Ziggyology

by Simon Goddard

  The Friday after the Festival Hall, Lou played his first solo European show in London at the King’s Cross Cinema. Ziggy, Angie and Ronno were there, as was ‘Martian blow job’ photographer Mick Rock and another familiar face that couldn’t help but crack in a goofy smirk when it spotted Lou’s trousers beginning to sag and poor Lou being too doped to notice. A face that within the next twenty-four hours would be on the same King’s Cross stage also making its British live debut. The face belonging to Iggy Pop.

  It was gone 2 a.m. Saturday morning by the time Lou wobbled on stage wearing the same black velvet and rhinestone suit and death-mask make-up. With the eyes of Ziggy and Iggy upon him, he pulled back for a moment from the stiff microphone, looking like Dr Frankenstein’s failed first draft, thrown away for being too saucy and just crawled out of the laboratory garbage. Mick’s camera went click.

  Before Lou had recorded a note for the album he planned to make with Ziggy, Mick already had the cover.

  AFTER SIX MONTHS of gigging, Ziggy and the Spiders had spun their wondrous web far and wide over England. For the last night of their first tour, they returned full circle to its beginnings at the Friars Club in Aylesbury. There’d been a brief pipedream of having the concert relayed to a giant video screen in the market square outside the venue. As it was, the RCA budget had already been exhausted by DeFries, who’d arranged for a select party of journalists to be flown over from New York to London to review the show and interview Ziggy for the US press.

  The Americans arrived on the Friday, just in time to catch Lou at King’s Cross in the early hours of Saturday morning. Still jetlagged and already bamboozled by the charred rusticity of English pub grub, they’d barely had time to sleep before being ferried to Aylesbury and wading through a scrum of glitter-cheeked micro-boppers. Inside the hall, the furnaces of mayhem were stoked by big Stuey, who showered the crowd with flyers and pinwheels. When Ziggy appeared the kids concertinaed towards the stage in an indistinguishable mass of hair and havoc. During the encore, he ripped off his jacket, tossing satin shreds into the tongue-twisting void. The Americans looked on, not entirely sure whether they’d witnessed a sleep-deprived hallucination or, as one of them would later print, ‘The Elvis of the ’70s’.

  Outside, a crowd of stardust kids rushed Ziggy as he darted out of the stage door to his specially hired limo for the evening, a strawberry pink Rolls Royce. Stuey battered them back as arms flailed and pens waved in violent fits of futility. In the split seconds it took Ziggy to clamber inside and close the door something fleshy blurred in front of his eyes. As the car sped away, he felt wet heat somewhere in the centre of his face. His fingers dabbed the edge of his nostrils. When he pulled them away the tips were bloody. It had only been a nudge, nothing drastic. Just a little nosebleed, Angie assured him, patting his thigh, handing him a tissue and a compact mirror. But blood was blood. Ziggy had never thought of himself as somebody who bled, only somebody who shone. It felt uncomfortable. Most ungodlike. All too human.

  BLOOD NEVER BOTHERED Iggy Pop. He had a reputation for lacerating his body on stage with broken glass, small but determined nicks across his torso until it wept scarlet streams like scourged Jesus. But the audience at the King’s Cross Cinema didn’t deserve blood. They sat and gawped and looked slightly terrified as he wandered among them, crooking his body into sexy sinew-defying shapes, topless in shiny silver trousers to match his dyed aluminium hair, make-up outlining eyes and mouth, umbilically tied to a never-ending mic cable which broke just the once prompting his spontaneous burst of the cabaret standard ‘The Shadow Of Your Smile’. It impressed Johnny, a 16-year-old snaggletoothed Stooges fan from up the road in Finsbury Park, calculating generational ambush in the corner. And Ziggy, who’d been driven, bloody-nosed, straight from Aylesbury in his pink limo to catch Iggy’s midnight special. Even with a broken mic, it was enough to convince Ziggy that, despite having his hands full with Mott and Lou, he’d be as well to produce Iggy’s next album too. He especially liked the new song ‘I’m Sick Of You’, which stole the riff off one of his favourite Yardbirds singles, ‘Happenings Ten Years Time Ago’. Ziggy made a mental note: next time stuck for inspiration, nick a Yardbirds’ riff.

  Below the stage, Mick Rock was back, aiming his camera at Iggy as he clasped his mic-stand in prayer, leaning to the right, staring a thousand yards into the distance, a thousand years into the future, an eternity of punk wisdom on his huge eyelids. Mick’s camera went click. Before Ziggy had recorded a note for the album he wanted to make with Iggy, Mick already had the cover.

  The American journalists had done well to survive their first thirty-six hours in London, pinballing back and forth between King’s Cross and Aylesbury, being Loued, comprehensively Ziggyed and latterly Iggyed. After a welcome Sunday lie-in, they regrouped for a final press conference with Ziggy at The Dorchester, hotel of the stars, where he’d spent the weekend in a second-floor suite; the official line from DeFries was that due to his extraterrestrial fear of heights Ziggy could never be accommodated higher than the eighth storey. Mute waiters circled the room like silent phantoms bearing silver trays of cakes, sandwiches, wine, tea and whisky. A stereo played the newly finished Mott The Hoople album, All The Young Dudes. Lou was slumped in the corner, a pair of aviator shades masking the lunacy beneath, while Iggy goofed around in a cheap T. Rex t-shirt, his idea of a cheeky jest in the court of the king.

  The king himself wore his latest Freddie creation: a white jumpsuit with rhinestones and collar, a droogy kink on the one Elvis had worn at Madison Square Garden. The Americans and a few of their British peers took turns to probe him. They asked confusing questions about who he was and where he’d come from. Ziggy answered, sometimes unsure whether he was speaking or if it was the ancient croak of David Bowie hollering to be heard through the make-up.

  ‘Ziggy is a conglomerate. He just doesn’t exist for the moment.’

  Dave?

  ‘I’m still totally involved with Ziggy. I probably will be for a few more months, getting it entirely out of my system.’

  Stop, Dave.

  ‘By the time people start realising about Ziggy I may be Tom Bloggs.’

  Will you stop, Dave?

  ‘But I’m having so much fun with Ziggy at the moment …’

  Go on …

  ‘… that I’m sticking with him. He’s a gas to work with.’

  The journalists stood up to leave. ‘Goodbye, David,’ said one of the Americans.

  Ziggy laughed. ‘Call me Ziggy!’

  The struggle was finished.

  ‘Call me Ziggy Stardust!’

  He had won the victory over himself. At least for now. Over the next few weeks he made sure he stayed victorious.

  ‘I’m very rarely David Jones any more,’ he’d tell another reporter. ‘I think I’ve forgotten who David Jones is.’

  And if he ever had any doubts about who he really was or wasn’t, all he need do was open the music papers and see the full-page adverts for his next London shows.

  ‘David Bowie is Ziggy Stardust live at the Rainbow’.

  THE RAINBOW WAS somewhere over Finsbury Park, within wailing distance of the already demolished site where the boy David Jones saw Tommy Steele play sixteen years earlier. Its stylish interior betrayed its origins as a 1930s art-deco cinema, the foyer looking like an Arabian palace with a central fountain from which a genie might spring at any moment. The stage itself was framed by an elaborate proscenium design of a magical Saharan village. The previous November, during his final throes of being Bowie, Ziggy had darkened the Rainbow’s doorway when he took the Spiders to assess the competition, a beaky prankster from Detroit, born Vincent, now calling himself Alice Cooper. His act was being hyped as the most shocking on the concert stage, helped in part by a misreported incident at a gig in Toronto where he allegedly bit the head off a chicken.

  It struck Ziggy as poignant that the day of his first Rainbow show, Saturday 19 August, Alice Cooper should be number one with ‘School’s Out�
�. His own ‘Starman’ was still falling down from its peak at ten while Mott’s ‘All The Young Dudes’ was spiriting gently towards three. He also had the comradeship of his support band, a new quintet of super-spangly artful oddballs called Roxy Music, who saw themselves, like Ziggy, ‘part of a natural reaction against the last three years of groups in Levi’s and plimsolls’.

  Across town, Marc Bolan had been bumping and grinding in the studio all week, recording what he hoped would be his fifth number one, ‘Children Of The Revolution’, his presence still felt by the cryptic ads in that day’s music papers for T. Rex’s new album. ‘To be or not to be, that is The Slider.’ But before the Rainbow doors had opened, the verdict among the lipsticked apostles gathering on the kerb of Seven Sisters Road was that Ziggy had already sewn up the kids’ revolution and won the glam war.

  ‘Alice Cooper’s ugly, in’e?’ said a girl to a newsman, mooning how Ziggy was lovely because he had ‘a woman’s face’. Men with shiner-thick eye-shadow and scraggy feather-boas bragged to one another how they stole their girlfriend’s make-up to Ziggy themselves pretty. Young kids with wonky sequins spelling out ‘ZIGGY’ on their jackets wore souvenir transfers on their hands and faces; cartoons of the Spiders designed by David’s best friend, George. And inside the Rainbow, a mandie-popping coterie of Lou, Iggy and his Stooges, the boys from Mott and even little Rocket Reg, who came with high hopes only to leave early complaining ‘it wasn’t rock ’n’ roll’.

  It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. Ziggy at the Rainbow was theatre. It was Broadway on a budget. It was art. The Spiders had spent a week of intensive rehearsals with Lindsay Kemp, David’s old mime tutor who’d been coaxed back to London from Edinburgh, and a quartet of dancers Ziggy named The Astronettes. The band played under levelled scaffolding, painted silver and connected by ladders, the floor covered with a thick layer of sawdust which flared and spattered at the slightest footstep, an old mime trick to exaggerate movement. Slides were projected on a giant screen, including portraits of Ziggy, paintings by Magritte and Warhol and, for the opening ‘Lady Stardust’, a montage of famous faces including Elvis Presley, Little Richard and, the one image everybody would remember, Marc Bolan. Ziggy had some new clothes for the occasion, including his first kabuki-inspired costume by designer Kansai Yamamoto, a red legless ‘bunny suit’ decorated with drawings of woodland creatures. There were also fresh additions to the setlist: a song written by Jacques Brel, which had been stuck on the turntable of his mind for weeks: the soundtrack of his nightmares about dying on stage, his paranoia of plane crashes and the shock of bloody noses in the back of limos; a song written in French as ‘La Mort’, in English ‘My Death’. And, conscious of time, place and occasion, during ‘Starman’ he broke off in the chorus to sing a few lines of Judy Garland’s ‘Over The Rainbow’.

  Ziggy had wanted his pop mime extravaganza to leave his audience feeling their heads had been bitten off like one of Alice’s poor chickens, their bodies left twitching in decapitated awe. It worked on Lou, who ran amok backstage clucking ‘that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen’ – quite possibly because the gig ended with a nine-minute version of his own ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. But DeFries was far less enthusiastic. Like Rocket Reg, he didn’t much care for the hifalutin distractions of Kemp and his bothersome Astronettes and vetoed any hope of taking the same staging out on the road. After the three Rainbow shows, to Ziggy’s dismay, Kemp was given his marching orders back to Scotland, where he’d soon find himself cutting some capers as a pagan innkeeper called McGregor on the set of the film The Wicker Man.

  In the meantime, work on Lou’s album had started at Trident, prompting Ziggy to temporarily move out of Haddon Hall to a suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel, shortening the daily commute to Soho. Titled Transformer, it would be Lou’s second solo album. The first one stank: not the songs, a lot of them golden waifs from the last days of The Velvet Underground, but the rank production and the stagnant strums of the vibeless English session musicians. Lou still had a couple of stray Velvet diamonds he wanted to record with Ziggy, including ‘Satellite Of Love’ and ‘Andy’s Chest’, written after the attempt on Warhol’s life by Valerie Solanas. The shadow of Andy also inspired ‘Vicious’, Andy’s challenge to Lou to write a ‘vicious song’ about hitting someone with a flower, while ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ was an affectionate homage to the backroom freaks and Warhol superstars of Max’s Kansas City. There was also the elegiac ‘Perfect Day’, which sounded like a waster’s hymn to New York (it was actually written in Wimbledon, Lou’s London base), and the Stonewall swing of ‘Make Up’, quoting the New York Gay Liberation Front’s motto of ‘Out of the closets and into the streets’.

  They were already great songs, but it was Ziggy and Ronno’s task to make them even greater. Ronno’s strings for ‘Perfect Day’ purred with Viennese elegance. On ‘Satellite Of Love’, Ziggy’s closing harmony vocals were a homesick wolf call to the stars, howling beyond the furthest reaches of the Milky Way. And ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ simply slid with animal grace, ironically thanks to Herbie ‘Grandad’ Flowers on bass and a guest saxophone solo from an uncannily familiar face. It had been over ten years since Ronnie Ross had given his last weekend lesson to the boy from Bromley called David Jones. Even if he’d remembered him, he’d never have been able to connect that boy to the red-haired, odd-eyed, pale-faced abomination of undernourishment sat behind the recording console flashing him the occasional embarrassed grin.

  In early September, with ‘Starman’ out of the charts, Ziggy released his second single. A part of him had secretly ached at having passed ‘All The Young Dudes’ to Mott. But he could, at the very least, try to compensate by writing another song in homage to the bright young creatures of the Sombrero club. Maybe not as grandiose and poetic as ‘Dudes’ but something snappier, funnier and many beats-per-minute faster. For his own amusement he stole the hook of Marc’s ‘Hot Love’, speeding it up on acoustic guitar so that it sounded more like Eddie Cochran. The lyrics were about a couple of Sombrero queens, one of them getting frisky with a chick on the dancefloor while trying to reassure his jealous boyfriend: ‘John, I’m Only Dancing.’

  The press ads featured an intense black and white portrait with Ziggy’s index and middle fingers of his left hand jutting towards his lips at a tantalisingly phallic angle. Mick Rock had also made a special promo film during their run at the Rainbow featuring the dancing Astronettes and Ziggy’s transformation into a space-age Jimmy Dean in his new blue bomber jacket. He’d also drawn a small anchor motif just below his left eye, inspired by the American sitcom Bewitched. Its lead character, a sexy suburban witch called Samantha, had an annoying cousin called Serena, both played by actress Elizabeth Montgomery. Serena distinguished herself with similar beauty marks, from lovehearts to treble clefs and, once in the episode ‘Darrin On A Pedestal’, an identical anchor.

  Bitterly, the BBC were less than bewitched with the film and refused to show it on Top Of The Pops, playing the song over their own footage of a motorcycle gang. The critics weren’t so keen on the single either, whether repelled by its transparent bisexual bravado or miffed he hadn’t played safe with a soundalike ‘Starman Part 2’. Thanks to the eager needles and glad hips of his boogie children, it sashayed to a comfortable number twelve regardless.

  A small but vocal tide had nevertheless turned on Ziggy, crashing in waves of polarised opinion in the pop mags’ letters pages. One week Record Mirror’s Val was opening the moist missive from an unnamed girl in Wiltshire who’d been an ‘unconvertible’ Marc fan until swapping allegiance to Ziggy. ‘I listen to “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”,’ she trembled, ‘and bawl my eyes out.’ The next, Val was drowning in the ink from poisonous pens attacking ‘that gay creep’, ‘that freak-faced pop puff’ and similar bile from regional branches of ‘The David Bowie Extermination Society’. ‘As a gay guy myself,’ wrote one exterminator from Lincolnshire, ‘I find him quite and utterly repulsive.’

  Immune to such
hateful slings of the biro-biting minority, Ziggy returned to the road, illuminating the early autumn gloom up north, streaking the Pennines with a densely scented fog of adolescent star lust. In Stoke, a reporter asked if Ziggy was worried his show might be too sexy. ‘It is,’ he shrugged. ‘I can’t deny that, and if I shock people then it’s too bad.’ Yet, as if on preordained prudent cue, right at the very moment he’d become too sexy for English shores, the stardust bugle sounded for Ziggy to desert them.

  The Spiders were in Manchester, the honorary first act to open a new purpose-built concert venue called the Hardrock. The morning after the show, DeFries summoned an emergency meeting in their hotel. Not just Ziggy, Ronno, Weird and Gilly but Angie, big Stuey, hair Suzi, the Frosts and the entire tour party. He had some very important news.

  ‘In about two weeks’ time,’ DeFries announced, ‘everyone in this room will be in America.’

  The promised land of Sal Paradise, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. The Starman and his family were going to take America and, as DeFries outlined, take it in style.

  ‘You’ve all got to learn to look and act like a million dollars.’

  Ziggy laughed. It was a strange thing to say to a cosmic messiah too sexy for Queen and country, second only to God. Couldn’t DeFries tell? He already felt like a trillion.

  SIX

  THE AMERICAN

  IT WAS ONE of big Stuey’s favourite jokes. ‘A Starman that won’t fly.’

  Nothing could persuade Ziggy to board another aircraft. He’d had nightmares – ‘premonitions’ he called them – about crashing. Not through pilot error or bad weather but some freak cosmic catastrophe. He dreamed that the electromagnetic force field around the Earth was going to falter. ‘So all the aircrafts in the air were just going to plummet to earth.’ He didn’t know when this would happen, only that it probably would, to him, within the next few years. ‘If nothing happens by 1976,’ he acquiesced, ‘I’ll start to fly again.’