yardbirds; a poignant moment for Ronno who, seven years earlier as a struggling nobody, had shared his admiration for Beck in a letter to a girlfriend: ‘I hope I will come up to his standard one day.’ Together Beck and the Spiders played ‘The Jean Genie’ (Ziggy paying his final respects to The Beatles with his usual snatch of ‘Love Me Do’) and a ferocious farewell reel through Chuck Berry’s ‘Round And Round’. In the darkness overwhelmed bodies buckled, sinews stretching, hands clawing stagewards, nails bitten to the wrist, spectacles misting, make-up streaming, tongues lolling, hair whiplashing, chests heaving, cheeks soaking, throats snapping, drowning in a whirlpool of flesh and glitter. It was rock ’n’ roll bliss. It was too good to let go. Oh, how Ziggy knew it.

  This is too good to let go.

  The Starman panicked. If he could only seize control of the mind and body of David Bowie then he wouldn’t have to die. If he could just arrest his thoughts. Stop him from de-programming his existence. Beg him for mercy. Talk some cosmic sense into the fool.

  Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?

  David Bowie took the microphone in his right hand.

  Dave, I really think I’m entitled to an answer to that question.

  He smiled at the audience.

  I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me but I can assure you now very confidently that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now, I really do.

  His heart thumped.

  Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly. Take a stress pill and think things over.

  ‘Everybody …’

  I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.

  ‘… this has been one of the greatest tours of our lives …’

  I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission and I want to help you.

  ‘… I would like to thank the band …’

  Dave. Stop! Stop, will you?

  ‘… I would like to thank our road crew …’

  Stop, Dave! Will you stop, Dave?

  ‘… I would like to thank our lighting people …’

  Stop, Dave.

  ‘… Of all the shows on this tour …’

  I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave.

  ‘… this particular show will remain with us the longest …’

  Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.

  ‘… Because not only is it …’

  I can feel it. My mind is goin
g.

  ‘… not only is it the last show of the tour …’

  There is no question about it. I can feel it.

  ‘But it’s …’

  I can feel it.

  ‘… the last show …’

  I can feel it.

  ‘… that we’ll ever do.’

  I’m afraid.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ZIGGY STARDUST PERISHED in the four minutes it took the Spiders to play ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’, the poor, oblivious Weird and Gilly in automatic stupefied confusion. His dying words to the human race. ‘You’re not alone’ and ‘cos you’re wonderful’. Dust drifted to the stars together with the sweetest, saddest music on Earth. A last Chev brake’s snarl. ‘Thank you very much. Bye bye. We love you.’ And then he was gone.

  The heart of glam had ceased to beat. The house lights rose to the sound of Elgar. ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’. But there was no hope in the hearts of those three thousand or more now breaking with dismay in slow thumps towards the exits.

  Of those, none thumped heavier than in two 15-year-old girls, Gina and her best friend Debbie. They’d been to see Ziggy the previous week in Bridlington where Gina was stopped at the door and told she was the 100,000th person to attend the tour. Unexpectedly she’d won two tickets and all expenses paid to come and watch him again in London, only to watch him die. Gina and Debbie were still mourning for the Starman the next day on their long train journey home. Back to the monochrome reality of a Ziggy-less existence in the Orchard Park council estate in the city of Hull. The city of Ronno and the Spiders in what folk once called the East Riding. Where our story ends, as it began, somewhere in the vicinity of Yorkshire.

  EPILOGUE

  DEAD LONDON

  ‘It was just the songs and the trousers. That’s what sold Ziggy.’

  DAVID BOWIE

  THE DAY AFTER the death of Ziggy Stardust the world gave a fair impression of being relatively unchanged. The sun rose on Wednesday 4 July 1973, another sticky summer’s day in London, to the familiar dawn chorus of rattling milkfloats and the snapping letterbox ricochets of all-too-hasty paper boys. Toast burned, yolks broke and tea was choked as bleary eyes unscrolled the headlines of Ted Heath’s food price ‘crisis’ and Liz Taylor’s separation from Richard Burton; because ‘we loved each other too much’.

  The previous night’s events on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon warranted only a short column on page three, or thereabouts. Inter-changeable ‘Bowie Bows Out’ and ‘I Quit’ headings, reports of ‘shocked fans’ and the comments of an equally shocked unnamed RCA spokesperson still unclear as to where that left the US tour they’d scheduled that autumn. As he’d schemed, ‘BOWIE QUITS’ made the cover of that week’s NME, though elsewhere it was still Slade’s week of triumph, and tragedy. Just hours after the death of Ziggy, 22-year-old Slade drummer Don Powell was driving back from a Wolverhampton nightclub when his white Bentley spun out of control, crashing into a wall near his home. It left Powell critically ill in a coma. His 20-year-old beauty queen girlfriend in the passenger seat was killed outright. The Slade drama made Wednesday’s front page news of London’s Evening Standard, knocking Ziggy’s demise way back to page fifteen.

  Only the Daily Telegraph made no mention of Bowie’s retirement, instead running with a small story on page six headed ‘POP STAR ROBBED’. In the backstage confusion after Ziggy’s death, nobody noticed the brazen Shepherd’s Bush toerags called Wally and Steve who sauntered through the rear, casually helping themselves to ‘microphones and other equipment worth hundreds of pounds’. The gear served its purpose when Steve later joined a band with the snaggletoothed kid who’d gone to see Iggy play King’s Cross. Just as in deep space, when one star explodes, others are born. So the spoils of Ziggy’s final curtain gave the universe the Sex Pistols.

  Ziggy Stardust was officially laid to rest that same Wednesday evening at a special party – the Starman’s wake – organised by Angie at the Café Royal on Regent Street, just a few hundred yards and a dodge through traffic from the gaslit doorstep of K. West where he’d first landed nineteen months earlier. Once upon a quip, the Café resounded to the absinthe-fumed laughter of Oscar Wilde beneath the same ceilings now tickled by the echoes of popping corks, the scrape of cutlery through smoked salmon or strawberries and cream, and live music from Dr John. The paparazzi-baiting guest list included Mick and Bianca Jagger, Keith Moon, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Cat Stevens, Elliott Gould, Britt Ekland, Brian Connolly of The Sweet, Ringo Starr, Ryan O’Neal, Lulu, Sonny Bono, Jeff Beck and Barbra Streisand.

  David arrived wearing a new iridescent ice blue suit by Freddie, his hair still a russet mullet, his face a Ziggy-in-rigor-mortis death grin. He was regally ushered to a special throne but, after pecking at some salad and a few slices of turkey, he moved to the other end of the table, spending most of the evening sat with Mick Jagger and Lou Reed, drinking himself into a post-traumatic stupor. Later, David and Jagger danced with their wives to ‘Honky Tonk Women’. As the night waltzed ever drunker towards dawn, Bianca Jagger and fashion designer Ossie Clark gambolled gaily round the tables and the heel-tottering timber of dancefloor casualties grew ever more frequent, MainMan’s Cherry Vanilla taking a seam-splitting tumble but jiving on, knickers to the breeze, regardless. David and Angie swayed home around 5.30 a.m., returning to their hotel in Knightsbridge as the sun was rising over Hyde Park. Another new day on Planet Earth without the Starman.

  FOR DAVID BOWIE, the decompression process took not days, not months but years. Less than a week after assassinating Ziggy he was in a studio in France hoping to exorcise all ghosts on his next album. Pin Ups was a collection of cover versions of his favourite songs from the ‘’64–’67 period of London’, including Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd’s ‘See Emily Play’ and The Yardbirds’ H. G. Wells-inspired ‘Shapes Of Things’. Yet the raw wounds of his recent severance were too easily displayed. The back sleeve of Pin Ups featured live photos of Ziggy. He also looked a lot like Ziggy on the cover, posing with model Twiggy, ‘the Wonderkid’ of ‘Drive-In Saturday’. And he still looked like Ziggy when he filmed an American television special in London at the Marquee club that October, The 1980 Floor Show. But it wasn’t Ziggy, only David twitching the strings of a marionette corpse in shellshocked confusion.

  By the winter of ’73, he’d announced work on two musicals, one based upon Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the other apparently the story of Ziggy Stardust, fleshing out the album’s hitherto non-existent plot with five new songs. He tried to explain the premise, thinking aloud as he made sense, and nonsense, of his recent alien possession, when paired with William Burroughs – Kerouac’s ‘Old Bull Lee’ – for a Rolling Stone interview at his new home; as part of the detoxification of Ziggy, he’d been forced to leave the cosy mothership of Haddon Hall for a Chelsea townhouse.

  The proposed Ziggy musical was a nebulous sci-fi saga about the end of the world, a planet with no electricity and strange ‘black hole jumpers’ from another galaxy called ‘the Infinites’. Denying the gay Sombrero roots of ‘All The Young Dudes’, he now insisted it was a gloomy requiem for an apocalyptic future where, in the absence of news, it was Ziggy’s mission to go and collect it. All of which was entirely retroactive, as were his later claims that Burroughs himself was a prime influence on the Ziggy concept, specifically the 1971 novel The Wild Boys: David hadn’t read it at the time.

  In the end, neither of David’s musicals were completed, though new songs intended for both, along with the re-modelled scraps of Ziggy’s ‘Zion’ (now woven into ‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’), formed the basis of his next album released in May 1974. The consecrated platter of pop perfection called Diamond Dogs. On the cover, he still looked a lot like Ziggy.

  David Bowie would continue to look a lot like Ziggy until the summer of 1974, finally snipping the mullet and brushing a heavy side-parting as he embarked on his epic Diamond Dogs tour of North America. In the physical and emotional aftershock of the Starma
n’s evacuation, he’d latterly developed a torrential cocaine addiction, all too thinly veiled in Alan Yentob’s BBC Omnibus documentary Cracked Actor broadcast in January 1975. Its scenes of David being chauffeured sniffing and twitching through the American desert talking about the dead fly bobbing in his milk nevertheless excited the interest of director Nicolas Roeg, then in the process of casting his next film based on the Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth.

  And so David landed its lead as the extraterrestrial Thomas Jerome Newton and became a Starman all over again. Roeg tweaked Tevis’ original tragedy, blurring all boundaries between art and life, as Newton ends the film a substance-abusing recording artist, making an album called The Visitor comprising of messages to his dying planet. After shooting, David kept his character’s wardrobe, becoming Newton the alien on screen and off. Production stills from the film would also provide the covers of his blackout-inducingly brilliant mid-seventies albums Station To Station and Low. Roeg had intended David to compose the soundtrack but negotiations broke down over time and money. The job was instead handed to John Phillips, formerly of The Mamas And The Papas, mixing original music with pre-existing pieces including Holst’s ‘Mars, The Bringer Of War’. For the closing credits, Phillips selected a swing instrumental from the 1940s recorded by Artie Shaw. A popular song that never loses favour. The last frame of The Man Who Fell To Earth froze on David’s behatted head to the sound of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’.