Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  And so were his band, The Spiders From Mars. He’d do his best to steer people away from the planetary specifics. The Spiders, as anyone with an ear for accents could quickly determine, were from Hull (and being from Hull they couldn’t even say ‘Mars’ like normal folk, but squashed it into a softly droning ‘Mazz’). But it was essential Ziggy and his band weren’t of this world. It would never work if he used some made-up comic book ‘Mongo’. The same was true of the other planets in the solar system. ‘The Spiders From Uranus’? Unthinkable.

  But Mars? Mars was different.

  Mars had something unique, something altogether priceless. Mars had been the trigger of innumerable human imaginations for millennia. Mars was the one-way ticket to the unknown kingdom of otherness. Mars was the magic powder igniting the brilliance and terror of H. G. Wells, Gustav Holst and Orson Welles’ panic broadcast of 1938. Mars was the license for the fearless to turn dreams into reality, the hunger ravaging Robert Goddard which first sent humans out among the stars. Mars had already cost the US government millions of dollars in the creation of crude robot probes punted towards its atmosphere carrying with them the greatest of all human hopes. That, in this unthinkably vast and mysterious universe, we are not alone. Mars was imbedded deep in the atomic core of all human DNA and had been for centuries: an immovable molecule of cranked-up fear, weirdness and wonder.

  The cosmos had already decided for them. Ziggy Stardust and his Spiders could only ever come from Mars.

  IN THE FIRST week of January 1972, the BBC consulted the Ministry of Defence for a forthcoming episode of their current affairs programme Man Alive. The subject: the growing number of UFO reports.

  Unknown to the BBC at the time, when the MoD compiled their end-of-year figures for reported UFO sightings in 1971, the number came to 370. The highest amount of official flying saucer scares in a single calendar year since their records began.

  The ministry were nevertheless keen to avoid encouraging further public hysteria and steer the programme as best they could towards healthy scepticism. Their new head of the ‘UFO desk’ was former Wing Commander Anthony Davis, one of the pilots involved in the notorious ‘Lakenheath–Bentwaters incident’ of 1956. On Tuesday 4 January, Davis was interviewed by the Man Alive team, filing a report for his Whitehall bosses later that week. The broadcast, Davis assured them, would focus on the naïvety of eye-witnesses and their ‘willingness to believe’ anything slightly outside normal experience must have extraterrestrial origins. There was a ‘need’, Davis noted, ‘felt by many people for a new mythology’.

  The year 1972.

  The need for a new mythology.

  Four days after Davis was filmed by the BBC, on Saturday 8 January in Haddon Hall, the friends of David Bowie gathered to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday. As good an occasion as any to break in his brand new ‘Liberty’s’ suit with codpiece and patent leather boots.

  As the guests started to arrive, David excused himself and went to the bathroom. With a deep breath, a last farewell prayer to the man everybody called David Bowie, he closed the door behind him.

  When he turned to look in the mirror he was already somebody else.

  ONE

  THE BIRTH

  ‘WHAT’S IT GOING to be then, eh?’

  Ziggy Stardust stared in the bathroom mirror at the pale, bony face nervously grinning through skewback fangs. There was still a part of his brain which wasn’t entirely sure if he was Ziggy looking in the mirror at David Bowie or vice versa. But as he ran his fingers through his cropped hair – the cut wasn’t bad but he’d have to sort that colour – and blinked his eyelids over his pupils – one a Saturnian gas giant, the other a Mercurian dwarf; one a mystic Neptunian green, the other a brilliant Plutonian blue – he knew, absolutely, that no human being could ever look like this. He was the Starman, all right.

  He ignored the hubbub of voices and music from the other side of the door, drinking in the reflection, softly pawing his face, his lips, his painted fingernails and the fabric of his fabulous new art-deco Superman suit. Here was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh, he thought. Until his reverie was broken by a woman’s nearby screech.

  ‘Where’d David go?’

  Right now that seemed a fair question. A cue for Ziggy to step outside and reveal the answer.

  The party was already happily humming in flat number seven, Haddon Hall, the air thick with the festive fug of mulled wine below its aerosol-painted silver ceilings dotted with giant blue circles. If it wasn’t for the giant Victorian bay windows shattering the illusion, anyone looking around might even mistake it for a set from a TV sci-fi drama, possibly UFO or Doctor Who, both broadcast to the nation earlier that Saturday.

  It still felt terrestrial enough a welcome to 41-year-old composer Lionel Bart, there as a friend and fellow client of the same management company; best known for the hit musical Oliver!, David would have been just as impressed by Bart’s role in Tommy Steele’s early career, the Armageddon skiffle ‘Doomsday Rock’ included. Lou Reed was also fondling the canapés and helping himself to a generous slug of wine, now over in London to record his debut solo album for RCA with dismal consequences, taking a night off to wish David Bowie a happy twenty-fifth birthday, not realising that he, like Bart and everyone else, would instead be toasting his first glimpse of Ziggy Stardust.

  The division of Haddon Hall into separate flats had left a stairway to nowhere in the middle of their main reception area, its only destination a narrow balcony at the top where the Spiders just managed to sleep side-by-side on spare mattresses. The same balcony where Ziggy had crept up from the bathroom in order to make his formal birthday entrance. The guests circled at the bottom and watched him descend in slow, steady Gloria Swanson-like struts, the god-upon-high climbing down from atop his gothic suburban Ziggurat into a sea of expectant mortals. As David Bowie, he’d known these people for years. But through the fresh eyes of Ziggy it felt like meeting them anew, a chance to reacquaint himself with the characters that would each play their part in the Starman’s world.

  Angie, the wife. A firecracker of sex, intelligence and impropriety. ‘I adore vulgarity,’ she’d say, ‘but it must have style.’ Strangers meeting Angie for the first time would, after a few minutes, gaze at her in disbelief wondering where she hid her ‘off’ switch and how they could trigger it. Angie had no ‘off’ switch: Mrs Ziggy was forever ‘on’.

  Zowie, their son. Just seven months’ worth of gurgling innocence crawling over their blue Persian carpets, too young to be corrupted by the stray sex mags lying around the house with their back page ads for a £35 Rubber Woman (‘guaranteed not to answer back’).

  DeFries, the manager. A cigar-smoking ballbuster from Bigshot Inc., or so he’d have the rest of the world believe. When DeFries spoke it was with a soft hypnotising hiss: Ziggy was already irretrievably entranced.

  Freddie from the East End. ‘Rudi Valentinto’ as was. The hipless wonderfop who’d help Ziggy sew his wardrobe alongside his girlfriend Daniella Parma, another exotic clotheshorse with a shock of peroxide white hair.

  The Frosts, Ziggy’s downstairs neighbours. Dependable Sue, nanny to baby Zowie and occasional Starman seamstress. Her husband, Tony, a bloke who knew how to take care of himself and who’d soon be taking care of Ziggy as one of his burly Ziggyguards.

  And, not least, The Spiders From Mars themselves. Weird, Gilly and the indispensable Ronno with his inexhaustible Humberside contacts. Before the winter was through he’d throw another Hull face into Ziggy’s ranks, black Yorkshire bruiser Stuey George, a former dock worker and club bouncer with a pronounced limp who’d make the most formidable Ziggyguard of all.

  Later that night, the party cackled, screamed and swayed a messy trail from Haddon Hall to the dancefloor of the Sombrero club in Kensington where Ziggy was hugged, kissed, fondled in his droogy suit and repeatedly wished ‘happy birthday’ by people who still insisted on calling him ‘David’.

  Like the colour of his hair, that w
ould soon change.

  THE GRAVITATIONAL INFLUENCE of Yorkshire continued to propel Ziggy to his destiny when, a week later, he found himself spending a wet January afternoon skulking in the doorways of a dimly lit Mayfair sidestreet. Over two centuries earlier it had been christened by a Whig politician in honour of his northern constituency, a market town just a few miles outside the city of Hull. Heddon Street.

  Ziggy was there for his first official photo-shoot with the Spiders, a matter of priority since that week’s papers were still running adverts for the Hunky Dory album showing David in his long-haired vintage Hollywood vamp pose – a David who, barely a month after the record’s release, no longer existed. The new portraits were to be taken by the same photographer, Brian Ward, in a makeshift studio in one of Heddon Street’s rag-trade warehouses, only a short walk from Ziggy’s management offices further up Regent Street near Oxford Circus.

  The Spiders might even have recognised the homely Hull significance of Heddon had their minds not capsized with worry over the clothes Ziggy had prepared for them. Tight glittery satin trousers and jaunty floral jackets exposing their alabaster chests. They flinched and fussed with manly unease as subtle dabs of eye-shadow and mascara were licked across their faces, silently praying that not a word of this should ever reach the other side of the Humber Bridge. Ziggy ruffled their hair and straightened their collars, rallying them to pose for individual close-up portraits, hoping they could evoke the same menace as Malcolm McDowell’s Alex on the Clockwork Orange poster.

  Brian suggested they continue their droogy fashion show outside in the open.

  ‘It’s too wet,’ grumbled Ronno, ‘and too cold.’

  Weird and Gilly agreed with him, even if, as Yorkshiremen, all three should have been used to far colder and wetter. And so, leaving the Spiders in the warm, Ziggy and Brian stepped out into the deserted alleyway without them.

  A row of cars remained parked along the pavement, its wet stones glistening in the musty yellow light from a nearby streetlamp as the close beep and hum of early evening Regent Street traffic rattled the rooftops. Ziggy paced around in his art-deco Superman suit and leather platform boots, a Les Paul guitar strapped across his body. Brian directed him towards a gas lamp mounted in the brickwork above number twenty-three. Ziggy slung his guitar to holster position and stood beneath it, a few steps in front of the sign for number twenty-one which read ‘K. WEST’. The ‘K’ stood for Konn, a family of furriers who had premises there in the ‘West’ End as well as a branch in east London. A metal bin stood next to the front step, obscured by a mound of rubbish, mostly cardboard boxes and discarded packaging from the firm Paquerette Dresses. Ziggy rested his left leg on the bin, throwing a hand on his knee and stared straight into Brian’s camera.

  Click.

  At the top of the street back near Brian’s studio lay a small cul-de-sac with a red telephone kiosk, one of the original late-1920s K2 models designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, a handy source of artificial light. First Ziggy pulled a few rock ’n’ roll rumbas outside it: knees together, feet splayed, guitar aimed at the lens like a Tommy gun. Then he unstrapped his instrument, lit a cigarette and stepped into the phonebox, another dallying hand on his hip. Outside in the street, Brian centred Ziggy’s body symmetrically through the door’s square glass panelling.

  Click.

  It was a few days before Ziggy saw Brian’s contact sheets, removing the last traces of human doubt in his mind about who he was and the purpose of his mission. Here, for everyone to see, was indisputable evidence that an extraterrestrial pop star had fallen to Earth somewhere in the backstreets of Mayfair in early January 1972. Possibly beamed through the ether, arriving in an interplanetary atom smash in a public phonebox. Or in a shaft of light from a flying saucer upon a pile of wet cardboard while a few hundred yards away in Whitehall former Wing Commander Davis sat behind his ‘UFO desk’ unaware of the Martian invasion happening right under his ministry’s nose.

  The Starman had landed.

  THAT SAME WEEK, DeFries arranged a couple of print interviews to promote the current concern, Hunky Dory. The men from Melody Maker and Disc arrived for their individual timeslots at DeFries’ Regent Street offices, expecting to meet the long-haired ladyship they’d seen poised like Greta Garbo upon the album’s cover. Instead they were confronted by the newly shorn, pixie-like vision of Ziggy, sat waiting for them in his favourite Freddie suit, merrily smoking a cigarette and drinking tea as he listened to rough mixes of ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Five Years’ and other Stardust melodies.

  Both reporters detected a strange, almost mischievous air about their subject. Wild words pelted forth from his lips, mercurial sentences slip-sliding back and forth between truth and nonsense, fact and fiction, David and Ziggy.

  ‘I’m just a cosmic yob, I suppose,’ said Ziggy.

  ‘I’ve got a grasshopper mind,’ confessed David. ‘I’m not very well organised.’

  ‘I feel very butch now,’ laughed Ziggy.

  ‘I’m gay and I always have been,’ admitted David. ‘Even when I was David Jones.’

  Eyebrows were raised. Pencils scribbled furiously. Ziggy spoke about his plans for the year ahead and his ideas for his new staging. ‘The costumes are outrageous,’ he warned, ‘like an astral West Side Story’. The show, he insisted, would be beautiful. And he, Ziggy, would be huge. And that, he giggled, was ‘quite frightening’.

  Both papers ran their stories the following week. It was the one in Melody Maker by Michael Watts which set the Haddon Hall phone ringing off the hook, concerned members of the Ronson clan fearing their Mick had been kidnapped by some heinous southern sex cult of mincing deviants. For there was Ziggy on the front cover, an impish space-age sybil in his open-chested Freddiewear, fingers twisted like shadow puppetry as he twirled a cigarette above a bangled wrist, his presence the one diverting detail on a page carrying the coma-beckoning screamers that King Crimson had broken up and Jethro Tull were going on tour. Then on the inside, page 18, opposite a tour ad for the vacuum of hope calling itself Barclay James Harvest, another portrait of Ziggy in playful repose, the heading ‘Oh you pretty thing’, and in glorious typeset black and white, ‘I’m gay and I always have been.’

  In the last days of being David Bowie he’d bravely crept towards the precipice of outrage, testing his mettle with ‘Rudi’ and Arnold Corns, allowing reporters to roam around Haddon Hall making note of the various newspaper clippings on homosexuality ‘carefully arranged on his mantelpiece’. But as Ziggy he could leap without fear into the great gay void, peppering his speech with Polari, the secret queer slang of the London theatre world, using words like ‘varda’ (to see) while nodding and winking at his inquisitors like some giddy and undiscerning Queen of Outer Space. If nothing else, it was guaranteed to annoy a few smelly Stackridge fans in Squaresville, Northamptonshire. Such were the strategies of the Starman’s new mythology.

  The Maker article had also been kind enough to refer to Ziggy by name, listing the title of the as-yet-unfinished album, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, described by Watts as being ‘about this fictitious pop group’.

  Fictitious?

  The simple truth was Ziggy still wasn’t entirely sure what he was writing. Whether he was making a ‘concept album’ or a ‘rock opera’ like Tommy, or maybe some sort of Broadway musical like Bart’s Oliver!

  It would be another eighteen months before he realised, only in deathly hindsight, he was composing the soundtrack of his own existence. That the rock ’n’ roll suicide was to be his own. And by then, it would be far too late.

  THOSE FIRST TWO interviews made public what many in the record industry had already heard whispered since before Christmas. That devious David Bowie was ‘up to something’. He’d had a haircut and stopped wearing ‘dresses’ (technically ‘men’s gowns’). He and his band were busy making a noisy rock rumpus, at least according to those who’d been earwigging at Trident or the Thomas A’Becket pub on the Old Ken
t Road in Bermondsey where the Spiders rehearsed on the floor above its famous boxing gymnasium. There were also rumours of some funny concept about the end of the world and a freaky singer from outer space. Most of his peers laughed it off. If David Bowie had gone back to space that sounded like he was desperately trying to flog the old dead horse of Major Tom. Either that, or up to similar psychedelic shenanigans as heavy hippies Hawkwind currently being praised by Record Mirror for their alleged innovation of ‘sci-fi rock’.

  Most of his peers laughed, that is, except one.

  The gentle gust of Ziggy gossip didn’t take long to make its way to the prickling ears under the corkscrew hair of Marc Bolan. He was intrigued by what he’d heard, and more than a little miffed. Cosmic pop and silly names were supposed to be his domain. They were all over Electric Warrior, the T. Rex album still yo-yoing back and forth to number one that January, and his next single poised for the top, ‘Telegram Sam’. And so, being Marc Bolan, he did what any self-respecting, jealously paranoid pop god with everything to lose would do in the same position. Steal a peal of Ziggy’s thunder.

  The same Saturday, 22 January 1972, as a nation of disbelieving denim greasers picked up their copies of Melody Maker to read about the gay liberation of Ziggy Stardust, their sisters would have been burying their heads in Mirabelle, riddled with envy at Linda Newman’s account of interviewing Marc at his Maida Vale flat. And between simpering over the backpage pin-up of Marc looking all cosy and ‘hello, Mum’ in dungarees they’d have read of his plans for continued pop domination in 1972 and of the two film scripts he’d claimed to have written.

  ‘One is about a cosmic messiah,’ teased Marc. ‘A kind of intergalactic Jesus.’

  At home in Haddon Hall, Ziggy Stardust read the same issue of Mirabelle with rapt attention. He read it again, just to make sure he hadn’t been hallucinating, before dropping it to the floor where it landed next to a copy of Forum.