The recording process had yet to be properly electrified in 1922 when, on Friday 27 October, the London Symphony Orchestra crammed into the central studios of the Columbia Graphophone Company in Petty France, Westminster. They were there to tape the first in a series of seven discs which when grouped together in the days before the long playing album would comprise a popular new orchestral suite. Conducting the session in Petty France that day was the suite’s composer, a physically sickly, intensely private 48-year-old girls’ school teacher of Anglo-Baltic ancestry with such a severely cropped haircut even his own family likened his appearance on the podium to that of ‘a newly released convict’. Yet this frail, shaven-headed spectre would fuse the strands of Beethoven and Wells as one, sweeping the century clear for Ziggy by unleashing the melodic force of that which Pythagoras and Kepler had only ever dreamed about – the audible harmony of the spheres. The suite was The Planets. The composer, Gustav Holst.
WHEN HOLST WROTE his name-making masterpiece he was thinking in terms of astrology, not astronomy; an obsession he developed in his thirties hoping to make sense of a life which up to that point he considered an absolute failure. He was born Gustav Theodore von Holst in Cheltenham on 21 September 1874; the same day, a hundred miles away in Bromley, the young H. G. Wells had just turned eight. Gustav was a puny, asthmatic boy with poor eyesight who cut a dismal figure beside his hearty younger brother, Emil. Their mother died when Gustav was eight, leaving them in the care of their strict father intent on moulding his eldest son into a pianist despite neuritis, a muscular inflammation which plagued Holst till his death. When he came to write The Planets the pain was so bad he could no longer hold a pen, only capable of scribbling with a nib strapped to the middle finger of his right hand.
Untainted by the trauma of his dad’s practice regime, music stirred the young Holst’s soul like nothing else. He’d remember hearing a mass by Bach for the first time as an out-of-body sensation akin to levitation, clutching the sides of his chair for fear he might fall off. Moving to London to study at the Royal College of Music, Holst fell under the spell of Wagner; so poleaxed by a performance of Tristan And Isolde that he wandered the city streets all night in a transcendental stupor until watching dawn rise over the Thames.
Holst’s late-nineteenth-century London odyssey sharply echoed the footfall of Wells but a few years earlier. Both were scrawny, impoverished vegetarian young men studying in South Kensington in the shadow of the Albert Hall; both were music lovers lured by the new English socialism movement. Like Wells, the young Holst also attended meetings at the Hammersmith house of William Morris, even conducting the affiliated Hammersmith Socialist Choir. After his boyhood dreams of becoming a concert pianist were thwarted by his worsening neuritis, conducting and composing became his life. Offered a place at the Royal College for an extra year, Holst chose to end his music scholarship in 1898, preferring to ‘learn by doing’ out in the world – a world which at that very moment was trembling to the descriptions of Martian heat rays in a new book by H. G. Wells.
The London concert circuit at the turn of the century was comparatively sober, save for one notable early Proms performance at the Queen’s Hall. The conductor was a friend of Holst’s, Henry Wood, who that night presented a new march by the most celebrated English composer of the day, Edward Elgar. At the end of the march the audience ‘simply rose and yelled’, recalled Wood. Unable to quell their applause and continue with the rest of the concert they played it a second time. ‘With the same result,’ exclaimed Wood. And so they played it a third time in a frantic bid to restore order. The piece would soon be supplied lyrics by the poet A. C. Benson as the ‘Coronation Ode’ of Edward VII, ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’. But in October 1901 it was simply ‘Pomp And Circumstance March No. 1 In D’ – the tune destined to peal through a sea of sobs in the Hammersmith Odeon in the minutes immediately after the death of Ziggy Stardust.
The Hammersmith Odeon hadn’t yet been built when Holst, now aged 30, took up a teaching post less than half a mile away from its eventual site. He would remain head of music at St Paul’s Girls’ School in the leafy avenue of Brook Green for the rest of his life, naming the key which allowed him access to the building to work any time of day or night as one of his two prized possessions. The other was a tuning fork given to him by an admirer, which had passed through many hands during the last hundred years since it left those of its original owner: Ludwig van Beethoven.
Teaching supported Holst, but as a composer he was struggling to make any impact in a world dominated by the pastoral reflections and sabre-rattling patriotism of the newly knighted Elgar. ‘I’m “fed up” with music,’ he mourned. ‘Especially my own.’ Sensing Holst’s deepening depression, in 1913 his friend the composer Henry Balfour Gardiner rallied round to raise his spirits, offering to pay his way to join himself, fellow composer Arnold Bax and Bax’s brother, the writer Clifford, on holiday in Spain. As they boarded the train to the coast at Charing Cross station, Holst and Clifford Bax discovered they shared a common interest in astrology: Holst still a novice, Bax an authority.
Their many conversations during the trip resuscitated Holst’s wilting muse. Upon his return he bought a thin booklet by British astrologer Alan Leo called What Is A Horoscope And How Is It Cast? Its humble contents provided Holst with everything he needed: a readymade blueprint for an orchestral suite on the different human character traits associated with each of the planets. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
He had found his spheres. Now, to give them harmonies.
BY THE LATE summer of 1914 Holst was still teaching in Hammersmith but now resident in Thaxted, a small country village in Essex. In this idyllic, earthbound setting he started to write The Planets, commencing with ‘Mars, The Bringer Of War’. Historically, it seems obvious that its mood must have been sculpted, however subconsciously, by the outbreak of the First World War, even if Holst denied this. But the first drops of blood shed in Belgium and Prussia weren’t the only influence. To any literate, culturally aware member of Edwardian society living and working in early 1900s London, as Holst had, the word ‘Mars’ and its association with ‘War’ would have meant only one thing: the slimy ovoid invaders and the indestructible tripod fighting machines of H. G. Wells.
As Holst wandered through the fields and meadows around Thaxted, it’s not beyond reason to picture the germ of the tune’s rhythmic ferocity beating between his ears conjuring hallucinations of Martian heat rays incinerating the hedgerows. Holst’s ‘Bringer Of War’ could be a First World War symphony scored in blood and bullets upon a barbed-wire stave but, equally, a graphic Wellsian Martian invasion made music: the slow, rumbling approach as the cylinder falls ever closer to Earth through deep space; the crash of impact and the commencing battle; the relentless slaughter to a cold, cruel, military death beat; the respite of human despair; the holocaust resumed and the crescendo of total extraterrestrial victory.
Regardless of what Holst may have intended at the time, the sway of The War Of The Worlds was closer at hand in the village of Thaxted than he might have realised. Two miles down the road in Easton Lodge estate, the Countess of Warwick was renting out the rectory house on her grounds to a fellow socialist and successful author who’d just relocated from London. His friends called him ‘Bertie’. The two 21 September birthday boys from Mars, Wells and Holst, were now practically neighbours.
IN THE LAST weeks before armistice, on 29 September 1918 The Planets was unveiled to a private afternoon gathering at London’s Queen’s Hall in its now familiar final order: the Wellsian overture of fear ‘Mars, The Bringer Of War’; the sedate, spacey relief of ‘Venus, The Bringer Of Peace’; the frolicsome ‘Mercury, The Winged Messenger’; the royal salute of ‘Jupiter, The Bringer Of Jollity’ (which, the story goes, had the hall’s charwomen waltzing with their mops in the corridors); the pensive epiphany of Holst’s personal favourite, ‘Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age’; the discordant, dramatic ‘Uranus, The Magic
ian’; and the icy, inscrutable tranquillity of ‘Neptune, The Mystic’.
Among the invited audience were his former Spanish holidaymakers the Bax brothers and Henry Wood, the man who’d conducted Elgar’s infamous double encore under the same roof. Also present that Sunday was the critic Edward Dent, describing The Planets as ‘extremely queer’ yet ‘very much alive’. Of the seven pieces it was the eerie ‘Neptune’ which impressed Dent the most. ‘It was really mystical and exploratory,’ he enthused, ‘with a feeling of posthumous Beethoven, and a sense of getting on to a different plane altogether.’
Undoubtedly ‘Neptune’ was the most challenging for early-twentieth-century ears, involving a women’s choir – hastily assembled for that performance from the girls of St Paul’s – whose task it was to end the suite with a real-time live fade-out. Rather than simply lower the volume of their voices, Holst instructed that the choir should stand in an adjoining room, the door to be slowly closed until they could no longer be heard. His daughter Imogen vividly described its debut recital as like opening ‘the doors on an unknown world’. Holst wrote The Planets as an astrological voyage through the human psyche. But its impact was infinitely more cosmic. In the days when the world had yet to punt so much as a satellite into orbit, using only a pen nib tied to his finger in a soundproof room in a Hammersmith girls’ school, Holst, with the supernatural strains of ‘Neptune’, propelled humankind to the very edges of our solar system, weaving harmonies between the heavenly spheres. Exactly as Kepler had dreamed three hundred years earlier.
The Planets brought Holst the acclaim he’d been yearning for all his life, not only in England but internationally in Europe and America; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor invited him to become their professor of music, a post he had to decline due to his enduring ill health. The sad irony was that having hungered for recognition, Holst failed to cope with his new status as a popular composer. Against his better judgement, he allowed ‘Jupiter’ to be fashioned into a jingoistic hymn with words by Cecil Spring-Rice, ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’, a nationalist sentiment he deeply regretted. As his reputation grew, so did his wariness with the constant attention; his standard response to fan mail requesting autographs was a curt typewritten slip informing the recipient ‘Mr Holst’ never signed anything for strangers.
Holst’s muse returned to space for a final fleeting visit in 1929, picking out a weird and appropriately alien piano dirge to accompany the words of Humbert Wolfe’s poem about the star ‘Betelgeuse’ in the constellation of Orion, over six hundred light years from Earth. Yet when he finally heard his ‘Betelgeuse’ performed in public the cost of a life spent forever groping in the unknown darkness of non-human musical realms hit Holst with cruel force. The same concert ended with Schubert’s ‘String Quintet In C Major’. Hearing this one classical masterwork all but destroyed him. In the emotion and humanity of Schubert, he recognised everything his own music lacked. ‘He felt imprisoned in a cold region,’ recalled his daughter, ‘where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated.’ Her father had spent so long composing among the stars he’d forgotten to fall back to Earth. The man who made twentieth-century music extraterrestrial had all but become one himself.
ON 23 MAY 1934, the 59-year-old Holst was admitted to hospital for a stomach operation. Two days after surgery, he died of heart failure. His close friend and the inheritor of Beethoven’s tuning fork, Ralph Vaughan Williams, paid poignant tribute in a foreword for Imogen Holst’s biography of her father published four years later. ‘Holst’s art has been called cold and inhuman,’ he wrote. ‘The truth is it is supra-human… his music reaches into the unknown, but it never loses touch with humanity.’
In the supra-human melodies of Holst’s The Planets blazed the sparkling prelude of the Starman’s hazy cosmic jive. Strange, modern music from outer space, written at the birth of the recording age which found mass popularity through the new medium. In ‘Mars, The Bringer Of War’, it would eventually find its way into the repertoire of a young London mod band called The Lower Third. And in the ethereal siren call of ‘Neptune’ it would one day echo around the expectant auditorium of an Odeon cinema mere streets from where it was composed, in the hour before the greatest pop star who ever lived stepped out on stage for the last time.
From the First World War to the 1970s. From Gustav Holst to Ziggy Stardust. The harmonic essence of alien mystique was born, and died, in Hammersmith.
SIX
LIGHTNING
THE YEAR 1932. Just forty years before the arrival of the Starman. He exists, for now, as a chorus of yet-to-be-connected whispers, no longer sequestered in the creative subconscious of a lone Ludwig, Herbert or Gustav, but subtly twisting the tongues and moulding the murmurs of thousands, an echo of dots waiting for the right DNA to smooth him out into a single coherent dash called Ziggy Stardust. All that’s needed is for fate to gently tap the sides of the test tube, to delicately tweak the last vital pieces of genetic apparatus. But first, fate has to find them.
Life in the spiritually weakened England of 1932 was a life out of gear. ‘Very seriously out of gear,’ as the 65-year-old H. G. Wells told the nation across the airwaves of the BBC. ‘There has been a creeping paralysis of business for some years,’ mourned Wells. ‘We are over-producing and under-consuming. None of us with investments feel safe with these investments and none of us who are gainfully employed, as the census forms put it, feel safe that that gainful employment will continue. Our political life is out of gear, even more than our economic life. We are taxed overwhelmingly, crushingly, to pay for the last war and to prepare for the next …’
Four thousand years earlier, the Babylonians countered their fears of famine, war and poverty by building Ziggurats to their gods. The louder, faster, fidgety human race of 1932 wasn’t so very different.
At 11.30 a.m. on Easter Monday, 28 March, the doors of a new temple opened to awestruck crowds in west London; a 190-foot-wide architectural marvel looking like a polished granite spaceship crafted by an infinitely more sophisticated alien species, now parked at the far end of Fulham Palace Road. Inside, the walls of the temple were as lavish as anything recently uncovered in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings by archaeologist Howard Carter. Gleaming columns and pilasters, tones of horizon green, grey, mauve, silver and various harmonising metallic tints enriched with gold lacquer. Even the atmosphere was heaven sent: five million cubic feet of pure air filtered through a complex system of pumps generating over 180 fresh tons per hour. The public called this temple ‘the modern of moderns’. The press called it ‘West London’s Wonder Cinema’. The owners called it the Gaumont Palace, Hammersmith Broadway, later to change its name to the Odeon. Four decades before Ziggy Stardust landed, his gallows were already in place.
The Babylonians designed their Ziggurats to worship the stars. The British built their Gaumont Palaces for the very same purpose. Stars twinkling in silvery light, illuminating the darkness of a three-thousand-seater auditorium. Visions of exotic, sensual perfection beaming bigger than the tramcars which shuttled the cheer-starved audience of a sorry slump nation to its doors. Where the Babylonian priest of 2500 BC shook before the might of Ishtar, Marduk and Shamash, the British cinemagoer of 1932 cowered before Karloff, Dietrich and Garbo.
None were more spellbinding than Garbo: alleged Scandinavian flesh and blood living in the Californian Olympus called Hollywood but a mortal-mocking deity of desire when amplified through the lens of a 35mm film projector. When the New York Herald Tribune critic Percy Hammond made the mistake of criticising her performance in that year’s Grand Hotel, the ensuing fatwa of vitriolic mail from devoted Garboites forced him to publish an apology. ‘When in a strange land,’ Hammond noted to himself, ‘worship the gods of the place, whatever they are.’
The first gods to grace the Hammersmith Gaumont Palace were of an admittedly lesser power than Garbo. Upon the screen, the latest ‘Aldwych farce’ A Night Like This, starring Tom Walls, and the American gangster drama Bad Comp
any with Helen Twelvetrees. Upon the stage, a celebratory ‘Easter Egg’ variety bill featuring the noted Dutch violinist De Groot. Addressing the assembled public and members of the press that Easter Monday lunchtime, the Mayor of Hammersmith praised the Gaumont’s thoroughbred British construction and, in particular, the ingenuity of its modern art-deco design. The latter was down to the brilliance of 44-year-old English architect Robert Cromie, already famed for similarly grand cinemas in Croydon and Epsom where he pioneered the widespread use of tubular steel furniture. The Hammersmith Gaumont confirmed his status as the country’s leading creator of picture palaces – a reputation which belied his apprenticeship with a firm specialising in the construction of Edwardian mental asylums.
Two years later, on Monday 3 December 1934, the ribbon was cut on another of Cromie’s cinemas in Tunbridge Wells. With its clever use of space, squeezing the foyer into a narrow street corner so as not to disturb neighbouring shops, and capped by a fifty-foot decorative glass tower, the new Ritz was hailed ‘Kent’s most luxurious theatre’. Upstairs was the added attraction of the Florida, ‘Kent’s most luxuriously appointed restaurant and ballroom’.
The Ritz complex tempted the townsfolk with such embarrassment of ‘luxury’ but the reality of its patrons’ provincial life was all too poignantly summed up by the film chosen for its gala opening. Sing As We Go starred northern back-alley sweetheart Gracie Fields as a newly unemployed millworker merrily trilling her way through the country’s worsening economic paralysis Wells predicted. ‘Sing as we go although the skies are grey,’ grinned Fields. ‘A song and a smile making life worthwhile.’
Life in England in 1934 under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald – ‘The Boneless Wonder’ – wasn’t nearly so ‘gay’ as Fields pretended. As Wells had previously argued, ‘Plainly there is urgent need for some supreme control in the world to arrest this stalling of our economic machine.’ By 1936, that urgent need had frayed disenchantment into desperation and hopelessness into hatred. In want of a common enemy, and in the absence of any Martian assault, men and women whose fathers had fought the war to end all wars found other aliens to attack.
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