Bowie: A Biography (33 page)

“It’s the concept of hope that the song communicates,” Woodmansey said. “That ‘we are not alone’ and ‘they’ contact the kids, not the adults, and kind of say get on with it, ‘let the children boogie.’ It kind of spearheaded the whole Ziggy Stardust concept both musically and visually, on
Top of the Pops
. It was like reaching the summit of Everest, after seeing so many great bands doing it over the years. I recall waiting to go on, standing in a corridor, and Status Quo were opposite us. We were dressed in our clothes and they had on their trademark denim. [Vocalist/lead guitarist] Francis Rossi looked at me and said, ‘Shit, you make us feel old.’ The success of ‘Starman’ really opened it all up for us; everything changed. Mick and I would go out shopping for food, clothes, etc, and every shopkeeper would ask what we’d want and then they wouldn’t take money for it! We would try really hard to pay them but they wouldn’t take it no matter what we did.”

“I think it stands as one of the pivotal moments of modern music, or, if not music, certainly a pivotal moment in show business,” says Gary Numan today. Then a fifteen-year-old, he watched it in his East London living room. “It must have taken extraordinary courage and/or a monumental amount of self-belief. To say it stood out is an epic understatement. Even as a hard-core T. Rex fan I knew it was special.”

More fantasy bands were formed that night than possibly any other night in modern rock history, as in one three-minute TV appearance, suddenly everything that wasn’t Bowie-touched seemed too small and bland. For these kids, this was the equivalent of Bowie first playing that Little Richard 45 on his gramophone back in Bromley. If they were watching with the family (as most English kids didn’t have a TV in their own room at the time), all the better. A father dismissing Bowie as a “pouf” or a mom shouting, “Oh, turn it off,” made it that much more arresting.

“I was only thirteen but I watched
Top of the Pops
and thought maybe I was Ziggy Stardust all along. I felt and still feel that there was Ziggy Stardust in me,” says Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen. “I used to draw it in the back of exercise books or wherever, and I’d always draw—it’d be roughly Bowie’s face but with my lips on it. The
Ziggy
album was my way out. I used to sing it all the time, but not in front of people, just closed in at home, and I’d wait for everyone to go out or be downstairs, and I’d sing along to Ziggy and try to hold the notes like he did.”

“It was simply being sucked in by that larger-than-life, slightly unreal persona that makes people want to be more than they are. It’s something a lot of rock stars have but Bowie, at that time anyway, had it more than anyone,” Gary Numan says.

“Bowie represented a way for me to get out of myself, and also to escape from where I was,” Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode recalled. “[My hometown] Basildon was a factory, working-class town. Bowie gave me a hope that there was something else. This world that he seemed to be a part of—where was it? I wanted to find it. I just thought he wasn’t of this earth. And that was really attractive to me, to live in a different persona.”

“He was my hero,” says Dave Wakeling, then a Birmingham teen and later cofounder and singer in post-punk ska legends the English Beat. “I wasn’t much one for theatrical kind of pop. It can be such crap. I couldn’t watch something like ‘Pinball Wizard.’” But Bowie got away with it ’cause he’d actually been in theater productions and added this lovely backdrop of Buddhism and all the things I was interested in. He had his aesthetic down perfectly I thought. I’d practice having conversations with him as a kid. I’d think about all the things I’d ask him. When I finally did meet him years later, I just stood there making noises like I had a mouth full of cotton balls.”

Siouxsie Sioux watched
Top of the Pops
while in the hospital with ulcerative colitis. The performance provided her with three minutes of escape from her bleak and antiseptic surroundings. “It meant such a lot,” she tells me. “I was in a room where all kinds of people were coughing their guts up or walking around with blood hanging from a cradle on a support.”

Seeing Bowie seemed just as important as listening to him, if not more so. Once the images started getting out (and they have only just recently stopped), there was nothing that could contain him. The full flowering of the visual Bowie was well timed to his meeting with writer turned photographer Mick Rock in mid-March of 1972. While backstage at Birmingham’s Town Hall, Bowie and the Cambridge-educated Rock discussed Syd Barrett. Rock had met the tragic Pink Floyd leader and taken photos of him that were already iconic. He wanted to know about Bowie’s involvement with Iggy Pop and Bowie was interested in hearing all about Syd.

“Oh, Mick Rock. Love your name. Is it real?,” Rock says, imitating a twenty-five-year-old David Bowie the first time they met. “Of course his given name was Jones,” Rock remembers. Mick Rock began taking photos of Bowie almost immediately thereafter and remains, to this day, the photographer most closely associated with the star. “From the get-go I found him to be a fascinating person. He had a way of being very quite visceral, but also absolutely cerebral. He’s a very intellectually inquisitive person for somebody who is so kind of tactile. He synthesized in all these influences: Kabuki theatre, mime, the Living Theatre,
2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange
, the Velvet Underground, and they all went into the character and music of Ziggy Stardust and the timing was perfect.” The photos manage to frame both Bowie and Ziggy, the subject appearing both warmly human and almost impossibly beautiful and superhuman at the same time.

“David and Syd, they did have similarities in the sense that they were both incredibly beautiful and experimental, plus they sang with an English accent which was virtually unprecedented at that time,” Rock says. “David could switch it on for the camera very easily. More aware of the camera than anybody I had known up to the time and since. He revolutionized the image of rock ’n’ roll.”

Rock, Bowie and Angela took in a Joe Littlewood play in London’s East End and soon Rock joined the Haddon Hall extended salon. “I was not an artist before the first time I picked up a camera (and even then it was many years before I seriously considered myself in that light),” Rock says. “I had a scholarship to Cambridge University to study modern languages and literature. Deranged poets that used chemicals and sex and sleep deprivation to open themselves up to new ways of expressing themselves fascinated me. So starting with Syd and on to Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, Freddie Mercury, the people that drew me in, I saw them like Baudelaire or Rimbaud or Byron. Of course you gotta remember how young we all were and how young the alternative culture was. This was a new age and I wanted my piece of it and photography turned out to be my means of access. To me these characters were not just rock ’n’ rollers. They were visionary artists.”

Rock spent the rest of the spring and early summer traveling on the tour and documenting the ascent of Ziggy Stardust almost from the beginning, early on capturing another shot that became a part of the pan-sexual Ziggy myth.

“He’d really hit his stride that summer with the release of the
Ziggy
album. It was at Oxford Town Hall June 12, 1972, when I took the infamous guitar gnawing shot.” Rock is speaking of his famous photo of Bowie, his feet splayed, biting Ronson’s guitar. Of course it only suggests fellatio, but that was enough for those with sexually fertile minds, in other words, everyone in the audience and everyone who saw the photo. “There were a thousand people there, his biggest audience to that date” Rock says. “He really was just trying to bite Mick’s guitar,” Rock says. “He’s not really on his knees. His feet are splayed. He is tenderly gripping Mick Ronson’s buttocks, of course.” Ronson had been desperately searching for a guitar move to call his own. Townshend had the windmill; Jimmy Page had the violin-bow solos. Perhaps this was not exactly what he had in mind. After the show, Bowie rushed offstage and asked Mick if he caught the moment on film. Mick went home, stayed up all night and developed it. Defries purchased a page in
NME
and the shot was run as an ad, thanking those who caught the tour.

“It certainly caused some fuss and helped fuel David’s controversial image,” Rock says. “The summer of ’72 changed everything not only for
David but also for Iggy Pop, Mick Ronson, Lou Reed, and of course in a more modest way at that time, myself. It all spins around David Bowie. And it’s all done on a shoestring. Smoke and mirrors. I remember sitting in a cab with David driving through Hyde park that summer going to his new management office, and he told me he hung out with Overend Watts of Mott the Hoople a night or two before,” Mick Rock says. “They’d just been dropped by their label, Island Records, and they were going to break up. They didn’t know what else to do. David thought this was crazy. He thought they were a great band although to be fair to Island Records they had never really taken off or sold many records. And he told me he already had a song for them. We got to his manager’s office and David picked up his acoustic guitar and cranked out ‘All The Young Dudes,’ which of course was a huge hit and finally put Mott the Hoople on the map and into the annals of rock ’n’ roll.”

The members of Mott were not pretty. They were pub rockers, but they had a genuine appeal and a great front man in Ian Hunter, who wore sunglasses everywhere and had a great voice. Ronson would join Hunter’s band after leaving the Spiders. Mott was about to break up when he offered them “All the Young Dudes.” Defries negotiated a deal and signed them from Island to CBS, where the Stooges were newly signed.

“Well, he offered us ‘Suffragette City’ first,” Hunter says today, “but I knew that wouldn’t work because it was okay, but it wasn’t that great, and English radio was closed up to us because we had two or three singles out already and our time was up. But then he came back with ‘Dudes,’ and very seldom in your life if you’re in music do you get to sit behind a hit and know it’s a hit. We were sitting in an office on Regent Street and he sat on the floor and played it on acoustic guitar and the first thing was ‘Can I do this?’ and the second was ‘Why is he giving it to us?’”

“If they were doing okay at the time, I don’t think they would have wanted to link up with me, because they were quite macho, one of the early laddish bands,” Bowie told
NME
. “But things weren’t good, and I literally wrote that within an hour or so of reading an article in one of the music rags that their breakup was imminent. I thought they were a fair little band and I thought, ‘This will be an interesting thing to do, let’s see if I can write this song and keep them together.’ It sounds horribly immodest now but you go through that when you’re young. How can I do
everything? By Friday? So I wrote this thing and thought, ‘There, that should sort them out.’ Maybe got my management to phone up their people.”

Ian Hunter had worked in a factory and knew well that being in a band was better. “It’s a question of alternatives, it’s as simple as that,” he says. “I’ve been in factories, I know what that is and I don’t want to go back there.”

Mott didn’t absorb into the Bowie circle as smoothly as the already perverse Iggy Pop or the opportunistic Reed, but they were won over by his drive and talent. “I think Bowie was more analytical than we were and definitely more ambitious. He was a planner. And he’s an extremely bright individual,” Hunter says. “There was obviously something different with David right from the off. I mean, we were doing all right but David was meteoric at the time. And he still had time to be pretty unselfish. He liked Mott so he therefore gave more to us. If I had been David I wouldn’t have given. He helped a few people along the way.”

Mott dutifully put on the glam drag as well. They felt funny about it but realized it was necessary to succeed. “People were going to grab it and use it,” Hunter says, “because there were thousands of bands trying to get on. David took it to the extreme, you know; we sort of did it, but it worked. Otherwise you’re going back to the factory.”

Rock shot a video for Bowie’s new single “John, I’m Only Dancing” during sound check for Ziggy’s sold-out show at the Rainbow in August. Lindsay Kemp and his troupe performed onstage behind Bowie and the Spiders for the full theatrical effect. In essence, the teacher had become the pupil. “David gave me the music which he’d recorded for
Ziggy Stardust
, and then as we played the songs I outlined my ideas for the production,” Kemp said. Kemp found David in the full flush of fame to be recognizable, however. “David said to me, ‘Look, you may not like some of the songs from
Ziggy Stardust
because they’re very rock ’n’ roll,’” Kemp tells me. “But I loved them all, obviously, I loved the gentler, more romantic, say sentimental numbers like ‘Lady Stardust.’ That was the opening of the show. But I mean, I staged them all. ‘Queen Bitch’ was me, you know, wearing my Flowers dress actually. And Starman was me as well. And we danced together during those numbers. I just loved that world, but it was also my world. I’ve always been kind of a rock ’n’ roller.
Someone once said I was probably the world’s most famous silent rock ’n’ roll star. Certainly that world of hedonism and bright lights and living for the moment appealed to me. I was terribly thrilled, but I was also absolutely amazed, because it had only been like, you know, a year since he was performing for ten pounds a week.”

Meanwhile, both Iggy Pop and Lou Reed wound their way to London, both struggling a bit with the transition from American, urban toughs to slinky glitter femmes. Iggy was writing lyrics for what would become the Stooges’ third album,
Raw Power
, and Reed had moved with his then girlfriend Bettye Crondston into a small furnished apartment in the Wimbledon section of London, far beyond the excitement of Soho.

“Lou was a junkie as far as I could tell,” says Suzi Ronson, who was dispatched to do his hair. “I went over to Wimbeldon and thought, ‘What a wreck these people are.’ I had a similar thing with Iggy a bit later. Went to do the Stooges’ hair and they couldn’t hold their heads up. And they smelled awful. Never had any experience with drug users. I’m young. No clue. I remember apologizing to Tony. ‘The haircuts might not be straight, they couldn’t hold their heads up.’”