Ziggyology

  ‘Cosmic messiah?’

  He walked to the bathroom, veins pumping, heart thumping, locked the door and stared in the mirror once again. To his surprise, the face staring back at him had a twinge of a smirk in the corner of its mouth and a sporting twinkle in its jewel-like eyes.

  ‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’

  If it was war Marc wanted, let the great cosmic messiah fight of 1972 commence. But in the meantime, Ziggy really needed to sort that hair.

  TWO

  THE CUT

  HE WAS STILL fretting about his hair in all its scanty splendour when The Spiders From Mars played their first gig at the end of January. The venue was Friars Club, a hall in the market square of Aylesbury, thirty-odd miles outside London. The audience had paid to see David Bowie. ‘The Most Beautiful Person In The World’ said the poster. Instead, they got the most beautiful person out of this world – albeit with the wrong haircut.

  It was Ziggy’s chance to prove what he’d recently told Disc. ‘I’m the last person to pretend that I’m a radio. I’d rather go out and be a colour television set.’ He turned up the contrast before he’d even reached the stage, the band making their well-rehearsed entrance to the Clockwork Orange fanfare of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’. ‘Run your race, brothers! As joyfully as a hero goes to victory!’ Or something similar in robotic German. (The strangest of coincidences which Ziggy couldn’t possibly have known, it being Saturday 29 January 1972, he was premiering his fuzzy warbles in the same vicinity, Aylesbury market square, where one year and one day earlier the real Alex and his droogs had been filmed terrorising a librarian for a scene which Kubrick eventually had to cut.)

  The Friars’ show was an extraterrestrial toe in the water, a practice run for Ziggy to test the plutonium power of the Spiders at full volume, to break in the new boots and codpiece, then halfway through slip into white satin trousers and a collarless jacket, the latter cut from some flock fabric Daniella had found for him in a south London market. In songs, slacks and sheer heart-attacks it successfully smacked the gobs of most of those in attendance, including the cracking set of choppers belonging to a 25-year-old Indian ex-art student who carefully scrutinised Ziggy’s every blow and, as future records show, went on to do it his way.

  By the end of January, Ziggy’s album was just about finished, or so he believed. The title, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, had long been decided, even if the story of that rise and fall was all a bit sketchy. It still sounded like a concept album, which it definitely wasn’t. The only concept was Ziggy himself, which not everyone understood.

  ‘I just dropped the numbers in as they appear,’ he’d try to explain. ‘It’s not a story. Just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, who could feasibly be the last band on Earth.’

  The running order had been on constant reshuffle since before Christmas. At various points in recording the album was supposed to include a phenomenal rethink of David’s 1970 flop ‘Holy Holy’, an acoustic cover of the Jacques Brel ballad ‘Amsterdam’, a saucy sci-fi Weimar frolic provisionally called ‘He’s A Goldmine’ and a dirty thumbs-in-belt-hooks rocker called ‘Sweet Head’. But as things now stood, the tracklisting went like this:

  Side One.

  1. ‘Five Years’. Ziggy’s overture of doomsday rock to the steady tempo of humanity’s dying heartbeat. Some of the scenes of pandemonium David had borrowed from poet Roger McGough, along with a subtle slip of Kerouac’s ‘woulda killed him if they hadn’t drug me off’ straight from his teenage bible On The Road. Wherever its individual parts came from, the finished ‘Five Years’ broke hearts with the electrifying truth of its all-consuming sadness.

  2. ‘Soul Love’. A sonnet from a distant star, Ziggy caressing the sweetly sharp divide between romantic and cynical.

  3. ‘Moonage Daydream’. A total space invasion of the senses, salvaged from the wreck of Arnold Corns, stitched back together with alligator skin, pink monkey feathers and debris from The Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s ‘Gemini Spaceship’.

  4. ‘Round And Round’. Included as an example of the sort of classic rock ’n’ roll number Ziggy and the Spiders would play in concert, a raucous studio jam through David’s childhood Chuck Berry favourite.

  5. ‘It Ain’t Easy’. A Ron Davies song, recorded by David during the Hunky Dory sessions, now dropped on Ziggy’s doormat.

  Side Two.

  1. ‘Lady Stardust’. An irresistibly elegant love letter, possibly to Ziggy himself or possibly, as some thought, to his beguiling rival Marc Bolan.

  2. ‘Star’. Ziggy’s cunning transplant of his own Stardust dreams into his audience’s head, cheekily throwing in a couple of stolen shimmies from Marc (‘get it on’) and Lou (‘just watch me, now!’).

  3. ‘Hang On To Yourself’. The living end of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, also rescued from the Arnold Corns affair; a priceless zap of sci-fi ‘Summertime Blues’ carrying a siren call to all ‘blessed’ would-be Spider groupies.

  4. ‘Ziggy Stardust’. The expositional ballad of the Starman. A 3-D vision sculpted from Ziggy’s bones, blood and guts.

  5. ‘Suffragette City’. Ziggy wanting to be a dog like Iggy, also dropping in a tell-tale Kubrick ‘droogy’ and a ‘Wham bam!’ toot to Charles Mingus.

  6. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. The prophecy of Ziggy’s doom, a parting kiss of hope to the human race before taking arms against his sea of alien troubles. Perhaps the saddest yet sweetest harmony ever heard among the heavenly spheres; if nothing else, the greatest ever heard on Planet Earth.

  So ran The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. It had life, love, death, glamour, sorrow, sex, leprosy and vaseline. All that anyone could ever ask from a rock ’n’ roll album. The only thing it didn’t have, according to Dennis Katz, Ziggy’s boss at RCA, was a hit single.

  When Ziggy looked at the charts that last week of January he realised Katz had a very good point. There was Marc Bolan crashing in at three with the unstoppable mantra of ‘Telegram Sam’. Number one was The New Seekers’ sugar-rush ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ while Melanie’s similarly cheery ‘Brand New Key’ still swung its merry elbows at five. For Ziggy to blast his way anywhere near the top ten he’d have to concoct something equally as lethal a ‘la, la, la’. A tune to puncture the brain like a pickaxe, once lodged, impossible to remove. He’d already written his ballad of ‘Ziggy Stardust’. But what this called for was more along the lines of a theme tune – a national anthem for a new kingdom of glam.

  The talented borrow but, as Ziggy was fast realising, the genius steals. Overnight, he placated Katz with a melody which chugged in the slipstreams of T. Rex and The Velvet Underground’s Loaded, stirring in a heaped spoonful of Motown (the Morse-code twinkles of The Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’) and, the meteoric cherry on the spacecake, kidnapping the chorus of Judy Garland’s ‘Over The Rainbow’ from The Wizard Of Oz.

  The accompanying words were a simple statement of intent, a recap of Ziggy’s arrival from outer space and his plans to reach out and make ‘the children boogie’. Yet its molten core raged with the same nuclear fission as Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, a profound understanding of the holy formula of rock ’n’ roll: that pop is at its most religiously intense when occupying that sacred fissure between longing and fulfilment; the twilight of loneliness between the hope of knowing there’s somebody up there in the sky and the fear that they may never come down.

  On Wednesday 9 February, as Marc Bolan celebrated his third number one with ‘Telegram Sam’, the Chuck Berry cover ‘Round And Round’ was snipped from the running order of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Its place on side one, track four would instead be filled with the new track. Ziggy’s swirling pop signature. The song of the ‘Starman’.

  AS FEBRUARY DAWNED, Ziggy had already made his mark in the press, on stage in Aylesbury and on radio, tapi
ng a couple of radio sessions for the BBC’s Sounds Of The 70s programme whose listeners would have been among the first to hear the gospels of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and the apocalyptic ‘Five Years’.

  Which left only the nation’s cathode rays to infest. The same week the album running order was finalised, the Spiders made their TV debut. Just as Ziggy had predicted in ‘Starman’, he’d been picked up by the BBC’s ‘channel two’, their new midweek rock show The Old Grey Whistle Test, which went out at five to eleven on a Tuesday evening. Not exactly prime time and not exactly pop, it was presented by the assistant editor of Melody Maker, Richard Williams, a man better used to tipping his readership towards his favourite fifty-piece prog-jazz ensemble called ‘Centipede’. Less the kind of programme you’d switch on expecting to find T. Rex than the sort you’d switch off to avoid the gruesome honk of Barclay James Harvest.

  The studio itself was a suitably blank, threadbare canvas for Ziggy to streak with colour, choosing a palette of bright red (shiny patent-leather boots), greeny-grey (his trusty art-deco Superman suit) and sapphire (his acoustic guitar). The other Spiders were also fast coming into bloom, quietly settling into their blue, silver and gold satins having overcome the initial toxic-shock of the Heddon Street photo-shoot. The band mimed along to the pre-recorded backing of three songs as Ziggy sang live. Two were chosen for the next evening’s broadcast: the sexy Lou homage ‘Queen Bitch’ from Hunky Dory and a first airing for ‘Five Years’.

  The following night, Ziggy and the Spiders watched the programme together at Haddon Hall. For Ziggy it was exactly like looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, only now from all sorts of interesting new angles. In ‘Five Years’ the camera went for a close-up of his face. It looked like something from the Victorian storybooks David used to browse through when he lived with Kenneth Pitt. An enchanted forest elf with ears by Arthur Rackham and eyebrows by Walter Crane, though lord only knew what bedevilled draughtsman was responsible for those teeth, a skirmish of pearly daggers all fighting for the same patch of gum. But it was the hair that still disturbed him. It had been trimmed and tidied since Weird first sheared it before Christmas, but it still wasn’t right, like the last boyish scrap of David Bowie desperately clinging to the mast of Ziggy Stardust, a tether of normality stopping the full shock of his flag from unfurling.

  He’d have to endure his still-too-human moddish crop a while longer, with no time to experiment with a new colour and style before the opening of Ziggy’s first proper UK tour the following night. Around sixty people, their curiosity pricked by a mixture of the ‘gay’ Maker article, that week’s Whistle Test broadcast and hazy memories of ‘Space Oddity’, gathered in The Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, way down in the south-west fringes of London. Ziggy and the Spiders played the only way they knew, as if on stage before an audience of thousands. And so the three score of Tolworth trembled in blissful stupor, from the first parp of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ to the last frenetic sob of ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’.

  The set still had its bumps and creases, which time would eventually erase. A cover of Cream’s ‘I Feel Free’ was a great excuse for Ronno to unleash some sabre-toothed sorcery from his fretboard, but was also dispensable. And Ziggy would also have to concede defeat with his ambitious James Brown medley of the soul godfather’s ‘You Got To Have A Job’ and ‘Hot Pants’: it was one thing to turn three Yorkshiremen into a rock ’n’ roll band from Mars but a take-it-to-the-bridge too far to pass them off as a convincing funk act.

  Two nights after the conquest of Tolworth, the Spiders scuttled over to South Kensington, to a university union where Ziggy felt as if he, alone, could hear a ghostly, century-old applause echoing around its walls, urging him to perform super-Martian feats. And so, encouraged by strange spirits, he responded. He remembered a TV clip he’d seen of The Stooges at the 1970 Great Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival, where Iggy walked upon the heads of the audience, raised aloft by their hands like a hero of ancient Rome. Ziggy looked down at his own front row, a fidget of ties, goatees, spectacles and Mary Hopkin types with barely the strength to wave a daffodil between them. Still, it was worth a try. Ziggy vaulted off the stage and tried hoisting himself upon the nearest pair of shoulders. An upward surge. A muscular tremble as he straightened his knee. Then a feeble grin as he lay on the floor staring up at a circle of polite young faces asking if he was OK. Now he thought about it, Iggy hadn’t made the mistake of trying it in a science students’ union wearing knee-high wrestling boots. Yet still the phantom applause of old rang in his ears for reasons he would, and could, never understand. A secret salute through space and time from one Bromley Martian to another, here in Imperial College, London, formerly the Normal School of Science. Alma Mater of H. G. Wells.

  Duly baptised by the spectre of the master, Ziggy continued his invasion with stealth. Beyond London, into the provinces. From Brighton to Sheffield, Chichester, Sutton Coldfield and Yeovil, place names that were as alien to him as the moons of Phobos and Deimos were to the curious teens who paid fifty pence for a night which, in many cases, changed their lives. By March, he was receiving fan mail from kids fully willing to believe he was ‘from space’. It helped ease his anxiety on the nights when the audience was only half full. But other fears were less easily shifted.

  In Southsea, the Spiders arrived in a port in distress. A freak wave had overturned a hovercraft coming back from Ryde on the Isle of Wight. Among the passengers was a nine-year-old girl who loved ballet dancing. She’d been begging her family for months to go on the crossing. That Saturday her uncle took her on the hovercraft as a weekend treat. The same little girl, and four others, had drowned.

  The Southsea tragedy triggered a new panic in Ziggy. He’d have nightmares about his own alien mortality, thinking that at any minute in any journey to any gig his car was going to crash or that the next time he took a plane it would inexplicably malfunction and drop out of the sky. But his most vivid nightmare of all was of being killed on stage. Probably not in a half-empty hall in Hampshire, but somewhere like America, or possibly a giant concert hall in London. A nagging, gut instinct that one day a hugely successful artist would die live in front of their audience. The more he flipped it over in his mind, the more he came to the conclusion that such a death was bound to be his.

  If it was any bittersweet consolation, in March 1972 Ziggy Stardust wasn’t yet anywhere near the assassin-baiting superstar he hoped or feared. According to that month’s annual readers’ poll in Record Mirror, ‘David Bowie’ was only the twentieth most popular British Male singer. Only twenty-one people had bothered to vote for him, less than those for Val Doonican and Englebert Humperdinck. At number one – it almost went without saying – was Marc Bolan.

  Ziggy’s indignation was compounded by sensational reports of that month’s T. Rex show at London’s Wembley Empire Pool. Column after column of honeyed hysterics from grown men hailing it ‘the concert that changed the face of British rock’, with scenes of ‘fanmania reminiscent of The Beatles’. Everything that Ziggy dreamed of and aspired to. Adding insufferable insult to injury, Marc still had the audacity to keep telling journalists about his ‘cosmic messiah film’ while Ziggy’s album lay dormant, gathering dust on the RCA schedule, not due for release until the summer.

  Marc had suddenly raised the stakes of battle. Ziggy needed to counter attack. To save space face. To Starman the barricades. But more than anything else, Ziggy needed to sort that bloody hair.

  BEFORE THEY SAVED Ziggy Stardust, the magic fingers of Suzi Fussey had first fondled the follicles of Peggy Jones, mother of David Bowie. Suzi worked for Evelyn Paget, a salon on Beckenham High Street opposite The Three Tuns pub where a few years earlier David had rented the back room for some experimental ‘Arts Lab’ nights. Peggy helpfully drummed up custom by recommending Suzi to her daughter-in-law, Angie, who asked for an all-over white peroxide dye with three colour stripes in the back, a direct copy of the haircut sported by her friend Daniella. Angie was so impressed with t
he ‘fabulous’ result that a few days later she rang Suzi again. Would she be able to make a home visit to Haddon Hall; not for Angie, but her husband?

  It had taken Ziggy many idle hours flicking through dozens of women’s magazines until he saw what he wanted – on the cover of a copy of Honey, at least as far as he’d later remember. A rich Warhol soup can red, blazing atop a model wearing a stunning kabuki-inspired Japanese dress by designer Kansai Yamamoto. Ziggy made a note of Yamamoto’s name and showed the magazine to Suzi.

  ‘Can you make it like that?’

  Suzi took her scissors to Ziggy’s luscious glory, snipping the sides, leaving it long at the back and spiking it on top – a mish-mash of three different haircuts from three different magazines, at least as far as she’d later remember. She prepared the dye solution and let it take effect, feeling only slightly distracted by the smouldering looks from Ziggy’s guitarist, the one they called Ronno.

  The next morning Suzi was back in her salon when the phone rang. It was Angie, heaving hysteria into the receiver. There was a crisis in Haddon Hall. Ziggy had woken up, wandered to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and screamed the paint off the ceiling. The face staring back at him wasn’t a cosmic messiah, more a cosmic mess. When Suzi had left the night before his hair had looked red. But in the bald Beckenham light of day it was a horrible, muddy pink. Nor would it stand up, flopping in a limp fringe. ‘It’s an emergency,’ squealed Angie. ‘Help!’

  When Suzi returned to Haddon Hall she took no chances. She prepared a special mix to her own ‘recipe’ of Schwarzkopf’s Fantasy Colour range ‘Red Hot Red’ and saturated Ziggy’s every follicle. When the solution was rinsed off, it looked as if coppery flames were licking out of his forehead and all around his ears. To keep its shape, Suzi applied a dandruff treatment called Guard containing a strong setting agent. Ziggy sculpted it proudly with his fingers, the shine of happy tears in his eyes. It was a masterpiece, but one which was going to take a lot of maintenance.