Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be a wasted effort . . . I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time.
– Albert Hofmann, describing his first-ever LSD trip, 16 April 1943, in LSD: My Problem Child
I’m treading the backward path. Mostly, I just waste my time.
– Syd Barrett, to Mick Rock, 1971
Everybody was convincing me that I was a messiah . . . I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy . . . It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity; I put myself very near the line.
– David Bowie, Cracked Actor, 1974
For Syd Barrett, the songs had simply ceased to come. Not that he had yet surrendered to the inevitable, even after he returned to the family home in Cambridge. Perhaps – like Nick Drake – he was hoping against hope that such a move would reattach his musical muse to its wellspring. Already he was talking about returning to his original love, painting. Back in March 1971 he had described his day-to-day life to Melody Maker’s Michael Watts as ‘pretty unexciting. I work in a cellar, down in a cellar . . . I think of me being a painter eventually.’ But, by December, Barrett’s muse seemed to be wholly becalmed. When his old photographer-pal Mick Rock popped in to see him in the guise of Rolling Stone’s English correspondent, Barrett’s frustration with himself was evident in much of what he said. At one point he confessed to Rock: ‘I may seem to get hung-up, that’s because I am frustrated work-wise, terribly. The fact is I havent done anything this year . . . I’ve got an idea that there must be someone [I could] play with.’
Rock interpreted their conversation as Syd’s way of ‘trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He talked about “treading the backward path”, retracing his steps, trying to find himself in some way, finding the kid in him and going back there to sort out his identity . . . His mum brought us tea and iced sponge in the garden. Poor lady . . . she didn’t know what the hell was going on.’ Although Barrett seemed ‘very up and bubbly’, Rock also remembers how ‘he would laugh in strange, strange moments. Like there was a joke, but it was only his joke.’ Evidently he was still not sure, what exactly is a joke? For all the enforced jollity, there was this ineffable sense that Barrett already knew he’d penned his last. At the end of the afternoon, Barrett offered to show Rock ‘a book of all my songs before you go’, then cryptically adding: ‘There’s really nothing to say.’ And one suspects there really was nothing to say.
If Syd himself was a spent force by the end of 1971, his influence on the future course of rock was once again about to be felt around this dark globe, as two of music’s most enduring statements took the fate of the ex-Floyd frontman as a jumping-off point. Issued almost exactly a year apart, but both initially conceived in the weeks between Rock’s conversation with Barrett and its 23 December appearance in Rolling Stone, David Bowie’s The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon would become the two benchmarks for most forms of English rock from here to Punk. And each took its cue from the laughing Madcap himself.
Of Syd’s former bandmates, Roger Waters was the one who had been thinking of writing about the man who showed him the way. It was a case of finding the right context. And that was not as part of Meddle, the Pink Floyd album EMI had just released when the band convened at Broadhurst Gardens for four days in mid-to-late December to begin preparing a new live set for a series of UK shows scheduled across the first two months of 1972. The song ‘Brain Damage’, a.k.a. ‘The Lunatic is On the Grass’, which he presented to the other three at their first December rehearsal, was something he had been playing around with at the Meddle sessions that summer but had not developed any further. Only at this point did he decide Syd was a subject matter worthy of his pen, warranting his time and providing a way of reinforcing his assumption of the de facto leadership of the band that was once Barrett’s:
Roger Waters: There was a residue of Syd in all of this. It was pretty recent history. Syd had been the central creative force in the early days – [while] maybe I provided some of the engine room – and so his having succumbed to schizophrenia was an enormous blow . . . That was certainly expressed in ‘Brain Damage’. [2004]
Originally intended as the closing theme to their new song-suite, the opening image of ‘Brain Damage’: ‘The lunatic is on the grass, remembering games, and daisy-chains and laughs / Got to keep the loonies on the path’, was a direct evocation of the Barrett of yesteryear. Indeed, as Waters said in 1998: ‘The grass [in “Brain Damage”] was always the square in between the River Cam and King’s College chapel . . . I don’t know why, but the song still makes me think of that piece of grass. The lunatic was Syd, really. He was obviously in my mind. It was very Cambridge-based, that whole song.’
‘Brain Damage’ was more than just another song brought to a possible Floyd project; it was the trigger for an album dealing with how life’s demands can lead people to the brink. The title of the piece when Floyd first toured with it the winter of 1972 said it all – Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics. Even without the subtitle, there was no mistaking the album’s ghost in the machine. As Dave Gilmour recently remarked: ‘There are specific references to “Syd moments” in [the] lyrics of Dark Side. Syd was a constant presence in our minds and consciences.’ At the same time, Waters already had a grander theme in mind, and it was one that would dominate all of his songwriting in the years when the Floyd were remorselessly moving towards becoming the biggest band on the planet. The plan was, in Waters’ words, to ‘do a whole thing about the pressures we personally feel that drive one over the top.’ What he did not do was spring this concept on the rest of the band until rehearsals began to assume a direction of sorts:
Dave Gilmour: Sometime after we started and got quite a few pieces of music sorta formulated vaguely, Roger came up with the specific idea of going through all the things that people go through and what drives them mad; and from that moment obviously our direction slightly changed. We started tailoring the pieces we already had to fit that concept, and Roger would tailor words in to fit the music that we had. [1977]
Floyd drummer Nick Mason believes that Waters actually hijacked a project originally conceived along broader lines: ‘The concept was originally about the pressures of modern life – travel, money and so on. But then Roger turned it into a meditation on insanity.’ Vestiges of that original conceit would continue to be represented, with ‘On the Run’ beginning life as ‘The Travel Sequence’, while Waters turned up with a home demo of the song ‘Money’ for the band to work on. But it was mortality and insanity that became the bedrock of their first album-length meditation on life.
Waters may simply have been trying to steer the others away from reworking the idea underlying their earlier performance-piece ‘The Man & the Journey’ (the subtitle of which clearly connects it to Eclipse – ‘More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd’). If that suite had been a conglomeration of songs from other projects, old and new, cobbled together to form ‘a day in the life’, Dark Side of the Moon also began with the band scrabbling around looking for old bits and pieces they could reuse. Or to utilize Gilmour’s chosen phrase, ‘You jam, you knock stuff about, you plunder your old rubbish library.’
‘Brain Damage’ was by no means the oldest piece now attached to a new canvas. ‘Us and Them’ had originally been part of a twenty-minute instrumental called ‘The Violent Sequence’, which the band had intended for Michelangelo Antonioni’s impenetrable piece of cinematic codswallop, Zabriskie Point. The sequence, composed by Richard Wright, was debuted in concert back in February 1970, even though it was fated to become one of half-a-dozen pieces Antonioni passed on. The new lyric they grafted on in December 1971 – with a title that had already served as a chapter heading in R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience (1967) – Waters initially suggested he would sing himself. After all, these lyrics intentionally developed another of his favourite themes, which he now bolted on to the song-cycle – ‘our failure to connect with each other’:
Dave Gilmour: When we started on a new album we’d always dredge through old tapes to see if there was anything left over we could make use of . . . [But] when Roger walked into Broadhurst Gardens with the idea of putting it all together as one piece with this linking theme he’d devised, that was a moment . . . You see, nobody back then had problems with the concept of concepts, so to speak. [1998]
English rock bands at this portentous juncture in rock history had no fear they would be lambasted for displaying such ambition. The concept album had yet to become a naughty word. The NME had still not devised their own send-up of Tommy, called Dummy, or begun to ridicule the pretensions of many an English prog-rocker with headlines such as, ‘Is this man a prat?’ If there was a heyday for the extended song-cycle or theme, it was now. While Floyd rehearsed their new concept, Jethro Tull were putting the finishing touches to a two-part, forty-five-minute rock symphony called Thick as a Brick, which told listeners to ‘mark the precise nature of your fear’. Tulls front-man Ian Anderson later claimed it was ‘a spoof of the genre’, though if it was, he wisely avoided saying so at the time.
Other prog bands were just getting warmed up. Genesis, who within three years would create their own hundred-minute concept double-album, the triumphant The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, were piecing together their twenty-five-minute seven-part epic, ‘Supper’s Ready’. Yes, too, were looking to record their first side-long track, ‘Close to the Edge’, for the album of the same name. Pink Floyd themselves, as pioneers of the side-long song, were already fully conversant with what was required to put ‘it all together as one piece with this [one] linking theme.’
In fact, this was pretty much how ‘Echoes’ had been pieced together, as a compilation of smaller ‘ideas’. As the band’s engineer, John Leckie, later recalled: ‘The tapes we took to Air [studios] were filled up with lots of little ideas . . . They were all called “Nothing” – “Nothing One”, “Nothing Two” and so on . . . [“Echoes”] was conceived as one big thing, [but from] bits in various sections . . . [and] recorded that way.’ Floyd coterminously developed the work over a series of live performances, until they were absolutely satisfied they had found a way to make the whole thing blend.
This modus operandi would also inform both the new work, and its successor, Wish You Were Here. In both cases, Floyd would work on the album while simultaneously touring the material around the world for a year or so. Even in an era when bands regularly debuted their new songs months before they recorded or released them, this was a unique way of working. For now, Floyd saw an album as the conclusion of the tour-promotion-album process, not the starting point. As Gilmour points out, ‘In those days tours got booked in. And back then, they weren’t promotional vehicles; they were entities in their own right.’
Floyd were certainly treating the new piece as an entity in its own right. The UK Eclipse tour programme even came with a lyric sheet for the new songs. But certain segues were not so seamless. Eclipse in its earliest guise comprised five sequences – ‘Breathe’, ‘Time’, ‘Money’, ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Brain Damage’ – stitched together with a series of musical joins, some solid, others audibly coming apart at the seams; making for almost a return to the sons of nothing.
‘The Mortality Sequence’ linking ‘Time’ and ‘Money’ was an instrumental piece over which the band projected taped letters of St Paul, though it wasn’t entirely clear whether the fiercely agnostic Waters was lampooning the solace religion could provide in death, or demonstrating that religious fervour led irredeemably to madness. As well as these tape cut-ups, a long ‘Travel Sequence’ gave Gilmour and Wright an opportunity to jam to their heart’s content – as of now, they didn’t know what they were ‘On the Run’ from. As such, Eclipse still contained echoes of its side-long predecessor, being the kind of music that in Richard Wright’s view, ‘we created . . . when all three of us [sic] got together and collaborated, rather than individually coming to the studio with a song’.
Nor for the time being was there any redemptive coda to Eclipse – the album charted the passage from birth (‘Breathe’) to mental breakdown. (One can’t help but wonder how the album might have fared if this had continued to be the case.) As such, the final line of the work as debuted at Portsmouth Guildhall on 21 January 197226 was, ‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’; the expression ‘dark side of the moon’, ‘always [being] considered [by the band] to be a metaphor for the other side of madness’, [as cover designer Aubrey Powell avers].
Even at this juncture the band thought that single phrase was the real title of the new song-suite – though they publicly called the piece Eclipse (Medicine Head had just used Floyd’s preferred title on their own album). And Waters claims that, when he wrote this concluding line, he fully intended to suggest he personally identified with that lunatic on the grass: ‘When I say, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”, what I mean is, If you feel that you’re the only one . . . that you seem crazy ’cos you think everything is crazy you’re not alone. There’s a camaraderie involved in the idea of people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone. A number of us are willing to open ourselves up to all those possibilities.’ In another discussion of the album’s genesis, Waters suggested that fear was another very real factor in the lyrics he was now writing:
‘For me, it was very much “There but for the grace of God go I.” . . . I did feel at times close to madness myself. I can remember being in the canteen at Abbey Road [during the Dark Side sessions. I was] sitting at the table with everybody, and suddenly there was no pain; everything – the table, all the people at it – receded. The sound became tinny, and the room looked like I was looking at something through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.’
Eclipse, as such, would be superseded as the album title by the time recording started in earnest. Clarity was the order of the day. Hence, the printing of the lyrics for concert-goers even when the suite was just a performance piece – a conscious attempt to strip any residue of spacey ambiguity from their current work. Gilmour remembers Waters stating that ‘he wanted to write it absolutely straight, clear and direct. To say exactly what he wanted to say for the first time and get away from psychedelic patter and strange and mysterious warblings.’ This lurch towards a certain lyrical articulacy was perhaps Dark Side’s greatest departure from Floyd’s already redolent history. Even as they embarked on their latest month-long sojourn, culminating in four nights at London’s Rainbow, the members of the band sensed that maybe they really had managed some kinda breakthrough:
Dave Gilmour: The process went on, the rehearsing, the writing, the performing live . . . All these things came together and it became clearer and clearer, probably gradually, that we had definitely made progress and that this was going to be a bigger, better thing than [anything] we had previously done. [2003]
The Rainbow shows – which ran from 17 to 20 February 1972 – were the first point at which the world began to sit up and take notice of the new Floyd opus (though not, as legend would have it, because of the famous Tour ’72 bootleg, which contrary to myth, was not issued at the time; nor when finally released a year later did it sell in anything like the kind of numbers that have long been attributed to it). The reviewers for the music press were out in force, and took it as read that a new Floyd stage show was something worth writing about.
These shows also brought the curious, the already converted and the general prog-rock concert-goers out in their thousands. Among the curious was one Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, who had hoped to sneak in to the show incognito: only for the unfortunate lad to bump into Mike Leonard, the man responsible for all those innovative early Floyd light-shows. As Leonard recalls, ‘I [had gone] to a post-Syd Pink Floyd concert in Finsbury Park, quite an important one for them, and I met Syd lurking in the hall. I don’t think they’d even invited him, he’d just come on his own.’ If Leonard thought ‘he looked a bit . . . gaunt’, it seemed ‘he was still Syd’.
So Barrett was once again keeping tabs on ‘his band’; and one imagines that, after hearing ‘Brain Damage’, he gave the boys in the band one of those trademark quizzical looks, especially if he caught that last couplet right – the most explicit of references to his time in the band: ‘And if the band you’re in starts playing out of tune27 / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.’
At the Portsmouth concert, this preceded the music coming to a shuddering, synth-induced halt, like a sonic depiction of the dying of the light, but at The Rainbow ‘Brain Damage’ segued into a new piece, ‘Eclipse’, that seemed like a concession to the kind of hippy idealism the rest of the album rejected. Waters, ever one for the grand gesture, says he ‘felt as if the piece needed an ending . . . The [‘Eclipse’] lyric points back to what I was attempting to say at the beginning.’ It was rather a way of making the album end with a comradely call to all of those ‘people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone’, as opposed to the wholly Barrettian ‘Brain Damage’. Nonetheless, one imagines the so-called lunatic left the hall at last impressed by a Gilmour-era Floyd show.
Syd now had something to follow, which, four days later, is exactly what he set out to do. It could well be he was at The Rainbow that night precisely to check out the opposition before he debuted his new band, ironically christened Starz, at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, sharing the bill with Detroit’s loudest rabble-rousers, the MC5, who were now very much on their last, drug-addled legs. Having wondered aloud to Mick Rock back in December whether there was someone out there he could play with, Syd was in full rehearsal mode by the beginning of February with a band that also comprised the ever-industrious Twink of Pink Fairies/S.F. Sorrow fame and bassist Jack Monck. It was an impromptu jam session with Twink and Monck, after an Eddie ‘Guitar’ Burns gig at the Kings College Cellars on 26 January, which convinced him to give it one more go. Again, though, he had placed too great a burden on his sagging shoulders, and for those – like Melody Maker reviewer Roy Hollingsworth – who expected some epiphany, the 24 February gig proved to be the night of the big letdown.
It all began swimmingly with a slow version of ‘Octopus’ – Barrett resuming at the very point he had previously left the stage – followed by competent renditions of ‘Dark Globe’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’, ‘Baby Lemonade’ and ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, before he ignited the night with what Rob Chapman called in his Terrapin review, ‘a remarkable version of “Lucifer Sam”’. Misguidedly, instead of segueing into ‘See Emily Play’, a song they had rehearsed that afternoon, and leaving the crowd wanting more, Barrett decided to try to rediscover the spirit of that initial jam session. As such, in Chapman’s words, he ‘concluded [the set] with a couple of shapeless ragged 12-bar instrumental, [which] ended [only] when Syd’s right index finger began bleeding rather badly’. Hollingsworth – the man who later the same year would dismiss the New York Dolls as a bad joke – concentrated on the latter part of the set in his review, reinforcing the cliché that was Madcap Syd:
He played and played and played. No tune in particular, no tune in fact. He sounded out of tune most of the time anyway. But the tune was most certainly in his head . . . I don’t know how much Syd Barrett remembered, but he didn’t give in. Even though he lost his bassist and even though Twink couldn’t share Syd’s journey, Syd played on . . . As the clock ticked into the small hours of Friday morning, Syd retreated to the back of the stage, trying to find one of those [guitar] runs. He messes chords together. There is no pattern. But if you think very hard, you can see a faint one, you can see some trailers in the sky . . .
With a single stroke of his injudicious pen, Hollingsworth signed Starz’s death warrant. As Twink told Kris DiLorenzo: ‘The reviews [sic] were really bad, and Syd was really hung up about it; so the band folded. He came ’round to my house and said he didn’t want to play anymore.’ Hollingsworth later insisted it was not his intention to press the autodestruct; but if he did not realize how fragile Syd’s ego was, he was a reviewer in a million. According to one Floyd biographer28, Barrett’s own response to the Corn Exchange gig was even more dramatic and emotive. After the show he had returned to the Hills Road house, where he started smashing furniture before retreating to his bedroom in the cellar, where he commenced smashing his head repeatedly against the ceiling.’
Shortly afterwards, he turned up at the door of Sheila and Mick Rock’s London home. As Mick remembers it: ‘For a moment he was thinking of doing something in London, but it just seemed to pass through his mind briefly . . . It wasn’t like he said, “Fuck it, I’m never going to play again.” . . . [but] he knew he wasn’t wired for a life like David Bowie . . . He was just trying to make up his mind, really, about getting off the bus.’
*
Just as Barrett got up to get off the bus, who should he pass on the stairs but sorcerer’s apprentice David Bowie. The last time he heard that man’s name he was reviewing Bowie’s Deram single, ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, for Melody Maker’s Blind Date column back in 1967, when still having a laugh. Back then, he called Bowie’s effort ‘a joke number’, but not in a bad way. As he helpfully explained, ‘Jokes are good. Everybody likes jokes.’
And now Bowie was namechecking him in the very weekly that was sending Roy Hollingsworth to slag off Starz. The increasingly androgynous boy from Brixton was on the front cover of England’s most popular music magazine, pronouncing himself gay. In the 22 January 1972 issue of Melody Maker Bowie unveiled his Ziggy persona for the first time, and the only English rock star he referenced (alongside Iggy and Lou, the two Americans he was explicitly courting) was Syd Barrett. Bowie described to Michael Watts how ‘it is because his music is rooted in this lack of [self]-consciousness that he admires Syd Barrett so much. He believes that Syd’s freewheeling approach to lyrics opened the gate for him.’
Ever one to seize a vacant mantle, Bowie already knew that Barrett had abdicated his pop throne by the time he took Ziggy Stardust on the road in February 1972. He was soon spending his nights and days with the last man to see Syd standing: Mick Rock himself. When he and Angie heard that Rock was coming to see a show at Birmingham’s Town Hall on 17 March, they were both secretly thrilled. For Angie, it may have been Rock’s position as Rolling Stone correspondent that excited her, but Bowie surely knew the name from the sleeve of his copy of The Madcap Laughs, and maybe even the 23 December 1971 issue of Rolling Stone, which had just carried Syd’s last interview. Rock was certainly left in no doubt about how highly Bowie regarded Barrett: ‘Bowie worshipped Syd. He always saw him in the same bracket as Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.’
The Ziggy persona that Bowie formally introduced during a February 1972 TV appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test had actually been given a quick spin around the block already, in a less measured guise, with the two singles by ‘Arnold Korns’ that first gave the world unrealized renditions of ‘Hang On to Yourself’ and ‘Moonage Daydream’. Korns, originally conceived as a transvestite singer ‘discovered’ by Bowie, took his name from another famous transvestite, the one Barrett celebrated on the first Floyd A-side, ‘Arnold Layne’. Indeed, if the androgyny of Ziggy had a prototype in English pop, it was from Barrett, a debt Bowie openly acknowledged: ‘[He was] the first bloke I’d seen wear make-up in a rock band to great effect. Me and Marc Bolan both noted that.’ The fact that Syd always had ‘this strange mystical look to him, with [his] painted black fingernails and his eyes fully made up’, provided Bowie with just the inspiration he needed to go the whole hog, dye his hair, put eye shadow on, and generally prostitute his art along lines he’d outlined a year earlier.
Barrett also had a profound effect on the style of songs that Ziggy sang. As Bowie duly acknowledged in the same year he recorded his own version of ‘Arnold Layne’ in concert29: ‘Along with Anthony Newley, Syd was the first guy I’d heard sing pop or rock with a British accent. His impact on my thinking was enormous.’ From the first line of Bowie’s 1972 album, ‘Pushing through the market square . . .’, sung in an accent that would have made Eliza Doolittle glow, there is no mistaking the singer’s proximity to the bells of Bow. In a world where a transatlantic accent, or a Jaggeresque Southern slur, were almost de rigeur, Ziggy placed himself full square in the little cul-de-sac off Regent Street, where he was snapped for the album’s iconic cover. At the time, Bowie even joked that his ability to switch between ‘stone the crows’ cockney and BBC English was ‘part of me general schizophrenics’; while Ken Pitt well recalls the way ‘he would sometimes come into a room looking like a ravishingly beautiful girl then, ten minutes later, he’d be a “Gor blimey” yobbo. He would turn the cockney persona on and off.’
In constructing Ziggy, Bowie continued taking a leaf or two from the Dylan he was still nightly celebrating in song (nor should one discount the effect of Anthony Scaduto’s widely read biography, published the previous autumn). Where Dylan had constructed his backwoods folkie persona from archetypes who were either dead (Hank Williams, Cisco Houston, Robert Johnson) or artistically moribund (Woody Guthrie), so Bowie carefully built his own iconic alter ego around recent casualties found at the side of the road to excess. And of those figures, Barrett and Hendrix were the ones that seemed to loom largest. This pair, rather than the colourful but essentially inconsequential Vince Taylor, would be the true templates to Bowie’s new alias. (Mark Paytress exposes Bowie’s likely motive for repeatedly citing Taylor in his slick monograph on the Ziggy album: Although it is easy to see in Ziggy elements of all the casualties of the counterculture – especially Hendrix, [Peter] Green and Barrett – Bowie’s . . . citing of the obscure Vince Taylor as his defining model [is] typical of his desire to wrap himself, and his work, in the cloak of mystery.’)
Bowie has continued to muddy the waters ever since he was first asked, whither Ziggy? In a 1992 Life article he brazenly claimed that his first inspiration in rock ‘was John Lennon, [along with] some of the Stones and Kinks, and then it got hammered in with guys like Bryan Ferry, King Crimson, Pink Floyd . . . [before I started] applying Dada, creating those absolutely frightening, extraordinary monsters of rock that nobody could possibly love’. But portraying Ziggy as some Dada creation – more Dalí than dahling – merely provides further evidence ‘of his desire to wrap . . . his work in the cloak of mystery’. In early 1972, Bowie’s main points of reference were strictly musical. Art was the one with a voice in Simon & Garfunkel. As Simon Frith astutely observed in Let It Rock the following June, ‘Ziggy Stardust is the loving creation of a genuine rock addict.’
This is not to say that Bowie hadn’t self-consciously decided to bring the theatrical side back to pop music. In this he was inspired not only by the theatricality of early English glam-rock (and Alice Cooper) but by the Warholian antics of a New York acting troupe who descended on London in the summer of 1971, to perform the risqué Pork. When he met the American cast after opening night he even told troupe-member Tony Zanetta, who would end up working for him: ‘I’m going to play a character called Ziggy Stardust. We’re going to do it as a stage show. We may even do it in the West End. When I’m tired of playing Ziggy . . . someone else can take over from me.’
He had been ruminating on creating a stage caricature of the rock star for some time now, telling Rolling Stone back in February 1971: ‘My performances have got to be theatrical experiences for me as well as for the audience. I don’t want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up onstage – I want to take them on-stage with me.’ In the late 1990s he duly confirmed that ‘the initial framework [back] in ’71, when I first started thinking about Ziggy, was [essentially] as a musical-theatrical piece. And it kinda became something other than that.’ Understatement of the year of Glam.
The theatrical idea was already some way advanced by the time Bowie began recording Ziggy’s intended repertoire in November 1971. When during the sessions he met up with music journalist George Tremlett – who had interviewed him a number of times over the years – ostensibly to promote his latest album, Hunky Dory, Tremlett asked him whether he had finished arranging the new stage act he had mentioned to him the previous April. Bowie responded, ‘That’s what we’re working on now.’ What sort of stage act would it be? ‘Outrageous. Quite outrageous, but very theatrical . . . It’s going to be costumed and choreographed, quite different to anything anyone else has tried to do before.’
Bowie was already professing to have little time for ‘anything anyone . . . tried to do before’, even as he entered the choppy waters of glam-rock a full year after other pop pioneers first started glitzing up pop. He gives Alice Cooper short shrift in his January 1972 interview with Michael Watts, refusing to recognize Cooper’s Detroit credentials or the trailblazing nature of his early stage-act. And looking back in 1993, he was especially bitchy about British glam-rockers The Sweet, who ‘were everything we loathed; they dressed themselves up as early Seventies, but there was no sense of humour there’. Actually it was Bowie who missed the joke, from a band whose tongues remained firmly in their cheeks throughout a series of gloriously camp hit singles such as ‘Little Willy’ and ‘Wigwam Bam’. (The real source of his later enmity may be their appropriation of the ‘Jean Genie’ riff for their own tail-chasing chart-topper, ‘Blockbuster’.)
Thankfully for Bowie, by spring 1972 he had chanced upon the fully conceptualized Roxy Music – contemporaneously championed by another Melody Maker journalist, Richard Williams – who were starting to make waves of their own. At the same time he began encouraging the likes of Mott the Hoople, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to glitter up and pout their lips, hoping to create a second wave of glam that would be altogether more exclusive. As he later claimed, ‘We took ourselves for avant garde explorers, the representatives of an embryonic form of postmodernism. [Whereas] the other type of glam-rock was directly borrowed from the rock tradition, the weird clothes and all that. To be quite honest, I think we were very elitist.’
Meanwhile, his friend Bolan continued holding the high ground, chart-wise, all the while camping it up with a series of five memorable back-to-back number-one singles, ‘Hot Love’, ‘Get It On’, ‘Jeepster’, ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’. But as far as Bowie was concerned, all of those who glammed up before him were not really transgressive. Their campness was an act, and obviously an act; not so much the gesture of a social deviant as the archetypal music-hall cross-dresser.
He had far grander ambitions with his creation, or so he would claim twenty years later: ‘From a very early age I was always fascinated by those who transgressed the norm, who defied convention, whether in painting or in music or anything. Those were my heroes – the artists Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí and, in rock, Little Richard.’ If, as seems to be the case, he was expressing a genuine viewpoint here, it was couched in artistic reference points he learnt to apply after he gave up on rock.
If we can believe his right-on mother, Peggy – who told a reporter in the early 1980s of one occasion when, as a little boy, she found him wearing her make-up and ‘told him that he shouldn’t use make-up. But he said, “You do, Mummy.” I agreed, but pointed out that it wasn’t for little boys’ – Bowie was just as confused about his sexual identity as the young Barrett. He made an allusion to such experiences in the second of his Ziggy-era conversations with Michael Watts, prior to his legendary August 1972 Rainbow concert: ‘I spent all those formative teenage years adopting guises and changing roles . . . just learning to be somebody . . . I’ve always been camp since I was about seven . . . My interests weren’t centred around obvious seven-year-old interests, like cowboys and Indians. My things were far more mysterious.’
It was high time he threw off his rags and revealed himself. After all, he had been dropping hints of the direction he was heading in for a year or more, albeit in some out-of-the-way places. On a local San Francisco radio station in February 1971 he had told the DJ that TMWSTW was in fact ‘a collection of reminiscences about his experiences as a shaven-headed trans-vestite’. But it was really the messianic streak he’d unleashed on TMWSTW that was now leading him on. In New York for the RCA signing in September, he told a reporter for the Detroit-based Creem: ‘As the earth has probably only another forty years of existence, this would be a fine time to have a dictatorship. I’m fed up being free.’ Although no one was yet ready to take such statements seriously he had informed Disc’s Dai Davies the previous January that he thought the coming youth revolution would be led by someone who was an amalgam of Adolf Hitler and Jimi Hendrix:
David Bowie: The whole Nazi thing was given the image of a mission by their very effective publicity machine, and it really appealed to the youth of an entire nation. The Leader that’s going to take this country over will have to be a lot more youth-orientated than [Enoch] Powell30. It’s the youth that are feeling the boredom most; they are crying out for leadership to such an extent that they will even resort to following the words of some guitar hero. [1971]
This was the kind of conceit he could get away with in a theatre, and for now that was the extent of his (and Ziggy’s) ambitions. He even had a setting for his messianic story, and it was fittingly apocalyptic. The rise of Ziggy Stardust would be set during the last five years on Earth, and ‘Five Years’ – recorded in November – would set the stage for the emergence of this ‘guitar hero’ who would herald the end of days. Was it a case of today Broadway, tomorrow . . . who knows?
Decades later, in his introduction to Mick Rock’s collected photos of the Ziggy era, Moonage Daydream (2005), Bowie again provided a suitably pretentious way of explaining how he conceptualized rock’s first self-consciously conceived rock star: ‘Writers like George Steiner had nailed the sexy term post-culture and it seemed a jolly good idea to join up the dots for Rock. Overall, there was a distinct feeling that “nothing was true” anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it had seemed . . . Everything was up for grabs. If we needed any truths we could construct them ourselves.’
As it happens, by the time Ziggy took to the stage he was no longer some cracked actor – he was Bowie’s stage alter ego. The theatrical show had fallen by the wayside as soon as he started recording the songs and found that a cogent theatrical concept was not the same as a cohesive concept album. When Bowie revisited the making of Ziggy Stardust for a mid-Nineties Mojo special, he remembered ‘there [had been] a bit of a narrative, a slight arc, and my intention was to fill it in more later – [but] I never got round to it because before I knew where I was we’d recorded the damn thing’, a recollection that tallies with the facts. The bulk of the album was completed over a single week at Trident, nine songs being cut from 8–15 November 1971, including six of the eight songs that tell the story of Ziggy.
By 15 December, he had a provisional tracklisting with the first three songs already solidly in place, though at this juncture the story of Ziggy ends with ‘Lady Stardust’, his homage to Marc and Syd. That original album sequence (surprisingly called Round and Round on the tape box), which made it as far as two master-tapes, included three songs, two of them covers, that never made the final artefact: Chuck Berry’s ‘Round and Round’, Jacques Brel’s ‘Amsterdam’ (a leftover from Hunky Dory) and the glam-era curio ‘Velvet Goldmine’, with its hummed outro straight out of Paint Your Wagon.
According to comments Bowie made over the phone to an American radio DJ in January 1972, as he set about reconfiguring the artefact, ‘Round and Round’ ‘would have been the kind of number that Ziggy would have done onstage. He jammed [on] it for old times’ sake in the studio, [but] our enthusiasm for it probably waned after we heard it a few times.’ Actually the Berry standard, just the kind of number that not only Ziggy but Vince Taylor ‘would have done onstage’, made it as far as the final test-pressing. Bowie was already looking to explain away what happened to the story of Ziggy Stardust and his band, offering this version to the US radio audience:
David Bowie: It wasn’t really started as a [full-on] concept album. It got kinda broken up because I found other songs that I wanted to put in the album that wouldn’t fit in with the story of Ziggy. So at the moment it’s a little fractured and a little fragmented. What you have on that album when it finally comes out is a story which doesn’t really take place. It’s just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which could feasibly be the last band on earth, because we’re living the last five years on earth . . . It depends what state you listen to it in. Once I’ve written an album, my interpretation of the numbers on it are totally different afterwards than when I wrote them. And I find that I learn a lot from my own albums about me. [1972]
It took until the end of January before he finally had the three songs needed to round out the album. The most important addition was a quickly penned, catchy single, ‘Starman’, which seems to have been prompted by something he said to Michael Watts the week he recorded it: ‘We have created a new kind of person . . . a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is twelve.’ Here was a man now wholly estranged from his own immediate family, looking to claim those twelve-year-olds for his very own Jean Brodie of glam. But the song was never really part of the Ziggy concept – it was always a commercial palliative as producer Ken Scott confirmed, ‘“Starman” was a separate inspiration that was added on later, ’cause the record company didn’t hear a single.’
Initially, Bowie even clung to the idea of releasing ‘Starman’ as a stand-alone single, with ‘Round and Round’ still holding its place in a 2 February sequence. But two days later, the Chuck Berry classic had given way to a song that was a natural successor to his last hit song, ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’. The two other brand-new songs recorded at the same session(s) shifted the album’s axis: ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. They would make the story of Ziggy end not with his ‘rise’, but with his ‘fall’. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ was both some kind of wish-fulfilment and a spell to keep death at bay. Its first line, ‘Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth’, was Bowie’s way of saying, ‘Life is a cigarette, smoke in a hurry or savour it’, a sentiment he attributed to Baudelaire, though it actually originated with Manuel Machado. Looking for the supreme gesture of the messianic rock god, he had found it in another of his little literary lifts.
On the other hand the death of Ziggy, the Dionysian rock star, drew from immediate examples rock had considerately provided for him, particularly the recent demises of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. As he later confessed, ‘At this point I had a passion for the idea of the rock star as meteor. And the whole idea of The Who’s line: “Hope I die before I get old.”’ The death of so many family members, culminating in his father’s just weeks before ‘Space Oddity’ charted, had left internal scars. But even before that life-changing event, he felt haunted by death, or so he informed Michael Watts: ‘[When I was young] I would pull moodies and say things like, “I think I’m dying”, and sit there for hours pretending I was dying.’ The idea of dying on stage was bound to be enticing one to someone who even as a child had dramatized his own death in his head; and now confided to new inner-circle entrant Mick Rock, ‘I know that one day a big artist is going to get killed on stage, and I know that we’re going to go very big. And I keep thinking – it’s bound to be me.’
Having self-consciously created a character who ‘because I never drew a template for a storyline too clearly . . . left so much room for audience interpretation’, he was almost apologetic about the album in its finished form, keen to downplay any notion of conceptual unity therein. Six weeks after the album was sequenced – and three months before it chased ‘Starman’ into the charts – Mick Rock’s notes to his first interview with Bowie, shortly after the Birmingham show, reveal the would-be star’s inner doubts:
Ziggy Stardust – rise & fall of. It started off unfortunately as a concept of the life-cycle of a rock & roll star but it ended up as fragmented songs on an album, but I’ve still retained the original title which really only relates to the first side now. The other side is a collection of different songs. A very mini-concept album. Very melancholic view of the star-trip.
It seems even Ziggy’s auteur did not know which pieces of the puzzle fitted where. In the end it would be side one that would have the sensual superfluity of ‘Soul Love’, ‘Starman’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy’, while the second side would build steadily up to the ultimate ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. While Bowie wasn’t quite sure what Ziggy Stardust was mutating into, he was adamant that his creation was not a cipher for his own deep-rooted neuroses. Laurel Canyon constituted no part of this Londoner’s address. Disavowing the solipsistic universe of the singer-songwriter – before it rejected him – Bowie was insisting: ‘My songwriting is certainly not an accurate picture of how I think at all.’
At the same time he complained about ‘the half-bakedness of myself, and everyone else in the rock business. Songs these days are supposed to be representative of the writer’s attitude and mind, instead of just being [something] on record.’ Coming from a man who two years earlier was telling Top Pops, ‘Everything that one writes is personal, but . . . what I do is take something that has happened to me and put it into . . . some kind of symbolism’, such pronouncements smacked of someone blowing smoke from behind a big green screen.
Naturally he had an explanation for the change – a personal epiphany some time between Hunky Dory and the Ziggy sessions: ‘I used to come out with great drooling nine-minute epics . . . [Then] I decided it wasn’t worth singing about myself, so instead I decided to write anything that came to mind.’ [One ‘drooling nine-minute epic’, ‘The Width of a Circle’, still remained the centrepiece of every Ziggy show from The Rainbow to Hammersmith Odeon, marking the point in the set when Ziggy became a lad insane.) He knew he was consciously disavowing ‘one of the principles in rock: . . . that it’s the person himself expressing what he really and truly feels . . . [whereas] I always saw it as a theatrical experience.’]
But, try as he might to deny it, Bowie’s latest creation was as much a part of his identity as his estranged family. Nor was his solution such an original one. As Peter and Leni Gillman astutely noted in their fiercely independent Bowiebio, Alias David Bowie (1986): ‘The concept at the very heart of the [1972] album, of inhabiting the character of Ziggy, had close similarities with some schizophrenics’ strategy of adopting a series of personas as if searching for one that will allow them to function and survive.’ Bowie almost got around to embracing the Gillmans’ charge in 1993, describing his Seventies strategy thus: ‘I felt that I was the lucky one because . . . as long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music and into my work I could always be throwing it off.’
The prime question, though, quickly became not how much of himself did he put into Ziggy but where exactly did the creator end and this ‘absolutely frightening, extraordinary monster of rock’ begin? Wife Angie saw at first-hand how the starry monster initially served its master well: ‘By creating Ziggy to go out and front for him, David never had to act like himself in public if he didn’t want to, which in turn meant that he could pursue art and applause without having to deal with his . . . frigid self-loathing.’ Talking to one reporter on his first US tour as Ziggy, he owned up to the validity of his wife’s portrait, ‘I’m a pretty cold person . . . [Yet] I have a strong lyrical, emotional drive and I’m not sure where it comes from. I’m not sure if that’s really me coming through in the songs.’
For most of 1972 he retained the requisite degree of control over this emotive doppelganger, even during that infamous first interview with Melody Maker’s Michael Watts, witnessed by Angie, when ‘he was [already] speaking at least half of his lines from the persona of his hype-spawned sacrificial-alien rock star’. At the time he really did seem to know what he was doing. Six years later he was not so sure. Talking to Watts again, Bowie recalled how he ‘was starting to build Ziggy . . . and I was naturally falling into the role; and . . . you sorta pick up on bits of your own life when you’re putting a role together . . . I was sorta half-serious there when I said that I’d developed a school of pretension within rock & roll . . . He was Ziggy, he’d been created . . . so I had to work with him for a little while.’
For the next nine months the on–off switch would continue to work as, in Bowie’s own words, he ‘carried the character into interviews, newspapers, onstage, offstage – whenever there was media around . . . to keep those characters concrete’. Again, it would be some years before he would gamely admit that the whole thing had been his way of conquering ‘an unbearable shyness; it was much easier for me to keep on with the Ziggy thing, off the stage as well as on the stage . . . It was so much easier for me to be Ziggy.’
Despite turning twenty-five in January 1972, Bowie was still finding himself; and psychoanalysing himself into the bargain. As he told Watts: ‘My own work can be compared to talking to a psychoanalyst. My act is my couch.’ And talking to musician-journalist Lenny Kaye in July 1972, he ‘explained’ Ziggy in terms of an ongoing internal quest: ‘I’m searching all the time for an identity, and it comes through in the form of images.’ However, he was subsuming himself to find himself. Becoming Ziggy onstage and off empowered him, but such was the power of his own creation that he soon failed to recognize the person staring back at him in the mirror: ‘That flamboyant front was very useful to me. It gave me a platform: I talked to people as Ziggy . . . who was a cracked mirror . . . [And] David Jones was in there somewhere. But not much.’
At least Davey Jones was not alone. A relentless musical magpie, Bowie was still picking through others’ ideas for a self he could call his own. Early on in the Ziggy ‘experiment’, he confided in Mick Rock: ‘I’m more like a focal point for a lot of ideas that are going around. Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all; I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.’ He had certainly co-opted a fair proportion of Ziggy’s characteristics from previous models of rock stardom, hoping that before pop ate itself he would become the consummate rock star. Not all of those from whom he borrowed these jigsaw pieces were amused or appreciative. According to Tony Visconti, who throughout 1972 continued to conjoin his future to T. Rex: ‘[Bolan] seethed with contempt for David when he came up with Ziggy Stardust. When Bowie’s album came out he made some very petty and nasty comments.’
As for the two American degenerates Bowie flew into London in July 1972 at Main Man’s expense, one doubts that either Iggy Pop or Lou Reed thought the fey Englishman was anything more than a means to an end (a record deal for the former; a hit record for the latter). Thankfully Iggy was not there the night in February when Bowie attempted to walk out across the audience at an Imperial College gig, à la the Stooge, only for the fans to recoil at the very idea. In fact, according to Woody Woodmansey the Spiders from Mars’ unloquacious drummer, there had been a wholesale rethink immediately after the March show in Birmingham attended by Rock: ‘Initially audiences did not like that show . . . So we stopped touring briefly. It was only when “Starman” got all over the radio that things turned.’
Bowie sensed that the audiences were still not embracing this whole Ziggy schtick: ‘Ziggy was a case of small beginnings. I remember when we had no more than twenty or thirty fans at the most. They’d be down the front and the rest of the audience would be indifferent.’ Rock’s photos of these early shows bear out his recollection. Bowie was simply playing to the wrong audience, one he had built up with some of the best AOR (adult-oriented rock) this side of Prog. But if he was going to tap into the same constituency as his embittered old friend Bolan, he needed not only to make his music more raunchy, but also to sex-up the show they then came to see. And a teen market brought up on a soundtrack of T. Rex, The Sweet, and even the touchy-feely-creepy Gary Glitter, demanded something more like the transgressive theatre of the Weimar Republic (albeit Christopher Isherwood’s take on it) and less like the mock-glam that was Hunky Dory. When Bolan drooled, ‘I’m a vampire for your love / And I’m gonna suck ya!’ he sounded like he meant it.
When UK shows resumed in late April, Bowie was determined to make Ziggy more androgynous and more sexualized. The following month at a show in Oxford he went down on Ronson’s guitar for the first time, a form of fellatio emblematic of the real thing, but not graphic enough to actually get him banned. His fabled Top of the Pops appearance in the first week in July, when he languorously placed his arm around Ronson, turned ‘Starman’ into a Top Ten single, and made him the subject of a number of ‘think pieces’ on the Bowie phenomenon before it was one.
He was trying every trick in the book, while carefully mirroring Bolan’s proven template musically. The same week he appeared on Top of the Pops, he headlined a show at the Royal Festival Hall, a benefit for whales, which brought yet more rhapsodic reviews from a smitten music press. And then he temporarily pulled the plug. While the band took a brief sabbatical, he set about creating a very special evening, a 19 August show at The Rainbow that would be the formal unveiling of Ziggy. Like the Floyd six months earlier, Bowie knew that The Rainbow would be the perfect place to unveil the work that would forever define him.
The Rainbow show was a spectacular triumph. The most powerful moment of all came at the start of the evening, when Bolan’s visage was projected on to the back of the stage as Bowie walked to the piano and began to sing, solo, ‘Lady Stardust’, the song for Marc that had led him to this place. But that night was also the death of Bowie’s original theatrical dream. As he later wrote:
At appropriate moments [photographic] stills of rock icons – Presley, Little Richard, Bolan, etc. – were projected to give a semblance of continuity to the Ziggy theme, as though he was already one of them . . . [Yet] ironically enough, this would be the first and last time I would ever stage the Ziggy show on such a scale. We simply couldn’t afford it. For the rest of his existence . . . the Ziggy shows themselves were just great music and rather smart costume changes, the emphasis . . . being on the actor and not the plot.
By this time, Bowie was no longer acting. Ziggy was taking him over. When the American media was invited to the Dorchester in mid-July – after being taken to Friar’s, in Aylesbury, to see a real Ziggy show – the Bowie they met was not entirely in control. Although he assured the reporters, ‘I’m still . . . involved with Ziggy. I probably will be for a few months, getting it entirely out of my system . . . ’ he inadvertently betrayed his divided self by then suggesting, ‘ . . . and then we’ll don another mask’. The mask and the man were slowly fusing into one just as he was learning the truth of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, ‘Give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.’ Having created his first ‘extraordinary monster of rock’, Bowie had forgotten that Ziggy’s downfall had been the result of his own messianic fantasies:
David Bowie: When I first wrote Ziggy it was just an experiment; an exercise for me and he really grew out of proportion . . . Ziggy overshadowed everything . . . His own personality [was] unable to cope with the circumstance he found himself in, which was being an almighty prophet-like superstar rocker, who found he didn’t know what to do with it once he got it. It’s an archetype . . . it often happens. [1974]
Now it was all happening to Bowie himself. And he wasn’t sure he had the willpower to resist. As he later confessed: ‘I felt very, very puny as a human. I thought, “Fuck that, I want to be a superman.” I took a look at my thoughts, my appearance, my expressions, my mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, and didn’t like them. So I stripped myself down, chucked things out and replaced them with a completely new personality.’ That ‘new’ personality, entirely created in his own image, began feeding on an inner self as messianic as his brother’s: ‘Everybody started to treat me as they treated Ziggy: as though I were the Next Big Thing, as though I moved masses of people. I became convinced I was a messiah. Very scary.’
And just as he was becoming subsumed by his androgynous alter ego, Bowie learnt that he would at last be taking the show to America for his first US tour. However uptight the UK mass media had proven, it was as nothing to its cousins in the land founded by Puritans. Describing his 1972 arrival four years on, Bowie expressed his amazement that, in America, ‘Sex was still shocking. [So] everybody wanted to see the freak . . . Unwittingly, I really brought that whole thing over [here] . . . Nobody understood the European way of dressing and adopting the asexual, androgynous everyman pose. People all went screaming, “He’s got make-up on and he’s wearing stuff that looks like dresses!”’ (His own record label, RCA, decided not to release the non-album follow-up to ‘Starman’, ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, because they considered it too risqué to generate radioplay.) At the time, though, he couldn’t wait to introduce the glamorous Ziggy to the colonials.
And so, in September 1972 two English acts who had been flitting around the US charts for the past couple of years without ever setting them alight, brought radical new stage acts to the other side of the pond. It is highly unlikely that either Bowie or the Floyd saw the other as ploughing a furrow akin to the one dug by the now-spectral Syd (though each had a song called ‘Time’). But after five years of English rock tours, with proper powerhouse P.A. systems, Americans were ripe for a little more musical repatriation, though Pink Floyd had barely begun recording the album they were now debuting, and David Bowie was still chasing his first US hit 45.
For Pink Floyd, the September tour, running from the ninth to the thirtieth without ever touching the East Coast, was their second Stateside sortie of the year. The night of their greatest triumph this time around was unquestionably the show at the Hollywood Bowl, when employees of their US label, Capitol, came out in force, and searchlights strafed the L.A. sky during the finale of the now definitively titled, ecstatically received Dark Side of the Moon. (Their US record company chairman enthused, ‘It was like watching [a] great Verdi opera for the first time.’)
A week later, on a different coast, David Bowie took Manhattan for the first time, and almost as a reminder to himself played his own mortality sequence, in the form of a song first introduced at The Rainbow, an acoustic version of Jacques Brel’s ‘My Death’ that served as the prelude to the symbolic summoning of Ziggy that was ‘The Width of a Circle’. By now – as Bowie admitted to a BBC documentary crew shortly after extracting himself from Ziggy’s maws – ‘I was so lost in Ziggy. It was all that schizophrenia.’ Being wholly ‘lost in Ziggy’, Bowie was starting to believe he should give Ziggy a whole album of his own and, who knows, this time he might manage to sustain the basic concept all the way through. That was, if he didn’t go crazy in the process.