by Pat Gilbert
“I’m going to be a huge rock star,” he declared after the show to future music journalist Kris Needs, then sixteen years old. “Next time you see me I’ll be totally different.” Meanwhile, Tony Defries insisted that the promoter paid him in cash. “He was given the fee in 50p pieces,” remembers Needs. “He went away, counted it again, then came back and said it was 50p short!”
Bowie was eager to record his next album, even though Hunky Dory wasn’t scheduled for release until Christmas 1971. With the advance from RCA, money wasn’t an issue, and after a month of rehearsals in Greenwich, Bowie and his band returned to Trident on November 8. Once again, Ken Scott manned the console, while Bowie seized control of the arrangements, to the extent of humming the solos he wanted Ronson to play. If Hunky Dory was to be Bowie’s singer-songwriter album, the prevailing sound this time would be the noir-ish metallic rock that the Stooges and the Velvet Underground had invented—without either bands, conveniently, having made any impact on the mainstream UK (or, for that matter, American) charts. “I remember David coming in and saying, ‘You’re not going to like this album,’” Scott told writer Mark Paytress. “I asked why, and he said, ‘It’s much more rock ’n’ roll’… I think by then he’d come to terms with the music industry. He wanted success more.”
Bowie performing during the first run of Ziggy Stardust shows.
Much of what would become The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was committed to tape in the second and third weeks of November, with Ronson’s flowing, liquid guitar playing, Bolder’s busy bass runs, and Woodmansey’s expressive flams the Spiders’ defining elements. The straight rock setup meant the recordings were made quickly, and “Hang On to Yourself” and “Star” were nailed on the same day. “On Hunky Dory, each song was treated specifically to fit the way it was felt the song should go,” said Scott. “For Ziggy, the basic sound was kept virtually the same for all the tracks.”
On December 17, Hunky Dory was released in the UK, with the US edition following two weeks later. Brian Ward’s front cover photo, colored by George Underwood, showed Bowie striking a pose inspired by screen goddess Marlene Dietrich, or possibly her rival, Greta Garbo. A repository for Bowie’s quizzical meditations on everything from extra-terrestrial life to Nietzsche, fatherhood, silent Hollywood movie stars, art, and insanity, all set to some of the most beautiful melodies in rock, Hunky Dory was Bowie’s first masterpiece. The voice that emanated from the record—that of a pleasantly kooky Englishman lost in his library of books, paintings, and old films—had the same cracked, bewitching allure as Syd Barrett’s and a deep melancholia akin to the Kinks’ finest work. “Changes,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” and “Life on Mars?” contained all the drama of mini stage plays, wrapped up as they were in a pop-friendly format, while the kaleidoscope of cultural and philosophical references on “Quicksand” both celebrated and lampooned the beautiful, fathomless confusion of the postmodern hippie mind. The flipside of the album, with its accent on the United States (“Queen Bitch,” “Andy Warhol,” “Song for Bob Dylan”), showed a brilliance of another kind: gentle pastiche born of genuine admiration. Then there was the final comedown of “The Bewlay Brothers,” with its disturbing image of a sibling lifeless on the rocks, possibly dead, possibly not.
A posed portrait on the cusp of superstardom, April 1972.
Hunky Dory’s greatness was not lost on the critics, with Melody Maker describing it as “the most inventive piece of songwriting to have appeared on record for a considerable time” and the New York Times proclaiming Bowie “the most intellectually brilliant man yet to choose the long-playing record as his medium of expression.” These bouquets did not, however, translate into significant sales, with only two thousand copies shifting in the UK in its first month of release. Yet for Bowie, it was a triumph—“People [were] actually coming up to me and saying, ‘Good album, good songs,’” he told Uncut’s Chris Roberts. “That hadn’t happened to me before.”
Bowie spent Christmas 1971 in Cyprus with Angie and Zowie before work restarted on Ziggy in early February. The final sessions of the album yielded versions of three songs that would dramatically change the shape of the record: “Starman,” “Suffragette City,” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” Up until this point, Ziggy had not been conceived as a concept album per se, but now Bowie had a selection of material that could loosely tell the tale of his fictional rock star Ziggy Stardust, who becomes a messiah before falling foul of his own ego. The idea for Ziggy, Bowie once claimed, came to him in a dream, and though that may be true, when exactly he decided to adopt Ziggy as a stage persona is difficult to pinpoint. But it seems that by the end of January 1972 the process was well under way.
“Ziggy Stardust,” the song, had been sketched out at a Holiday Inn in Los Angeles in February 1971 during Bowie’s first promotional trip to the United States. Though the singer would later claim that the name “Ziggy” came from a tailor’s shop, it also owed a clear debt to Iggy Pop, whom at that time Bowie had yet to meet. Ziggy’s surname, on the other hand, came directly from cult American performer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. “Mercury executive Ron Oberman took me to one side just before my departure from the States and furtively pressed a couple of singles in my hand,” he informed the author in 2002. “‘Play these,’ he said. ‘You will never be the same again.’ Back home, I choked on [the song] ‘Paralyzed’… and fell all about the floor at ‘I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship.’ I became a lifelong fan and Ziggy got a surname.” Ziggy’s other key ingredient was leather-clad rock ’n’ roller Vince Taylor, whom Bowie had befriended in the mid-1960s at La Gioconda on Denmark Street, and whose acid-fried mind had convinced him that UFOs were visiting Earth and that he was a disciple of Christ. From these components, the ultimate cosmic rocker, Ziggy Stardust, was born.
Though Bowie’s creation still needed finessing, in January 1972 the singer moved a step closer to determining his physical form when Angie cut Bowie’s hair short, the first time his ears had seen daylight since he’d appeared in The Virgin Soldiers in the autumn of 1968. The cut was refined shortly afterward by Ronson’s future wife, Suzi Fussey, who feathered it on top while letting the back grow down Bowie’s neck. Around the same time, the singer acquired a pair of wrestler’s boots that laced up to the knee, and Angie and Freddie Burretti set to work at Haddon Hall on a series of glamorous, transgender costumes for Bowie and the Spiders from Mars to wear on stage. The look was designed to echo the image of Alex’s gang of Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s recently released—and soon to be banned—film A Clockwork Orange, only here spangled with Bolan-style glitter. Brian Ward, who’d taken the cover shot for Hunky Dory, was enlisted to photograph the new-look group at his studio on Heddon Street in Mayfair. It was raining outside, so the Spiders opted not to pose in the street next to a red telephone box, though their leader did, creating the iconic early Ziggy images that would adorn the sleeve of Bowie’s next album.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or at least a fledgling version, made its debut appearance at Friars Aylesbury on January 28, 1972, fulfilling Bowie’s promise to journalist Kris Needs, made the previous September, that when he returned he would be “totally different.” Certainly Brian May and Roger Taylor, attending that evening and looking for new ideas for their own band, Queen, thought so. “We loved it,” recalled Taylor. “They looked like spacemen.” In the dressing room after the show, the ecstatic mood was fueled by gate-crashing fans wanting to know where Bowie got his hair cut and bought his clothes. Pushing through the scrum outside to climb into his getaway car, Bowie was punched by an overzealous female admirer. “I think that was the moment Bowie realised it was really taking off,” recalled the show’s promoter David Stopps.
With the material for Ziggy in the can and Hunky Dory in the shops, Bowie set out on the promotional trail. On February 4, he and the band taped an appearance on the BBC rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test, performing “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Queen Bitch,�
� and “Five Years,” and giving their new sound and image their first national TV exposure. On February 10, they set out on a short nationwide tour that would eventually become a mammoth jaunt stretching until the end of the year. The first dates were given an invaluable PR boost by a revelatory interview Bowie gave to Melody Maker in January, in which Bowie claimed he was gay. The paper’s Michael Watts had arrived at Gem’s office on Regent Street to do a small piece acknowledging the release of Hunky Dory and to publicize the tour. Watts regarded the singer as “a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy” and felt compelled to enquire directly whether he was, in fact, gay. “I’m gay,” Bowie replied, “and always have been, even when I was David Jones.” Bowie was being playful, though possibly calculated too, which Watts picked up on, telling his readers that “there’s a sly jollity about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of the mouth.”
Painting and decorating at his home, Haddon Hall, in April 1972.
An RCA Records promotional photo showing Bowie in full Ziggy getup.
The quote had the desired effect: the story ran on the front cover of the January 23 edition, together with a photo of Bowie in a Liberty-print jumpsuit. In 1971 there were few, if any, openly gay rock stars (though plenty of closeted ones), and the statement was regarded as incendiary—though several readers affected outrage that the paper had fallen for such a blatant publicity stunt by an artist still widely regarded as a one-hit wonder. In 2002, talking to MOJO magazine, Bowie was candid about his motives. “I found I was able to get a lot of tension off my shoulders by almost ‘outing’ myself in the press in that way, in very early circumstances. So I wasn’t going to get people crawling out of the woodwork saying, ‘I’ll tell you something about David Bowie you don’t know.’ I knew that at some point I was going to have to say something about my life. Ziggy enabled me to make things more comfortable for myself.”
Bowie’s tour initially comprised around twenty dates, beginning at the unremarkable setting of the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, on the fringes of Southwest London. As few as twenty or thirty people attended the earliest shows, but with each one, Ziggy and the Spiders—who, as red-blooded Northern lads had to be coerced by Angie into wearing their brightly colored, revealing jumpsuits—grew in confidence. Angie played the role of stage manager, lighting technician, and catering manager, while Stuey George, a friend of Ronson’s from Yorkshire, was appointed as Bowie’s personal minder, ensuring the singer didn’t come to any harm from over-enthusiastic fans or drunken homophobes. The group and entourage, traveling in two Jaguar cars, crisscrossed the country, gathering admirers wherever they went. Borrowing a trick from Iggy, Bowie often would launch himself onto the crowd in front of the stage, often with painful consequences when the concertgoers stepped aside. By the time they played at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on April 21, however, there were enough Ziggy-lovers to keep him aloft.
The cover art to Bowie’s most famous album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Manchester also marked another leap forward in Bowie’s assemblage of the Ziggy character: on Angie’s instructions, Suzi Fussey had dyed his blond hair red. With Woodmansey painting “The Spiders” onto the skin of his bass drum, the difference between David Bowie and his backing band from Hull (augmented on these dates by keyboardist Nick Graham) and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was getting ever harder to discern. It was a conceit that Bowie increasingly relished. “It was a fun deceit,” he told MOJO. “Who was David Bowie and who was Ziggy Stardust?” Ziggy, it would transpire, was a magnanimous being, for when in March Bowie heard that Island Records signings Mott the Hoople was thinking of splitting up, he proposed that the group record a new song he’d written, with a view to restoring their morale and propelling them onto the pop charts. The band was invited to hear Bowie play it on his acoustic guitar at Gem’s offices, and so it was Mott, and not Bowie, that became synonymous with one of Bowie’s finest compositions from the Ziggy period—“All the Young Dudes.”
Amid all this frenzied activity, on June 6 The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars hit the racks. For fans who’d heard some of its tracks performed live, here at last was the album in full—and though Ziggy Stardust’s story wasn’t as cohesive as the title may have suggested, what the record’s overarching narrative lacked in detail, the songs made up for in sheer panache. From the opening track, “Five Years,” a swaying ballad predicting a half decade before the world ends, to the emotional, waltzing climax of “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” it’s an album big on melody and high on drama. And with tracks such as “Ziggy Stardust,” “Star,” “Lady Stardust” (a tribute to Marc Bolan), “Hang On to Yourself,” “Moonage Daydream,” and “Suffragette City,” it became a touchstone for what was then dubbed “glitter rock” but would soon be universally known as “glam rock.” If the album had a centerpiece, it was the timeless “Starman,” a sing-along boogie with a yearning chorus melody lifted from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and an extraterrestrial theme that Bowie, still then best-known for “Space Oddity,” was apparently monopolizing. The only incongruous piece in the jigsaw was “It Ain’t Easy,” a cover of a Ron Davies number that had been rejected from Hunky Dory’s track listing the previous year. Reaction from critics, perhaps still caught up in Hunky Dory’s sumptuous grooves, was curiously mixed. Michael Watts, who had posed the “gay” question earlier that year, found it “a little less instantly appealing” than its predecessor. Cashbox in the United States, meanwhile, called it “another example of the shining genius of David Bowie.” NME regarded it as evidence that Bowie was “tremendous.”
Mott the Hoople tears up London’s Rainbow Theatre on November 14, 1971. Earlier in the year Bowie had gifted the band his song “All the Young Dudes,” propelling them to stardom and likely saving their careers.
An early print ad for the album reveals “David Bowie Is Ziggy Stardust.”
On July 8, 1972, Lou Reed joined Bowie onstage at the Royal Festival Hall, London, to perform the Velvet Underground songs “White Light/White Heat,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and “Sweet Jane.” A few weeks later, they proceeded to Trident Studios together to record Reed’s breakthrough solo album, Transformer (opposite).
During a short break in what was now becoming a never-ending tour, Bowie, Defries, and Ronson flew to New York to set up a string of US dates in the autumn. The evening they arrived, RCA took them to see Elvis at Madison Square Garden, where Bowie caught Presley’s eye when the singer’s entourage walked in late to take their front-of-stage seats, Bowie dressed in full Ziggy regalia. When the tour resumed, Bowie had a new trick up his sleeve, premiered at Oxford Town Hall on June 17. During the solo on “Suffragette City,” Bowie danced over to Ronson, knelt down, and caressed the strings of Ronson’s guitar with his mouth, thus simulating an act of fellatio entirely in keeping with Ziggy and the Spiders from Mars’ intriguing sexual energy. The moment was captured on film by Mick Rock, who’d been recruited as Ziggy’s official photographer. The shot—now one of the most iconic in rock—was distributed to the press, causing yet more ripples of delight/horror when it was printed. Among those most outraged were the citizens of Hull, who hurled abuse at Ronson’s family in the street. The guitarist was so upset by the incident he declared he was quitting—and probably would have done so had Bowie and Angie not talked him out of it.
While “fellatio-gate” was erupting, Defries was hard at work empire-building. He had cut a deal with Laurence Myers, severing his ties with Gem and leaving him to manage Bowie’s career alone. In return for $500,000 in deferred royalties, Gem would also surrender the masters of the four Bowie albums it owned. Defries called his new management company MainMan, soon to become a byword for 1970s rock ’n’ roll excess. Besides Bowie, his first signs were Iggy (now “Iggy Pop”), who since February 1972 had been living in London with guitarist James Williamson, writing new material, and Lou Reed, poised to record his first solo album for RCA.
> An RCA Records promo EP, released in 1972, paired two tracks from Ziggy Stardust with two of Bowie’s best-loved songs, “Space Oddity” and “Life on Mars.”
The controversy regarding Bowie’s bisexuality spread to the wider British public on July 6, when he performed “Starman” on Top of the Pops, the Thursday evening must-see BBC music show. In a calculated move, Bowie sidled over to Ronson and casually put his arm around his shoulders, a gesture that in any other group might have suggested a touching matiness, but with the two men wearing makeup and dressed in tight-fitting, glittering one-piece costumes, the move communicated something far more risqué. The performance helped push “Starman” to No. 10 on the singles chart and Ziggy to No. 5. In the first summer of glam rock, with Slade on the charts with “Take Me Bak ’Ome” and Bolan rising high with “Metal Guru,” Bowie had at last become the star he’d always dreamed of.
