Having spent eight years trying to make his way in the music industry via the Kon-Rads, the Kings Bees, the Mannish Boys, the Lower Third, the Buzz, Turquoise, and Feathers etc., as well as a spell as himself—reimagined as David Bowie—at the beginning of 1970 he formed yet another group, this one called the Hype. The band’s first gig was supporting Country Joe and the Fish at the Roundhouse on February 22, 1970, and was the first dawn of glam rock. Bassist Tony Visconti wore a white leotard, silver crocheted briefs, and a green cape. John Cambridge, the drummer, wore a pirate outfit complete with an eye patch, while Mick Ronson was dressed as a cartoon gangster, wearing a gold lame suit with matching fedora. Bowie was Rainbow Man, wearing diaphanous scarves and a bodysuit. The costumes were designed by Angie and Visconti’s girlfriend, Liz Hartley, and while they were really only worthy of a school play, they helped Bowie move from subaltern status to rock-star status. He disbanded the Hype almost immediately, and focused instead on a new idea, the Spiders from Mars.
MICK RONSON (GUITARIST): I mean, it was David’s gig: he got it all together. But I did help. We worked really well together, onstage and in the studio. I was always musical. When I was very little I started playing piano, then later, I learned the violin. I started off as a blues guitarist in Hull in a band called the Rats. We were into all-night blues sessions. Jeff Beck was my idol. I used to copy everything he did. Woody Woodmansey was in the Rats and, later on, Trevor Bolder. When I first came to London, I couldn’t get enough musical work to support myself. One day I was mowing a lawn, when Rick Kemp [who originally played in the Rats before joining folk band Steeleye Span] came along. He was on his way to play on Mike Chapman’s Fully Qualified Survivor album. Anyway, he took me with him and it was on that session that Tony Visconti first heard me. He introduced me to Dave. One day I was round at Dave’s and John Peel called up to ask him to do his show. Dave asked me if I felt like helping out. I didn’t know any of the numbers, because I’d never played with him before. I just filled in around what Dave was doing. And we kept working together on and off until the Spiders were formed. It felt funny at first dressing up and all that, then gradually it became part of me.
RICK WAKEMAN: He sat me down and said he was forming a band called the Spiders from Mars, and asked me if I wanted to run it. That afternoon I’d just been asked to join Yes, so this was a very weird day. I said I’d think about it and call him tomorrow. I’ve often said that if it had been the day before I would have said yes, but while there was no doubt that David was one of the most influential people I’d ever worked with—I loved his music, I loved his songs, I loved the way he treated musicians—obviously the Spiders from Mars would be playing David’s music, and I actually wanted to contribute musically myself. So I told him. He actually said, “I think you’ve made absolutely the right decision, in every respect.”
MICK RONSON: It took a bit of a struggle to make up my mind when David asked me to join him, because I was in debt and Dave wasn’t doing very much. But there was some kind of special excitement. We did a few live gigs with Tony on bass and Woody on drums. Then we had a crazy time recording The Man Who Sold the World. I don’t think [my parents] always understood what [I’d] been up to, but they never interfered. I think it used to be a bit difficult when all the Bowie thing was going on. I know people used to stop my sister on the street and say, “Is that Mick of yours a poof?” That was all really David’s image. I never got involved with all those queens who used to hang out around David. I just used to get on with my work and have a few drinks, but David felt he had to play his image to the hilt. He always found it difficult relating to regular people and especially to the rest of the band. I was the link.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY (JOURNALIST): I hadn’t interviewed Bowie before because I was a kid writing for little magazines like Oz. Richard Neville took me to see him at the Roundhouse—it was one of two Roundhouse shows he did, but not the one where everybody wore costumes—and I remember he came out and did the beginning of the set solo and acoustic, and then brought the band on. I remember him doing Van Morrison’s “Madame George” and also that he had a harmonica holder, and as these gadgets are prone to occasionally do, it was coming loose. Every time he attempted to play the harp, it would move further away, and he was having to crane his neck. When you’re playing solo you can’t stop and readjust it, because then you have to take your hands off the guitar and stop in the middle of the song. In retrospect it was an endearing sign of human frailty. For some reason I remember that Mick Ronson had his hair dyed black rather than bleached platinum. But I definitely remember that he was peeling off a lot of Jeff Beck runs.
TONY VISCONTI: When we met Mick Ronson, it turned our world over. We knew David had the talent to be successful, and I knew that he could make a great art rock album like Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix. He had it in him, but Mick Ronson was the missing piece. After Mick had played five notes I knew he was the one. David and I looked at each other and we couldn’t stop smiling. Mick at the time was like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix all rolled up in one person. He was our age and we were the generation right after the Beatles so he simulated all those magic guitar styles from British rock guitarists. He had it all and his technique was phenomenal, as were his sensibilities. He knew the right notes to play, the right way to play a song. Give him a song for ten minutes and he was there—he just played all the right things. It’s great when you don’t have to spend half your life explaining something to a musician.
MICK ROCK: Mick was a Northern lad who didn’t quite know what was going on. He was such a great arranger, though, and a really accomplished musician.
DANA GILLESPIE: Ronno was such a simple guy in a way. He had that accent which I can’t do, and a very serious face, but when he smiled it was like the sun came out. He was very sparkly, and had twinkly eyes with the longest eyelashes you’ve ever seen, the sort of thing that make women think it’s unfair that men get them. He wasn’t keen on all the dressing-up lark, but he did it because it was part of the gig. I often felt that being down on his knees in front of David was probably not his idea of fun, but it was showmanship.
MICK RONSON: He was just beginning to try things, but he always liked to dress. He was the local freak, you know. He was always a bit outrageous. He used to say, “Let’s go out and look at some antique shops,” which really didn’t interest me. I was never interested in antiques myself. He used to come back and say, “Look at this I’ve just bought, isn’t it wonderful?”
TONY VISCONTI: With The Man Who Sold the World we tried something different, something harder. It was our second album and I was already playing live shows with David on the bass. And then Mick got his friend Woody Woodmansey down from Hull to be the drummer. And this was the core group that became the Spiders from Mars. So we made The Man Who Sold the World with Mick and Woody and myself. And of course David was the lead singer; we had plans to go on the road and promote David and even open up for him. We would be the opening act as well as his own band. The album is my favorite album I’ve ever produced. It’s adventurous, we broke all the rules; we just threw caution to the wind. There was no single on the album for a start. “The Man Who Sold the World” became a single for Lulu eventually, but we didn’t write it with a single in mind. We wanted to make an art rock album. It had to be seen by our peers as a work of art rather than just a pop album, along the lines of a Frank Zappa album, as David and I were into the idea of a concept album. A few years earlier the Beatles had made Sergeant Pepper and so we wanted to do a concept album too. We thought The Man Who Sold the World would be it. The single went out of favor for a while because the likes of Led Zeppelin and Yes were making albums that were outselling singles for the first time in history. We wanted to be seen as a great album group. When we started rehearsing, all of us lived in Haddon Hall in Beckenham. And we cleaned up an old wine cellar and put up eight crates on the wall as soundproofing—to this day I don’t think those crates ever worked. We got a lot of complaints from the neighbors, as we spent weeks down there, all day long, because we made this album our job and it was conceived right from the beginning as a concept album. And we were working on the sound. This is what we couldn’t quite do for the Space Oddity album—there was no David Bowie sound yet, and so we were concentrating on that very earnestly for that second album. By the time we got into the studio we were actually very well rehearsed and it was just a matter of putting all the tracks down and recording it. I think we had a four-week budget, which was not a lot at the time, but we made a few mistakes that we just had to let go. But it’s a great album really, and we felt so satisfied afterwards.
I felt like I had learned something, too, by being self-focused and trying new techniques that I had never tried before. There are a lot of backwards echoes on it that are really difficult to do, as you have to record something then turn the tape over and then apply the echo when the tape is running backwards and then flip it back over again. Then if it doesn’t work out you have to flip back again and try it another way. So we wanted to make startling new sounds that could only exist in the studio, because the Beatles had told us the studio is a musical instrument. That’s because when they started doing “Strawberry Fields Forever” they said they could never perform this song live—it was all the same thing, flipping the tape over and chopping the tape up and all that stuff. So we were on a mission to do something completely original. I knew how to do most of these things, and if I didn’t know how to do it I would figure them out on the spot. David was a cheerleader, and if I managed to pull one of these effects off he would be so grateful. That was always the basis of our relationship: He would think of something and then he would present me with a challenge. And if I did it then he would get really happy. Mick Ronson was the same way too, when he wanted effects on his guitar that he heard on other records.
GLENN GORING: One night David asked if I’d like to hear The Man Who Sold the World, which hadn’t been released yet. I thought he was going to put the album on but he sat down crossed-legged and played it on his guitar. I sat there while he performed the entire album. Every now and again he would ask me what I thought about this or that song. And I had to ask myself, what the hell was my opinion worth at this moment? Some pieces were certainly more melodic than others and I hoped my muttered approvals were understood for what they were. In all honesty I was not a huge fan of David’s music at that particular period of his career. I remember thinking as I watched his chord positions played close-up, and his right hand churning over the strings, that he wasn’t a great guitarist. But for David Bowie, what the hell did that matter?
TONY VISCONTI: There were inevitably aspects of Marc Bolan’s work that seeped into David’s. I would discover one thing and then perhaps incorporate it into someone else’s record. Some special effects I used cinematically. Some special effects might be perfect for one song but you just couldn’t throw it on another song just because it’s a special effect—it had to be the right one. But definitely Marc Bolan and I were up to the same kind of trickery as well in the studio, which started around the same time because, when I was doing The Man Who Sold the World I was still working with Marc. In the studio, Marc was all about Marc, whereas David was more generous. However it was always David’s record—his name is the biggest name on the cover, not mine. But here’s what it is: David was always tenacious with an idea and he would not let it go. He would switch very rapidly, he would listen to your idea and he would give you very little time to develop it, no more than five minutes, maybe twenty. If it wasn’t working he would say, “Well, try this, I know what it is now,” and then he would not let go of his own idea. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, because even if someone played on his album and they were the bass player or a guitarist, it was still a David Bowie album. If they had any ideas that were overlooked or slighted in any way they should have just kept those ideas and made their own album. There’s a joke in the business, that if you don’t like something you go, “I like what you just played but you can save that for your own album.”
WOODY WOODMANSEY (MUSICIAN): Coming from Yorkshire, we were musician-musicians. We didn’t dress up. Meeting David it was like, this guy dresses up! Even for breakfast! When I first met him he had a rainbow T-shirt on, hair down his back, bangles on, red corduroy trousers. Shoes with red stars painted on them. I thought, bloomin’ ’eck, he’s more dressed up than my girlfriend. But we chatted for a few hours and he played stuff, and we thought this guy can write, and he means it. Mick and I had never really met anyone that determined. He was assuming he’d made it already. That was something we were still going for. We were wondering what you need to make it, what’s the missing ingredient. We thought you’d do it, and someone would tell you you’d made it. We’d got it the wrong way round.
ANGIE BOWIE: I just happened to see these dresses at Mr. Fish. I saw them and picked them up, and David said, “Oh look at that!” And I said yep, try them on. And we did a deal with Mr. Fish and we walked away with both gowns. Both gowns were incredible, and David took them with him on the 1971 tour of the United States. He did New York and Boston and then he went to the West Coast, and he played songs from Space Oddity without a band. He only had a guitar. He had those gowns with him, and he played to people at Rodney Bingenheimer’s house and people at Tim Fowley’s house. He did the rounds and got to know folks, and it was a great thing because all of those people talked about David Bowie when he was gone. They said how interesting he was, how amazing he was, and then they would play his music. By the time we came back, although we didn’t have enough people in the audiences—because no one had actually spent enough money in advertising it—there were hardcore fans. They were so devoted and so into the music and into the different subjects that David was talking about, that they really were the backbone of his audience. They brought more and more people. So after three or four years of very light attendance, we were able to fill Universal Amphitheatre six nights in a row, or Radio City Hall three or four nights in a row. It took a while but we kept going.
DAVID BOWIE: The trip to America in January 1971 changed how I felt about what I was doing, as it opened up so many new doors for me. The country was still alien, and the music that was coming out of the cities was far more urban than it was in Britain. The whole scene with Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Ultra Violet, Moondog, the Stooges, it was all fascinating, and I have to admit that I was swept up in it. Obviously it was during this trip that the whole Ziggy Stardust thing began to gel. I couldn’t believe the country could be so free, so intoxicating, and so dangerous. It suddenly made Beckenham seem very small, very timid, and very English. I needed to get out of that whole British sensibility, and that’s what I did with Ziggy Stardust.
What isn’t discussed as much as it should be in regard to the origination of Ziggy Stardust is Bowie’s slightly embarrassing meeting after a Velvet Underground gig at the Electric Circus in New York in January 1971. After the show, Bowie showered Lou Reed with praise, only to be informed that the man being showered wasn’t Reed at all, but rather John Cale’s replacement in the band, Doug Yule. As Reed had since left the band too, Yule was the focal point, the cause of Bowie’s embarrassment.
To his credit, Bowie thought the whole thing rather funny, although as he left the venue that night, he started ruminating on the idea that perhaps he could do the same thing, impersonate someone onstage. Such was his confidence that it didn’t appear to concern him that, unlike Lou Reed, Bowie wasn’t famous, so how would anyone know he wasn’t real?
It should also be noted that Ziggy appeared during a period when many other glam stars pretended to be other people when they were onstage, notably Alice Cooper, Gary Glitter, and to a certain extent Bryan Ferry. Bowie’s extra gear was pretending to be Ziggy offstage too.
DAVID BOWIE: The first time I went to America there was a wonderful writer who lived in Greenwich Village. The first thing he did within a couple of days of me getting there was play me Loaded by the Velvet Underground and this was like the new release. I thought, Wow, I’m in America, I’m in Greenwich Village and there’s this guy playing me Loaded—this is heaven and I’ve brought a dress with me. In New York I was very impressed by transvestites; they were kind of pre-Raphaelite, there was something about the Edward Burne-Jones/Rossetti thing that I thought was a purist new energizing of the British spirit. I had long hair at the time and it looked like something interesting—so I wore that around for a bit.
TONY ZANETTA (ACTOR, PORK; WARHOL ACOLYTE): The big thing in Los Angeles was Rodney Bingenheimer. If I was the guy in New York, Rodney was the guy in L.A. They flip-flopped about him—they liked him, they didn’t like him. But he made David on the West Coast.
RODNEY BINGENHEIMER (DJ): I had been Davy Jones’s stand-in on The Monkees TV show, and then got a job as DJ at KROQ. I was also doing FM promotions for Mercury Records, and my job was to take the artists round to different radio stations. I had a friend at the time called Al Hernandez, who had seen David play back in London in 1969 and he told me about him, so when he came into L.A. in February 1971, I took him around all the studios. I picked him up from the airport in a friend’s Cadillac. He was all by himself, dressed in these loose black clothes, looking like a ghost. He was great, as he was into the Stooges, Velvet Underground, all that stuff that most people had never heard of at the time. I took him everywhere—we saw Marlon Brando, Gene Vincent, Elton John. I took him to record stores, clubs. We walked by Hollywood High one day and the kids were all outside playing ball and they went mad when they saw him because he looked like an old Hollywood film star, like Veronica Lake. This was just after I spent two weeks taking Rod Stewart around. But David was different because he was just out there—long dresses, a floppy hat, colored hair, he looked incredible. I’d never seen anyone look like that, and at the same time he was very friendly, real funny, very positive. He was quite shy. If he needed to go to the bathroom he would always ask so politely. I took him out to some stations in Orange County, and people just couldn’t cope with him putting on his makeup in the booth. I’d take him to parties up in the Hills, out in the Valley, over in Brentwood—he’d sit on the floor and cross his legs and play songs for people; he played a version of “Hang On to Yourself” cross-legged on a waterbed, acoustic, before it ever appeared on record. I saw him write the lyrics on some Holiday Inn napkins. He was talking a lot about this creation he was thinking of writing songs for, an alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. Rod Stewart was more of an outspoken, aggressive guy. He wanted to go out all the time, whereas David was far more shy.
Later I also had this place called Rodney Bingenheimer’s E Club on Sunset Strip near the Chateau Marmont, which David actually came to after his concert at Santa Monica Civic. I was playing Elvis Presley records, and David was dancing with himself in front of the mirror. And then I opened this club playing British music, the English Disco, on December 15, 1972, my birthday. David encouraged me to open it, in fact he suggested it. I had been to London to see my girlfriend, Melanie McDonald—who later married Tony Defries—and David had told me to look him up, so I spent a lot of time at the Hunky Dory sessions at Trident Studios. In the evenings I went out to all these pubs and clubs and went to this club called the Cellar, where they were playing Roxy Music, T. Rex, Slade, all that stuff, and I really liked it. So David said I should play this music in L.A. So I bought a bunch of records in London, came back, and found a place. We put up all these posters of David, T. Rex, Suzi Quatro, it was like a David Bowie cathedral. Everyone came—Led Zeppelin, the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople, Kim Fowley, everyone. Everyone who came looked like a miniature rock star. It ran for three years. There wasn’t much going on in L.A. at the beginning of the ’70s. Everything had kinda stopped at the end of the ’60s. So whenever bands came to town they came to the English Disco—they came for the girls, the beer, and the steak-and-kidney pies. I wanted to bring a little piece of London back to L.A., and people went crazy for it. They would be dressed up like David, or the Sweet, in red snakeskin platform boots, feather boas, dyed hair, crazy-colored dresses. Women wore tube tops, guys wore leather, shirts covered in stars, glitter makeup…
For visiting Anglo rock stars, Bingenheimer soon became a conduit of quite epic proportions. He seemed to have access to an apparently limitless supply of young girls eager to hang out with emerging British rockers. “If you were given the blessing of Rodney Bingenheimer, then your week at the Whisky a Go Go was like a pussy parade of girls wearing three sequins at most,” says Michael Des Barres, who at the time was singing with the band Silverhead. “He was the guy. He met us at LAX Airport when we first arrived in ’72, with a cavalcade of rich girls from Pacific Palisades.”
ANGIE BOWIE: I would say that for quite a long time David had a sex addiction. Even when he was in the Mannish Boys he was obsessed with sex. Dana [Gillespie] said that back then the band used to have a hearse, which was basically their booty buggy, you know. So yes, there was probably a sex addiction. We had an open relationship. That was a very “said” agreement. We talked about it a lot, and publicly. People always asked us. Once I had been in the Daily Express, and then I talked to Woman’s Own about it. I did this magazine and that magazine and before I knew it, it was well documented. The open marriage was a part of it, bisexuality was a part of it. You must understand, I was expelled from the College of Connecticut for Women. They expelled me because I was having an affair with a girl. They tried to lock me up in the infirmary and they were not amused. I said, “Do you know what, I need a pen and a pencil in my jacket pocket, can you get me my clothes?” So she got me my clothes, and I got dressed. I opened the window. It was the second floor, but it was a rolling lawn out. So I did a dive, and tumbled out of the window. I ran across the whole campus, got to Scott Catherine Blunt dorm, went upstairs, packed my stuff, and in an hour and a half I was out of there and on the road to New York to the airport to get on the plane. That’s how fast I left. Because before I left Cyprus, my father said, “Don’t ever let them tell you that they’re going to give you anything but an aspirin for a cold. Anything else that they try and give you, they’re trying to lock you up and trying to make you a part of their health system.” He said, run. And I did. I was totally devoted, from fifteen years of age, to LGBT rights. I was totally and utterly convinced that anyone who had any other idea about how society should be was depraved. These people were not people I wanted to be around. But yes, David was bisexual, I was bisexual. I wouldn’t have had any use for David if he hadn’t been bisexual. Being bisexual obviously helped his image; of course it did! How could you go to a dance club, and not understand or appreciate all the fabulous alternative society people who love your music! So it was very planned. I didn’t manufacture his image though, I didn’t have to! He was a mod! And then he went through a hippie stage. He was doing the unwashed and slightly dazed look.
Then we went dancing at the Sombrero [actually called Yours or Mine] on Kensington High Street one night, and there, in this fabulous ’50s beautiful vintage nightclub was this guy—God, he was gorgeous. He was more handsome than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life, and it turned out it was Freddie Burretti. And Freddie was wearing hot pants, a shirt with short sleeves, and this long hair that was curled and practically went down his back. And he was so handsome and Scandinavian-looking, he was divine. David couldn’t believe his eyes—he kept saying, just look at that guy! And I was saying, I know! And look at that gal with him! And there was this precious person! This little amazing Indian girl, with platinum short tiny hair. She looked like a negative! Her hair was white and she was just the most beautiful golden brown, and maybe five foot four. And she wore really high heels, so now she was like five-ten. And skinny, and beautiful. And she was crazy about Freddie. She had a friend who was always with her, another beautiful girl, a gorgeous girl, who was just lovely. Then there was Michael, who was another friend of theirs. And we met them all. And it turned out that Freddie was a tailor, and he made everything he was wearing. David looked at me and I said, “Well! It looks like we found a little more than we were looking for when we went dancing!” Freddie and his friends Daniella and Antonella, who was a marvelous hairdresser, all came down to Haddon Hall. And Freddie started working on costumes for Mick and the boys. We started what was basically a design studio at Haddon Hall. Me, Freddie, Daniella, Antonella. I had done eight years of couture at school, so I was definitely a seamstress, and so was Daniella. And Antonella was used to having to help Freddie at the last minute, so we were all seconded. In the meantime, Tony Visconti and the boys had built a rehearsal room downstairs, and we were upstairs doing the costumes. It was really like an arts lab. So David had graduated from the Arts Lab on a Sunday evening at the Three Tuns, to an arts lab at his own home, which was putting together what would be the staging of Ziggy Stardust. Freddie made the clothes for David, Ronno, Woody.
LEE SCRIVEN (FILMMAKER): I used to be a musician in Bletchley, and one of the guys I played with said he grew up with this boy named Freddie Burretti, who went on to make David Bowie’s clothes. I started investigating his life, as we both had a very similar upbringing, moving out from London’s East End to Bletchley. He was a curiosity as it was unusual for someone from my hometown to have had such an impact; by the time I finished I realized it was more than an impact. The reason they clicked is because they were both mods. Freddie had an absolute obsession with clothes, as did Mr. Bowie. The other thing was that he was a fantastic dancer, which compounded the sense of one-upmanship. He could also box, so he had a lot of self-confidence, and if you put those three factors together, that’s one powerful character. He was actually very humble, and knowing his brother like I do, and having a sense of what his father was like, I think they were a very humble family—very old-fashioned, East End, don’t be too flash, don’t be too garish, and if you’re good at something just pull something back a little.
The infamous meeting between Freddie and Mr. Bowie happened in the Sombrero in 1971. Freddie was the star of the club, and the clientele waited to see what he would be wearing, and what dance routines he had worked out. It was a massive theater for Freddie, and he was the star of the show in front of a lot of TV personalities, and general eclectic London people. It had a Saturday Night Fever–style dance floor, with segments instead of squares. It seemed to be a magnet for the weird and wonderful, which Freddie obviously loved. It was a gay club and Freddie must have been so liberated to leave a town like Bletchley. But even in those days you couldn’t be too flamboyant when you left the club.
Mr. Bowie was very astute, and he could see that Freddie was already a star. It was Angie who came over to talk to Freddie, but he thought twice about going over to talk to Mr. Bowie because he’s dressed to the nines and Mr. Bowie’s in a Mr. Fish dress with long hair. I think it was Angie’s forcefulness and probably a bottle of Champagne that convinced Freddie to go over. Anyway, they seemed to click immediately, which, as I said, had to do with their mod ethics. He was absolutely fixated by Freddie’s clothes, especially when Freddie said he’d made them all himself (he used to get suits off the peg, and then unstitch them and make them up again). Bowie hadn’t had a big hit for a long time, and was just quietly sitting in the corner. I think he had self-belief, but he wasn’t full of a lot of self-confidence, and there’s a difference. And there’s this kid, who’s just wowing people with his presence, and so Mr. Bowie thinks maybe he can get him to sing his songs. Although obviously after a while he started to think that he could do it himself, with Ziggy Stardust, rather than rely on Freddie. He made so many clothes for him, for Pin Ups, Diamond Dogs, for all the tours. At one point both Paul McCartney and Elton John wanted him to make clothes for them too, but Mr. Bowie’s management put their foot down.
TONY ZANETTA: It was May 1971. We were doing Andy Warhol’s play Pork in New York, and there was an article about David in Rolling Stone. David has just done his Mercury promotional tour, and there was a little article with a picture of him. Of course this captured our attention, as he was the man in the dress. It was intriguing. We liked that. In New York, Pork was known as an Actors’ Equity showcase, which meant that you could only do twelve performances, which we did at La MaMa. And during those twelve performances, a guy named Ira Gale, who was one of Andy’s art dealers in London, saw the play and wanted to bring it to London. He probably wasn’t the ideal candidate, because he was not a producer. Warhol wanted the show to go to Broadway, but there wasn’t anybody interested in doing that. The only person interested in it was Ira Gale. The thing that appealed to Andy was that it would keep the play alive for the summer, and they might have more of a chance of getting a Broadway producer, which they never did. So we decamped to London in June, for the run of Pork at the Roundhouse. The first part of the process was getting English understudies, and one of the people who auditioned was Dana Gillespie. We think she stole a script and gave it to David Bowie, which is where the song “Andy Warhol” comes from.
We opened at the beginning of August, which is when I met David. I didn’t go to the Country Club show that Jayne County, Cherry Vanilla, and Leee Childers went to. I met him when he came to see the play. He came backstage afterwards with Angie and Dana Gillespie and Tony Defries and maybe Mick Ronson. He wasn’t at all what I had expected. I mean, he was this married bloke, number one. He was very nice, kinda sweet, but kinda shy and quiet, and not particularly engaging-looking. He had long, mousy stringy hair and was dressed very tamely. Angie on the other hand was very extrovert and flamboyant. We used to go to the Sombrero. Angie was a lot of fun, and we hung out all night. David didn’t really engage too much; he was sitting at a table, talking. Angie was more playful. She asked me if I wanted to come the next day to have Sunday lunch with them. She said they’d send a car for me, which I thought was odd.
So they did. A little old lady came to pick me up in a minicab. I got into this car and didn’t know where I was going, I was just putting myself in their hands, or in this lady’s hands. I was going off on this adventure, and that’s literally what I did. And never came back. It wasn’t until I got to their house in Beckenham that I began to connect with him. Once I got to their house their roles kind of shifted. He wasn’t extroverted, but just very engaging. David had this ability to turn the charm on and off. You could be in a crowded room with him and you wouldn’t even be able to find him, because he could just totally turn it off and disappear. Or it would be like this blinding light was suddenly shining on him. He really had that ability.
That day in Beckenham I could tell that he was very intelligent, we shared a lot of interests, he was interested in theatre and theatricality. We talked about Lindsay Kemp and mime and I shared my experiences of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous and Pork. We had a shared love of Hollywood and stardom. And of course he played me a lot of music. He had a sense of destiny. He was very quietly determined. He was very young, very bright-eyed about the future, with great optimism. I’d never really met anyone who had it to the degree he did. He had a sense of destiny and what he was going to accomplish. But mainly what he wanted to accomplish was bringing the idea of theatre to music, dressing up rock and roll and having some fun with it. He wasn’t wildly extroverted.
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS (PHOTOGRAPHER): We had brought Pork to London. Cherry Vanilla was in the title role. I was the assistant director. Cherry was still very much a groupie, and I was trying to get ahead with my rock and roll photography. So we pretended we were working for Circus magazine in America, which we weren’t. But in those days it was easy to pretend. So we called up these record companies and pretended we were in town. And we got in to see everyone; Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan—we were really having a wonderful time in the rock and roll scene of the very early ’70s. And I saw an advert for David Bowie, even though he was very unknown at this point, and I had read a little thing about him wearing dresses and stuff. I said, “Cherry, let’s go and see this person; he wears dresses!” Except he wasn’t wearing a dress when we saw him so we were very disappointed. He was very thrilled with us working for Andy Warhol and everything, so he came again and again many times to see the show, with his wife, Angela.
JAYNE COUNTY: My first impression of David was one of confusion. He just looked so womanly. I thought he must be transsexual, because he looked totally feminine! Very long hair, baggy girly-style clothes, a big hat! Looked like he was wearing makeup base. He was squatting on the floor singing acoustic songs along with Mick Ronson. They looked like they just stepped off the love train on the way to Woodstock! Tony Defries later hired us all to work for him and David at MainMan, David’s management agency. MainMan was basically the cast from Pork.
CHERRY VANILLA (ACTRESS): Andy wanted a different feel for London. The girl who played the lead was a trained Broadway actress, and in Andy’s mind he wanted someone more raw. I auditioned for him, which is how I got the part. In London our apartment was nicknamed Pig Mansion. People were as titillated as they were repulsed and disgusted by us. We went with the strength of a group. We felt like Warhol’s stars in London. The first time I met David was when I went with Leee Black Childers and Jayne County to see him at the Country Club on the outskirts of London. Leee knew about him because David had apparently done a radio-promo tour of America a year before. We introduced ourselves to Angie, who introduced us to David, and we all became friends. We all recognized something in each other. I think he saw the roles we could play for him. It was organic. We started playing our roles for him almost immediately. We weren’t servants, but we wanted to tell the world how fabulous he was. Everything was sexual in those days. Time was going fast and we were going to have a good time. You just wanted to accomplish something and also have as much fun, and as much sex, as you could. We were all in love with him. We had to be, to be the way we were. He was our mission. We were in love with our discovery, and in love with the idea of everyone else falling in love with him. We took on subservient postures. But then we were going out and having sex with him, so how subservient is that? We just wanted to end up in bed with him at the end of a working day. The sexual attraction was immediate. He was married, but we knew he had an open marriage. At first I was mostly attracted to Mick Ronson, because he was the shy lead guitarist, which is like a groupie dream come true. Blond, shy, and a musical genius. I just adored Mick. He was straight and apparently not tied up with a girlfriend or a wife, as David was. But I was also attracted to David and Angie, obviously. He was basically a straight man who had no problem with homosexuality. He dabbled a little, had some experimentation. But just think what he did for homosexual boys. That’s so giving and beautiful and fearless. The same goes for geek boys, who weren’t interested in sports. Socially, what he did was incredibly generous. If I had to choose a word to describe him in those early days it would be “focused.” He was always incredibly focused, always working.
Thursday, June 3, 1971, was the first time the Spiders from Mars actually played together. Mick Ronson had been with Bowie for a while, and drummer Woody Woodmansey for a year, with bassist Trevor Bolder being the new recruit. The session took place at the BBC’s Paris Studios in Regent Street, a recording for John Peel’s radio show, In Concert. When Bolder made a mistake in “Song for Bob Dylan,” Bowie shouted at him. Suddenly Ronno, Weird (Bolder), and Gilly (Woodmansey) were all on the good ship Ziggy.
TREVOR BOLDER (MUSICIAN): We were a gang, I suppose, me, Mick, and Woody. But by the time we started in the Spiders we’d been together for a couple of years, playing together, all from Hull and we’d known each other for years and years, since we were kids really. And I think David was quite lucky to get us as a band, really, in that we slotted quite quickly into being the Spiders and it worked so well. I don’t know if he’d have got that with individual musicians. I think he tried it with individual musicians earlier on but it didn’t work. But we’d been playing together as a band, we were all best friends; I mean Mick Ronson was the best man at my wedding. And me and Woody were great friends, and I think that’s why we were like a gang.
JULIEN TEMPLE: My father is from the Glastonbury area, so in 1971 I skipped school in order to go down to the festival. I was probably sixteen. These days of course people go prepared with washing machines and catering but back then it was extremely primitive. You were barefoot, and there was no fence, no ticket. But along with that there was a certain sense of chaos, I guess. At the time David wasn’t on anyone’s radar, as we thought of him as a novelty artist with just one hit, “Space Oddity.” I think the big attraction on the night he was due to play was Traffic, and things inevitably went off-schedule, so he got shunted off the Pyramid Stage. Everyone crashed out after Traffic but then as dawn broke people started running around, waking you up, saying you’ve got to come and listen to this amazing guy, as David had just started his set. He was in full Hunky Dory mode—long hair, a dress, and just his guitar, playing the dawn chorus. It was a breathtaking performance, quite spectral, and you realized immediately just how powerful all this creativity was. I’d seen David and Tony Visconti in Hype at the Roundhouse a little earlier, but this was just amazing, and five thousand people were just hypnotized by him. We knew instantly that here was a major talent.
The actress Julie Christie was at Glastonbury, accompanying Nic Roeg, who was making a film of the festival. She describes it that year as a huge exotic town straight out of a sci-fi story—a town vibrating with sexuality. She remembers an entire naked family sitting on the back of a gigantic carthorse, and a naked motorcyclist with his penis laid out tidily in front of him on the fuel tank. She also remembers David Bowie, “because his music was wonderful and, like so many of the boys, he looked like a girl.”
DAVID HEPWORTH (JOURNALIST): In Glastonbury’s chaotic fields—among the head bangers, tribal drummers, mud sliders, face painters, geodesic dome dwellers, exotic religionists, naked exhibitionists, boy mystics in patent-leather shoes, bewildered children, pert-nippled girls rehearsing their music and movement lessons in the open air, ravishing film superstars like Julie Christie, rake-thin models rarely seen more than a few yards from the Chelsea drugstore, and puzzled musicians surveying the bobbing heads of gibbering loons, their brains fried with acid—here, in one week in June 1971, were born many things. Acts like Fairport Convention, Family, Traffic, and Terry Reid played that week, the latter two at the peak of their powers. But more significantly, this was the week when David Bowie ceased his eight years of merely dabbling in music and got serious. His stock had been rising since his return from the United States in February. He’d appeared on Top of the Pops the week before Glastonbury, miming the piano part on Peter Noone’s hit recording of his song “Oh! You Pretty Things” and had recorded an In Concert for BBC radio, where he appeared in public for the first time with Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder. Bolder, having only previously seen him as a normal bloke in shirt and jeans and assuming him to be just another bandleader, had been amazed to see Bowie get changed into a gown before the show. Bolder came from Hull, where such sights were rare.
Bowie and Angie, who had evidently found someone on whom to park three-week-old Zowie, made their way to Glastonbury by train, alighting at a remote country station and then attempting to walk to the festival site. This was made more difficult by the costume he had decided on for the day, which was Oxford bags [trousers], unsuitable shoes, and a Three Musketeers hat. He was supposed to go on in the early evening of Tuesday, June 22, but delays and the organizers’ fear of the neighbors complaining about noise meant that he didn’t appear until dawn the following day. He performed as a duet with Ronson, unveiling most of the songs from Hunky Dory for the first time. He had already started recording this at Trident Studios in Soho. He played the song that was a hit for Peter Noone; “Kooks,” the song inspired by the birth of the child they had left behind; “Changes”; “Song for Bob Dylan”; and “Memory of a Free Festival.” That Sunday evening as he was traveling back by train, Radio One broadcast the In Concert show he had recorded the week before. It felt to Bowie and his retinue, which included Dana Gillespie, Tony Defries, and his publisher Bob Grace, as though things might be finally falling into place.
KEN SCOTT: We recorded Hunky Dory that summer, and it was a great experience. I would say that in all the time I recorded and produced David, his vocals were pitch-perfect 95 percent of the time. Considering that I worked on six of his albums, that is an incredibly high success rate. He really was the very best vocalist I ever worked with, and I worked with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He was an average musician, and he could strum along to whatever was needed, but then he didn’t micromanage. He knew what he wanted and he was able to get other people to get it for him. But as a singer he was beyond compare, literally. He was the very best. The way he allowed Rick Wakeman to become a virtuoso on Hunky Dory was masterful. Other people would have smothered him. David knew what was best for him.
RICK WAKEMAN: David used to call Haddon Hall “Beckenham Palace.” The minstrel’s gallery was bigger than my entire house. He also had a grand piano, which was unusual in those days. He asked me to sit down, took out this battered old twelve-string guitar and said, “I want you to listen to these songs.” And then he played “Life on Mars?” and it was fantastic. It ticked every box. Great melody. Great chords, surprises, and then when you thought it was going to go a certain place it went somewhere else. He was very good at that. When I asked him why he was playing his songs on a tatty old twelve-string guitar, he said, “If it sounds good on this, think about what it will sound like with good musicians on good instruments.” He said that too many people fool themselves by playing on great instruments, but it’s actually the great sound that they’re listening to. He also said that if a song works on a piano, it will work on anything. He also had a great voice. I did some stuff with Cat Stevens around the same time, and before he did his vocals he would go out and smoke a packet of cigarettes. David didn’t need to do that.
I remember leaving St. Anne’s Court, Trident Studios, and coming home and saying to a couple of friends I met that evening in the local pub, that I’d just played on what I considered to be the best song I’d ever had the privilege to work on. [“Life on Mars?”] had every single ingredient. The great thing about David was, he was a wonderful melody man, but it wasn’t just the melodies—he had great ideas for chord structures, and would always throw in the odd surprise when you were least expecting it. And that was what was so great about playing his stuff. He’d be teaching you a song, and you’d be going along and thinking, I know how this is going to go, and then he would change. A very clever guy.
TREVOR BOLDER: I suppose we were recording Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust at the same time, as David already knew what direction he wanted to go in. As soon as we recorded “Moonage Daydream” I knew something was going to happen. After listening to the guitar solo, I just thought, This is going to be amazing, this is going to go somewhere. This is special. And then it did, you know. That was the point when I knew, Hang on, there’s something special here. This is going to be really, really good.
ROY DALLEY: I lived on a council estate on Beckenham Hill Road, which was half a mile from Haddon Hall. The estate had been built for people with trades, and my father was a carpenter. It was really quite beautiful there, with very mature oak trees, but I guess we were scruffy South London council-house kids. I was ten years old at the time, and when my friends and I discovered that David Bowie lived down the road we’d go down there and hang out. We soon found out which house was the house of the weird pop star because Haddon Hall was really quite unlike anything else along that road—it was a kind of dark, almost scary-looking place from the outside. It was also very beautiful in an elegantly wasted kind of way. We knocked on the door at least six different times before anyone answered. One day Angie answered the door, and after that she always did. She was incredibly generous with her time chatting to us all. She was unlike anybody I’d ever come across up to that point. She had a larger-than-life personality, but there was no sourness or bitterness within her—she was very boisterous. Her hair was some kind of tone between sky blue and turquoise, and cut in the same style as Bowie’s. We would always be asking her what Bowie was up to, and she went through a period of saying that what she was really excited about was a song on his new LP, “Life on Mars?” All she could talk about was Hunky Dory. She said that this was going to be the one that made people sit up and listen. Bowie himself would always be in the background. We saw him once, sitting at the window, with the bright-red hair, but as soon as he saw us turning into his drive he just shot away. Angie came to the door one day in a trouser skirt thing and then all of a sudden from between her legs almost like between stage curtains appeared her son, Zowie. He was just a toddler, and while he didn’t break into song he reveled in being the center of attention. [Bowie’s] producer Tony Visconti lived there too, and I distinctly remember seeing chocolate-colored people walking up and down in pastel-colored bikinis and pastel-colored afro wigs. I’m not sure what gender they were. It was a very theatrical twenty-four-hour lifestyle they all had. You’d also see other kids hanging around, as he was becoming famous by then. We weren’t rude, we were just wide-eyed kind of kids going to see the weird pop star who lived up the road.
BOY GEORGE (SINGER): Angie had opened the window at Haddon Hall when we were kids and shouted, “Why don’t you all just fuck off?” We were delighted—it was an acknowledgment of sorts. We adored Angie just as much as we adored David.
CHERRY VANILLA: When I first met him he didn’t take many drugs, maybe a diet pill every now and then and a glass of white wine to get himself tipsy. He didn’t really get high until he started getting into cocaine, which I actually helped him get into. He went into cocaine really fast, but then he came out of it quite quickly too. I helped him get the very best cocaine when he was doing it, but he only did it for eighteen months or two years tops. I think it was just cocaine, and not aware of him doing anything else. He only really liked cocaine.
JULIEN TEMPLE: A few months after Glastonbury I saw David again, this time at a screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead. The Everyman was a very small cinema, and so you had David and his entourage walking in and creating havoc just because of the way they looked—very exotic, very alien, very colorful. Suddenly the place shrunk. They were all incredibly charismatic and it was just a buzz to have them in the theater. He had red hair and looked extraordinary. I’d never seen anything like it. He was a man transformed, and I was blown away by his look, and by his entourage, who were all suitably cartoon-like. It was as though the party had arrived, and as soon as they swept into the cinema, you spent your time watching the film, then swiveling around to see what they were doing themselves, what Cherry Vanilla was up to, what David was doing. It was already theatre. Even then, and this was probably late 1971 or early 1972, he looked extraordinary, and was already having so much influence on people that those around him had started to copy the way he looked. It was visually stimulating, as you had all these automatons onscreen, this wild pack in the audience, and an incredible flickering light. Metropolis was quite a big film for him.
DAVE STEWART (MUSICIAN): As a musician, when you first heard his records, you knew how complex they were. Structurally he was astonishing, as you never knew where a song was going to go. His melodies don’t go where they are meant to go. It was like he had some dough or some clay and he could make anything. Hunky Dory just blew me away, especially the work that Rick Wakeman did on it. I learned every song on the album, because they were so instructive. I learned so much from copying those songs.
KEN SCOTT: The five of us started on Hunky Dory, and got so close that we could almost finish each other’s sentences. It had almost reached that point. We were making records for ourselves, and if other people happened to like them then that was great. For me the transformation happened over a period of time, so it wasn’t any great surprise. I didn’t really notice as it was going on, because it was so gradual. I was seeing David fairly regularly, and the character just got further and further evolved. It’s like your kids: when you see them every day you don’t really think they’re changing; you don’t realize how much they’ve grown until their grandparents come over and say, “Oh God, they got so big.” It was that kind of situation.
The thing that surprised me most about Ziggy originally was the fact that David thought I wouldn’t like it. We’d finished Hunky Dory, and it was only a very short time later that I saw David and he said we’ve got to start making another record. Hunky Dory hadn’t even come out yet, but his management wanted him to do another album, so that’s what we did. And he said, “Although I don’t think you’re going to like this one. It’s going to be a lot more rock and roll.” I can’t remember if he said it was going to sound like the Velvet Underground or Iggy Pop, but as I didn’t know of either band at the time, it didn’t really make much difference. And he was completely wrong. I loved every second of the album. I think my greatest achievement with the record was making an album that the five of us were happy with. It was the perfect team, and there was a great sense of camaraderie when we were making the record.
NICK KENT: Hunky Dory is up there with Revolver. If you’re talking about great records then Hunky Dory is a great record.
ALAN YENTOB (FILMMAKER): Hunky Dory is one of the great albums of all time.
DANA GILLESPIE: The songs he wrote around the Haddon Hall times, things like “Kooks,” “Oh! You Pretty Things,” and “Changes,” they were very much a part of him. He hadn’t really traveled the world that much. So they were from the heart. When he started moving around, to America and Berlin and Paris, his mind filled with other thoughts, but the Hunky Dory songs were all him. Those early songs just came from within and the only outside influence one could get in those days was whatever record you could find or the odd thing on your black-and-white television. So they came from within. I remember we used to all be sitting in Haddon Hall and he would say, “Quick, there’s Kabuki on!” and we would all stare at Kabuki on television. Or it would be, “Listen to this” and he would play something weird and wonderful on the guitar. He was mad about Anthony Newley in Gurney Slade, mad about anything that he felt was different. Although he played blues on the very first night that I heard him, he never really did it after that. My theory is that so many musicians and rock and roll bands, Beatles or Stones, all started with forms of blues because they’re so easy with their three chords and twelve bars. So it’s a great beginner style for a musician to get going with. But he went beyond the blues, David; he just used it as a foundation. Then he started experimenting with interesting chord progressions, and I’ve always so admired that in his songs. They go to places where you don’t expect them to go. But then so did his mind and so did his lifestyle for quite a while. Hunky Dory was the record that changed him.
Woody Woodmansey thought Bowie was bisected, like his brother Terry, and said he seemed like an artist in preparation—adopting a Yorkshire accent if a Yorkshireman was present, and doing the same for Cockneys, Mancunians, or Australians. He said he seemed to be able to take on a new persona and then write songs better than that person themselves, in a “truly authentic, unforced way.” The one thing Bowie and Woodmansey argued about was, typically, clothes; on one occasion when Bowie had asked him to wear something, Woody point-blank refused, adding that he thought he looked like a cross between Lurch from The Addams Family, and a deck chair.
As Bowie morphed increasingly into Ziggy, his tolerance for those strands that connected him to his past was evaporating, and he let many relationships slip through his fingers like boat ties. When Terry turned up at Bowie’s aunt Pat’s house one day, having spent a week sleeping rough, she took him round to Haddon Hall to see if his brother could put him up. When Angie opened the door, Bowie apparently simply said, “Sorry, we’re busy.”
TONY ZANETTA: At that moment I was his key to the Warholian world. Little did he know that I really had very little to do with the Warholian world. He was definitely more interested in me than I was in him. But his career was about to take off and he knew it. He had been with Tony Defries for a while, they had been shopping for a record deal, and they were about to do big things. Everything was percolating. David and Angie came to the final performance of Pork and by this time we had bonded and I kind of felt responsible for them. That night I took them to the Hard Rock Café, which is where everyone was going that summer. But David wasn’t really comfortable in that kind of environment. He wasn’t someone who wanted to go to the cool, trendy place. Because he wasn’t David Bowie yet. He wasn’t comfortable being someone on the sidelines. He was not an aggressively flamboyant person. He was calm. Then I went back to New York, and a few weeks later they came to New York to sign the deal with RCA. In September 1971 he signed with RCA. I was there. I was the New York friend. That week Tony Defries, David, Angie, and Mick all stayed at the Warwick Hotel—why? Because the Beatles had stayed there! I spent the whole week with them. All this was done through Gem, Lawrence Myers’s company, as MainMan didn’t exist yet.
I also spent a lot of time with Tony Defries. First of all, you have to understand that he was only, like, a couple of years older than we were—David and I were pretty much the same age. But he seemed like ten or twenty years older, because of his personality and his manner. He had a very measured way of speaking. He was a very calm, focused person. When Tony Defries was in the world you just knew that everything was going to be OK. He was very intelligent. He wasn’t a child of the ’60s, and there was nothing hippie or trendy about him. He was very grandiose. He dreamed big, real big. It felt very good to be in a room with Tony Defries, because you suddenly became a part of that grandiosity, that big dream. David had exactly the same quality but in a different way. They were both extremely ambitious and extremely focused. They really made a good match. They were going to conquer the world. There was no doubt when you were in the room with them. It was Kismet when they came together, because Defries was the perfect partner for him. They were so alike it was comical. David didn’t have a lot of shelf life left, and I don’t know if he would have found someone else to look after him like he did. We toured all over the city, visited everywhere that week. I remember being outside Radio City and David very casually saying he was going to play there. It wasn’t even a rock and roll venue, but within eighteen months he did play there.
I took them to the Factory to meet Andy, and that was interesting. One of the main impetuses of going to the Factory was so that Tony Defries could meet Paul Morrissey and talk about representing Factory Films in Europe. He thought he could solve all their problems. There was Andy Warhol, and there’s me, who played Andy in Andy Warhol’s play. There’s Allen Midgette, the guy who played Andy on the college circuit when Andy sent an impersonator out instead of doing it himself. Then there’s also David Bowie, who played Warhol in the film Basquiat. It wasn’t an excruciating meeting, but it wasn’t great. The meeting was kind of tense because Warhol was not a great talker, and neither was David. It was awkward. Nobody was really taking this conversation and running with it. So they were circling each other and then David gave him a copy of Hunky Dory and played “Andy Warhol,” which Andy hated. Which didn’t help the meeting.
He also met Lou Reed and Iggy Pop that week. Lisa and Richard Robinson introduced David to Lou Reed. Richard worked at RCA in the A&R department, and that week he had a party and invited Lou and David along. RCA also threw a dinner on the day David signed, at the Ginger Man restaurant. After that dinner I took David to Max’s Kansas City, bumped into Danny Fields, who called up Iggy to come down and meet David. When Iggy met David he basically never went away again. David was magnetic. He had charisma, and was seductive more than sexy. At the time the English were very different sexually from Americans, because even though we were fucking everything in sight, we were still very repressed. The English weren’t. They were easier with it, and bisexuality wasn’t a big deal. A lot of couples would occasionally have a threesome with a man or a woman, and so what? It wasn’t earth-shattering. You didn’t have to brand yourself. You were just sexual. That certainly applied to David and Angie. David wasn’t a sex hunter; he wasn’t going out looking for sex all the time. But sex was always a little part of the equation. A lot of people might’ve ended up in bed with him because he was so seductive. Whether he needed to be adored, or whether he was just adored, it would always surface. He was the adored one.
DANNY FIELDS (MANAGER, PUBLICIST, AND AUTHOR): One night in September 1971, Richard and Lisa Robinson called me and asked if Iggy was still staying at my apartment, which he was. We had both fallen asleep watching television. She said she was with David Bowie, they’d just had dinner with Lou Reed at the Ginger Man, and now they were on their way to Max’s Kansas City and wanted to know if we were coming down. David really wanted to meet Iggy. So I woke him up, and told him that the person who had been so nice about him in Melody Maker—he’d voted him as vocalist of the year or something—was down at Max’s and wanted to meet him. We thought it was astonishing that someone in the UK knew who Iggy was. I was de facto managing Iggy then, and I thought it would be a good idea if they met, as Iggy was at a loose stage of his career. Professionally, prospects were not too promising. So we walked down from Twentieth Street and Fifth Avenue, where I lived, to Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue. Five short city blocks. We walked into the back room at Max’s, which was kind of empty, but then it was two thirty in the morning. They were introduced and immediately began talking about music. I made my excuses and went to sit elsewhere, as I didn’t know anything about music, and have always found it difficult to talk about it intelligently. And that was the beginning of their relationship. They were off and running. David was very good at spotting talent more cosmic than his own, and very good at flattering people. And Iggy knew that David had more money, more resources, and more credibility. They worked it out between them, and we have the records to prove it. But both Lou and Iggy were a little bit closer to heaven. David was a vampire, but a good vampire, he did something good with the blood. He shared the nutrients.
KRIS NEEDS (JOURNALIST): When Bowie made his first appearance at Friars Aylesbury on September 25, 1971, as he told me at the time, its success created the path he should now take. At that time, Friars was already one of the coolest clubs on the circuit. It was only an hour from London, and regularly hosted the likes of Mott the Hoople and Genesis. It was a warm club, as were the audience. It was a benign place, and you knew you would get a good reception there. In 1971, the promoter David Stopps phoned me to discuss some prospective bookings, and he mentioned that he’d been offered David Bowie. At that time, Bowie was only really known for “Space Oddity,” but he had also been dabbling with some Velvet Underground songs, and as I really liked them I was intrigued. I recommended he hire Bowie, so Stopps paid Tony Defries £150 for Bowie to test his new band at Friars on September 25. This was the first proper performance by the Spiders, and I designed the flyer for it. There was already a bit of an Aylesbury connection as Bowie had given a song he had written, “Star,” to a local musician called Les Payne, who had often appeared at Friars with his band, Chameleon. He liked Aylesbury. The “market square” in the opening line of “Five Years” is actually the clock tower in front of Friars.
On the day of the gig, Bowie turned up, and was both amazingly shy and amazingly charming. He was such a sweet man. He still had long blond hair, and had a big black hat, sort of baggy black culottes, red platforms, and a beige jacket. Oh, and no shirt. He looked cold and asked if we had a heater. The hall was only half full, even though it was only 50p a ticket, and he was supported by the band America, who had just had a hit with “A Horse with No Name.” I stood on the side of the stage, just behind Mick Ronson’s amp. David said “We’re gonna start slowly till we get the hang of it,” and then they played “Fill Your Heart” from Hunky Dory and “Buzz the Fuzz” by American singer-songwriter Biff Rose to warm up, so the gig sort of started slowly, quietly. It got rowdier as the band played “Queen Bitch” and Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” which I think he said was going to be the title of his next album. They did “I’m Waiting for the Man” as an encore, and then I went backstage. He was really pleased that it had gone so well. He said that he really wanted to come back and play later in the year, but that when he did, he was going to be completely different. He actually said that he was going to be a huge rock star. You could tell that he was on the verge of something. There was a unique, wired euphoria around those early Ziggy gigs which I’ve never encountered anywhere else, but was probably similar to the time Jimi Hendrix first played in London.
CHRISTOPHER ZARA (JOURNALIST): Suzi Ronson was a restless youth. As a twenty-one-year-old hairdresser in the early ’70s, she worked at a neighborhood hair salon in Bromley, but she had her sights on bigger things. Fate intervened in late 1971 in the form of Peggy Jones, one of Ronson’s regular customers, whose son David was a local musician in need of a hairstylist. At the request of Bowie’s wife, Ronson (then Suzi Fussey) visited the Bowies’ home in Beckenham to have a go at Bowie’s locks. “We looked through magazines, talked about hair and style and everything, and I ended up cutting his hair off.” And then dyeing it bright red. “We were still lingering in hippiedom here,” Ronson says. “Marc Bolan was definitely a change—he put a little glitter on his cheeks and started wearing makeup. But David took it to a completely different level.”
The Ziggy haircut was inspired by a magazine photo featuring a model at a photo shoot by Kansai Yamamoto, the designer who would eventually create costumes for Bowie. As Ronson tells it, Bowie was searching intently for something different, an entirely new look. Although the haircut would be a drastic departure from the long hair most rock stars wore at the time, Ronson said she knew instantly that Bowie could pull it off. “I was completely excited about it,” she says. “Remember, I’m looking at a tall, thin man, with a long neck, white skin, blue eyes, and very androgynous-looking. He was the perfect person to do this kind of style.”
The hairstyle took a little time to perfect, however. After the initial cut, Ronson took samples of Bowie’s hair back to her salon to experiment with color treatments before settling on the flame red. And getting it to stick up was no easy task. Ronson ultimately discovered that a product called Gard, an anti-dandruff treatment, helped to stiffen his hair if it were properly set and dried. “If you look at the Ziggy Stardust album cover, it’s not really sticking up because I hadn’t really figured out the setting lotion yet.” Ronson skillfully parlayed the Ziggy Stardust haircut into a full-time job as the band’s hairstylist and wardrobe assistant. It was no accident the look required constant maintenance, making Ronson an invaluable asset once the album became a runaway success. “I knew if I created something that needed touching up every two or three weeks, I was in. I would go with them on tour. I saw the danger of being someone’s wife or girlfriend. They got left behind. I wanted to be on the bus, not waving at it.”
London in 1972 was like the Bakerloo Line—all brown and Bakelite and dark even when lit. Decimalization, which was meant to hint at the white heat of modernization, had only encouraged Londoners to think that they were all slightly worse off than they’d been before it was introduced the previous year. A gallon of petrol was 35p, a pint of beer 13p—figures that were still new to people. A pensioner interviewed on the BBC News couldn’t understand “why they didn’t wait for us old people to die out” before changing the currency.
It wouldn’t be enough to say that every day in London in the early ’70s was like Sunday; specifically they were like any Sunday in November between the hours of four and five o’clock in the afternoon. It was almost as if the country had been brushed with a charcoal wash. On small black-and-white televisions, in overinked black-and-white newspapers, in magazines that only sparingly used color, the world was held at a safe monochromatic distance. As the writer Chris Bohn pointed out in the New Musical Express, when looking back at 1972, “Psychedelic color had fast faded into uniform blue denim and fledgling heavy metal; love and peace had come to stand for passiveness and eventual apathy; the spirit of ’68 was doused once it was channeled into the conventional left.”
Yet if one put his ear to the ground, or had his finger on the pulse, he might be able to tell that change was afoot. “What makes 1972 special goes beyond folk memories of a glorious summer lived out to the sound of a then-hip Rod Stewart singing ‘You Wear It Well,’ ” wrote David Lister in the Independent not so long ago. “What makes that year special is that it marked a borderline between the Sixties—the years of affluence, experiment, sex and drugs, and hippie, idealistic, and, yes, flaky politics—and the real Seventies, the years of inflation, unemployment, changing attitudes to gender and sexuality, radicalisation and the first mentions of words that were much later to become commonplace: terrorism and terror.”
This is the world that Ziggy Stardust landed in, beamed down to a sullen, punitive, disgruntled gray country, a so-called Great Britain that hadn’t been Great for some time, full of sullen, disgruntled people who by rights shouldn’t have taken too kindly to a pipe-cleaner-thin pop singer dressed up as a gay alien in a quilted jumpsuit. But take to him is exactly what they did.
KRIS NEEDS: He came back to play Friars with the proper Ziggy look in January 1972. He had completely altered his persona, and having told so many people that the new stage show was going to be outrageous, the place was buzzing. Everyone was so excited. I was backstage before the gig and remember Mick Ronson being very unhappy that he was being asked to wear his gold jumpsuit. After a really long wait, the lights went down and we heard “Ode to Joy” from A Clockwork Orange over the PA, as a load of strobes filled the hall. Then they all came on and they looked amazing, with Bowie wearing these red wrestling boots. The shock of seeing Ziggy Stardust live for the first time remains a major turning point of my life. I’ve said it many times, but for me that night just kick-started the ’70s. In the dressing room afterwards, Bowie just looked at me and shouted, “I told you!” When I got home that night, I wrote in my diary, “Met David Bowie again tonight. I can’t believe how nice he is.”
TREVOR BOLDER: In January 1972 we did a run-through of the Ziggy show at the Friars Club in Aylesbury, and it went down an absolute storm. The time we’d played it before we had been doing all the Hunky Dory stuff and the folk stuff, and it was a folk audience. And when we went back we thought we were going to get the same people again, but they were different. We all looked at each other and it was like, Jesus, this is going to work….
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: I came across Bowie because I read about him. I was running a series of shows at Hemel Hempstead Pavilion, and in January 1972 Bowie played at the Assembly Rooms in Aylesbury. Having seen him, I booked him to play in Hemel Hempstead that May. Both concerts were extraordinary. He had this manager called Tony Defries, who had started a management company called MainMan. He came up to Hemel Hempstead, and before David had gone onstage, Defries gave me a lecture on how David was going to become the single most important artist in the world, the best artist, and this, that, and the other, and I should really get involved with him. Then David Bowie went onstage with a pretty amazing band, the Spiders, and they just nailed it. The audience went nuts. When he came offstage, I remember Tony Defries just laying into me, telling me once again just how big and how important David was going to be. And he was right. My acid test with artists is always the stage, because the edge of the stage is the dividing line between the business and the real world, and if an artist can get across that barrier, the edge of the stage, and the audience connects with them, then you know you’ve got a winner. So many times bands play and the audience watches, but they’re talking, they’re drinking, they’re not engaged. That didn’t happen with Bowie. He was so different. At the start of the ’70s, everyone was coming out of the woodwork, but Bowie was better than all of them. Bolan had the talent but he didn’t have the stamina. So I did this show with Bowie, it was a big success and everybody was talking about it.
On January 22, 1972, on the cusp of fame, Bowie told Melody Maker’s Michael Watts he was “gay, and always have been.”
LEE SCRIVEN: Looking back on it, I like to think that Freddie Burretti being gay encouraged Bowie to make his coming-out statement to Melody Maker. It happened at the high of their friendship and closeness, as Freddie was sort of living at Haddon Hall and looking after Zowie, so I think he did it for Freddie. If you’ve got a very close friend who’s homosexual and always felt oppressed, I think you’d have to wear the badge of honor to say something about this in a roundabout way.
MICHAEL WATTS (JOURNALIST): I think he did it deliberately. He definitely felt it would be good copy. He was certainly aware of the impact it would make. I think he’d had a relationship with a man at some point in his life. I think it was something [his manager Tony Defries] encouraged. He understood the news value of something like that. I was aware of a changed mood towards gay people, not just in rock, but in culture as a whole. Bowie was very alluring. You couldn’t help but feel he had a hell of a lot of magnetism. It was a mixture of film-star and rock-star appeal—he was so much better-looking than other rock stars. We met in his publisher’s office, in Regent Street. He was dolled-up as Ziggy—skintight pantsuit; big hair; huge, red plastic boots—dazzling. Only recently had he stopped wearing a dress—“a man’s dress,” he elaborated. He was slightly flirtatious, and made me uncomfortable with myself. “Camp as a row of tents,” I wrote. Soon he was coming out to me. “I’m gay,” he said, “and always have been, even when I was David Jones.”
KEN PITT: I wasn’t at all happy when the “I’m gay” interview appeared. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would have advised him to do. I had been observing what was going on in San Francisco, how gays were creating comfortable housing out of slums, designing clothes, going into business, and flourishing. I could see how the gay scene was changing and I realized it would happen here eventually. And I knew that if the right kind of artist was to talk about this with great sincerity it would break down all the barriers. That’s why we did the interview with Jeremy, a dreadful magazine. I was horrified by the Michael Watts interview, and the fact that it was repeated in the Evening Standard that night.
JOHN LYDON (SINGER): Around Ziggy Stardust, Dave Bowie was an absolute full-on “I’m a homosexual.” That was his image. And it was as challenging to the world as you could ever hope to be at this point, and that was a damn brave statement to make. And yobs, hooligans, basically working-class guys really liked him for the bravery, for the front of it. It was taking on the world, going, That’s what I am and fuck you! A very, very good thing.
JAYNE COUNTY: I always thought David and Angie’s marriage was kind of for show, really. They were more like friends. They would often pick up tricks and bring them back for all sorts of carrying on.
PAUL REEVES (FASHION DESIGNER): He would not have made it without Angie. In essence David was actually quite shy and retiring, and it was Angie who was the pushy one. She had the vision. When he suddenly announced he was gay, that was Angie. That was her doing. She styled him, she put him in women’s clothes, she was the one who understood androgyny. By this time I was designing clothes, and had a shop in Fulham called the Universal Witness. Both of them used to come in, and that’s when they started buying women’s clothes for him. I made the big floppy hat he wore for the Hunky Dory sessions, the one he wore at Glastonbury, and I remember an electric-blue fake fur women’s coat he used to like. They both bought a lot of Oxford bags at the time, and knitted Lurex off-the-shoulder jumpers and things like that. They were both very good at interpreting the right vibe of the time; the Ziggy hairdo, which everyone thought was amazing, was actually based on a haircut that lots of us were wearing at the time, who hennaed their hair and brushed it up. But he was a very effective sponge at absorbing the influence into his own look.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: Angie was hard work, a flower child gone wrong. Angie was a nutcase, completely wild. She was always a car crash.
NICK KENT: Angie Bowie was the original Nancy Spungen, the original Courtney Love, and her downfall was that she wanted to be a star. But she didn’t have the skills; she didn’t have any skills. She was too top heavy as a personality. She didn’t so much light up a room as detonate it. She had to be the center of attention.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Angie was very high energy, very much Hollywood diva in training mode. She had Warhol-y fabulosity. It was thanks to Angie and Tony Zanetta and Leee Childers that the word “faaaabulous” spelled with at least four a’s became NME currency. You had to say it in a bored, monotone voice. A Lou Reed drone.
RICK WAKEMAN: When I knew Angie quite well in the early days, they were very happy and she was very supportive of anything he wanted to do. There’s no doubt that she helped him enormously. The thing is, half of anything to do with fashion, like anything, is having the courage to do it. And David had the courage. David was ahead of everything, but no one was really quite ready for David. I think David could tap into his female side and his male side and an out-there side whenever he wanted to do…and was like, Well, if you don’t like it, I don’t care.
CHERRY VANILLA: I was a nymphomaniac at the time, and I suppose Bowie was a sex addict. He just had a good time. He may have intellectualized it, but it was really just sex. Lots of sex. You have to remember we were living through a sexual revolution. To me it seemed natural to me to have as much sex as possible. We didn’t go to gyms so dancing and sex were our exercise. You could fuck your fat off. Sex was an act of rebellion at the time—fuck the Church, fuck the establishment. Let’s fuck.
WENDY LEIGH: Of course David was bisexual, but only when he chose to be. He obviously had an affair with Lionel Bart, but only because it was expedient to do so. David went to Lionel for business advice, and I think he was fully prepared to swap sexual favors for financial advice. David was also very influenced by Lionel. If you listen to his wonderful song from Oliver!, “As Long as He Needs Me,” it has this wonderful chord change in it, where it goes one way when you’re expecting it to go another. Then listen to “Life on Mars?” straight afterwards and there it is again, the chord change going in the other direction. So I’ve always wondered how much Lionel Bart had to do with “Life on Mars?”—maybe more than we think. David was eager to learn from people, but eager to steal too. His relationship wasn’t just an affair, it wasn’t just sexual. David went to visit Lionel when he was in hospital after an accident, and they were actually very close. I suspect that Lionel was more than a mentor for David. One of David’s talents was he knew who to use. He used his bisexuality. As one acquaintance from the time said, “I said he would either be a gigantic star or make a lot of money in the Piccadilly men’s loo.” There were certainly times when it seemed as though David were available if the deal was right. He used his appeal to get what he wanted, whether it was sexual or not. It was all about David in bed, and with men I don’t think he ever had sex unless it was a means to an end. It was a bisexuality of ambition. I actually think it’s very refreshing that he used the casting couch; after all, it’s usually women who get accused of that.
LINDSAY KEMP: When Angie married David I think there was an arrangement whereby they would be free. She got a bit fed up in the end and left him because he was slightly overdoing his freedom I think, so it wasn’t really a marriage at all. It was really a business relationship. But he made that clear to her before he married her, you know. They had a great relationship during the time that Angie, David, and I were together; it was a lot of fun. And of course she pushed him. She was the power behind the throne, she was the Lady Macbeth.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: I don’t think we felt that the NME owned Bowie, as that would have been really presumptuous. Maybe Tony Parsons felt he owned the Clash, but we weren’t proprietorial about Bowie. We didn’t have a hissy fit if he talked to Melody Maker. The journalists at the NME were youthful obsessives on drugs who didn’t have much of a life outside of our bubble. We used to end up after work or gigs at each other’s houses and flats, and we’d sit up all night with a bunch of new albums, a few bottles of wine, and a bunch of drugs and we would listen to important new stuff—Oh, there’s a new Wailers album, a new Roxy album, Bowie’s new record—and we would stay up all night arguing and debating. This stuff mattered to us, and we thought we were being read by people who also thought it mattered. We felt that we were taking on the music business in defense of the musicians, or taking on the musicians in defense of the audience, or taking on the audience in defense of the art. We loved it when one of our favorites did something really good, and we got really upset if we thought they’d made a dumb or lazy record. We took it as a personal insult.
TREVOR BOLDER: The Old Grey Whistle Test performance in February 1972 we did in an afternoon, in a ridiculously tiny studio, so small we couldn’t move. It looks intense when you look at it now, but we literally didn’t have anywhere to move. This was our first big thing with the BBC, and we couldn’t wait to see it. It was broadcast the following week and we all watched it at Haddon Hall, the whole band, and we crawled around the TV to watch it, slapping ourselves on the back for finally being on TV.
NICK KENT: I saw the first official Spiders from Mars gig in London in February 1972. He had done the infamous interview with Michael Watts and he’d cut his hair. He no longer looked like Veronica Lake. So on Wednesday that copy of Melody Maker went on the stands, and on the Saturday he played his first gig in London, at Imperial College, and I was there. Just a week before I started writing for the NME. Bowie came onstage with Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder, and Woody Woodmansey, and they hit the first chord of “Hang On to Yourself,” and after four bars the PA just stopped. Silence. They’re all dressed up to the nines and then nothing, just silence. This terrible silence. All the hype of the week had been this performance at Imperial College, and this was his showcase. In London, in front of everyone important in the industry, and after sixty seconds onstage, silence. The sound had gone, which is every performer’s nightmare. And so Bowie was standing there, and for a split second, you could see panic in his eyes, thinking, What the fuck am I going to do? And what he did was put his guitar down, put his hands on his hips in this really camp way, and proceeded to give us all a run-down of what he was wearing. OK, boots Anello and Davide, trousers Freddie Burretti…He just did this camp routine, and then after about a minute the sound came back on. In that minute, Ziggy Stardust’s destiny was manifest. If he’d walked offstage, as 90 percent of performers would have done, sloping offstage in a Spinal Tap way, he would have been over. But Bowie stood there, brazen, and won the audience over. There were a lot of potentially hostile elements in the audience, and he totally won them over. We were all going, OK, you’ve made us look at you, now impress us. But the show was great, and you could see that this was one step on from Marc Bolan. At that moment there was T. Rexstasy in the UK, and Marc Bolan was bigger than Jesus. But people with sophisticated ears could see that Bolan didn’t have the talent to carry on. He had had a two-year stint of golden hits, and those singles were very good, but he did not have the ability to develop.
David had spent the ’60s developing. He’d learnt all the chords. He’d spent hours, days, weeks, months, learning to play. He did the work. Whenever Rick Wakeman talks about Bowie, he talks about this guy who was a total professional. If it was ten o’clock in the morning and he had a recording session, even if he didn’t have a song ready, he was there. He’d go in. He wouldn’t sit there and read a newspaper while someone spent seven hours getting the right drum sound, he’d go in and start work. He’d be at the piano or the guitar and he’d start writing lyrics, and by midday he’d have a backing track, probably with a bunch of people he’d never worked with before, and by four o’clock he’d have a finished demo. That’s how he did it. You don’t spend fourteen years making an album, you don’t spend four years making an album. You’d go in and do it. He did everything in two takes, no messing around.
Before the NME I worked at Frendz, and someone on the magazine knew someone at MainMan, and so I was trying to get an interview with him. I realized that he was going to be the big figure and I wanted to talk to him. I used to call up three or four times a week trying to get an interview, and I would always be told that he was busy. I was even told he was at the dentist once, which, considering how much work he had on his teeth during the Ziggy time, I could believe. But he was always busy. Tony Defries had made David unavailable. He was doing the Greta Garbo, Elvis Presley thing of keeping away from the press, trying to make him as distant and as exotic as possible. Defries made a lot of enemies, although I don’t think Bowie knew what he was doing in his name. When I toured with the Rolling Stones in late 1973, months earlier several of the road crew had worked on the Ziggy farewell tour, and according to these guys, and there was more than one of them, they’d gone to Defries for their money and been told they weren’t going to get paid. He said the very fact that you’ve worked with a superstar of the caliber of David Bowie is recompense enough. You can put that on your CV now. And you’ll get work. And you don’t do that to roadies. But Tony Defries did that. I don’t believe Bowie knew. Bowie had a generosity towards people. MainMan was a shambles. There were people doing nothing drawing huge salaries. And Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey were on a basic wage.
MICK ROCK: I was vaguely aware of David in my last year at Cambridge in 1969, with “Space Oddity,” but it was treated more as a gimmick record than anything else. Then, about three years later I used to have access to the Oz offices, as they had a darkroom there. Felix Dennis was the only one who ever appeared to be there, and the other two—Richard Neville and Jim Anderson—I never saw. God knows what they were up to. Felix always had a huge pile of promo LPs, and one night he said I should help myself. So I picked up a copy of Hunky Dory, took it home, and fell in love with “Life on Mars?” I’d already started working as a photographer, and had worked for Rory Gallagher and Syd Barrett. I think it was my relationship with Syd that later cemented my relationship with David, as he idolized him. That, and what Tony Defries would always say to me, that “David says you see him the way he does himself.” I went up to see him play one of the first Ziggy gigs at Birmingham Town Hall on March 17, 1972, with David’s plugger. There were only about four hundred people there. I was writing as well as taking pictures, so I could do both. The very first pictures I have of him I took backstage, and then I started shooting him all the time. One of the first sessions was for the men’s magazine Club International. He was a very gracious man. When I saw him perform in Birmingham, even though his outfits and the makeup weren’t as exotic as they later became, the rudiments were there and the performance above all was mesmerizing. I think I was kind of hypnotized by him. We laughed about our names, admired them, because my name was real, and his was made up, although they were both very good rock and roll names. We had some silly little banter about that. That show was primitive, but it still had power. The way he projected himself it was as though he was playing to a much bigger audience. We started hanging out, and he loved hearing all my stories about Syd Barrett. But then I loved hearing all his stories about Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. He took me down to Kensington High Street, to the Sombrero, where there were all these amazing characters. It was a revolutionary little place, full of all these androgynous people. It was all about dancing. Older gentlemen, younger girls; older gentlemen, younger boys.
TREVOR BOLDER: Even Noddy Holder’s sideburns weren’t as long as mine. Mine started out as [part of] a full beard. When I joined Bowie, I was in the Rats, with the rest of the Spiders, and because of the Beatles I’d grown a full beard. And I looked really odd compared to Mick and Woody, because they were clean-shaven. So when we started to put the Spiders show together I looked really strange. So I thought, Well, I can’t go on with a full beard, it looks really odd. So I shaved the middle out, so I had a ’tache and sideburns. And then I thought, Well that looks really odd as well. So I shaved the ’tache off, and I was just about to shave the sideburns off when Angie Bowie said, “Don’t you dare shave them off, that’ll be part of your image.” So it was her decision that I kept them, otherwise they would have gone as well. And then of course she decided that she wanted to spray them silver. Which is exactly what she did. David took a lot from Marc Bolan, because Marc had got there just before him.
WOODY WOODMANSEY: Bass drum skins had to have the name of the band on them back then. I had a blank one, and I said, no, I’m not having that, so I took it off and wrote “The Spiders” on it. Bowie came in and looked at it for two minutes. I thought, well, he’s either gonna like this or not, and he looked at me. No expression. And then went, “OK, what’s the first number we’re doing?” So it passed the audition. It was Ziggy and the Spiders from then on.
MICK ROCK: The fellatio picture is one of the most striking images from the Ziggy period. A few days after the release of Ziggy Stardust, there were a thousand people—his biggest audience to date—at Oxford Town Hall, and I was shooting the show from the front, because I had the access. I wanted a different view so I went to the side, and that’s when it happened. David said he wasn’t trying to look as though he was going down on Mick, and if you look at the picture you can see that he’s not actually on his knees. He’s chomping on Mick’s guitar but his feet are splayed. He was hugging Mick’s buttocks in a cute way, but he only did that because of the way Mick was swinging his guitar around. He said, “I was simply trying to bite Mick’s guitar.” He was playing a passive role to Mick’s macho role. The crowd certainly had never seen anything like that before. I remember him rushing offstage afterwards and he said, “Mick, did you get it? Did you get it?” And I’m thinking to myself, Well, I think I did. I’m not sure. It happened so fast. Everything happened so fast in those days. So the next day I got up really early, processed the film, saw the shot, blew it up, and then brought it in to show David and Tony Defries, who both loved it. This was proper shock value, like Jimi Hendrix setting light to his guitar, or Pete Townshend smashing up his. This had gay overtones as well, which was still quite shocking in 1972. The rock industry had never seen anything like it. It was mad. Rock photographers were fairly low down on the rungs at the time, but that picture really set me up. And he knew that. David was a very fast read, and he would pick up on things very quickly and absorb them. Then he would make them his. David was a complex person, there was no doubt about it. Complicated, a true artist. I didn’t realize until much later how hard he had worked to get where he was. He had had time to evolve, which is what made him so good. He had time to marinate.
TREVOR BOLDER: Well, you got accused of being the same as Bowie, which was unfair, because we weren’t. We were just a band going along with his idea of how to be big. I mean, it was a big issue for Mick, because Mick being the blond guitar player, he was like David’s sidekick, I suppose he got more people thinking he was like David than we got. But it was a bit of an issue when you came back to Hull. Because people get jealous, don’t they? So you’d come back to your hometown and all the people who were your mates, or you thought were your mates, turned out to be not your mates, because they put you down all the time. We didn’t get a lot of it, but you did get that sort of thing happening just because you were associated with David.
When he wanted to describe exactly how he wanted us to look, he took us to see A Clockwork Orange. A lot of people thought it was Star Trek but it wasn’t, it was totally based on the characters in A Clockwork Orange. And we just dressed up. It was the makeup thing that was the big deal; I remember that. Ronson was definitely against it, but then when we started using it, it wasn’t that bad because we didn’t use that much. It was more theatre makeup than anything glammy or anything. He just wanted us to stand out. Whereas if you go onstage and you look normal, there’s nothing different. So he wanted us to wear this makeup, which wasn’t a lot but it made your features and your face look different, and it made you stand out. We went along with it; of course everybody took to that, and all the girls liked [it], so it was all right after that. It was good. I am enormously proud of what Bowie achieved on our behalf, as it was like reaching the summit of Everest. If he’d pushed it at us, we might have pulled away, thinking, What’s he trying to do? He just slowly did it for us.
MICK ROCK: I mean, he wanted it. He was extremely ambitious and in the early days of Ziggy he could taste it. He knew it was about to happen and that made him an invigorating person to be around. He was hip too, because much as everyone knows about the Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop these days, no one knew about them back then. But I did, and he did. We thought we were very hip. I’d taken a lot of LSD at Cambridge and thought I was pretty experienced. He trusted me though, as he knew I was capturing something that was evolving. He was very open and relaxed with me. He wanted me to take the pictures that were going to get him noticed. He mixed a lot of elements—it was the shaved eyebrows, it was the wild hairdo, the color, the outfits. He needed an official photographer, and I suppose that’s what I became. I shot him so many times, and while I shot Iggy and Lou and Debbie Harry and Freddie Mercury, my bond with David was really strong. The thing about David was that he knew what he was doing. He wasn’t a dark soul, not like Iggy, and certainly not like Lou. He had the ability to generate all this positive energy. Ironically Iggy was the one we all thought would go first, but he’s a tough little bugger.
ROBIN DERRICK (ART DIRECTOR): I distinctly remember my older brother bringing the Ziggy Stardust album home for the first time. I remember staring for hours at that image of him on the back cover, and reading the TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME line and thinking it was so otherworldly. To be sitting on a sofa in my parents’ house in Keynsham and being transported like that, it was quite extraordinary. Also the way in which the lyrics applied to both Bowie and Ziggy, the whole thing was fascinating. Up until then you had a singer and you had songs, simple as that. Ziggy was such an extraordinary record, and it influenced an entire generation, whether we knew it at the time or not.
KEN SCOTT: RCA had said they needed a single, so we went and made one. “Starman.” It was as simple as that. I like it, and it’s a cute record. I didn’t notice the Judy Garland reference [the song was thought to sound a lot like “Over the Rainbow”] at the time, but when I made “My Sweet Lord” for George Harrison I didn’t realize that it sounded a bit like “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons. When you’re working on records you just don’t hear anything other than what you’re making at the time.
Much later, after Bowie died, I appeared on a panel with Ken Scott at an Advertising Week conference. At the end of the discussion, Ken played the vocal track from “Five Years,” which was a revelation to everyone in the room who wasn’t Ken. As the song reaches a climax, Bowie starts crying. He is so moved by his own lyrics, and involved in the song that he actually cracks up crying. You can’t hear it on the finished record, but it’s there, and now I’ve heard it I hear it every time I play the song. This performance makes a mockery of those who say that this was Bowie’s “insincere” period. He is so distraught, so moved by his own lyrics.
TREVOR BOLDER: The bass line on “Starman” was very simple, and we recorded it very quickly. Everything we did with David was, like, one take. He learnt it and away we went, and that was the finished product. But it’s a pretty simple bass line to play. I just used to play whatever came into my head that felt good, really.
BONO (SINGER): There was a huge influence of chanson tradition in his work. Now it’s so obvious to me. I completely missed it, in my teens, but if you listen to “Five Years,” and put on a funny French accent, it’s “Five years! Ra ta-ta-ta!”; as well as being a kind of brand-new sound, it completely has its roots in deep traditions like the chanson. We came across Brecht through him, and one of the famous lyricists of all time, the great Belgian, Jacques Brel! He opened up all that for us. Coming from North Dublin, to be a fan of David Bowie wasn’t just to be a fan of David Bowie. He was a portal into all kinds of other worlds. You have to understand, after the war, going through the rubble of that destruction became the antidote to a hateful world. And it was this love and peace and feminizing of culture. And he represented that. And you’re like, “Wow!” Punk made it male again, but that was an amazing thing. If you look back at the postwar period, you think, How did that happen? There was a period there where in the Western world, it was really OK to be feminine; that had its origins in the rubble of the Second World War.
DAVID BAILEY (PHOTOGRAPHER): I took my first pictures of Bowie for Vogue in 1972. He came in full Ziggy Stardust costume. Acting already. I said to him, “Who are you today? Lassie or fucking Hamlet?” But right then, right at that moment, he was Ziggy Stardust, and there was nothing I could do about it. You never know who you’re getting when you photograph an actor, and he was always an actor. In some ways he was easy to photograph because he laid it all on for you, but you didn’t really know what was going on behind all the fancy dress. You would see him around London before that, at parties, always on the fringe of things, but he was around. I remember seeing him at a party in Sloane Square around this time, with Mick [Jagger], and I remember how they both looked the same, because they were whippet thin and not that tall. They were like two Giacomettis standing next to each other, two skinny pop stars. You always look tall when you’re skinny. He was always asking questions about art, seemed to love art.
The ad for Ziggy that appeared in Zigzag magazine has him sitting on a stool, wearing wrestling boots and the same haircut he wore on The Old Grey Whistle Test. The copy line reads: “Can a young guy who went through truly incredible ‘Changes’ and made it all ‘Hunky Dory’ ever find true happiness as a ‘Starman’?” Ziggy Stardust was the first pop star with built-in obsolescence, a self-willed creation, and Bowie’s ambidextrous android was the forerunner of punk’s glam savages. If Bowie was Pygmalion, then Ziggy was his Galatea. It’s easy to forget just how important the Ziggy Stardust album was at the time, as this was an album that was genuinely appreciated—loved, in fact—by those who bought singles, who bought into fame, and those who bought albums, and who bought into integrity. The Ziggy Stardust album had a weird, broad appeal (unsurprisingly, perhaps, as it had been based on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). Then, just at the time when Bowie needed to start consolidating his success, building on all the momentum of the last few months, he gave away the greatest, most commercial song he had written so far. Having heard that Mott the Hoople, a rather orthodox rock band from Herefordshire, were on the verge of splitting up, he gave them a new song he’d written, “All The Young Dudes.” “Everyone in Mott knew right away that it was a hit,” said Ian Hunter, the band’s lead singer. “I would never have given that song away to anybody. I got the feeling he’d tried and tried, with his own version, and got bored with it. But once he was in the studio with us, he knew exactly what sound he wanted.” It was an extraordinarily successful hit, the lyrics peppered with references to some of the night owls he and Angie had been hanging out with at the Sombrero. When Bowie wrote, “And Freddy’s got spots from ripping off the stars/From his face/Funky little boat race,” he was referring to Freddie Burretti.
Still, even if he had just given away his most commercial song, he was gradually replacing Marc Bolan as the love object of the nation’s teenage girls. “Bolan was someone that girls wanted to mother, rather than the person they wanted to be fucked by,” says T. Rex’s former manager Peter Jenner. Bowie had exactly the opposite effect.
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: Marc Bolan became very unpleasant towards the end. He could see how successful David was becoming and he hated it. I did a bit of work for him and I would go round to his flat and it would look like a bomb had hit it. He used to say he’d had “a bit of session.” He was full of self-loathing, and used to sit around watching videos of himself when he was younger, and thinner. Drinking too much, too many drugs. Wasn’t in a good frame of mind. When David wrote “All The Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople, it mentions T. Rex, and I think Marc thought he was having a dig, but he wasn’t. David always had time for Marc, was always singing his praises.
TONY ZANETTA: David came back to New York in June 1972 to see Elvis at Madison Square Garden, which was the last time David flew. He was suddenly Ziggy Stardust. He didn’t look like the same person. He’d been working pretty much nonstop from January to June, doing gigs in England. He was more tense, and wasn’t really quite the same person, because I think he was really beginning to rev up. They were making plans to come to the US that fall, which is when Tony Defries created MainMan properly, and that’s when it became formal that I was working for them. It was more like Angie saying, “Oh darling, we’re going on tour in the fall, and you must come with us.” It didn’t make any sense, because I wasn’t a guitar player, but then things started happening really fast. I had $5,000 that I could tap, finding an apartment for Tony, buying clothes for David and Angie, passing out photos of David. You couldn’t focus, you didn’t know where to look. It was bizarre, like a three-ring circus. It was kinda awful, not focused. It was distracting. Suddenly it was the Ziggy circus, and the next stop was America.
SIMON NAPIER-BELL: From Ziggy Stardust onwards it would have been difficult not to find him interesting. When the album first came out I had to make a trip from London to Zurich, alone, driving. On the ferry from Calais I looked for some cassettes to play on the way but I couldn’t find any, except in the tobacconist. When I asked if he had any he said no, he didn’t stock them. “But you can have this one,” he said, handing me Ziggy Stardust. “Someone left it on the counter. It’s crap.” I played it from Calais to Zurich, nonstop, eleven hours driving in all, so I listened to it right through more than twenty times. “Space Oddity” was extraordinary in both its content and production. And that gave Bowie an instant appeal. And by the time Ziggy Stardust came three years later, he had become a complete self-contained package—theatrics, music, image, and perfect press controversies. To anyone who managed acts he had to be appealing. He had it all.