Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  If ‘Fred Burrett’ was too plain then ‘Freddie Burretti’ sounded like an Italian ice-cream salesman. But if David was going to make Fred a star, he might as well steal the name of one of the biggest. And so Fred from the East End became ‘Rudi Valentino’ – the public face of the ‘Moonage Daydream’ single David recorded with Rungk. It was David’s voice with Rungk’s backing but, as an experiment in wrongness, the record was launched as the debut by Rudi’s band, The Arnold Corns, named by David in homage to Syd Barrett and The Pink Floyd’s earlier single about a clothesline thief, ‘Arnold Layne’. David was still credited as writer and producer, posing with Rudi in publicity photos as alleged artist and mentor – in truth, artist and artifice. They appeared on the cover of Soho ‘sex education’ mag Curious with David declaring Rudi to be ‘the leader of the whole gay scene’ and Rudi announcing his ambition to be on the cover of Vogue. It didn’t even matter that the single flopped. As David’s first indulgent low-key exercise drill in rock camp and pop duplicity it was a screaming success.

  While David was preoccupied with the slow birth of Ziggy, in late May Angie gave birth to their son, Zowie. Typical of his current zed-shaped fixation, David christened him after a phrase he’d seen in one of his Batman comics. He’d been at home listening to Neil Young’s After The Goldrush album when the call came telling him he’d become a father. David went straight to the hospital, the receptionist pointing him to the maternity ward, where he found his son’s cot and proudly cooed. A few moments passed before the nurse told him he’d been admiring someone else’s child. His son was in a different cot. He’d been looking at the ‘wrong’ Zowie Bowie. David’s world was fast becoming a place where no one but no one was ever whom he thought they were…

  PETER WASN’T A no-one though he’d always be a Noone. He’d had a successful career in the sixties as singer with Herman’s Hermits, a Lancashire hot-pot of guitars and teeth popular in Britain but virtually pandemic in the States. Noone bailed out in 1971, looking to Hermits producer Mickie Most to jumpstart his solo career. Most succeeded thanks to a song he’d chosen from a demo given to him by David’s publisher, Bob Grace. The lyrics were a bit on the heavy side – some Nietzschean gobbledygook about ‘Homo Superior’ – but its ragtime tune was so catchy that most listeners probably wouldn’t notice. And, besides, it had a very pleasant title. ‘Oh You Pretty Things’.

  Noone’s single peaked at number twelve. The highest charting David Bowie song since ‘Space Oddity’ four years earlier. Noone had somehow achieved what Fred’s ‘Rudi’ hadn’t. Scoring a major hit single as the wrong David Bowie. It made David laugh. The Starman tumour swelling inside his head laughed along with him. The punchline was that neither of them knew who the right David Bowie was any more.

  Every song he wrote these days he seemed to be somebody else. Not yet Ziggy, but no longer David either. He sang inside the skins of others, or at least how he imagined those others to be. He was ‘Andy Warhol’. He wrote a ‘Song For Bob Dylan’. He was Lou Reed, ‘Queen Bitch’. He thought about his baby son Zowie and wrote ‘Kooks’. He thought sad and strange thoughts about his half-brother Terry and wrote ‘The Bewlay Brothers’. When he tried to think about himself, all he could focus on were these same fluctuating ‘Changes’. As he’d later self-analyse, he was clearing his system ‘of the schizophrenics’.

  The new songs formed the core of Hunky Dory, David’s fourth album, recorded that summer, along with his own version of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ – adding an exclamation mark and reinstating the word ‘bitch’ which Noone censored as ‘beast’. With Tony Visconti scarpering off to steer the good ship T. Rexstasy, another of his former engineers, Ken Scott, had taken over as album producer, assisted by David, or as he’d tellingly credit himself, ‘The Actor’. He also had the stability of a solid new backing band. Three formidable musicians, one of them a genius, whose vowel-flattening accents betrayed their shared origins way up north. From a city so devoid of hope that the gods shoved it to the far eastern edge of Yorkshire with a feeble prayer that one day a freak tidal wave might wash it into the sea, never to be heard of again. Except that Ziggy Stardust needed that city. Of all the towns in all the world, this was the unlikely grim incubator of the human specimens deserved of becoming his Spiders From Mars. Because only Ziggy, only a creature from outer space, would dream of recruiting the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the universe from Hull.

  Their names were Mick, Woody and Trevor. One guitar star and his two orbiting planets of rhythm.

  Mick Ronson. The genius. Less a man, more a Titan. Made in Hull, he played like heaven. In his ten fingers alone lay the secret harmonies of the spheres; how Kepler would have wept for joy had he ever heard the music of Mick Ronson. The Beethoven of the Greatfield estate, he was classically trained on piano, recorder and violin. When he later took to the guitar it was with practised hands and a maestro’s mind. In the spring of ‘66, aged 19, he was good enough and serious enough about joining a band to make a pilgrimage to London, loitering between the cups and saucers of La Gioconda, itching to be discovered. It wasn’t his time. By the autumn he was back in Hull, taking a job for the city council’s parks department, where he might have stayed had his friend John, drummer from one of his previous local bands, The Rats, not recommended him to David. In January 1970, John travelled from London to fetch Mick from Hull. When he got there, he found the greatest guitar player of his generation marking lines on a rugby pitch.

  Four months later, John was sacked leaving David in need of a new drummer. Mick recommended another Humberside face, Woody Woodmansey. He’d also played with Mick in The Rats, one of the reasons he landed the nickname ‘Woody’: his real name was also Mick, so it avoided any confusion of having two in the same band.

  Last to join was the hairy phenomenon called Trevor Bolder, once destined for great things as the finest young trumpeter in the whole East Riding until willingly corrupted by rock ’n’ roll. Mick had seen Trevor play bass on the local club circuit and once asked him to fill in for The Rats when their own bassist chickened out of a gig for fear of being electrocuted. Mick and Woody had already made one album with David, The Man Who Sold The World, featuring Visconti on bass. With Visconti gone, Mick lit up the Humberside telephone exchange once again to beckon Trevor as his replacement. The Hull’s angels were now three. As Mick, Trevor and Woody, they were David’s band. As Ronno, Weird and Gilly, they’d soon be Ziggy’s.

  Even as they were making Hunky Dory, David’s new Yorkshire terriers could sense a foreign presence flexing under their singer’s surface. They covered a country blues tune by American songwriter Ron Davies called ‘It Ain’t Easy’. To their surprise David decided not to include it on the album, as if he was saving it for something – or maybe someone – else. All the clues they needed were in the last title recorded for the album. ‘Life On Mars?’. Not actually about Mars but life on Earth in all its incurable loneliness, David looking through the eyes of the saddest girl in the cinema, stirring in Mickey Mouse, the Norfolk Broads and some lyrics pinched from another single he’d brought back from America about a cartoon caveman called ‘Alley Oop’ by The Hollywood Argyles. The tune wasn’t entirely original either, stolen from a French song, ‘Comme D’Habitude’. Three years earlier David had proposed an English-language version with his own words called ‘Even A Fool Learns To Love’. Instead, he was gazumped by a better set of lyrics from popular American singer– songwriter Paul Anka who took ‘Comme D’Habitude’ and created ‘My Way’, the 1969 calling-card for Frank Sinatra. ‘Life On Mars?’ was David’s belated devilish riposte. Taking ‘My Way’ and doing it his way. Or, rather, Ziggy’s way.

  Work on the album wound up in August, just as a controversial new play opened at London’s Roundhouse called Pork. ‘Written’ by Andy Warhol, its script was based upon edited highlights of years of telephone conversations he’d recorded with Factory superstar Brigid Berlin discussing sex, drugs and family problems. Berlin provided the template for its epo
nymous heroine ‘Amanda Pork’ played by New York groupie and journalist Cherry Vanilla. The Warhol role of ‘B. Marlowe’ was played by Andy-lookalike Tony Zanetta complete with silvery wig. Audiences were scandalised both by its cast, including drag queen Wayne County as ‘Vulva Lips’, and its scenes of shooting up, nudity and ‘plate jobs’ – the scatological fetish of watching someone do their business on your face through a Perspex plate. Disclaimers were placed in the press: ‘Warning: This play has explicit sexual content and offensive language. If you are likely to be disturbed, do not attend.’ David and Angie weren’t likely to be disturbed. They did attend. Twice.

  Before the play’s Roundhouse residency was through, the Bowies had befriended most of the cast, including Zanetta, or ‘Zee’ as everyone called him, Vanilla, County and Pork’s director, Leee Black Childers. David was fascinated to hear their tales of life inside the Factory and the real Warhol. He’d just written a song about Andy on Hunky Dory and was desperate to know what the real Andy was like.

  What was the real Andy like?

  The cosmos coughed in mischief and, for the love of Ziggy, decided to show him the answer.

  THE MORNING AFTER meeting Lou and Iggy, David awoke groggily in his hotel bedroom, serenaded by the close sound of familiar voices and the clattering of cutlery on china. He got up to find Iggy in his suite, horsing down two breakfasts, chatting between mouthfuls of egg while DeFries sat opposite, silently contemplating how he could turn this famished Detroit junkie trashbag into dollars and cents. Iggy agreed to let DeFries sort his affairs, leaving to collect his things from Fields’ apartment to come and move in beside them at the Warwick.

  In the meantime, David and DeFries went to meet a different kind of human freakshow. Tony Zee, back in New York now that Pork had ended, promised to chaperone them to meet Andy Warhol at the Factory. It had moved premises since Kenneth Pitt visited in 1966, shifting downtown to the sixth floor of the Decker Building on Union Square. The same building where, in June 1968, radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas had failed in her attempt to assassinate Andy.

  The first thing that greeted David by the entrance was a stuffed Great Dane – Andy’s unsubstantiated myth was that the dog had once belonged to director Cecil B. DeMille. The second was Paul Morrissey, now in charge of the Factory’s day-to-day business. The third was Andy himself.

  Warhol sat in the corner, staring blankly at the skinny, long-haired Englishman who was introduced to him as ‘David Bowie’. He said nothing. David smiled. Andy looked at his teeth with private alarm.

  Silence.

  DeFries began filling the air with spiel about how much money he’d been promised by RCA, how big a star David was going to become, and how it would be great if Andy could attach his name to him, just as he had with The Velvet Underground. Andy blinked. David fidgeted.

  Silence.

  David picked his moment to give Andy a present. It was an acetate of the song he’d written about him. Andy looked at Morrissey. DeFries smiled. David coughed.

  ‘Oh?’

  They sat and listened to ‘Andy Warhol’ by David Bowie. Andy Warhol in one corner, David Bowie in the other. The song finished. David scratched the corner of his mouth. Andy breathed.

  Silence.

  DeFries kept talking about his plans for David. Morrissey nodded, pretending to be fascinated. Andy looked David up and down. He picked up a Polaroid camera from his desk and pointed it at David’s feet.

  Flash! Whirr!

  Andy smiled. ‘You have such nice shoes,’ he told David.

  They were. Yellow leather with buckles, by Anello & Davide.

  ‘Thank you,’ said David.

  Andy continued taking Polaroids of David’s shoes, arranging them on a table as they slowly developed. David indulged him, watching him work, trying to figure out what must be going on inside that head. This legend he’d wanted to meet for the last five years. This person who he’d written a song about but said nothing when he heard it. This oddity, this alien, this construct, this person of everything, this multitude of nothing. This human screenprint that called itself ‘An-dy War-hol’. It was then that a familiar silvery voice whispered softly inside David’s head. ‘It takes a lot to become somebody else.’

  A voice he already knew by name.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

  BY THE END of 1971 David Bowie had everything he needed to become somebody else.

  He had the name, Ziggy Stardust.

  He had the band of Mick, Trevor and Woody, his Ronno, Weird and Gilly.

  He had enough songs for a new album which he’d started recording at Trident that November, even before Hunky Dory was in the shops. ‘You’re not going to like it,’ he warned producer Ken Scott. ‘It’s much more like Iggy Pop.’

  He had the beginnings of the haircut after Trevor, a former hairdresser, chopped away his luxurious Katharine Hepburn tresses leaving him looking like an elfish Japanese warrior: spiky on top, thin on the sides and with thin straggles wilting around his shoulders like dead ivy.

  He also had the first set of bespoke Starman clothes thanks to dear Freddie: a patterned grey-green windcheater and turned-up trousers giving the appearance of part superhero, part art-deco sofa. David chose the fabric himself, telling anyone who asked that it was from Liberty’s department store on the edge of Soho. They needn’t know the unglamorous truth it was from one of the discount schmutter shops up Tottenham Court Road; for all anyone could ever prove it was from the Jupiter branch of Macy’s.

  For the ‘stuffed crotch’ of the trousers, he’d taken inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s new film, his first in over three years since 2001: A Space Odyssey. As its poster declared, ‘Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.’

  The film was A Clockwork Orange, from the novel by Anthony Burgess. First published in 1962, and very roughly first adapted as Warhol’s Vinyl, its plot had been triggered by the brutal assault on Burgess’ wife by American deserters during the war, his experiences in Russia observing the stilyagi street gangs, and a visit to Hastings where he stood and watched ‘mods and rockers knocking hell out of each other’. Boiled down to a cosmic-yob concentrate, Burgess created Alex, a Beethoven-mad delinquent who robs, assaults, rapes and terrorises for fun until he’s arrested for accidentally murdering one of his victims. Sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Alex is given the opportunity for quick release by volunteering himself as guinea pig in a radical technique to rehabilitate criminals, brainwashing them into submissive drones incapable of free choice. Kubrick’s version remained faithful to the American edition of the book, which ends with Alex returned to his fierce old self after becoming a political pawn in the next government election; Burgess would always mourn the fact Kubrick never read the original British version with its extra final chapter where Alex relents and resigns to the responsibilities of adulthood.

  David had yet to see A Clockwork Orange – just out in America that Christmas, due in Britain in early January 1972 – but he’d taken cues from pre-publicity stills of Kubrick’s interpretation of Burgess’s droogs: space-age hooligans in bovver boots and codpieces. He wanted the look, codpiece and all, but not the ultra-violence, keeping the street-gang chic but colouring in the droogs’ whites with bright floral prints and soft quilted fabrics. He’d also keep the wrestling boots, swapping bovver black for Marvel comic greens and blues, specially made for him by local firm Russell & Bromley on Beckenham High Street.

  Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange would very soon arm David with much more than fancy boots and a padded pelvis when he finally saw the film in all its artful, brazen comic brilliance. The script’s jargon droogspeak – Burgess’s ‘Nadsat’ – fitted in perfectly with the fake world David was creating, even filtering into the language of his new song ‘Suffragette City’. Equally crucial was Kubrick’s use of music – the nervous force of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ and the drama of Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overtu
re’, as synthesized through the circuitry of New York electronic maestro Walter Carlos. Both would be used as David’s fanfares in concert straight from the official soundtrack album, as would its straight orchestral reading of Elgar’s ‘Pomp And Circumstance March No. 1’, set to become the Starman’s final exit.

  As the last grey sands of 1971 trickled away, in Edward Heath economic gloom, in IRA bomb fears, in spaghetti junctions and decimal coins, in the saucy asides of Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie’ and the stomping stackheels of Marc Bolan’s ‘Jeepster’, David Bowie had the name, the band, the songs, the clothes, the boots, the entrance, the exit and almost the right hair. But, greater still, he finally had the pure and perfect fantasy to unite them as one. His new identity.

  His name was Ziggy Stardust and he was a rock ’n’ roll star from outer space. A meteor storm of Iggy Pop, Andy Warhol, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lou Reed, Elvis Presley, Professor Quatermass, Little Richard, Syd Barrett, The Little Prince, Sal Paradise and Marc Bolan made extraterrestrial flesh. He was everything Vince Taylor, Moondog and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy pretended to be, only Ziggy was real.