At least he knew, absolutely, that Aladdin Sane was a better album than The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. As a rock ’n’ roll record it was less polished, but better informed. It was blacker, more truthful, more out there, more musically interesting, especially the title track with Garson The Parson’s spastic piano and Ziggy’s fame-hungry croon from The Cookies’ ‘On Broadway’. It was a sound to match the album cover, photographed by a man named Duffy and overseen by the Picasso of panstick, French make-up artist Pierre La Roche. The head and shoulders of Ziggy, eyes closed, snow-white face coruscated by a red and blue lightning bolt, water droplets reflecting in the grooves of his collarbone like a wet statue cleansed by an eternity of acid rains, waiting to be worshipped in a far flung altar at the other end of the universe.
The world was given its first proper glimpse of Aladdin Sane on Saturday 20 January when Ziggy appeared as a guest on a special ‘Pop’ edition of ITV’s evening chatshow Russell Harty Plus. With ‘The Jean Genie’ still grating against ‘Blockbuster’ in the top three that week, Ziggy bravely used the opportunity to unveil his next single, the one Mott had turned down, ‘Drive-In Saturday’. Harty, the show’s buttery host who hadn’t quite shaken the airs of his previous job as a Yorkshire drama teacher, described Ziggy’s physical appearance as ‘incredible’, that of a sci-fi teddy boy in silver tie, fibreglass platform heels and still with the solitary earring bouncing like a chandelier in an earthquake.
Ziggy may have looked ‘incredible’ but underneath he was anxious, not about singing but about his first sit-down television interview. Anxious about exposing himself as anyone other than Ziggy Stardust.
His favourite reporter from the NME, Charlie Shaar Murray, was shadowing him that day, offering him some valuable off-camera interview practice in the cafeteria of Harty’s South Bank studios. Ziggy tried his best to explain Aladdin Sane, who wasn’t really a character but an ephemeral ‘situation’.
Charlie tried to nail Ziggy down on what it meant to be Ziggy, telling him that most of the letters the NME received believed Ziggy to be more important than his creator, David Bowie.
‘Yes,’ smiled Ziggy. ‘They’re probably right.’
A pause for thought.
‘I don’t think David Bowie at all important.’
RUSSELL HARTY THOUGHT he knew all there was to know about interviewing pop stars. Their evasive tricks and turns, their eely manoeuvres, the way they’d play to the gallery with a cocky quip and a cheeky pout to elicit shrieks of delight from the fawning fans who’d hijacked that week’s audience. He’d already gone rounds with Marc Bolan the previous year, softly poking him about money, privilege and his ‘carefully constructed image’. Marc was disarmingly straightforward, ending their chat admitting he didn’t think he’d live to see the age of 50. Harty had dredged the psychological depths of Marc Bolan, and now he intended to trawl the bottom of Ziggy Stardust.
‘You have a strange face,’ said Harty.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Ziggy.
The audience laughed.
‘Were you a nobody who suddenly thought, “Jesus, I must get into the scene by some other way?”’
‘I never asked Jesus for a thing. It’s always on my own initiative.’
More laughter.
‘Could you draw the outline of your personality?’
‘Well, um, I find that I’m a person who can take on the guises of different people that I meet. I can switch accents in seconds of meeting somebody and I can adopt their accent. I’ve always found that I collect. I’m a collector. And I’ve always just seemed to collect personalities.’
Puzzlement.
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘I believe in an energy form but I wouldn’t like to put a name to it.’
A gripping hush.
‘Do you indulge in any form of worship?’
‘Uh,’ Ziggy hesitated. ‘Life. I love life very much indeed.’
And so they chatted on, about ‘magnificent’ groupies, Ziggy’s ‘heavy duty’ fan letters and his stockings from Woolworths, Harty forever sloshing in the murk, trying to snag the truth of the Starman, his inquisition slowly sinking in vain.
The programme closed with a second song from Ziggy, alone with his acoustic guitar. It was a song he’d been singing in concert for months, now poisoning his every waking hour, the dawn chorus to his first eyelid’s opening, the housewives’ favourite every time he looked in the bathroom mirror, and the knee-buckling swansong to the closing curtain of sleep. When Marc had been Harty’s guest he’d only spoken about death. Now Ziggy chose to sing it.
‘My death waits …’
Television sets hummed in late-night living rooms around the country to the sound of a voice which only minutes earlier had claimed it loved life, now wailing to its grave in the pallbearing shadow of Jacques Brel.
Just approaching twenty-five minutes to midnight, the end credits of Russell Harty Plus rolled over a close-up of Ziggy’s ghoulish face as he flayed his guitar with such force a string snapped, whipping loose like a severed tendon.
Ba-doing!
He finished the song a cappella. The audience broke out in applause. He nodded graciously.
Then he looked down at the broken string, twinkling like thin silver rope under the studio lights, and pictured his limp body dangling at the end of it.
EIGHT
THE FRENZY
HE COULD HEAR voices. Panicking voices. He could feel the heat and the breath and the hands of what felt like several people carrying the weight of his sparrow-like body. His eyes were closed, his head a deadweight lolling around his neck like a grapefruit in a stocking. He tried to open his eyelids, the serene blackness momentarily slit by a volcanic white light before they squinted shut again. His body bumped softly as the hands carried him forward. The voices now echoing, growing softer.
‘Is he OK? What happened?’
In his head, a symphony of happy oblivion.
‘Is he all right?’
Yes, he was all right. If this was what it felt like to be dead then he was definitely all right. Darkness, silence and absolute peace. He could feel the muscles in his face flex a smile. Jacques Brel was singing him to sleep. ‘Think of that, and the passing time.’
And so he slept and he dreamed about the passing of time.
He dreamed about a ship. A ship somewhere in the midst of the North Atlantic. The picture became sharper and he could see the name of the ship, the SS Canberra, and two men sat by a dancefloor watching couples shunt around in foxtrots. A familiar thin figure with bright red hair he recognised as himself. The other, his friend with dark curls, he knew to be called Geoff, a boyhood chum of David Jones from Bromley. They were drinking and joking about tea, cakes, portside chills and starboard boredom. They were Ziggy and Geoff but they chatted in silly voices pretending to be Oscar Wilde and his lover ‘Bosie’, the scene fading to the sound of that rare laughter which only exists between best friends.
A voice whispered what sounded like, ‘David?’
He ignored it and dreamed instead of a club. One of those Greenwich Village jazz heavens he’d read about in Kerouac books. The kind where Sal, Dean and all the other children of the American bop night would flock to cry wild and dizzy prayers to the holy beat, except that this night he was the one doing the praying to the black god called Charles Mingus, the one who’d taught him the sermon of ‘Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am’ all those years ago. He listened, and he dug and he twitched his feet both for his own sake and for his brother, Terry. It had been a long time since he’d thought about Terry. The music pinged and skitted in crooked off-roads and sudden detours. If only he could have dreamed Terry there beside him. The sadness grew. The night bopped. The scene faded.
‘David?’
Don’t wake up. Keep dreaming. About a theatre. A lavish art-deco theatre with ceiling curves which arced outwards in concentric splendour like the rays of a setting sun. A stage at the centre of the sun where many t
housand faces were already staring. The tremble of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ and feeling himself lowered down from a great height. Screams and light-bulb flashes. Singing songs people hadn’t heard yet and hearing cries of, ‘When’s this album comin’ out?’ Costume changes, noise and hysteria. Hearing a thousand voices sing along with him, ‘You’re a rock ’n’ roll suicide.’ Feeling like he actually was the centre of the sun, the body of a star, lighting the void. ‘Gimme your hands!’ Seeing hands upon hands upon hands, twitching rockets aching to launch themselves from their crying owners’ wrists, every straining finger an ode to the unreachable joy of his own fevered grasp. Then a body. A blur rising up from the roaring sea of flesh, now running towards him. Then terror. The shape coming closer. Then weakness. Then screaming. Then nothing.
‘He’s coming round.’
He slowly opened his eyes. Figures distorted by the light, their faces slowly coming into focus. A cup of water was pushed in front of his face. He said, ‘I’m OK.’ He raised his body up from where it had been lying down. He was in a dressing room. He could see a rail of brightly coloured clothes, a spectrum of sequins, and on the far wall a giant vanity mirror in which a head now bobbed into view with a vibrant red plume of hair and a gold circle gleaming like a lighthouse on its forehead. It was then he realised he wasn’t dreaming any more and his heart sank. He was still alive. He was still him in the mirror.
He was still Ziggy Stardust.
THERE WERE THOSE who thought it was all a publicity stunt. Ziggy Stardust’s return to New York to play two nights at the world famous Radio City Music Hall. A star-studded guest list including his friend Bette Midler, Jacques Brel’s English translator Rod McKuen (the man who turned ‘La Mort’ into ‘My Death’) and the great Salvador Dali, surrealist painter and co-creator of one of Ziggy’s favourite films, Un Chien Andalou. The first night, Valentine’s Day, fans clutching bouquets of flowers and scattering cards which read, ‘We love you madly.’ Ziggy making his entrance lowered from the rafters in a silver gyroscope, a prop borrowed from the venue’s house dance troupe the Rockettes. And then in the final song, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’, a boy invading the stage, pelting towards him for an embrace, only for Ziggy to suddenly collapse to the floor as if he’d just been shot. Some of the crowd even swore they heard gunfire.
It wasn’t the boy’s fault. He wasn’t to know that Ziggy was still convinced he was going to be killed on stage, just as Ziggy wasn’t to know the boy wasn’t running towards him with a loaded .38-calibre pistol. But he’d freaked and, right on cue with Ronno’s guillotine crescendo, he’d fainted in front of Dali, McKuen, Midler and some five thousand others. As Sounds reported back in England, ‘The gig could realistically be described as the night that Ziggy Stardust died.’
The official explanation given to the press by DeFries was ‘lack of eating and sleeping’. There was some truth in this. Ziggy had been back in America nearly two weeks, sailing over from England on the SS Canberra accompanied by Geoff MacCormack, David’s other best friend, who’d just joined the tour as a backing singer and percussionist. He’d been rehearsing intensely since he landed, long hours followed by longer nights going to watch Charles Mingus play the Village Gate down on Bleecker, or his friends the New York Dolls with their new drummer Jerry way uptown at Kenny’s Castaways.
He’d also fallen for another New York doll, a 19-year-old model named Bebe Buell, part of the Max’s backroom set along with his old flame Cyrinda Foxe. Ziggy invited Buell to his suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel; as she’d later recall he was ‘the first man who ever painted my toenails for me’. And when not swooning to the chimes of Buell, he was picking out pits with Ava Cherry, a gorgeous black singer with cropped dyed peroxide hair whom he’d met at an after-party for Stevie Wonder.
Four months earlier he’d played New York as a hyped nobody pretending to be somebody. Now he’d returned a somebody who needed hype from nobody. Aladdin Sane had come home to America, this time not intent on another epic Kerouacesque odyssey but a short lap of honour: starting in New York with a handful of stops westwards before ending in Los Angeles. Demand for tickets was so high that in Philadelphia Ziggy began playing two shows a day, matinée and evening. He slayed the audience in Nashville, and again levelled Memphis in the absence of its King. (The night Ziggy returned to the city’s Ellis Auditorium, Elvis was in Las Vegas where, a week earlier, he’d karate-chopped an over-enthusiastic fan who clambered on stage: paranoid over previous death threats, Elvis automatically assumed the boy to be a potential assassin running towards him with a .38-calibre pistol.)
In Detroit, Ziggy’s stage antics whistled life-changing rapture between the gap in the teeth of a 15-year-old girl wearing platform boots and a long silver cape, who savoured every sequin knowing tomorrow she’d be grounded for going against the wishes of her Italian father, Mr Ciccone.
In Los Angeles, Ziggy returned to the Rainbow Bar & Grill where Stuey earned his wage protecting him from a dumb punk who tried to swing a punch on the dancefloor. He quickened fifteen thousand pulses at the city’s Long Beach Arena, including Mick Jagger’s, and later dined with Marc’s favourite Beatle and T. Rex film director, Ringo Starr. And he hit high notes with teenage foxtrel Lori Mattix who told her friends at groupie bible Star magazine that, even off stage, ‘David likes to be called Ziggy’ and that he loved ‘like Rudolph Valentino’. Cherry sex. Mattix sex. Insert-name-here sex. The permutations were endless.
Every night on stage, as he’d done for the past year, Ziggy sang about making love with his own ego. The reality was he didn’t need to now he had America to love it for him. The face in the mirror with the gold circle on the forehead – a new addition to the Ziggy mask, the dark and ancient echo of Calvin Lee’s ‘love jewels’ – was that of pop’s true cosmic messiah made flesh, or more accurately bone.
HALF A WORLD AWAY, pop’s former cosmic messiah made flesh, or more increasingly flab, was slipping further from grace down sad slopes greased with champagne, cocaine and silent panic that his teenage squeaks were growing fainter. Marc’s new T. Rex single, ‘20th Century Boy’, was a pristine rock ’n’ roll depth-charge of galaxy-shaking proportions but, outrageously, couldn’t storm higher than number three, stalled by Donny Osmond and the triumphant super-yobbery of Slade, an unstoppable force of Midlands bovver-glam enjoying their fourth number one with ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’. All pop statistics concurred the metal guru of ’72 had since been toppled. By the Cassidy and the Osmond, by Slade and most savagely of all by the Starman.
In a frantic appeal to the last pockets of T. Rexstasy, he began peddling his body, offering Mirabelle readers the chance to ‘win tea with Marc Bolan’ and, weeks later, a used blouse. But Marc could offer the kids every thread of satin ’n’ tat in his wardrobe and still never fill the postbags of the pop press with the weight of letters from Ziggy’s weeping altar maidens scribbling in the sticks declaring him ‘the core’ of their universe. ‘Hero from the stars, all I ever ask is to touch you.’
And so Marc stuck his Moët fingers in his Chandon ears and pretended it wasn’t happening. Pretended that he was fine, he was cool and Ziggy wasn’t, because, as he’d candidly tell interviewers, he knew the psychological chink in his rival’s armour. Ziggy was ‘afraid’, sniffed Bolan. ‘Afraid that he will die before he has a chance to make a real strong contribution.’
ZIGGY STARDUST HAD, by now, been singing his life story every night on stage for over a year. His apostles could recite every syllable of its scripture by heart. The living legend of a man who came from Mars and changed the lives of all who listened; who was worshipped as their cosmic messiah until he became so big they were forced to destroy him; who was ripped to death while showing no defence or resistance: an act of wilful suicide. There lay the ballad of Ziggy Stardust. And so too the identical tale of Valentine Michael Smith.
It had taken Robert A. Heinlein over a decade to finish the novel he’d envisaged as A Man Named Smith. He’d already established a reputat
ion in the early-fifties writing sci-fi novels aimed at young adults, including one called The Rolling Stones and another called Starman Jones; he’d also written a novella imagining a future lunar expedition called The Man Who Sold The Moon. But Heinlein’s baby was the ‘Smith’ book (‘My sex and Jesus book,’ as he’d sometimes call it) first published in 1961 under its final biblical title Stranger In A Strange Land.
Heinlein’s was the messianic parable of Valentine Michael Smith, the only survivor of Earth’s first human expedition to Mars, where he’d been born to human parents who died, leaving him to be fostered by the wise Martian race of ‘Old Ones’. When Earth sends a second expedition to Mars they discover Smith, the red planet’s last surviving human, and bring him back to America. As Heinlein describes him, Smith is ‘a slender young man with underdeveloped muscles … his most marked feature was his bland, babyish face – set with eyes which would have seemed at home in a man of ninety.’ It becomes immediately obvious that Smith is not like other men, blessed with superhuman strength, telekinetic powers and a benign hippy philosophy of universal brotherhood and free love. With the help of an elderly lawyer Smith evades the government authorities hoping to contain him and starts a radical new church based upon sacred Martian teachings. Once his work on Earth is finished he allows himself to die at the hands of an opposing religious lynch mob. His final words as they hack him to pieces are a forgiving, ‘I love you.’
Published to an initially lukewarm reception, it wasn’t until the late-sixties that Stranger In A Strange Land became a word-of-mouth cult classic seemingly tailor-made for the times as a flower power sci-fi gospel. Heinlein’s story also pre-empted other ‘sympathetic alien’ novels, including 1963’s The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis, the brutally sad fable of a despairing extraterrestrial who comes to our planet on a hazardous mission to save his own only to be physically and mentally destroyed by human vice and idiocy. Both were, to various degrees, vanguards for Ziggy Stardust. But it was Stranger which resonated the loudest: the script for an unscored opera with aria-sized gaps the shape of ‘Starman’, ‘Soul Love’ and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’. Or so Tony DeFries thought.