All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  It was high time he threw off his rags and revealed himself. After all, he had been dropping hints of the direction he was heading in for a year or more, albeit in some out-of-the-way places. On a local San Francisco radio station in February 1971 he had told the DJ that TMWSTW was in fact ‘a collection of reminiscences about his experiences as a shaven-headed trans-vestite’. But it was really the messianic streak he’d unleashed on TMWSTW that was now leading him on. In New York for the RCA signing in September, he told a reporter for the Detroit-based Creem: ‘As the earth has probably only another forty years of existence, this would be a fine time to have a dictatorship. I’m fed up being free.’ Although no one was yet ready to take such statements seriously he had informed Disc’s Dai Davies the previous January that he thought the coming youth revolution would be led by someone who was an amalgam of Adolf Hitler and Jimi Hendrix:

  David Bowie: The whole Nazi thing was given the image of a mission by their very effective publicity machine, and it really appealed to the youth of an entire nation. The Leader that’s going to take this country over will have to be a lot more youth-orientated than [Enoch] Powell30. It’s the youth that are feeling the boredom most; they are crying out for leadership to such an extent that they will even resort to following the words of some guitar hero. [1971]

  This was the kind of conceit he could get away with in a theatre, and for now that was the extent of his (and Ziggy’s) ambitions. He even had a setting for his messianic story, and it was fittingly apocalyptic. The rise of Ziggy Stardust would be set during the last five years on Earth, and ‘Five Years’ – recorded in November – would set the stage for the emergence of this ‘guitar hero’ who would herald the end of days. Was it a case of today Broadway, tomorrow . . . who knows?

  Decades later, in his introduction to Mick Rock’s collected photos of the Ziggy era, Moonage Daydream (2005), Bowie again provided a suitably pretentious way of explaining how he conceptualized rock’s first self-consciously conceived rock star: ‘Writers like George Steiner had nailed the sexy term post-culture and it seemed a jolly good idea to join up the dots for Rock. Overall, there was a distinct feeling that “nothing was true” anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it had seemed . . . Everything was up for grabs. If we needed any truths we could construct them ourselves.’

  As it happens, by the time Ziggy took to the stage he was no longer some cracked actor – he was Bowie’s stage alter ego. The theatrical show had fallen by the wayside as soon as he started recording the songs and found that a cogent theatrical concept was not the same as a cohesive concept album. When Bowie revisited the making of Ziggy Stardust for a mid-Nineties Mojo special, he remembered ‘there [had been] a bit of a narrative, a slight arc, and my intention was to fill it in more later – [but] I never got round to it because before I knew where I was we’d recorded the damn thing’, a recollection that tallies with the facts. The bulk of the album was completed over a single week at Trident, nine songs being cut from 8–15 November 1971, including six of the eight songs that tell the story of Ziggy.

  By 15 December, he had a provisional tracklisting with the first three songs already solidly in place, though at this juncture the story of Ziggy ends with ‘Lady Stardust’, his homage to Marc and Syd. That original album sequence (surprisingly called Round and Round on the tape box), which made it as far as two master-tapes, included three songs, two of them covers, that never made the final artefact: Chuck Berry’s ‘Round and Round’, Jacques Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’ (a leftover from Hunky Dory) and the glam-era curio ‘Velvet Goldmine’, with its hummed outro straight out of Paint Your Wagon.

  According to comments Bowie made over the phone to an American radio DJ in January 1972, as he set about reconfiguring the artefact, ‘Round and Round’ ‘would have been the kind of number that Ziggy would have done onstage. He jammed [on] it for old times’ sake in the studio, [but] our enthusiasm for it probably waned after we heard it a few times.’ Actually the Berry standard, just the kind of number that not only Ziggy but Vince Taylor ‘would have done onstage’, made it as far as the final test-pressing. Bowie was already looking to explain away what happened to the story of Ziggy Stardust and his band, offering this version to the US radio audience:

  David Bowie: It wasn’t really started as a [full-on] concept album. It got kinda broken up because I found other songs that I wanted to put in the album that wouldn’t fit in with the story of Ziggy. So at the moment it’s a little fractured and a little fragmented. What you have on that album when it finally comes out is a story which doesn’t really take place. It’s just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which could feasibly be the last band on earth, because we’re living the last five years on earth . . . It depends what state you listen to it in. Once I’ve written an album, my interpretation of the numbers on it are totally different afterwards than when I wrote them. And I find that I learn a lot from my own albums about me. [1972]

  It took until the end of January before he finally had the three songs needed to round out the album. The most important addition was a quickly penned, catchy single, ‘Starman’, which seems to have been prompted by something he said to Michael Watts the week he recorded it: ‘We have created a new kind of person . . . a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is twelve.’ Here was a man now wholly estranged from his own immediate family, looking to claim those twelve-year-olds for his very own Jean Brodie of glam. But the song was never really part of the Ziggy concept – it was always a commercial palliative as producer Ken Scott confirmed, ‘“Starman” was a separate inspiration that was added on later, ’cause the record company didn’t hear a single.’

  Initially, Bowie even clung to the idea of releasing ‘Starman’ as a stand-alone single, with ‘Round and Round’ still holding its place in a 2 February sequence. But two days later, the Chuck Berry classic had given way to a song that was a natural successor to his last hit song, ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’. The two other brand-new songs recorded at the same session(s) shifted the album’s axis: ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. They would make the story of Ziggy end not with his ‘rise’, but with his ‘fall’. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ was both some kind of wish-fulfilment and a spell to keep death at bay. Its first line, ‘Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth’, was Bowie’s way of saying, ‘Life is a cigarette, smoke in a hurry or savour it’, a sentiment he attributed to Baudelaire, though it actually originated with Manuel Machado. Looking for the supreme gesture of the messianic rock god, he had found it in another of his little literary lifts.

  On the other hand the death of Ziggy, the Dionysian rock star, drew from immediate examples rock had considerately provided for him, particularly the recent demises of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. As he later confessed, ‘At this point I had a passion for the idea of the rock star as meteor. And the whole idea of The Who’s line: “Hope I die before I get old.”’ The death of so many family members, culminating in his father’s just weeks before ‘Space Oddity’ charted, had left internal scars. But even before that life-changing event, he felt haunted by death, or so he informed Michael Watts: ‘[When I was young] I would pull moodies and say things like, “I think I’m dying”, and sit there for hours pretending I was dying.’ The idea of dying on stage was bound to be enticing one to someone who even as a child had dramatized his own death in his head; and now confided to new inner-circle entrant Mick Rock, ‘I know that one day a big artist is going to get killed on stage, and I know that we’re going to go very big. And I keep thinking – it’s bound to be me.’

  Having self-consciously created a character who ‘because I never drew a template for a storyline too clearly . . . left so much room for audience interpretation’, he was almost apologetic about the album in its finished form, keen to downplay any notion of conceptual unity therein. Six weeks after the album was sequenced –
and three months before it chased ‘Starman’ into the charts – Mick Rock’s notes to his first interview with Bowie, shortly after the Birmingham show, reveal the would-be star’s inner doubts:

  Ziggy Stardust – rise & fall of. It started off unfortunately as a concept of the life-cycle of a rock & roll star but it ended up as fragmented songs on an album, but I’ve still retained the original title which really only relates to the first side now. The other side is a collection of different songs. A very mini-concept album. Very melancholic view of the star-trip.

  It seems even Ziggy’s auteur did not know which pieces of the puzzle fitted where. In the end it would be side one that would have the sensual superfluity of ‘Soul Love’, ‘Starman’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy’, while the second side would build steadily up to the ultimate ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. While Bowie wasn’t quite sure what Ziggy Stardust was mutating into, he was adamant that his creation was not a cipher for his own deep-rooted neuroses. Laurel Canyon constituted no part of this Londoner’s address. Disavowing the solipsistic universe of the singer-songwriter – before it rejected him – Bowie was insisting: ‘My songwriting is certainly not an accurate picture of how I think at all.’

  At the same time he complained about ‘the half-bakedness of myself, and everyone else in the rock business. Songs these days are supposed to be representative of the writer’s attitude and mind, instead of just being [something] on record.’ Coming from a man who two years earlier was telling Top Pops, ‘Everything that one writes is personal, but . . . what I do is take something that has happened to me and put it into . . . some kind of symbolism’, such pronouncements smacked of someone blowing smoke from behind a big green screen.

  Naturally he had an explanation for the change – a personal epiphany some time between Hunky Dory and the Ziggy sessions: ‘I used to come out with great drooling nine-minute epics . . . [Then] I decided it wasn’t worth singing about myself, so instead I decided to write anything that came to mind.’ [One ‘drooling nine-minute epic’, ‘The Width of a Circle’, still remained the centrepiece of every Ziggy show from The Rainbow to Hammersmith Odeon, marking the point in the set when Ziggy became a lad insane.) He knew he was consciously disavowing ‘one of the principles in rock: . . . that it’s the person himself expressing what he really and truly feels . . . [whereas] I always saw it as a theatrical experience.’]

  But, try as he might to deny it, Bowie’s latest creation was as much a part of his identity as his estranged family. Nor was his solution such an original one. As Peter and Leni Gillman astutely noted in their fiercely independent Bowiebio, Alias David Bowie (1986): ‘The concept at the very heart of the [1972] album, of inhabiting the character of Ziggy, had close similarities with some schizophrenics’ strategy of adopting a series of personas as if searching for one that will allow them to function and survive.’ Bowie almost got around to embracing the Gillmans’ charge in 1993, describing his Seventies strategy thus: ‘I felt that I was the lucky one because . . . as long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music and into my work I could always be throwing it off.’

  The prime question, though, quickly became not how much of himself did he put into Ziggy but where exactly did the creator end and this ‘absolutely frightening, extraordinary monster of rock’ begin? Wife Angie saw at first-hand how the starry monster initially served its master well: ‘By creating Ziggy to go out and front for him, David never had to act like himself in public if he didn’t want to, which in turn meant that he could pursue art and applause without having to deal with his . . . frigid self-loathing.’ Talking to one reporter on his first US tour as Ziggy, he owned up to the validity of his wife’s portrait, ‘I’m a pretty cold person . . . [Yet] I have a strong lyrical, emotional drive and I’m not sure where it comes from. I’m not sure if that’s really me coming through in the songs.’

  For most of 1972 he retained the requisite degree of control over this emotive doppelganger, even during that infamous first interview with Melody Maker’s Michael Watts, witnessed by Angie, when ‘he was [already] speaking at least half of his lines from the persona of his hype-spawned sacrificial-alien rock star’. At the time he really did seem to know what he was doing. Six years later he was not so sure. Talking to Watts again, Bowie recalled how he ‘was starting to build Ziggy . . . and I was naturally falling into the role; and . . . you sorta pick up on bits of your own life when you’re putting a role together . . . I was sorta half-serious there when I said that I’d developed a school of pretension within rock & roll . . . He was Ziggy, he’d been created . . . so I had to work with him for a little while.’

  For the next nine months the on–off switch would continue to work as, in Bowie’s own words, he ‘carried the character into interviews, newspapers, onstage, offstage – whenever there was media around . . . to keep those characters concrete’. Again, it would be some years before he would gamely admit that the whole thing had been his way of conquering ‘an unbearable shyness; it was much easier for me to keep on with the Ziggy thing, off the stage as well as on the stage . . . It was so much easier for me to be Ziggy.’

  Despite turning twenty-five in January 1972, Bowie was still finding himself; and psychoanalysing himself into the bargain. As he told Watts: ‘My own work can be compared to talking to a psychoanalyst. My act is my couch.’ And talking to musician-journalist Lenny Kaye in July 1972, he ‘explained’ Ziggy in terms of an ongoing internal quest: ‘I’m searching all the time for an identity, and it comes through in the form of images.’ However, he was subsuming himself to find himself. Becoming Ziggy onstage and off empowered him, but such was the power of his own creation that he soon failed to recognize the person staring back at him in the mirror: ‘That flamboyant front was very useful to me. It gave me a platform: I talked to people as Ziggy . . . who was a cracked mirror . . . [And] David Jones was in there somewhere. But not much.’

  At least Davey Jones was not alone. A relentless musical magpie, Bowie was still picking through others’ ideas for a self he could call his own. Early on in the Ziggy ‘experiment’, he confided in Mick Rock: ‘I’m more like a focal point for a lot of ideas that are going around. Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all; I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.’ He had certainly co-opted a fair proportion of Ziggy’s characteristics from previous models of rock stardom, hoping that before pop ate itself he would become the consummate rock star. Not all of those from whom he borrowed these jigsaw pieces were amused or appreciative. According to Tony Visconti, who throughout 1972 continued to conjoin his future to T. Rex: ‘[Bolan] seethed with contempt for David when he came up with Ziggy Stardust. When Bowie’s album came out he made some very petty and nasty comments.’

  As for the two American degenerates Bowie flew into London in July 1972 at Main Man’s expense, one doubts that either Iggy Pop or Lou Reed thought the fey Englishman was anything more than a means to an end (a record deal for the former; a hit record for the latter). Thankfully Iggy was not there the night in February when Bowie attempted to walk out across the audience at an Imperial College gig, à la the Stooge, only for the fans to recoil at the very idea. In fact, according to Woody Woodmansey the Spiders from Mars’ unloquacious drummer, there had been a wholesale rethink immediately after the March show in Birmingham attended by Rock: ‘Initially audiences did not like that show . . . So we stopped touring briefly. It was only when “Starman” got all over the radio that things turned.’

  Bowie sensed that the audiences were still not embracing this whole Ziggy schtick: ‘Ziggy was a case of small beginnings. I remember when we had no more than twenty or thirty fans at the most. They’d be down the front and the rest of the audience would be indifferent.’ Rock’s photos of these early shows bear out his recollection. Bowie was simply playing to the wrong audience, one he had built up with some of the best AOR (adult-oriented rock) this side of Prog. But if he was going to tap into the same constituency as his embittered old friend Bolan, he need
ed not only to make his music more raunchy, but also to sex-up the show they then came to see. And a teen market brought up on a soundtrack of T. Rex, The Sweet, and even the touchy-feely-creepy Gary Glitter, demanded something more like the transgressive theatre of the Weimar Republic (albeit Christopher Isherwood’s take on it) and less like the mock-glam that was Hunky Dory. When Bolan drooled, ‘I’m a vampire for your love / And I’m gonna suck ya!’ he sounded like he meant it.

  When UK shows resumed in late April, Bowie was determined to make Ziggy more androgynous and more sexualized. The following month at a show in Oxford he went down on Ronson’s guitar for the first time, a form of fellatio emblematic of the real thing, but not graphic enough to actually get him banned. His fabled Top of the Pops appearance in the first week in July, when he languorously placed his arm around Ronson, turned ‘Starman’ into a Top Ten single, and made him the subject of a number of ‘think pieces’ on the Bowie phenomenon before it was one.

  He was trying every trick in the book, while carefully mirroring Bolan’s proven template musically. The same week he appeared on Top of the Pops, he headlined a show at the Royal Festival Hall, a benefit for whales, which brought yet more rhapsodic reviews from a smitten music press. And then he temporarily pulled the plug. While the band took a brief sabbatical, he set about creating a very special evening, a 19 August show at The Rainbow that would be the formal unveiling of Ziggy. Like the Floyd six months earlier, Bowie knew that The Rainbow would be the perfect place to unveil the work that would forever define him.