CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: I first met him in July 1972, the Dorchester interview for the NME. I’d seen him before that, but that was the first time we were actually face-to-face. I thought he was very intelligent, and seemed to be less overwhelmed with all the flamboyance around him and emanating from him than everybody else was. He seemed much more relaxed than I would have expected him to be. Here was a guy who had been bouncing around the music business for ten years, since his mid-teens. I was twenty-one and he was twenty-five, and he was getting very close to what he had been working towards since he was fourteen or fifteen. And he didn’t seem carried away with it. He’d not just prepared for it by mastering his craft, or rather by mastering all the different dimensions of craft that he brought to the table, but it’s almost as if he’d become spiritually prepared for what he was doing. Alternatively, maybe he was retreating behind the mask of Ziggy, and feeling that he wasn’t really involved, and that it was just the character doing it. Which is a method of operation he found harder and harder to maintain over the following few years.
NICK RHODES (MUSICIAN): Ziggy Stardust was the first album I ever bought, and the whole period still has enormous significance for me, in particular Bowie’s performance on Top of the Pops, and before that Lift Off with Ayshea. I saw Lift Off at my parents’ bungalow in suburban Hollywood, on the outskirts of Birmingham, the same town that [Duran Duran’s] bassist John Taylor, grew up in. I was ten years old and besotted. I was sitting in the living room, which was very Abigail’s Party, with a little more sophistication, but not that much. The furniture was brown, with a round glass G-Plan table in the middle of the room, with a huge color television with the smallest of screens. My parents had bought it for the moon landings, failing to realize that all the transmissions would be in black and white. Thinking back now the TV looked like a piece of conceptual art. It was just this enormous cathode-ray monstrosity, but it did the trick because David Bowie pumped out of it.
Hosted by the singer Ayshea Brough (along with an owl puppet called Ollie Beak), the show that week featured Tony Christie, Hello, and a South African performer called Emil Dean Zoghby, as well as Bowie. Lift Off was a teatime show, and we watched it when we got home from school. She was a groovy-looking chick in white zippy outfits and there was always music on it. That night Bowie was wearing the jumpsuit he would wear on Top of the Pops a few days later, but played an ordinary, unlacquered acoustic guitar. Woody Woodmansey had yet to bleach his hair. We already knew who Bowie was, because we liked the record as we’d heard it on the radio, [people at school] were talking about him, and we’d seen his pictures in magazines. So we raced home from school that day, as we knew he was on. He was a phenomenon in the same way the Sex Pistols were a few years later.
At school the next day nobody talked about anything else. The approach, the look, the sound of him, the excitement that he was singing about aliens. At that point most people were still singing dull old love songs, and Bowie really came from such an obtuse angle, visually, conceptually, lyrically. He was unique. For me, at that time of my life, when I was just discovering music, it was so magnetic, and he was genuinely exciting.
My parents would often watch Top of the Pops with me, as they were quite turned on by knowing what was going on in the charts, and I remember they actually liked him. They liked Bowie so much they took me to see Bowie when he played the Empire Pool in Wembley in London in 1976, on the Station to Station tour, not once but twice. I’d become such a fan and he had become such a focus of what I thought I wanted to do with my life at the time. They were very indulgent of Bowie because this was the person who inspired me and the rest of Duran Duran and most of the rest of the British music industry that exists now to do what we all chose to do. I told my parents when I was ten that I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up, which they laughed off and said, “Yes, well that’s very nice darling, but let’s not talk about it now.” But when I was still saying it at fourteen it was a little more worrisome for them. At fifteen I could play guitar, and a year later, formed a band. I wore huge, wide trousers, bum-freezer jackets with wide lapels covered in Anabass badges, and shirts with unforgivably large collars. I accessorized and adapted everything. I remember during punk I would pin my tie back with paper clips to make it look thinner. You just adapted whatever you had. I remember in assembly at school, the headmaster announcing that, “Just because Nicholas Rhodes is doing this to his clothes doesn’t mean all of you have to do it.”
One of the most embarrassing moments of my life was when I had just moved into a new house in London, and had a surprise visit from Bowie and Iman. They just happened to be in London, and popped round on the off chance I was in. They both looked immaculate, but my house was full of boxes and piles of books and delivery cartons. There were no chairs, it was a complete mess, and there was junk everywhere. Anyway, my dad is there, painting one of the rooms, and when I introduced him to David and Iman, he put down his brush and said, “Hello David, could you give us a quick rendition of Major Tom, then?” At that moment I wanted the floor to open, but David took it in good grace.
The thing about David Bowie is that he totally changed the whole game at that point. There were lots of other people who were equally as innovative at the time, some people maybe even further ahead—you look at Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, Eno, there were lots of people with progressive ideas—but it was David who managed to focus that ’70s energy into something that was irresistible. You bought into the whole thing. You didn’t just buy into how great the songs were, or how strange the lyrics were, you bought into him being different, and it rubber-stamped you as being someone who thought about life in a different way. I was an incredibly young adopter, but having said that most of my friends at the time were fifteen or sixteen. Bowie bonded a generation.
TREVOR BOLDER: I suppose the greatest part was in the very early days, before we made it, when we all lived at Haddon Hall with David and we were putting it all together. It was so much fun, you know? Writing the songs up and going in the studio together, it was real fun. That’s my fondest memory, even though there are great memories from after, when we made it really big, but it was the early days of no pressure on us. We just had a lot of fun. We went down the pub together; nobody knew who we were. We went into the studio and there was no pressure. David wrote his songs and we played along, and then they were put together. Top of the Pops changed all that.
It was seven thirty p.m. on July 6, 1972, and I was sitting by myself watching Top of the Pops in our semi in Deal, Kent, and couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Back then, the show was regularly watched by 12 to 13 million people every week, almost a quarter of the population. A large percentage of viewers were teenagers, like me, who—having David Bowie strut about in his space-age onesie singing his new single, “Starman”—thought he was talking directly to them from the BBC studios. He was wearing a multicolored jumpsuit and playing a blue acoustic guitar, and he looked scary. Essentially, he looked carefree in a way that no pop star had ever looked before. It was colorful, risqué, transgressive, and very, very appealing to an impressionable twelve-year-old. Previously, my pop consumption had been based around one-hit wonders and odd T. Rex records. Bowie, to me, was a complete revelation. For me, he kick-started the ’70s, as the decade turned from black and white to color overnight.
TREVOR BOLDER: Tony Defries had been trying to get us on Top of the Pops for ages, encouraging the producers to come down and see us, but then we did a gig at the Croydon Greyhound and the BBC crew all came down, along with the producer, and that’s when we were offered the show. We had already done a TV spot or two, but this was the big one, this was the show that everybody watched.
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE (JOURNALIST): Doesn’t everyone remember where they were when they first saw David Bowie? For me, it was on television in the back room of the Eton college tuck shop, Rowlands, and he was performing “Starman” on Top of the Pops; shocking-red Ziggy haircut, Rainbow zigzag jumpsuit, hips gyrating, electrifyingly alien and disconcertingly sexy. It must have been the first or second Thursday of July, 1972, “Starman” having just charted. Bowie’s audience in the squalid, testosterone-rich Eton dive was largely unimpressed. Probably a hundred pupils were hanging out around the TV, with plates of chips and saucers of ketchup and there were catcalls of derision. “Pooftah.” It was summer term and the room was packed with boys in cricket and rowing kit, and these sporty pupils with their ketchup-dunked chips staring indignantly up at the screen. It was all so provocatively…queer.
TREVOR BOLDER: On July 5, the day of the Top of the Pops recording, the entire band felt elated. By eleven o’clock, as we climbed into the limo outside Haddon Hall—the management had decided that we should do the trip in style—it was already a hot day. Our stage clothes were all on hangers laid out in the boot, along with two bags of shoes. It wasn’t quite the hottest day of the month, but it was hot enough for us to pile into the car in our shirtsleeves, with no jackets. From being kids we’d all watched Top of the Pops, and seen all these monstrously successful bands on the show and never really thought we’d get there. To actually be there and play on it was a thrill. I actually achieved a goal in that way. As we were miming, we were a lot more nervous than we ought to have been. I always remember standing at the side of the stage when Status Quo were going on and thinking that this wasn’t somehow real, as they had had quite a few hits by then so it really felt like the big-time. It was just before midday when we arrived, the time we’d been told to turn up. We climbed out of the limo, and then ambled into the Stage Door reception, all the while being monitored by the crowd of young autograph hunters lying in wait in the lobby. We walked by the famous sculpture of Helios, across the lobby, past Security, past the marble-set lifts and into Studio 8. First right, then right again, and then left under the stairs, and there it was, just fifty yards from the reception. We arrived at the studio around twelve fifteen, went to our dressing room, hung around for a bit, playing cards and gossiping about the other acts on the show, and then went to the BBC bar. Then we did the dress rehearsal, a nonstop run-through, as if they were doing the show live. And then we had another break, and then about six o’clock they brought in the audience. Then we did it live, straight through, and then went off to the BBC bar again. In the bar people kept coming up to us and asking if we were in Doctor Who.
TRACEY EMIN (ARTIST): He had such a huge influence on me as a child. I saw him on The Old Grey Whistle Test in the green jumpsuit when I was about eleven, but it was the Top of the Pops performance that really got to me. I couldn’t believe someone could be so sexy. But it wasn’t like I projected my sexuality onto him, like a crush or fantasy or whatever. He made me feel sexy, and that’s how it worked. He made every outsider feel like they were an insider, feel like they’re doing the right thing. For all his glam rock, he wasn’t glam rock; he looked like the real thing. Ziggy Stardust was so immaculately well done, and not embarrassing. How could he look like that, and it not be embarrassing? He pulled it all off, and I think it’s because of the sincerity of it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, who shall I be today? How shall I get my next number-one hit?” I loved that side of it, but what I was really into was more mature, un-aggressive poetry, geography, music, and cut-outs. And he was into that too. It’s because of David Bowie that I got into Egon Schiele. Because of him that I started exploring art that I wasn’t really sure of.
NICK RHODES: I think people have forgotten the significance Top of the Pops had throughout the ’70s. It really focused the entire nation, every Thursday night for half an hour, on music, on what was going on. Sometimes the groups could be absolutely horrendous, and other times they were just brilliant. It didn’t matter if you had to watch a lot of gimmick acts as you knew you were going to get Roxy Music, or David Bowie or Cockney Rebel or Sparks, or any other number of oddities. Everybody watched it. It was a family event.
TONY BLACKBURN (TOP OF THE POPS PRESENTER): There were no autocues in those days; at least, I didn’t use them. I was a bingo caller more than anything. I just had to introduce the acts. You had to try and make sure that everything was perfect, because if you had to do a retake, it cost so much money. I loved the glam-rock era because it was so much fun, what with everyone dressing up. It was a real performance. All of the acts could be guaranteed to put on a show. It was almost like music hall. I met Bowie after presenting Top of the Pops that night and I told him that I loved “The Laughing Gnome,” not meaning anything by it, and he turned and very gently said, “Oh, that’s not me,” and walked off.
TONY PARSONS (JOURNALIST): I watched it at home in Billericay. Missing Top of the Pops would have been like missing church on Sundays—you just didn’t do it. As soon as I saw him I knew it was my thing. Pop culture was still pushing at the frontiers, still pushing west, and Bowie was an extension of that. My dad would have been watching it with a tray on his lap, having just come back from work. He was the type of man who would leave the room when [drag artist] Danny La Rue came on the TV, so he can’t have been impressed with Bowie. I was though.
The sexual ambiguity was there for all to see, but it wasn’t threatening, it was only like Jagger wearing his hair over his collar. It felt inclusive. You’ve always had these guys like Marc Bolan or Mick Jagger or Russell Brand, who play with their sexuality, and they’re always the ones getting all the girls. Plus you had Mick Ronson, who was clearly a brickie from Hull, so that was OK.
Surrounding Bowie you had the likes of Sweet, Mud, and the Glitter Band, and they were oh so obviously geezers, even if they were wearing Christmas baubles on their ears. David Bowie wasn’t a geezer. He wasn’t overly concerned with socioeconomic politics either, and was far more interested in the way that cultural touchstones influenced the Zeitgeist. This was only a few years after the first moon landing, when space travel was suddenly no longer exotic, when the expectations amongst all of us was that trips to the moon would soon be as common as taking a Number 19 [bus] up to the Arsenal. You couldn’t watch the moon landing and not imagine that we would all soon be bouncing around between the planets.
NEIL TENNANT (MUSICIAN): [As] I’d already seen Bowie play in Newcastle the previous month, it wasn’t some sort of epiphany for me watching the Top of the Pops performance, exciting though it was. I was already obsessed with Bowie and so were my friends. It was The Old Grey Whistle Test performance in February of that year that made the big impact on me, the camera so close on Bowie’s face at the beginning of “Five Years.” The Top of the Pops appearance just confirmed that the public was catching up and that Bowie finally had a hit. It was also rather thrilling that Bowie was so daringly “camp” on TV.
The thing that really did it for us was the advert for “John, I’m Only Dancing”—the picture where he’s got his arm outstretched. It was a bit of a classic glam-era image, that! I had a Ziggy haircut—dyed red as well. I did get his autograph in 1972, at the Newcastle City Hall in June, which I have to say was over half-empty! During “Suffragette City,” when he sang “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am,” they showered the audience with pictures of David as Ziggy Stardust, which was just about to come out. And I got him to sign one of those on his way out, which I still have funnily enough. My brother Simon and I used to tape [his BBC Radio sessions] and by the time Ziggy Stardust came out we knew almost every song on it already. “Hang onto Yourself,” “Moonage Daydream,” “Ziggy Stardust”—I’d all taped off the radio. “Starman” had been the single. I remember initially preferring those radio recordings. One actually forgets that “Starman” wasn’t a particularly big hit. David didn’t have a top-three single until “The Jean Genie,” and it seemed rather frustrating at the time. We did have Ziggy Stardust the week before it came out though, because RCA’s records were produced in County Durham and I had a friend whose father worked at the factory there.
IAIN R. WEBB (FASHION JOURNALIST): That edition of Top of the Pops was the night before my fourteenth birthday. What a gift. After that first sighting, a pair of girls’ lace-up platform shoes were duly purchased from the small ads at the back of the NME, while the Ziggy Stardust cropped pedal-pusher trousers were copied in part from the fashion favored by Smoothies [teens who were followers of the TV show Budgie, featuring a cheeky chancer portrayed by actor Adam Faith]. I cut my hair at the kitchen sink into a very bad approximation of his spiky hairdo and wore Antique Green nail polish. One Saturday, my mum returned from her regular shopping trip to the nearby town carrying a brown paper bag. It contained a secondhand fox fur, which I draped over my shoulder when watching Match of the Day with my dad. As Bowie went from snug, bum-freezer jackets to swimming in roomy demob suits, my own version came from the back of my dad’s wardrobe. I wore this with a trilby and a pair of Mary Jane shoes. Poor Dad. Bowie was all the things my life in a West Country village was not: extraordinary, exotic, and exciting. From that moment on, I devoted all my waking hours to lovingly documenting his every move in scrapbook after scrapbook (a dozen in all) and spent art class at school painting his portrait, mostly wearing outlandish new outfits designed by yours truly. I even fashioned a clay bust of him in pottery class.
MARK COOPER (BBC PRODUCER): The thing that interests me is intentionality. I might be completely wrong, and I know that Bowie was a careerist and capable of being completely calculated about these things—and I always thought the moment he told Michael Watts he was gay was calculated—but there’s something completely natural about the way he puts his arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulders. In hindsight we assume that a lot of this stuff is intentional, but a lot are just happy accidents. When he does it, it doesn’t look as though he’s doing it for the first time, or for effect. It’s also a generational thing. I think Jagger could have done what Bowie did, quite naturally, sidling up to Keith and throwing his arm around him onstage. But no one cared about Jagger, as he was an old man. The notion of a singer interplaying with their guitarist was not necessarily a new thing. It was generationally new. Plus Bowie was one of the few artists [along with Roxy Music and Elton John] to play both The Old Grey Whistle Test and Top of the Pops—he was both rock and pop, and so he straddled those two worlds too.
TREVOR BOLDER: It all happened after that night. We went out on the road and did a British tour, and where we’d been playing to maybe fifty, sixty people a night in small venues, we were selling places out. Friars in Aylesbury was the big one [July 15], as that’s where we tested everything out. That was sold out, and then everything started to go….Everybody wanted to see the band. So that was when we realized it was taking off.
PETER YORK (CULTURAL COMMENTATOR): Suddenly we all sort of registered it at the same time. We knew he was important, after all he was a pop singer who wore clothes by Kansai Yamamoto. I had a friend called Mick Rock at the time, and he was always around. The thing I remember most was the Friends of the Earth/Save the Whale benefit concert on July 8, 1972, a few days after the Top of the Pops thing. People were dressed up like mad, and some of them got it right, and some got it wrong. But it was wonderful to look at. Everyone dressing up, the design, the spectacle, the sexual energy, lots of gay kids doing a bit of early venturing. You could enjoy it on so many different levels. And then we started seeing him all the time. I loved him, and if you were a Pure Pop for Now People person, and you opened the NME, say, and it was all about King Crimson, you’d close it tight, as they were absolute mastodons of ghastliness. And then triumphantly glam rock arrived, and the things that we liked the most were obviously Bowie and Roxy Music. I had dinner with Bryan [Ferry] about three years ago, and he was being quite snotty about David, the idea that he was such a plagiarist, and I was thinking, You’ve got spot-on taste and perfect pitch but you’re not quite right there. You’ve allowed a few things to cloud your judgment. I call it picking up, not plagiarism. People of advanced taste would say the [competition] was Bryan and David, and of course David appeared to be operating on a bigger scale, and had more international traction and hit a bigger nerve. He was marvelously pretentious, with lots of allusions to…stuff. He read bits of books. A bit Continental. Drawing on Andyland. He distilled it all, and we loved it. It was a kind of composite motivation. The sex, the clothes, the design, the intellectualism.
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE: How rapidly obsessive fandom takes root. Within a day of hearing “Starman” on Top of the Pops, I’d gathered the backlist, just four albums at that point: David Bowie: London Boy, Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, and Hunky Dory, and then the one that sealed the deal, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, released on 6 June that year. I can’t pretend my devotion differed in any important respect from that of any other fifteen-year-old Bowie fan. I confess that, in those barely liberated days, I preferred evidence that my bisexual hero was more straight than gay. So it was good news he was married to Angie, less good they’d reportedly first met when sleeping with the same guy. And the album cover of The Man Who Sold the World, showing Bowie wearing a Michael Fish “man dress,” was uncomfortable. His voice, with its range, passion, and yearning, had a spooky Dalek quality and the lyrics felt like poetry to my teenage ear.
KRIS NEEDS: Bowie returned to Friars for a third performance on July 15, I think primarily as a showcase for a planeload of American journalists and record company execs. Tony Defries knew a Friars show would guarantee the right kind of reception. The guest list included Lisa Robinson, Lenny Kaye, and Creem’s Dave Marsh. Though I managed to see the sound check in the afternoon, I couldn’t get to Bowie. Tony Defries had put a barrier up, refusing all interviews, and it was impossible to get through to him. When I tried to make my way up the staircase to the dressing rooms, my path was blocked by Stuey George, Bowie’s new bodyguard, who informed me that I would get to see David “over my dead body.” So I didn’t see him again until he came back with Iggy Pop in 1977.
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: The success of Ziggy changed everything, because as soon as David started to get a little bit of success he was the happiest man in the world. All he ever wanted was success. And as success bred success, he was off. Beckenham, the Arts Lab, “Space Oddity,” then he was off. I spent so much time at Haddon Hall, nearly as much time as David had spent at my house in Bromley when we were younger. I met Tony Visconti, all the Spiders, it was all coming together here. I remember being at Haddon Hall when he first played “Suffragette City.” And at the end of the performance—he just played it on twelve-string—I shouted out, “Wham-bam, thank you, ma’am!” which was a song from a Charlie Mingus album, Oh Yeah. And it obviously ended up on the record. After Ziggy started working, he took real pleasure in molding his success.
LINDSAY KEMP: It was Angela who first got me involved with Ziggy. She played me the record and said, the name might not be very you and the music is very different from the old days, with their beautiful ballads and musical influenced songs and so on. Some of the music was quite heavy, but it was thrilling. And she said she wanted me to stage a production based on these songs. For the big Ziggy concert at the Rainbow, Angela was great fun and so helpful. She would take me on shopping trips and buy makeup boxes and costumes. It was a dream for me because I had never had any money to spend on a production before. I only had things I had before, things I had made with crepe paper. Here I was, holding all these fabulous fabrics and having this great theater, the Rainbow.
TREVOR BOLDER: Everybody always wants to talk to me about the Spiders, and they want to know what Bowie was like, and what it was like going out on the road together. It was a magical time for us, for the band, but it’s obviously become an incredibly special period for people who like the music, especially those people who weren’t there at the time, or who weren’t even born. When [I was] out on the road with [Uriah] Heep I met loads of people who are Spiders fans. My daughter went to see Moby and she went backstage a couple of years ago, and he wrote a song called “Bring Back the Spiders from Mars,” and he was doing the “I am not worthy” routine to her. It’s bonkers. No matter where I go in the world, or who I meet, as soon as they discover I was in the Spiders, they want to talk about it. I’m not sure we realized that this was going to be the case all those years ago. Sure, we knew it was an important period for Bowie, and we knew it was an important period for us, but I don’t think any of us understood just how important the whole thing was going to be in the history of rock music. The Spiders from Mars are almost a mythical band nowadays, a mythical band who happened to be real.
NICK KENT: Bowie was viewed at the NME as the main guy, the center of the ’70s rock world, the absolute center. Myself, Charlie, and Ian MacDonald all had huge respect for him. At the NME when there was a new Bowie album we would all sit round and listen to it and debate it—what is David saying? In the way that we once would have done about Bob Dylan. You don’t do that with Coldplay. What Coldplay are saying on their new album is, Well, the last album sold 7 million so we’re giving you more of the same because we know you like that kind of thing. David often wrote lyrics that were meaninglessness selling itself as abstraction, but usually there was real depth.
DAVID BAILEY: He wasn’t my kind of man, as I found him too affected. I knew what he was all about because the beatniks used to do what he did in Paris in the ’50s, putting a grid over a book and then drawing round it and picking out words as though they were meaningful. That’s how he wrote, using found words, just like William Burroughs used to do. So I got it. Just didn’t think it was particularly interesting, as it had been done before. You can come up with things that are totally ridiculous and yet they’re meant to be laden with meaning. Silly. He was always onstage, always playing David Bowie, always being what you wanted him to be. So I found it impossible to connect with him, as he was controlling everything. He was the personification of an actor actually. He always took things very seriously, which I don’t. If I found something serious then you probably wouldn’t know, but if he did then you absolutely would. That’s the difference in personalities. I don’t think I ever got him, not in a picture. I might have got a good picture of Ziggy Stardust, or Ciggy Stardust, but I don’t think I ever got a good picture of David Bowie. He was just one of those guys who didn’t like to give anything away. He was a bit like a woman because he liked dressing up so much. Very theatrical. Very Marcel Marceau. But he was always on time.
In September 1972, the Ziggy tour went to the United States. The US tour was wild, although perhaps no wilder than any other grade-A rock and roll tour of the time. What made it different was David and Angie’s very public codependent relationship. For a while on the tour David was seeing the soon-to-be-infamous groupie Cyrinda Foxe, who would go on to marry Steven Tyler, the singer in Aerosmith. His affair with her was apparently just as fluid as his marriage.
CYRINDA FOXE (GROUPIE): He once called me into the room [from the bathroom] to talk to him while he fucked a girl, and he needed someone to talk to, and that was me. I’d be watching the TV and talking with David, and he’d be screwing the groupie. Very nonchalant. [I saw Angie] crawling around on her hands and knees after having sex with a bodyguard, because it was so intense that she couldn’t walk afterwards. David would be in one room with me, and we’d be making love or we’d be talking while he was doing it with another girl…and Angie would be in the other room making the walls shake.
GEORGE UNDERWOOD: We were on the Greyhound bus on the US tour of 1972, and there was a little pig-nosed amp and an electric guitar at the back, just there for our entertainment. So I started playing, trying to do an old John Lee Hooker song, which almost sounded like a bass line. And it’s going on for a while and David asked for the guitar and starts playing the riff for “Jean Genie.” Based completely on a John Lee Hooker riff. This was David’s first US tour, and he had invited someone to come on tour with him, maybe Dana Gillespie. Because he wanted someone as a companion who wasn’t in the business. I got a call from David asking if I’d like to go to the States. I had only been married a year, and so we both went, my wife and me. He said a car would come and pick me up two weeks later. Two weeks later it turns up and drives us down to Southampton, where we board the QE2, first class. Five days later we’re in New York. It was so funny being on that boat, and he kept us entertained for most of the journey. He came down to dinner on the first night in one of his Ziggy outfits, a white dress version of something he wore onstage, complete with big wings on the shoulders. Everyone turns around and is literally coughing up their soup. After he didn’t come down for dinner anymore, as everyone was staring at him. I said, “What did you expect?” We were there for two weeks, and when Tony Defries looked at how much everything was costing, he said the Underwoods hadn’t cost him any money. And that’s because I was paying out of my own pocket. I took all the money I had in the bank and paid for every meal, everything we did. I didn’t want to be a hanger-on. David was cross, but he wanted me to stay, so he said that maybe I could do an album cover for him or something. We discussed me doing a cover for the rerelease of The Man Who Sold the World, but by the time we got to New York they’d already gone with the picture of him kicking his leg up in the air. So I ended up staying for three months.
The audiences on the Ziggy tour of the US just couldn’t believe their eyes. Every night was a sensation. The audience was brutalized, and had never seen anything like it. We went most places by Amtrak, which is a great way to see the country. He was high rolling on that tour. Every night was a party. We were talking one night in his hotel suite, and he disappeared into his bathroom and came out with his eyebrows shaved off. The phone never stopped ringing. People everywhere. That tour was bonkers, exhilarating but mad. It was a rock and roll circus. Angie was obviously there, running around. For all her faults as a mother, Angie was instrumental in getting Ziggy up and running. Getting fabrics, designing costumes. Her enthusiasm was second to none, and she was a huge help to David at the time, as was Tony Defries. David didn’t seem to care about anything other than making it work. In the US he was treated as a star and he really wasn’t one. He wanted me to go on to Japan with him, but I had to go home so he asked Geoff MacCormack to go with him.
LINDSAY KEMP: David was selfish, but he wasn’t nasty. Fame didn’t make him that way, as he was selfish from the start. He wasn’t very greedy. He lived an instinctive life. We didn’t talk about philosophical things. We talked about people like Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, the theatre of cruelty; the avant-garde. I was planning on dramatizing Jean Genet’s novel Le Notre-Dame des Fleurs, which became Flowers. It put me on the map and brought me fame and fortune and took me round the world a couple times. We talked a lot about Genet and a particular piece I was working on, and I hoped he would perform in it one day. But of course he did go away and wrote “The Jean Genie.”
WENDY LEIGH: One of the ways in which David made it in America was by being very English and having these wonderful manners. Let’s not forget, he wasn’t a working-class hero, in the same way that Mick Jagger wasn’t. He was middle class to the core, and in the States he used to play on his Englishness. He would romance women, sing to them, properly seduce them. He would talk and talk and talk until they were desperate to sleep with him. After a concert in Los Angeles in October 1972, the DJ Wolfman Jack threw a party at his home, with Bowie as the guest of honor. He spied a girl on the dance floor who was dancing with Kim Fowley, who knew everyone. David asked Fowley if she was with him, and when Fowley said no, he walked across to her, and said, “My name is David Bowie. Would you like to accompany me to the bathroom?” When they eventually came out, he kissed the girl on the cheek, shook her hand, and said, “Thank you.” He played the English gentleman to the hilt. He did it with a lot of class and a lot of elegance. I don’t think he stepped on people’s faces in order to go to bed with them. He did it all with great style.
JOSETTE CARUSO (GROUPIE): I’m a New Jersey girl, and I knew lots of rock stars at the time. I was a groupie, a groupie girl. I was nineteen, and had been seeing rock stars since I was sixteen. I went on tour with Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin, and I knew Jeff Beck very well. I knew Deep Purple, the Kinks, Ten Years After. I was living with my mother when I left to go on the road with Led Zeppelin. I was sixteen, and my mother wasn’t happy. I knew that she would be worried out of her mind. So I called her and I just said, “I’m with Jimmy Page and I’m not coming home,” and I hung up. I just went from one band to another. I was having fun, and I wasn’t looking to settle down with anyone or looking for a relationship. I realized straight off that these guys weren’t looking for a relationship, they were just looking to have some fun, and so was I. I wasn’t a runaway, I just went from band to band to band and had a great time. After a while the bodyguards got to know me, and knew that I wasn’t going to steal anything. I was getting what I wanted, with the limousines and the concerts and the backstage and the shows and knowing all the other girls wanted to be with them. But I was going to be the one sleeping with them afterwards. It was an ego thing, I won’t deny that. I didn’t fool myself into thinking there was any emotional involvement. I loved all these guys but none of them were like David Bowie.
BEBE BUELL (MODEL, SINGER): He came walking into Max’s Kansas City in that blue suit and that red carrot hair, no eyebrows. I mean he truly looked like he landed in his spaceship and parked it outside. We were all pretty blown away. So he got my phone number from someone, and then called me. I was only nineteen, so he asked me if I wanted to go sightseeing. He told me he was a little embarrassed to ask me. He said these mega-cool people found him foolish, and would I find him foolish? And I said no! Where do you want to go?! I thought it was delightful and there was no sexual vibe to it. He was just like a child who wanted to go see the Empire State Building and go see the Rockettes at Radio City. He wanted to go to the museum, he wanted to see the giant whale. So we went to see the Rockettes. He had the biggest smile on his face the entire time, cheering and clapping and he was just mesmerized. He told me, this is like the Mary Poppins version of a crazy-horse saloon in Paris. I thought that was kind of the perfect description. Do you know when we went on top of the Empire State Building he kept running around in a circle? Because he couldn’t believe the view and he just thought it was beautiful. He just couldn’t get over the view, and the wind was hitting his face, and he had that smile, and he didn’t smoke a cigarette for about an hour. That was a record for him, I think!
I took him to see Bruce Springsteen when he did a show upstairs in Max’s, where he was playing the piano and singing these songs. David had heard he was special and gifted and wanted to see him. I know that David was one of the earliest fans of Bruce Springsteen, that I can assure you. Bruce was singing his heart out at Max’s, and there were very few people up there other than David and I, and David kept leaning over to me and saying, “Can you believe his lyrics?” and he was just blown away by them. I remember him asking me, “Where is Asbury Park?” as he didn’t quite understand some of the portraits that Bruce was painting because it was all about the Jersey Shore. I drove him to the Jersey Shore one day, and he was really blown away by that, by where Bruce had grown up and where he got all his songs from. And I think he wanted to get a corndog or something, traditional beach fare. I couldn’t eat meat so I just ate a candy apple. He was worrying that I was going to pull my teeth out. I said my teeth are real, they can handle it! And then I took him back to the city. You know, I think we even took the Staten Island Ferry. He wanted to go on the boat, he wanted to do all these things.
No one recognized him, as he wasn’t huge yet. There was a time in New York where there was no paparazzi, and the only people that got chased by the paparazzi were the likes of Jackie Kennedy. I didn’t get introduced to the volume of the paparazzi till I dated Rod Stewart many years later and then I learned what it’s like to be chased around by them, but when I hung around with David Bowie or Mick Jagger, those guys took taxis and were very discreet. They didn’t go looking for the picture to be taken like a lot of people do today. They had a lot of class and decorum and David actually had a limousine. I think he was trying to give everybody an image, you know what I mean? He wanted it to look already like he was a rich, successful rock star. But the thing is he did stay at a smaller hotel, at the Gramercy Park, which is a lovely, enchanting hotel. I adore it but he wasn’t uptown at The Plaza or where the Stones or Marc Bolan would stay.
Whenever I would hang out with him or have tea or whatever, there was a lot of chaos. There was Mick Ronson, his girlfriend Suzy; there was a lot of movement, clothing being constructed, makeup all over the desktops and lots of contemplating what style was going to be worn. We went to see the New York Dolls one night, I remember doing that with him. He wanted to go see Bette Midler at the baths, so I took him to that. I know that everybody assumed we were lovers and we really weren’t and I always try to clarify that. There was kissing and canoodling and an attempt to make love but it ended up in a heap of laughter if you really want to know. I would come over and the women would be coming in and out. There was so much traffic coming in and out of his bedroom. I remember I came over and saw three women and he says, “I’m having an amazing time. There are so many beautiful women in New York, Bebe.” All we did was play with makeup. In a way he was a character actor. He invented so many enchanting characters, he was like Willy Wonka. Angela was never around at that point. She had her own world and her own life, and I always assumed that she preferred women.
I was living with Todd Rundgren but we were not married. I don’t think Todd minded me hanging out; well, I think he did a little bit because of the artistic thing that men have. Todd admired his music as we would both lay on our waterbed and listen to Bowie and so I think that when he saw that Bowie and I had become close, he became very curious. David really wanted to go see him in concert and so I remember taking him with me to see Todd at Carnegie Hall. Todd had a pretty prestigious show and he was dressed quite flamboyantly. David had a suit that looked like one Todd wore. Todd didn’t nick it, maybe their minds were thinking alike, I don’t know. But I took David to that concert and I remember he sat and watched very attentively.
There was a time when I leapt out of bed at three o’clock in the morning because David called and he was in tears having some emotional crisis. So I went. What he liked about being with me was that I didn’t put any pressure on him. I didn’t expect him to perform or blow my mind sexually or anything. I was a very young girl who totally appreciated and understood the complexity of his personality but I had a little experience, as I was living with a mad genius at the time too.
TREVOR BOLDER: We lived and breathed the Spiders. Of course, it was a performance, but when we started the tour we weren’t really the Spiders from Mars. As the tour went on we took the name and we actually became the characters, to go along with the whole Ziggy thing. So we tried to live up to people’s expectations of us when we came offstage. When we were in America we had all this gear, and of course the Americans went over the top for that sort of stuff. They thought we were really decadent, really out there. But once we’d finished performing we just used to put our jeans and T-shirts back on and we went back to street clothes. We did a show in L.A., and we all went back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and there was a knock on the door, and all these kids were there dressed up in these weird outfits and stuff. And of course we were in jeans and T-shirts and these kids said, “Jeez, you guys are really weird.” And we thought, Have you looked in the mirror? Because they were living what we were doing onstage, but we were walking away from it once we’d finished. We were different to what was going on at that particular time. A lot of other groups didn’t really understand what we were up to, because we looked so odd. They were going, “What’s going on here?” Because they were used to seeing bands like Fleetwood Mac, who didn’t make any attempt to dress up.
MIKE GARSON (MUSICIAN): I was surprised when I was approached to work with him back in 1972, because I didn’t know who he was. He could have been anyone because I didn’t know who I was going to audition for. I had just finished a series of jazz concerts, and the one just before the night he called was in Manhattan around Sixty-Ninth Street and Broadway. I was playing with a sax player who had played with Miles Davis, just one of the greatest jazz musicians in the world. I’d been practicing eight hours a day for the previous ten years to get where I was. I looked at my family that night and said, “This won’t work.” I was living in Brooklyn in an apartment that cost $150 a month, but when you’re earning $5 a night that’s difficult money to find. Tongue in cheek: “I think I need to go out with a famous rock star.” Those were my exact words. But interestingly enough, they say that if you can think it in your mind you might be able to manifest it, and the next day I got a call from Woody Herman. But I also got a call from David Bowie. I think it was Tony Defries. He got a real kick out of me saying, “Who is he?” So that day I went from Brooklyn into New York City, walked into RCA Studios, and these guys were wild. Red hair, funny clothes. In the booth were David, Trevor, and Woody. At the piano, greeting me very warmly, was Mick Ronson. The sheet music was “Changes,” which meant nothing to me, but having played a thousand weddings and bar mitzvahs in New York I could read anything. So I played it. And I swear within seven seconds Mick said, “You have the gig.” Everyone else was smiling. They hired me for eight weeks and they couldn’t get rid of me. In the first two years David must have fired five bands and I was the only one who stayed. He kept changing styles, but because I had a fairly broad spectrum, having played so much classic and jazz and pop and gospel, I could play with anyone. He was the best casting director there ever was, better even than Miles Davis. Everyone he ever chose had a purpose. He got everything out of me that I’d ever learned. He would open up to me late at night because I had nothing to do with his world. He loved that I knew nothing about rock. I still don’t. He was just fascinated with my lifestyle as a jazz musician, and I was fascinated with his brilliance. In 1972 I would sneak out into the audience to watch the show because I only played on half the songs. I was mesmerized. My jazz buddies thought I’d sold out. I actually thought they were not furthering the music, as they were just regurgitating Charlie Parker. The next thing after the audition, I’m in Cleveland rehearsing. I’m sitting at the piano, and I look to my right and I see this stack of speakers, and said to David, “The PA is facing the wrong way.” And he smiled and said that’s your monitor system, that’s just for you. I had to readjust. I got the idea that Tony Defries was trying to build something big here, what with the no-interview thing, and the way in which everything was controlled. Everyone had such style; everyone was exquisite. Platform shoes. The lot.
JOSETTE CARUSO: I went to see Bowie at Carnegie Hall in September 1972 and it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The show itself was insane, as everybody just dressed up beyond belief to see him. It was a real party, and New York had never seen anything like it. Oh it was all feathers and glitter and the highest heels and the reddest lipstick, everyone dressed up as if they were going to an extravagant rock opera–type event. At the concerts I usually went to with the groupies, we always used to dress up, whether it was wanted or not. But with him it was different in that everybody was dressed up, it wasn’t just the groupies. The guys were all wearing makeup, they had their hair all teased up. I had never seen anything like this before, not even at a New York Dolls concert. So I was backstage after the gig, and David’s bodyguard invited me to go back to the Plaza Hotel. So I go, and was standing around in this amazing silver sequinned mirrored dress when David walks up to me and says, “I can see me in you…” Which was the most flirtatious thing to say. But that was very David. Very polite, very flirtatious. Anyway, we were talking and making out and then he whispered that Angie was starting to look at me and was probably going to throw a plate of cakes at me. So David invites me to the next gig, which was in Philadelphia. I didn’t go to the show; I went straight up to his suite at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel and waited for him. When he turned up he really turned it on. He properly seduced me. I remember we talked a lot about The Catcher in the Rye, as he seemed to identify with the book’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield. We talked about Nietzsche, Freud, Picasso, pedophiles, so many different things. He appeared to really want to talk. I was impressed at how well read he was. He spoke about the books that he was reading and asked for my opinions on them. He was also impressed that I knew somebody who worked with Picasso. He looked so thin, and so fit. His skin was so white and translucent, and there was this complete contrast with his makeup as he still had his rouge on. We sat drinking very good red wine and he started serenading me with “Walk on the Wild Side.” He was obsessed with Jeff Beck, and kept asking me about him because he knew I knew him very well. He said that he would have loved to have Jeff Beck on guitar rather than Mick Ronson, and described how he bent notes with his fingers, and how he had this amazing way of playing. He was really concerned that people might think Mick was ripping off Jeff Beck. We spoke for over an hour, as though he was actually trying to woo me. And then all this conversation obviously led into bed, where he was wonderful. I mean, just terrific. He was very well endowed—I mean, absolutely—and really knew how to fuck. He didn’t appear to be on drugs, but he really knew his way around a woman’s body. He was an English gentleman, and it wasn’t just about him. He took control in bed, and he was very considerate, and very focused on making love, on fucking me. He was very intense—lots of kissing, lots of hugging, lots of fucking. The sex was wonderful, I mean he was the ultimate rock and roll lover.
Something weird happened later that night in Philadelphia. Something really chilling. At one point there was a knock on the door, and, after a while, one of his bodyguards went to answer it, and then called for David. So David went off and came back a few minutes later white as a sheet. He was visibly shocked. Someone had just turned up and offered him a warm, dead body for David to have sex with. The town had never seen anything like David before, and he obviously looked like such a freak that some sick people thought he might be into necrophilia. That was the perception of Ziggy, and that’s how crazy that tour was, that’s how decadent it was. David was completely horrified. He said, “Who on Earth do they think I am? Why would they think I’d be interested in something like that? Why would I be interested in fucking a dead body?” It took him a while to calm down, but once it was over he just moved right past it. If he had been into that I would have left immediately.
NICK KENT: I was never one of his intimates because he was wary of me. I’m a very particular kind of journalist and I wouldn’t have given him safe passage. It wouldn’t have been in his interest to embrace me. Iggy Pop was ideal for me because his life is an open book, and those were the kind of people I was better at writing about. I respect people’s privacy and I don’t like getting into people’s sex lives for instance, but I was interested in their drug life because it usually had such a dramatic effect on their music.
JOSETTE CARUSO: I was introduced to Trevor Bolder at the Carnegie Hall concert on Thursday, September 28, 1972, and all he could talk about was losing his job. He was concerned about being booted off the tour and asking if I thought that was going to happen and what might happen to him after there was no more Ziggy. I told him that he was a great bass player and I was sure he would find other work, but he was concerned about the expiration time coming up. It was sad in a way because he knew that it was coming to an end.
MICK ROCK: David was very charming, and very friendly. It was never difficult being around David. He was amazingly self-disciplined, and he was always very careful in how he approached things. He didn’t micromanage, but he liked to surround himself with people he could trust, who knew what they were doing, even if they weren’t sure they could do it themselves. That’s sort of what happened to me, as he gave me the confidence to just go for it. Somehow I was at the right place at the right time with the right instincts. Through him I met Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople, and I shot all of them. All these people had been dropped, they were failures, and yet David was trying to resurrect them all. He waved his magic wand, and I got a little touch of that too. It was like a rising tide, as all the boats went up.
NICK KENT: Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were two of the most maniacal, ego-driven people you could ever hope to meet. They were control freaks. So the very fact that they would acquiesce to Bowie tinkering with their music was a major thing. They saw Bowie in conflicted ways. They could see that he was using them to a certain degree, but you have to remember that they were marginal characters. Nowadays people claim that the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed had amazing cachet back in the early ’70s, but they were the cult of cults. It’s true that if you went round to someone’s house and they had a Velvet Underground record then you thought that this person was worth talking to. But maybe one thousand people in Great Britain owned Velvet Underground records. Maybe five hundred people owned Stooges records. Maybe. So he may have been using them, but it wasn’t as though he was glomming on to the Rolling Stones or Rod Stewart.
He chose Iggy Pop and Lou Reed because he knew that the ’60s were dead. He understood that since the Beatles had broken up, the decade was over. No one else understood that. He realized that his future lay in articulating a new sensibility that could be aligned to the ’70s. The pendulum was swinging. It wasn’t about big guys with beards playing mandolins anymore. The Band were over. Nineteen seventy was all about clean-shaven men singing about science fiction. It was a 180-degree swing. Bowie understood the pendulum swings because he’d been through all of this in the ’60s. One month he was in a rhythm and blues group, the next month a mod group, then a freak-out group. He knew how things changed, and how you could become obsolete in the blink of an eye. He made it his business to stamp his personality on that decade. And he knew that Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were both ahead of their time. And those were the guys to be with. He wasn’t going to sell more records, but his work was going to be informed by these guys, and he could align himself with them. It was cachet. He wanted to learn from them.
Two months after the Imperial College gig the Spiders from Mars played the Polytechnic of Central London, and the Stooges, Lou Reed, and Mott the Hoople were all in the audience. This is the first time that I met Ron Asheton from the Stooges. And all these guys are standing around thinking we’re here because we have to be, because Bowie is now our patron. The Stooges were like a motorcycle gang, and they’re thinking, What is this shit? They’re not usually impressed. Bowie knows that they’re all there and at the end of his set he turns to Iggy in the audience and he performs “Sex Machine” by James Brown, which is the only time he ever played it. And he did it for Iggy, as if to say, OK, you think you’re the James Brown of garage rock, and you might think I’m camp, and you might think I’m fake, but I can do James Brown as well as you can. And he did. That was how Bowie got people’s respect. And Iggy respected him. Bowie tried to copy Iggy, and he did some of it successfully, but not the stage diving, as you can’t stand up on an audience if you’re wearing platform boots. I remember Mick Jagger telling me that the only person he had respect for as a performer was Bowie. He knew he had to be on top of his game….
HANIF KUREISHI: He was very disappointed in his relationship with Lou Reed because Lou Reed was such a cunt. However, I remember him talking to me about being at Lou Reed’s apartment and finding all these Andy Warhol things. He had such huge admiration for Warhol because of Warhol’s ability to change, to steal. And to not worry about being original. Bowie loved that.
LOU REED: The whole glam thing was great for me. This was something I had already seen with Warhol, but I hadn’t done that thing. The ’70s was a chance for me to get in on it, and since no one knew me from Adam particularly, I could say I was anything. I had learned that from Andy: Nobody knows. You could be anything.
HARVEY GOLDSMITH: Everyone said he was a nightmare but Lou Reed and I actually became quite good friends. I found him funny, and he was a really nice guy. Whenever I was in New York he would take me down to the Mineshaft, this members-only gay club on Washington Street in the Meatpacking District. He had a sailor for a boyfriend called Rachel. Whenever I went he would take me to one weird and wonderful place or another. I think he was trying to turn me at one point! Publicly Lou and David got on extremely well, fed off each other, although privately I think there was a lot of rivalry. I suppose he could think that he’d been conned by Bowie, and there are a lot of casualties that Bowie has left along the way. I don’t think Lou had any resentment that I was aware of, but I can’t be sure.
BOB HARRIS: Mick Ronson was fantastic in the studio, and while I know that David gets the production credit for Lou Reed’s Transformer, the hub of it was Mick. But because Mick was a modest sort of guy, really, despite the showmanship, he never really wanted to push anybody else out of the spotlight and claim it for himself. You can’t overestimate Mick’s contribution to the sound, the look, and the image of Ziggy Stardust. Much later I spent some time with him in Woodstock while he was hanging out at Bearsville Studios, and I got the sense that he felt very sad and disillusioned by the fact that David had moved on from him so comprehensively. I just felt he had this sadness about him, I think he found it very difficult.
NICK KENT: Raw Power was a touchy point for both of them because Iggy was not happy with Bowie’s mix of the record. But Iggy and James Williamson had not previously done themselves any favors, because their idea of recording was putting everything into the red as far as possible. That was the Stooges’ idea of recording, just bleeding everything right into the red. It was the opposite to good sound. Bowie tried his best with them, but there was only so much he could do with their way of recording.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Did Bowie rip off Iggy Pop and Lou Reed? Maybe. He ripped people off, put them on the shelf, and then would maybe come back for them. Maybe not. Lou Reed did feel used. Lou’s biggest ever hit was the Transformer album, and that was Bowie and Ronno. The only two songs that civilians are aware of are “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day.” Art rock geeks will be able to argue for hours over which of the two live versions of “Waiting for the Man” is definitive. But civilians just know those two songs. Lou wrote them but it was David and Mick who crafted the arrangements and made them popular. Just as I think David had something to prove on Diamond Dogs—that he didn’t need Ronno—so was Lou miffed that people might think he needed David Bowie. David wanted to work with Lou again, but Lou was notoriously stingy about sharing credits, let alone royalties, and he didn’t want to write with him again. He had an auteur complex, and Bowie didn’t fit into that. Lou was also a prime member of the awkward squad. He could lose a charm competition with Van Morrison.
LOU REED (MUSICIAN): He’s very clever. We found we had a lot of things in common. David learned how to be hip. Associating with me brought his name out to a lot more people too. He’s very good in the studio. In a manner of speaking he produced an album for me.
NICK KENT: Lou Reed viewed Bowie as Bette Davis viewed Eve in All About Eve. Lou Reed even referred to Bowie as Eve on several occasions. But once they’d worked together he realized that Bowie had skills that he didn’t have. The thing is, Bowie got Lou Reed hits, he got Iggy hits. Up until Bowie they hadn’t had any hits.
RON ASHETON (MUSICIAN): One day in 1972 I got a call from Iggy, and it was perfect Iggy, because he said, “Well, we auditioned a hundred bass players and drummers and we can’t find anybody good, so do you guys wanna come over to London and play on the new album?” My first thought was, Yeah, thanks a lot, asshole. The first time I met David Bowie was the first day I arrived in London to work on the Raw Power album. Bowie was drunk, and he brought two Jamaican girls with identical, carrot-top David Bowie hairdos with him. They went down the basement to the kitchen, or the dining-room area, and drank wine and stuff, and I didn’t really participate a bunch with them. Then Bowie got kinda disorientated in the house. I showed him the front door, and he grabbed my ass and kissed me. I went to coldcock him, but then I thought, Huh? Whoa, it’s David Bowie! So I didn’t do it, but then he didn’t really want to talk to us anymore.
Scott Asheton (the musician and Ron’s younger brother) says that the first time he met Bowie was in Seymour Walk in South Kensington, arriving with two women, one black, one white. Scott thought that Bowie was freaked out by the Ashetons’ appearance. “We were all sitting around smoking hash, drinking some wine and just relaxing. And Bowie, he came in like a wild animal in a cage, just totally flipping out! Really, really nervous—and later we found out that he was afraid of us, ha-ha-ha!”
RON ASHETON: When Bowie was rehearsing for his show at the Rainbow, we went to the rehearsal. We were watching these guys get ready for their first, big Spiders from Mars show. So we were at the show and we’d gotten prime seats and he was playing, and the place was packed, and my brother and me were going, “Ah, we already seen this shit, let’s go get a beer!” We went to the bar, and there was Lou Reed. He was drunk and on pills, so he gave us each a Mandrax [Quaalude]. The next day I got a phone call to come down to the MainMan office. Bowie’s manager Tony chewed me out for getting up in the middle of David’s show and walking out. He was furious. I was like, “Fuck you, man. I mean, every seat was full, and I just didn’t wanna be there!” But when we went over to London to work with Bowie, it was a good situation. It was all top-notch stuff. We had a mews house with four stories and a driver. MainMan, at that time, was just top notch. I must say, Bowie helped Iggy every step of the way. I don’t know how many fucking times Bowie got him deals. If it wasn’t for Bowie, Iggy would be dead. The only reason Iggy is playing music today is because of Bowie. I mean, Bowie admired Iggy—and in a way, he wanted to be like him.
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE: One afternoon, my school friend the satirist Craig Brown announced he had two tickets to see Bowie at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park, during the Christmas holidays, and would I like to go? We took the train up from Sussex and at some point must have changed into Bowie gear. (Where? The train loo, presumably.) Is it really conceivable I wore a striped matelot T-shirt under a denim shirt with silver nylon lamé sleeves? Half the audience had enviable Ziggy haircuts. Sunday, December 24, 1972: my first Bowie concert, seats in the third row of the dress circle, and the man did not disappoint. All that remains is a memory of fuzzy orange light and loudness, a cover version of the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” as the finale, “Give me your hands…’cause yer won-der-ful,” please God, let this concert never end. During the long cab ride home, I sensed that Craig had not bought into the universal truth behind Bowie’s towering genius and lyrics to the same degree I had. He had reservations, even dared mock. Well, some people exist on a less sensitive plane and just can’t get it.
BOB HARRIS: And then suddenly it was over. I lost contact with Marc Bolan and David around the same time. I had known Marc for about five or six years, since 1967, and when the Born to Boogie film with Ringo Starr came out, we lost touch. He was off. I compered the 1972 UK T. Rex tour, but then he’s off to America, and I just don’t see him anymore. And it was exactly the same with David. I was the compere on the early gigs of the Ziggy Stardust tour, but because I was now on the radio, there was a limit to how much free time I had, and then: Boom!—I didn’t see David anymore either. At the end of 1972 he just disappeared on me completely. John Peel had a similar experience with David, and a similar one with Marc Bolan, although that was as a direct result of John giving Marc a stinging review. He had a column in Disc & Music Echo, and he used it to review the T. Rex single “Get It On.” John had not liked the curve that Marc had taken from T. Rex into electric pop; in fact, he really disapproved of it. And he wrote this terrible review, saying the only redeeming factor of the single was on the fade when Marc says, “Well, meanwhile, I am still thinking,” which was a throwback to Chuck Berry. Well, Marc read this, and he was mortified, and vowed never to speak to John again. Whereas with Bowie, even though he had been through various reincarnations and tried stylistic guises to be famous, when he eventually became famous, there wasn’t a sense that he was selling out, it just seemed to be another sort of stage persona. With David you really got the sense that new chapters arrived all the time, as people came and went all the time. They were steps along the way.
GEOFF MACCORMACK: I went on tour with him for three years and it was a three-year party. I got a call from him while I was at work asking me if I wanted to go on tour with him as a backing singer, so I said yes! I did three tours and six albums with him. I wasn’t sure I was entitled to be there, but we had fun. And of course in the early days he wouldn’t fly, so we traveled everywhere by boat. We boarded the SS Canberra on January 24, 1973, and had a great time. He obviously preferred to travel with me, the lighthearted silly friend. There were big things happening; he needed to relax. We developed these personas for the boat, and it got quite silly. I think that was his downtime, that was his time to recharge. We’d kind of playact. He became Oscar at that point, which was my pet name for him. He was Oscar because he had this definite Oscar Wilde thing about him, you know. At dinner I would say, “Oscar…more vegetables?” And he would say, “I find vegetables so very vulgar.” During the day we’d talking about afternoon tea being a big event. Coming back we came by train, the Trans-Siberian Railway, and traveled through Russia, went via the Berlin Wall. All those experiences contributed to Diamond Dogs, I’m sure.
COCO SCHWAB (BOWIE’S ASSISTANT): I first met David at a welcome-home party at Haddon Hall in 1973. He and Geoffrey [MacCormack] had just arrived back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian Express. My first impression was how tired and skinny he seemed. The famous red hair was a bit crumpled, but his essence, the warmth and kind gentleness, was there (through that worldly weariness) and he hugged Andrea [the Bowie fan club assistant] and me and made us feel welcome. Andrea and I had only been working at MainMan for several months and had not actually met him yet.
I got started working with David by answering an ad in The Evening Standard in London asking for “Girl Friday needed for busy office.” I had run my finger down the page and stopped there in totally arbitrary fashion. I needed a job to earn expense money for a trip my photographer friend and I were planning to take. We had a magazine interested in us to do a story of two girls on a Greyhound bus tour of America, kind of Jack Kerouac On the Road–style, but two girls as opposed to two guys. They were only willing to pay a certain amount up front and we thought to save a bit more we’d get short-term jobs.
When I was due to leave MainMan six months later, David called and asked me why I was leaving. I explained about this Greyhound bus tour of America thing. He paused for a minute and said, “How about a limousine tour of America?” I paused for about a nanosecond and said something like, “Uh, OK.” Needless to say, I don’t think my photographer friend ever truly forgave me.
SIMON NAPIER-BELL: All artists are deadly rivals even when they’re pretending not to be. Bowie and Bolan were no different. And of course, when Bowie happened in the USA, Marc was insanely jealous. Both of them had the measure of the press. They knew how to manipulate journalists and create stories out of nothing—keep them endlessly in the public eye. When I first saw Bowie emerge in public as a mime artist I would have been most surprised then to have known how successful he would become later. But once Ziggy Stardust was out and happening, there seemed no reason why Bowie wouldn’t go on and create more and even better things in the future.
Kansai Yamamoto said he actually had no idea who David Bowie was until he saw him wearing his clothes onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York in February 1973. Yasuko Hayashi, his stylist, was doing work for Bowie and had given him some of his clothes. This was the first time Yamamoto had ever met an artist who was wearing his designs. “Before then, I didn’t know how immensely talented he was,” he says. “At the time, David Bowie was all about transcending gender. I didn’t know anything about concepts like that, so I remember thinking: Whoa, when I saw him wearing clothes I had designed for women. The clothes were influenced by hikinuki, the method of changing costumes quickly in Kabuki. The audience in New York saw the costumes transform a few times during the show. I realized I had done something really cool when everyone in the audience got on their feet and clapped.”
IAIN R. WEBB: While flicking through glossy fashion magazines, Bowie discovered Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, who unveiled his designs in London in 1971 in a show that featured several of the outfits later worn by the singer. It also included some influential theatrics, such as the use of kuroko, traditional kabuki stagehands, for a series of quick-change outfits. Not only did Bowie commission Yamamoto to design the costumes for his Aladdin Sane tour (these included a unitard, a satin cape printed with Japanese script, and a skimpy all-in-one decorated with frolicking woodland creatures), he also lifted the spiky hairdo that the models sported, along with their red-and-black wedge boots. Apparently, Bowie balked at shelling out the equally high-rise designer price tag and had PVC copies made. Yamamoto also fashioned glittering ensembles for the singer that were part samurai, part sci-fi hero.
LEEE BLACK CHILDERS: I went back to America and got a job for Sixteen magazine, working for the glorious, brilliant Gloria Stavers, who taught Jim Morrison to shove his cock down the side of his leather pants so it looked big and bulging. She taught him that trick, so she was a star maker. And then the call came from David Bowie. He had become this huge sensation, and wanted us to work for him. Because the last time we went to see him it was at this little club and there were only, like, ten people there. He’d become a huge sensation and he was going to do an American tour, but he didn’t want business-type people working for him, more arty-type people.
Typical of us we just said yes, OK, even though we didn’t know anything about the music business. So Tony Zanetta, the guy who had played Andy Warhol, became the president of the company, I was vice president, and Cherry was secretary. So over he came to do the tour. Now of course we had read that interview in which he says he’s bisexual. That had preceded him of course. Now, to most of America bisexual just means gay. It’s queer. So there was a lot of backlash against that and everything. They launched a protest against him performing. And Cherry Vanilla had gotten on the radio the week before to do pre-publicity, and not only said that David was gay, but she also said that he was a Communist, somehow. So suddenly it was like this gay Communist is coming to the South to perform to their children! So the Ku Klux Klan turned out in a huge number. I was the road manager for the tour, and when we get to a town that no one had been to before, David would say, “Well, Leee, get out your guide—where are we going?” And you would look at the list of gay bars and go to a gay bar, because even though it wasn’t necessarily for any gay purpose, a gay bar is just somewhere you can be more comfortable, if you’re acting like David did then, as Ziggy Stardust—so that’s how we did the whole tour. We never had any trouble except once in Seattle, Washington. We looked up a bar in the gay guide and went to it, and it was some sort of vocal power dance of some kind, and everyone in the whole bar was in drag. Everyone was stoned. You know, there were nuns, drag nuns. It was a totally wild night. The next morning I wake up with the phone ringing, and it’s Tony Zanetta saying, Is David with you? I said no; someone was, but it wasn’t David! He said, We can’t find David, he’s disappeared. So we spent four hours in total panic because we had to get on a plane that afternoon to fly to Arizona for the next gig. No David.
Suddenly the phone rang and it was David. And we said, David, where are you? And he said, I don’t know! I don’t know where I am and there are all these people. Everyone was so crazy and now I’m in the middle of a house and when I look out of the window all I see is trees—I think I’m in the middle of a forest somewhere. So I went and got a bellboy from the hotel and asked him if he knew anything about the area, the geography. And he was a groupie, so he got on the phone with David for about ten minutes, and managed to work out where he was. So we were able to go and get him. But that was the most of any trouble we’d ever had.
I remember an episode about gayness in Memphis, Tennessee, with the promoter who was promoting David’s show. And he had a side line in running a male brothel. Not really a brothel but like a call-boy service. And I went down to make sure the hall was all right promotionally, ahead of time. And of course the first question he asked me was, “Is David really gay?” I found something like that really quite impertinent. David really sings, and he really writes his own songs, but whether or not he sucks cocks is really none of the promoter’s business. So I said, “Really, this is not what we’re here for.” And it took me a really long time for me to convince him that I was serious. Because if he was gay, and I was gay, and anyone else in the entourage was gay, then he’d supply us for our whole stay at Memphis with gorgeous escorts, as all part of the service. And of course once I found out that that was what he was on about, then naturally I was totally thrilled. This guy was so beautiful. And then we were met, with David, at the station. We were met by the Memphis police, and were escorted through town with a motorcycle escort, stopping all traffic as we went through in a limousine. And the police walked right through into the hotel, where the big hospitality suite had been, and all these gorgeous rent boys were just standing there waiting for us, and all the police were with us too, and it was all just like, “Cool!” No one had any problems at all with anything, it was really weird. It was like something out of an old polyamory-type novel.
NICK KENT: I met Bowie in 1973 in Detroit. I was with BP Fallon, who was Marc Bolan’s publicist at the time, who was a crazy guy. He didn’t know Bowie but he knew he was in town playing a gig, so he called up the hotel and tried to arrange a meeting. We went down to the hotel, and talked to Bowie’s bodyguard, and we were told to come back after the gig. So we went to the gig, which was extraordinary, and if you think the Ziggy shows in Britain were decadent, you should have been on the US tour. They were wild. In Detroit and Michigan, which were unhinged rock cities, a lot of people were taking drugs at gigs. Those gigs were like Fellini’s Satyricon. If you went into the toilets people were openly having sex, everyone was taking Quaaludes or cocaine; it was mad, completely mad. People would go to David Bowie concerts in London and they’d turn up as peacocks, it was very much a fashion show, as though you were in Paris. In America it was like, How fucked up can we get? That was Bowie’s audience, as somehow it was more radical to be sexually ambiguous in America.
So we went back to the hotel after the gig, and Bowie was very composed, wearing these pristine Oxford bags and a mauve shirt, and he looked incredibly androgynous. He was in full makeup. This was the Aladdin Sane tour, although the record hadn’t been released yet. He had an acetate of the album, and he played us the first side, saying he couldn’t play us the second side in case Tony Defries found out. What really struck me was how he looked at me. This was the first time we had had eye-to-eye contact, and I remember him looking at me and checking me out. He was like a robot—he was working out exactly what I was worth to him. And he was working out exactly what persona he was going to show to me: I’m going to humor you, but I have to watch out for you, (a) because you’re a journalist, and (b) because you’re a bit of a loose cannon because you’re dressed up like Siegfried and Roy. You could see him computing all this. He was very friendly, courteous, but he wasn’t going to let anything slip. I asked him for an interview and he said we’d do it in Los Angeles at the end of the tour, although I could tell that he was thinking he was going to stick with Charlie Murray, as he was his outlet at the NME. We went back the second night and the atmosphere was very different because he’d decided to have a party, and as the word had got out, the suite was full of a whole bunch of Detroit street life. There were a lot of really messed up people in that room, and Bowie was kind of alarmed. He couldn’t escape. He wasn’t on drugs and he looked completely straight. There were a couple of girls who tried rolling a joint and they were kicked out. He was very paranoid about anything to do with drugs, as he didn’t want to get busted. He also didn’t like anything to do with marijuana, and he was alarmed by people’s behavior at this party. It was in his personal suite and he couldn’t leave, which was a mistake. He looked out of control.
WENDY LEIGH: David used sex right from the very beginning to get what he wanted. He was obviously genetically blessed, and didn’t mind who knew it. He used it shamelessly. David did in a way what Freud did: he paved the way for people who perhaps had frustrating sex lives, who were not heterosexual, who didn’t just want a life spent in the missionary position, who perhaps felt alone, who maybe felt embarrassed about wanting more out of their sex lives. He freed people from the prison of their sexual desires, anyone who wasn’t mainstream. He said it’s all right to dress up as a woman, he said it’s all right to be gay, bisexual, trisexual, it’s all all right.
MICHAEL KAPLAN (JOURNALIST): In the early ’70s, the Sunset Strip was a magnet for rock stars: Bowie, Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, Mott the Hoople, the Who. They all hung out in the VIP rooms of louche L.A. nightclubs like E Club, the Rainbow, and Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. And with them, of course, came groupies. Scantily clad fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds like Sable Starr and Lynn “Queenie” Koenigsaecker sipped cherry cola, dropped pills, and evolved into pubescent dream girls for the platform-shoed rockers who could get anything and anyone they desired.
TONY ZANETTA: Rodney got all these kids worked up about David so much that when he arrived he arrived a star because he had all these new fans. Those little girls were charming; they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen fifteen years old, those groupies. But they were lovely. So adorable. Lori Lightning and Sable Starr were the most documented ones.
LORI MATTIX (AKA LORI LIGHTNING; FORMER GROUPIE): What I remember most about the E Club was Bowie. I met him when he was doing the Spiders from Mars Tour. I had not yet turned fifteen and he wanted to take me to his hotel room. I was still a virgin and terrified. He had hair the color of carrots, no eyebrows, and the whitest skin imaginable. I grabbed on to [DJ and club co-owner] Rodney Bingenheimer and said I was with him. So we all just hung out and talked. I had probably kissed boys by that point, but I wasn’t ready for David Bowie.
Next time Bowie was in town, though, maybe five months later, I got a call at home from his bodyguard, a huge black guy named Stuey. He told me that David wanted to take me to dinner. Obviously, I had no homework that night. Fuck homework. I wasn’t spending a lot of time at school anyway. I said that I would like to go but that I wanted to bring my friend Sable. She was dying to fuck Bowie. I figured that she would sleep with him while I got to hang out and have fun. At the time, Sable and her sister Coral were up in Laurel Canyon. People there were so high all the time—Quaaludes, heroin, whatever…
We got to the Beverly Hilton and all went up to Bowie’s enormous suite. I found myself more and more fascinated by him. He was beautiful and clever and poised. I was incredibly turned on. Bowie excused himself and left us in this big living room with white shag carpeting and floor-to-ceiling windows. Stuey brought out Champagne and hash. We were getting stoned when, all of a sudden, the bedroom door opens and there is Bowie in this fucking beautiful red and orange and yellow kimono.
He focused his famously two-colored eyes on me and said, “Lori, darling, can you come with me?” Sable looked like she wanted to murder me. He walked me through his bedroom and into the bathroom, where he dropped his kimono. He got into the tub, already filled with water, and asked me to wash him. Of course I did. Then he escorted me into the bedroom, gently took off my clothes, and de-virginized me.
Two hours later, I went to check on Sable. She was all fucked up in the living room, walking around, fogging up windows and writing, “I want to fuck David.” I told him what she was doing and that I felt so bad. Bowie said, “Well, darling, bring her in.” That night I lost my virginity and had my first threesome. The next morning, there was banging on the door and it was fucking [Bowie’s wife] Angie. I was terrified of her. David said not to worry about it. They were already at the point where they had separate rooms.
TONY ZANETTA: No one talked about the age of the girls at the time, and it wasn’t an issue at all. You can’t judge 1972 by 2017 standards. There was a magazine called Star that was completely devoted to these girls, prepubescent groupies. It was as common as mud and nobody batted an eye.
LORI MATTIX: You need to understand that I didn’t think of myself as underage. I was a model. That time of my life was so much fun. It was a period in which everything seemed possible.
HANIF KUREISHI: He loved black women. He really had a thing about black women.
AVA CHERRY (SINGER): It was 1973, and I was living in New York working as a model. And my manager at the time handed me this album, Ziggy Stardust. And I looked at it and thought, he’s cute, but he had green hair. And I go, “Who’s this?” When I took the album home I loved it. He could sing as well as being cute. I was friends with Stevie Wonder, and he was doing a show at Carnegie Hall. He says to me, “Ava, I know you know all the places around, where can we have the after party after Carnegie Hall?” So I suggested Genesis, where I was working as a waitress, which was an upscale disco owned by Hiroaki Aoki, who launched Benihana. So Stevie has his after-party there, with Lou Reed, Bill Cosby, Aretha Franklin, and everyone, and it was amazing. My manager comes up and goes: “You know that guy whose record I gave you, David Bowie? I invited him to the party.” Apparently he had just played Radio City. I’m singing to myself, and David comes over to me, introduces himself to me and says, “Oh, are you a singer?” His hair was red and mine was blond, and he says, “Wow, I really love your look!” So we sit and talk, and he mentions his new album, Aladdin Sane, and this tour he’s got coming up in Japan. He asks if I want to go to Japan with him, as a singer in the band, and tells me he’ll meet me at RCA the next day and introduce me to his manager. So the next day I meet Tony Defries, I audition for Mick, Trevor, and Woody, and I’m given all his records and an itinerary for the tour—and then David takes me to dinner, at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where he was staying. We had a wonderful dinner and then went to see Charlie Mingus. I really didn’t love Charlie Mingus but he did, so we went, and he was really nice and I felt as though he was a perfect gentleman. David was a really smart man and I was very taken with him. I was really falling for him. He obviously felt the same so he invited me back to the Gramercy Park Hotel, where we had some drinks, listened to Aladdin Sane and then one thing led to another. It was so romantic, and felt like magic to me. I’d never met anyone like him before, and had never slept with a foreigner. But then next morning the doorbell rings and it was Angie. She was very bombastic, like “Hello, darling!” I was a kid, feeling that I was being blown into a little bit of a riot, but I didn’t know how much of a riot. I said, “Who is this?” And she said, “Oh, I’m David’s wife! I’m Angie!” So I tried very hard to keep my facial expressions from going, Huh? Because I had really fallen for this guy. Then she goes just as quickly as she arrived—“Goodbye, see you!” Just like it was nothing. David sees the look on my face and then tells me they have an open marriage. When I ask what that means he says she’s free to sleep with whoever she wants to and so am I. I said, “That’s kind of messy though, huh?” And he said, “No it works out quite well because most of the time she’s on the other side of the world in France and I’m over here and when I’m over there she’s over here.” He told me to just stop worrying. I had all these questions as I’d completely fallen in love with him and I just wanted it to be the way he said that it was going to be. So I thought if his wife is telling me that they have an open marriage and he’s telling me that it’s OK then maybe it is. I really wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. They were so busy trying to convince me that everything was cool. So that’s how I ended up dealing with it.
He said we were going to go on tour together, and that we were going to have a great time, and he was going to send me the tickets. So I said I was going to go to Chicago to say goodbye to my parents and that he could send the tickets there. I quit my job, my apartment, and when I got to Chicago I got a telegram that says, “Dear Ava, so sorry but the tour’s been cancelled.” Something to do with him being sick. I wanted to die. I was like, “Huh?” So anyway, I’d already met this older guy, who had invited me to spend the summer with him in Monaco. I didn’t really like him, but now I had nothing to do and nowhere to live, so I said yes. I was delusional. I thought to myself I’m going to go to Europe and find this David Bowie and tell him what I think of him. I mean, I didn’t want to leave it like this. So I fly into Monaco and it is the most incredible landscape. I’d never been to Europe before and I felt like Cinderella. He picks me up and takes me to his beautiful apartment. I still didn’t want to be with him and I was kind of just grinning and bearing it, but OK, I was in Europe and that was my main goal. I went out to parties, and met people like Omar Sharif, but every day I’d been playing Ziggy Stardust at the house. He’d come into my room and I’d be playing this record and he’d go, “Why are you playing this guy’s record over and over?” I told him I wanted to go and find David, and then he realized that I didn’t want to be with him. So he gave me some money, and I went to Paris. I spent eight months there, working as a model, going back and forth between Spain and England and wherever. And I was doing pretty well. But I was still looking for David Bowie.
After eight months, I’m in this bar and I hear someone say his name. So my ears prick up. I go running down to the end; “Excusez-moi, savez-vous David Bowie?” And this guy says he’s in Castel, the famous club, right now. So I run over. I looked nice, but I wasn’t dressed for Castel. Anyway, I run down the stairs and bump into his bodyguard, Stuey. A Cockney lad. He sees me and says, “Ava, Ava what are you doing here? The guvner’s going to be shocked when he sees you!” And I was like, “Yeah, I bet he is.” So he takes my hand and takes me over to him. He was sitting with this woman who was dripping in diamonds and pearls and all that, but he looks at me, says, “Let’s go” and off we go. Anyway, we make up, he says he’s going to get me a job in London, and then nothing happens. So I find out he’s recording at the Château d’Hérouville and I take a train to find him. And then we were together for the next four years.
MICK ROCK: The 1973 American tour blew him up. Everything he did blew him up just a little bit more.
TONY ZANETTA: The US tour was a circus, but there was never any money. The advances were not big, and the gigs weren’t generating money. Tony Defries just made it work. He was insistent that David wouldn’t open for anybody; he had to headline. He was going to tour in the US as a star. Limos, first-class hotels, no interviews. But there was no money. Everything was charged to RCA. I literally had a bag full of petty cash. If you wanted cigarettes you came to me and I’d give you some money. It was a random tour anyway because none of it was planned, and further complicated because David wouldn’t fly, so we had to work out how to get from point A to point B. In a week you would normally play six or seven gigs to make the money, but because David wouldn’t fly we would do three, two, sometimes only one gig a week. We went from Arizona to Florida for one gig. Madness. RCA had an in-house travel bureau, so everything was booked through them. Tony was meant to pay them but of course he never did. From September to December we spent $400,000, and we brought in about $100,000. Defries wasn’t squirreling money away, he was using whatever money he could find in order to move this machine.
CHRIS O’LEARY (BLOGGER): Bowie was scared of airplanes, so he took a ship, the RHMS Ellinis, home to Britain in mid-December 1972. During the trip he read Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and found, he thought, similarities between the novel (completed months before the 1929 crash, and whose narrative ends in a near-future with World War Two already under way) and his own times. He soon got a song out of it.
At a London press conference in the summer of 1972, just as Ziggy Stardust broke, Bowie seemed unnerved by his success, though he had been trying to be a pop star for nearly a decade. Something disturbed him about his rise, he said, along with Lou Reed’s new prominence (“Walk on the Wild Side” would hit the top ten) and the glam boom. Once there had been well-groomed boys in matching suits on Top of the Pops. Now there was Roxy Music, who looked like extraterrestrials in a witness relocation program, or Slade and Roy Wood, hill trolls in Halloween costumes, or the Sweet, a bubblegum group who leered at their audience and seemed to be sharing a private joke. It was a sign that modern civilization had reached the point of absurdity—its entertainments had become bizarre and sordid, even menacing.
In Waugh’s novel, ridiculous young people dress up in costumes, sleep with each other, have treasure hunts on city streets at midnight, drink and drug themselves to oblivion; it ends on a battlefield. “Aladdin Sane” was Bowie’s parallel sequel: a premature epitaph for his own lost generation. Though this time the party would end with a nuclear holocaust (hence the song’s “(1913–1938–197?)” subhead—Bowie seemed to really think that the world would end before 1980).
There’s a sadness and frailty to “Aladdin Sane,” set in B minor, with its lyric a meager collection of fragmented images—glissando strings, bouquets of faded roses. It’s as though Bowie realized the decadence of Waugh’s era had a panache his own time lacked. Bowie had just come off a months-long rock tour of America in 1972, and had endured/enjoyed the debauchery, the loud fashions, the noise, the bad food. It was a flyblown existence and Bowie wanted a nobler victim: in “Aladdin Sane” he invented a more glittering world to snuff out.
DAVID BOWIE: Aladdin Sane was a very schizoid record, a very paranoid record made during a period when I really wasn’t myself. Honestly I wasn’t really sure who I was, as the whole Ziggy Stardust phenomenon was getting out of control. I was becoming ludicrously successful, but I was starting to be surrounded by very strange people, the kind that attach themselves to you when you become famous. There were some very mixed-up people on that tour, including myself, and I didn’t like myself very much at the time. In all honesty I had pretty much exhausted everything I wanted to do with strict rock and roll, as it had all come to a head with Ziggy Stardust. Aladdin Sane was really just Ziggy in America.
MIKE GARSON: By the time we started recording Aladdin Sane I couldn’t do any wrong, but I learned a lot. I wanted to learn everything about the rock and roll world. Ken Scott was fabulous and really knew his stuff.
KEN SCOTT: All our ears and minds had changed, and we were looking for different things. The drum sound was much more live than it had been before. With David’s arrangements—he threw a lot more in than he did in Ziggy. And then there was the addition of Mike Garson. There had been acoustic piano before, which Ronno or Bowie had done, but they’re not the greatest keyboard players in the world, and Mike made a big difference. On Ziggy it was all very sparse—there had been two bits of synth, that was it. Now on Aladdin Sane there were a lot more keyboards, Mellotrons, a Moog synthesizer, as well as acoustic piano.
MIKE GARSON: On the solo on “Aladdin Sane” he was encouraging me to go back to playing more free-form jazz. There were these two chords that were quite simple, and because they were so simple I thought they called for some bluesy playing. So I played a blues solo first. And he said, “No.” I played a Latin solo. He said, “No.” He wanted something avant-garde. So I did it in one take. It was he who pulled it out of me, because it wasn’t my first choice. Now, once he said that, it was a take one, but it wasn’t my choice to go there, so I give him big kudos for that. And everybody always wants to talk about that one track; they all want to talk about that one solo. He was the best producer I ever worked with, because he gave me so much. In truth the notes found me as much as I found them, and the solo seemed to come out of nowhere, although I am asked to replicate it all the time. I’ve played on maybe three thousand albums, every fucking day there’s at least five emails connected with “Aladdin Sane” from someone somewhere in the world, that specific track, and I don’t understand. I’m not resentful, I’m just baffled, because even though I’ve done all this other stuff, I’ll probably go down in history known only for this, and if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.
BRIAN DUFFY (PHOTOGRAPHER): Tony [Defries] realized that in order to get the record company really going, you had to get them up to their neck in debt, which was of course a masterstroke. He wanted to make the most expensive cover he possibly could get a record company to pay for, because he realized that if it cost £5,000, the record company were going to pay attention. Tony said, “Can you make it expensive?” No problem. One: dye transfer, a genius method of being able to spend the most amount of money to get a reproduction from a color transparency onto a piece of paper. Two: get the plate made in Switzerland—the most expensive place in the world to get plates made. Then to employ me to design it and create it—even better, more wasteful. Then we went to Conways, who were the most expensive typographical house—more money.
At the cover shoot, Duffy decided to photograph Bowie naked. He had also been making various doodles of a lightning bolt, inspired by the ones he’d seen at a Ziggy Stardust concert (which Bowie had borrowed from the Elvis Presley “Taking Care of Business” lightning flash). However, it was Bowie himself who came up with the idea of the lightning flash as a cover motif, and then the makeup artist Pierre Laroche (the “Picasso of Pan Stik”) suggested putting it across his face. But when Duffy saw it he said, “No, not fucking like that, like this,” and drew a much bigger flash right across Bowie’s face. Then he said to Pierre, “Now, fill that in.” Which he did. The red flash is so shiny, so glacé, because it was actually filled in with lipstick.
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE: My early hero worship took many avenues, and bordered on stalking. Reading that he’d studied mime with Lindsay Kemp, I took mime classes with Kemp myself in a church hall in Battersea, vainly hoping Bowie might drop by for a refresher lesson. One wet evening, I located that sacred site, 23 Heddon Street in London’s Soho, where the Brian Ward portrait was snapped for the Ziggy Stardust album sleeve, with the famous red telephone kiosk. There wasn’t a lot to see, frankly, but it made a connection. Having started a club with Craig Brown to invite celebrities down to lecture at school, an early guest after Elton John and Brian Eno was Angie Bowie, who ate spears of asparagus in an excitingly suggestive way over dinner, and satisfied our craving for Bowie info at one degree of separation. (She had arrived with Bowie’s personal photographer, Leee Black Childers—yes, three e’s, this was the ’70s—and we quizzed them both forensically: “Where do you and David live?”—Oakley Street, Chelsea—“Do you share makeup tips?”—Sure we do.)
MARY FINNIGAN: In 1973 there was a Ziggy performance at Earls Court, and David had given us very good seats. Afterwards they threw a party, and I took Caroline, my daughter. After the party, David came up to me, wearing his Ziggy outfit, he put his arm round my shoulders and walked me to the door, and he said, “Mary Finnigan you’re a wonderful woman and I will never forget you,” and I never saw him again.
OLIVER JAMES: It must have been strange for him, not knowing if he was going to die at a young age, but the reason he moved on from people so often was probably because of his very early experiences of being let down by Peggy, which I think would have been very likely. Peggy would have been quite self-orientated in caring for him as a baby and would have shut him out. Also, his narcissism came from his father’s favoritism of him. He was really loved by his father, and continually celebrated. He thought he was entitled, and often talked about being a leader, having grandiose plans for people. He sings about it too, discussing his feelings about becoming more important than anyone else—and so on a practical level, he worked out which people could be useful to him, and which he could afford to lose. “Thank you very much and goodbye.” After all those years faffing about with different groups, he learnt how to be pretty ruthless. He was a control freak, and because of how he was treated by his mother when he was small, he was needy, he got bored quickly, and needed new experiences every day.
NICK KENT: I lambasted him for the Earls Court gig, which he never forgave me for. In one of his last interviews before his forced retirement, he was asked if there was any criticism which still stung and he mentioned the Earls Court review. Earls Court held fourteen thousand people and was a huge place. It was a mistake by Tony Defries because he was greedy, and the place wasn’t soundproofed. The sound went everywhere. Big halls often didn’t carry music, and if you were Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, or David Bowie you needed to play big halls. Earls Court was a disaster. I genuinely regret some of the things I wrote about him in that piece, particularly about the theatricality, which I initially didn’t like. Talking about it now it just sounds ridiculous, but there were issues of authenticity with Bowie. To the rock critic of the time, Iggy Pop was authentic and Bowie was a mime artist. Lester Bangs didn’t like the theatricality either. But then it was over almost as soon as it had started, when Ziggy went to Hammersmith.
MIKE GARSON: It was terrible when the band found out how much money I was making. I was just on the plane one evening, and Woody asked me how much I was making a week on the tour. I said, “I was embarrassed to tell you, because I know you guys are making three times more.” So I said I was making $800 a week and his face turned white. He said they were making $80. So on the next tour I got reduced to $500, and they went up to $500, but it was a horrible moment. But it soon didn’t matter.
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE: It didn’t occur to us devoted fans that the Ziggy era would not continue forever. So it came as a devastating shock when, on July 3, 1973, a year almost to the day when he’d first appeared in my life on the tuck-shop TV, he announced at a Hammersmith Odeon gig that, “Not only is this the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you.” “Tears as Bowie Bows Out,” reported the London Evening Standard, which was where I first spotted the shattering news. A period of mourning ensued. But gradually it emerged that it was not David Bowie who would never perform again, but only his alter ego, Ziggy.
DENIS O’REGAN (PHOTOGRAPHER): A friend asked me to go with him to see the Ziggy Stardust show at Hammersmith Odeon, and I went along expecting to see just a rock star, and I had never seen anything like it—it was rock music, theatre, mime, it was just way beyond anything I had ever expected to see at a rock concert. So I borrowed a camera, although I couldn’t really use it, and all I really got when I did use it was shots of knickers being waved. But the real disappointment was the next day when I saw the headlines and it said David Bowie had retired. I didn’t believe it at the time, but it really affected me. When I eventually got to know David, and started shooting him regularly, he got really specific about what I did and didn’t photograph. One day, David said, disarmingly, “So what are you doing with all the pictures you don’t show me?” So I said, I put them in my bin. He said, “In your room?” And I said, “In the wastepaper bin.” And he didn’t say, “Get out of my sight,” but it was something like that. He was really, really angry, because he said the cleaner could pick up those pictures and get them all published. He took complete ownership of his image, and hated seeing things that he hadn’t sanctioned. He could really lose his rag.
CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: At the NME we weren’t kingmakers, but for a brief period I was a conduit. I started to suspect this when people started to get a bit snarky, saying that I was [Bowie’s] “representative on Earth.” One thing I became aware of quite quickly was that a lot of journalists he’d dealt with in earlier stages of his career, some of whom had actually been very supportive of him, were suddenly not flavor of the month and he wouldn’t talk to them anymore. With each phase he wanted to deal with a new bunch of writers who wouldn’t necessarily have firsthand recollection of the last round. He didn’t want people writing, “Oh I knew him when he was a hippie with ratty hair and holes in his jeans.” So the likes of Penny Valentine and Chris Welch didn’t get to talk to him anymore. He was talking to me. Then the lazy Susan rotated a bit more and it was different people again. But each time he wanted to be able to present himself as a new person. Then of course sometimes he wouldn’t talk. I remember being flown out to Fort Lauderdale at the tail end of 1972 to see him do a Spiders show, and he said hello and traded a bit of small talk but he wouldn’t sit for a full interview. It was all pretty rationed. I was flattered by the attention, but remember I was a young naïve kid from the provinces, and the whole thing was a novelty. Getting published was a novelty. Getting free stuff was a novelty. Suddenly you’re moving in the world you’ve only read about.
For a certain period, I was the person he spoke to. An example of this is his retirement concert at Hammersmith Odeon. The week of the Hammersmith concerts, I had a week’s holiday booked in Cornwall with my then girlfriend. I’d seen several shows on that tour, so I thought, I know it’s the end of the tour, but it’s just another show. I’ve seen it. I’ve got this holiday booked, I’m a bit knackered and I’ve seen a lot of his gigs. A few days beforehand Jeff Beck’s girlfriend had rung me up and said that Jeff would quite like to go to this show, and I’d called Bowie’s office and asked them to sort it. They said of course, because he was Mick Ronson’s idol. Then when I was on the phone, they said, “Hold on, David wants to talk to you.” He came on the phone and said, “Look, I’m knocking it on the head after the final show. Don’t tell anyone apart from the people in the office because even the band don’t know yet.” He said he wanted the story on the front of the NME the day after the final gig. He knew when we went to press, and as the gig was on the Tuesday, there was just enough time to do it. The paper was on the streets in London on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday in the rest of the country. I went and told Nick Logan [the editor], I gave him the quotes and we put the front page together, and the front page was actually coming off the presses before Bowie had actually announced onstage that he was killing off Ziggy Stardust. The only other weekly music paper that had the news was Record Mirror, and that was only because they went to press a day after us. Sounds and Melody Maker were well pissed off, as they were caught with their Kansai Yamamoto strides down.
ANGIE BOWIE: The boys were unceremoniously dismissed, without my prior knowledge. I guess David was informed by Defries. Because they asked for money and Defries didn’t want to pay. David and I were still thinking Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but Defries wanted to make him start thinking of David Bowie as a solo artist and then hiring other people. But we weren’t ready. I wasn’t prepared, and David wasn’t in a way either. Because you know, it was a bit quick.
TREVOR BOLDER: We didn’t know anything about it beforehand. I was a bit like, “What the hell’s he on about?” Woody thought about walking offstage before we did “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.” He told me later that if he’d known beforehand, he wouldn’t have done the gig. That’s why they didn’t tell us. They couldn’t take the risk we’d say “Up yours!” and walk. Everybody else knew. Mick Ronson knew. They just kept it from me and Woody.
It started out as a band, really, and we were all in it together. Like the Musketeers. He asked us to join him and we said OK, because we were on a record deal at the time and we gave that up to be with him. We were promised the same share of everything if we would do this, and it was, like, David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars, or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. We started out playing in clubs in London and, as a band, we went to all the gigs together in a car, but the bigger he got—and the band would go wherever he’d go—the less we actually saw him. We only saw him as we walked onstage. He separated himself from us towards the end; he was like a solo artist that didn’t need us, while in the beginning he definitely needed us.
We just sort of floated along with it. It didn’t intimidate me, as I was married with two children and I had to get on with that side of life as well. So I really enjoyed what we did, I really enjoyed playing. We didn’t have the sort of pressure that David had. He had all the interviews, and everything was on his shoulders and we were the band behind it all. We just got on and did what we always wanted to do since we first started playing as kids.
DAVID BOWIE: Ziggy was a monster but he was my monster. My very own monster, ha!
MARY LOVETT: The Hammersmith Odeon show was extraordinary. Peter [Frampton] was on tour with Humble Pie, so I went with our good friend Terry Doran, who worked at Apple and looked after George Harrison. The show was particular for many reasons, not least the fact that everyone was dressed up. Not just some of them, but everyone, as they felt they could be. David really legitimized everyone who wanted to feel as though they could express themselves. The Hammersmith Odeon was like a huge fancy dress party. Terry and I also went to the party afterwards at the Café Royal. It was an outrageous party. David and Angie were there, obviously, along with Mick and Bianca Jagger, Lou Reed, everyone. I remember Angie finally arrived, walking through the room like an empress, arm in arm with Bianca, who was carrying a riding whip and wearing a headdress. A very interesting costume. You could tell by the people at the concert and the party afterwards that he was embracing a lot of outside people who were finding a home with him. So I realized that was really different and unusual. He was touching a lot of people who needed a place to go. I didn’t really know how he was doing it but I thought it was pretty amazing. He touched so many people. When he announced he was retiring Ziggy we were all so shocked, as it was such a brave thing to do. The Café Royal party was like a court, almost a court of clowns and jesters in fancy costumes who were sort of flaunting about.
TREVOR BOLDER: As David got bigger, so the Spiders were pushed to the margins. I’ve got mixed memories about that time, really. There are really bad memories towards the end, when he changed as a person, and that was difficult to cope with at the time, because we were friends. He was really nice until then, just a regular sort of folk, but the bigger he got, the bigger his head got, and the less important we were to him. From all the stories I’ve heard, with all the musicians that were with him, speaking to lots of them who have worked with him over the years, he trod that thin line: when he didn’t need you, he’d discard you, but while he needed you, he was very friendly towards you. I saw him do it to a few people as well—they used to do shows with him, and once he finished using them, he didn’t want to see them again, and if they came to gigs, he wouldn’t let them in. They tried to see him play, and he’d be like, “I don’t want them here tonight, I don’t want them here!” That’s just the way he worked. He took the best bits from people and then discarded the rest.
But the worst point was when it all finished—being out of work, being penniless: in the end, we had no money, and I had a family, and Bowie didn’t really care about that. I’ll never forget what he did then. He just didn’t want to know, and me and Woody and Mick were really pissed off. Honestly, who wouldn’t be? But it was a shame really, a shame that we sort of drifted apart.
I think we could have gone another year. I think Bowie knew that as well; I think later on he thought it could have gone that bit further. And I always thought that the Spiders, with Mick, should have gone on as a band on its own, and done something as well. But it was all broken up and separated by the management, because they didn’t want that. They didn’t want the Spiders to be out on the road as a band, because they thought it might have taken away from David. They just wanted to give Mick his solo album, and me and Woody were left in the lurch, and we didn’t know where to go or what to do. So we sort of floundered around with no money.
ROBIN DERRICK: When I was at Arena [magazine] in the early ’90s, we did a Bowie special, and I arranged for the magazine to get permission to photograph all Bowie’s old Ziggy costumes. I flew to Lausanne, Bowie’s home in Switzerland. Almost all of the clothes from his tours from the last twenty years were stored and archived there, and the day after arriving, having hired a watch photographer’s studio half an hour away, Coco Schwab, Bowie’s long-term assistant, turned up in a van with dozens of outfits, all hung perfectly and draped in cellophane. Bowie had put the outfits together himself. There was the kabuki kimono, the pale blue suit from the “Life on Mars?” video, the circuit-board jumpsuit Bowie wore on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and the quilted one he wore on Top of the Pops. Two things were remarkable about the outfits, the first being that this was exactly what they were, outfits, not street clothes. The red boots copied from Kansai Yamamoto were literally held together with tape. I always imagined that the outfits would look more like the things you’d find in stores, but all of them looked like stage costumes. Reinforcing the idea that Ziggy wasn’t Bowie, he was an act. When I looked through the costumes, some hadn’t been touched since they were last worn, and there was even a beer stain on one of the kimonos. The second thing that shocked me was how small the clothes were: I was able to wrap my hands around most of the waists. They were absolutely tiny. When we photographed some of the clothes again ten years later, when I was working for Vogue, we got Kate Moss to model them. But she couldn’t get into them, so we had to call up Bowie and ask if he minded if we let them out. He didn’t mind.
PAUL MORLEY (JOURNALIST): He played with the idea of being a rock star but he was very good at sabotaging that role. And at the moment when he looked like he might become Billy Joel or Elton John—that moment when you get accepted and therefore you are fixed, he walked away. He had to work out: How can I be famous; how can I be that star that I want to be, but also be able to keep changing? Because of course the very consequences often of keeping changing is that you ruin your popularity because those that love you want you to be the same. So he managed to be absolutely the same all the time, always David Bowie, by constantly changing.