by Marc Spitz
To be in England in 1972 was to believe that the end was near. “There was a sense of not so much apocalypse as entropy in that there’d been the first great miner’s strike,” Charles Shaar Murray says, “the one the miners actually won, which caused serious power outages and the three-day week. There was a period when for several long periods of time, hours, London was without power.” Ziggy was literally born in darkness. Superficially, he would look like no other rock star before or since. Bowie’s Bromley Tech friend and ex-bandmate the artist George Underwood started making sketches of Ziggy shortly after the concept was mooted, and Bowie’s Sombrero Club muses, costumers Freddi and Daniella, started sketching looks for the antihero as well. In creative sessions fortified with barley wine, cigarettes and hash joints, there under the stained glass in the great living room in Haddon Hall, Ziggy Stardust started to spread his leathery wings. Ideas were thrown out and almost never shot down. It was more like “dare we?” If someone suggested a pair of lace-up wrestling boots, calf high and red vinyl, they could certainly be found somewhere in London (in this case ordered by boot maker Russell and Bromley) and all that was required was the conviction of Bowie pulling them on and pulling it off. Much like Johnny Rotten walking around the King’s Row four years later in his homemade I HATE PINK FLOYD T-shirt, chutzpah and conviction was all one really needed to alter fashion forever.
With the portals opened, any number of influences fell into the cauldron of images, visions, and characters they were mixing together for Ziggy. Kubrick, as he had with 2001: A Space Odyssey, figured into Bowie’s new vision. A Clockwork Orange had opened in London and Bowie was inspired by the androgynous but brutal Malcolm McDowell as Alex. In his February 11, 1972, review of the film, critic Roger Ebert wonders, “What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he really want us to identify with the antisocial tilt of Alex’s psychopathic little life? In a world where society is criminal, of course, a good man must live outside the law. But that isn’t what Kubrick is saying. He actually seems to be implying something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.” This was basically the debased state of affairs in which Ziggy would breed: suburban drudgery and shockingly violent youth energy. “It’s no world for an old man any longer,” a drunken vagrant moans before Alex and the Droogs stomp his guts. “You can feel the mean streets of England,” film writer David Thomson observes in his 2008 compendium “Have You Seen …?,” “where young people have grown steadily more callous.” Ziggy had his own Droogs in Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Irever Bolder, the latter two redubbed Weird and Gilley on a whim. This street gang would be called the Spiders, and they would move like tigers on Vaseline. Ziggy’s concerts would, in further tribute to Clockwork, open with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” from the film’s iconic moog-tinged soundtrack.
The real key to Ziggy Stardust was the hair. Suzi Fussey, later Mick Ronson’s wife, was a hairstylist who worked in a local salon next to the Three Tuns pub. She did Bowie’s mother Peggy Jones’s hair every Friday. Mrs. Jones, who traveled in from Bromley, never let on that the local cross-dressing kooks who would parade up and down Beckenham High Street were of any relation.
“I remember him and Angie and the baby would walk down the street past the hairdressers,” Suzi continues. “He had long hair and wore a dress. She had a butch little crew cut. They’d push their pram through the Beckenham High Street.”
One day Angie walked into her shop alone and asked for a new look. Fussey gave her red, white and blue Bomb Pop stripes. She styled it short and spiky and passed the test. Angie invited Suzi back to Haddon Hall and there Bowie, with his long, blond hair, asked her, “Do you like the way my hair’s been cut?”
Fussey observed, “It’s a bit boring.” Fussey, weary of greasy hippie locks, suggested short hair for Bowie as well. Magazines were produced and pored over. The cut comes from three different models in three separate fashion spreads. Today this cut is infamously dismissed as a shag mullet. In 1972, however, it was fabulously different. Angie claims it was she who suggested, “Let’s dye it red;” however, this has been, like much in Bowie lore, the subject of more debate. What’s agreed on is the name of the color, which was called Red Hot Red, and that it fit with the shape of the cut and Bowie’s pale complexion perfectly. Defries reportedly stated, succinctly, “It’s very marketable.” In fact, at one point, Defries tried to get all MainMan employees to wear the Ziggy haircut but ended his campaign early when most of the New York–based Warhol kids declined. Still the hair unlocked something in Bowie. The same way Jane Fonda’s Klute cut transformed her from sixties ingenue to seventies radical around this very same time.
Finally, Ziggy would not be hampered by conventional mores of sexuality, not with Armageddon time imminent. He would be a polysexual messiah, and Bowie’s notorious self-outing interview in Melody Maker, also in January of 1972, was essentially an invite posted to all potential followers, no matter who they liked to screw.
As the new year began, Bowie sat down with reporter Michael Watts in the offices of Defries and Myers’s GEM management company to give an exclusive interview promoting Hunky Dory and an upcoming festival appearance in Lancaster.
He was already transforming, in partial Ziggy mode, with red boots and hair. The tone of the piece is flirtatious from the start. Watts, who described Bowie as camp as a row of tents, stresses that in person he was “looking yummy” in an “elegant pattered type of combat suit, very tight around the legs with the shirt unbuttoned to reveal a full expanse of white torso.” Watts outs Bowie before Bowie has a chance to out himself. “He’s gay, he says,” the writer informs readers, and then provides evidence of the singer’s burgeoning gay cult, who, like the cast of Pork, flocked to check out his performance at the Country Club: “about half the gay population of the city turned up to see him in his massive floppy velvet hat, which he twirled around at the end of each number.”
It’s hard to read the piece without the benefit of hindsight, but there is an energy of expectancy here, as if you’re reading an early profile of Marlon Brando just before the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire. “A tape machine is playing his next album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which is about this fictitious pop group. Everyone just knows that David is going to be a lollapalooza of a superstar throughout the entire world this year, David more than most.”
If Bowie was simply declared a homosexual by the writer rather than declaring, “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones,” as he did, the piece might not have had the same impact. And its impact, in relative terms, was seismic; the story was picked up by proper tabloids beyond the cult of the weekly music press. It’s not homosexuality but rather unapologetic bisexuality that made the story so irresistible. Watts talks about Bowie’s wife and “baby son.” Similarly, if Bowie had not had such strong material behind him, nobody would have cared. “Don’t dismiss David Bowie as a serious musician just because he likes to put us all on a little,” Watts fortuitously states in the piece.
Bowie the interview subject seems to know that his stellar new material will make him a big star. “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way,” he tells Watts, and then, to fireproof this destiny, he announces, “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.” Those who loved rock ’n’ roll would know the name David Bowie given the quality of the new music, but those who did not would know the name David Bowie as well. Watts notes the “jollity” about the statement but also the power. “He knows that in these times it’s permissible to act like a male tart, and that to shock and outrage, which pop has always striven to do throughout its history, is a balls-breaking process. And if he’s not an outrage, he is, at the least, an amusement. The expression of his sexual ambivalence establishes a fascinating game: is he, or isn’t he? In a period of conflicting sexual identity he shrewdly exploits the confusion surrounding the male and female roles.” Bow
ie concludes the interview by making two clarifications: the dress he wore on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World was not a woman’s dress but rather a man’s dress, and more generally, “I’m not outrageous. I’m David Bowie.”
Forty years on, with homosexuality still a political football, there’s a lasting power to the device of self-outing. The courage it took is only slightly lessened upon learning that Mick Ronson was encouraged to “come out” as well and flatly refused. “It got a bit lonely out there,” Suzi says. “David was like, ‘Come on, mate.’ When the Melody Maker came out, Mick’s mother was just aghast. ‘Your son’s a faggot.’ He got a lot of flack for that. Even my mother came in with the paper, threw it down and said, ‘What’s this?’ But he was from a council project. He was a northern lad. The music is why Mick stayed. David longed to be one of those avant-garde people and I think he succeeded. But his songs were fabulous.” That same week the London Evening Standard picked up on the story and repeated it. This was the sensation that the founder of the Society for the Preservation of Animal Filament was unable to achieve in the sixties, the excitement he’d been dreaming of since childhood.
“As Melody Maker’s news editor at the time, I was a party to the decision to stick him on the front page with the headline ‘Oh You Pretty Thing,’” Chris Charlesworth tells me. “We were all pretty broad-minded on MM, so the gayness didn’t put us off him. I don’t recall any adverse reaction from anyone. We covered him fairly intensely because having him on the front page sold papers, just like Morrissey did in the eighties for NME and MM. He gave great interviews and he was a favorite of ours because of this. He was good for headlines, controversial, articulate, intelligent, always interesting, so us and NME and Sounds liked him for that. I would say that Bowie, Townshend and Lennon were the three best [British] interview subjects there were for us. It was a pleasure to interview them because you always came away with a strong story.”
“I think he said it very deliberately,” Watts has remarked. “I brought the subject up. I think he planned at some point to say it to someone. He definitely felt it would be good copy. He was certainly aware of the impact it would make. I think it was or had been true. I think he’d had a relationship with a man at some time in his life, so it wasn’t a lie. I don’t think he was lying. There may have been something between him and Mick Jagger. I think it was something Defries encouraged. He [Defries] understood the news value of something like that. I was aware of a changed mood toward gay people, not just in rock but in culture as a whole.”
Bowie’s actual bisexual proclivities were probably the opposite of his former lover Calvin Mark Lee’s—i.e., 95 percent women, 5 percent men—and by the height of his fame, circa 1975, he would be exclusively heterosexual, but that one interview would forever afford him the “is he or isn’t he?” mystique, the kind that helped propel the likes of Michael Stipe, Ellen DeGeneres, Angelina Jolie, and most recently, Lady Gaga and American Idol runner-up and avowed Bowie-ist Adam Lambert (who performed a three-song Bowie medley on the show’s annual summer tour) from mere stars to pop icons.
Unlike actual gay stars, the fair-weather bisexual Bowie would distance himself from this when the mood hit him. However, his later denials might be as deliberate a means toward the same “keep ’em guessing/ keep ’em interested” marketing strategy as the initial declaration. “When I brought the subject up four years later, Bowie denied it completely. ‘Bisexual? Oh, Lord no, positively not,’” Watts said. “‘That was just a lie. They gave me that image, so I stuck to it pretty well over the years. I never adopted that stance. It was given to me. I’ve never done a bisexual action in my life, onstage, on record, or anywhere else. I don’t think I even had much of a gay following. A few glitter queens maybe, but nothing much really.’”
Yet later that same year, talking to Cameron Crowe for Playboy, Bowie said, “It’s true. I am bisexual. But I can’t deny I have used that fact very well. I suppose it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It didn’t really matter who or what it was with, as long as it was a sexual experience. So it was some very pretty boy in class in some school or other that I took home and neatly fucked on my bed upstairs.”
Is he or isn’t he?
“He gave great interviews,” says Mick Rock. “I think they really helped garner him some serious attention. He knew how to be intelligent and provocative at the same time. He made the front page in Melody Maker with ‘Oh, I’m bisexual,’ and that certainly got people buzzed. Listen, English boys, who knows what they do in bed? There were a lot of straight young men back in those days who would come on as queer as clockwork oranges but watch out for your girlfriends! It’s true that a lot of sexual experimentation went on. After all ‘Glam’ ruled the hippest young Englishmen of the period. Le vice Anglais, the French would call it, although, lord knows, there have been a panoply of amazing French queers. There was certainly plenty of ambiguity about David. He really worked that. It was the hip thing at that moment in time and coincided with the advent of the gay liberation movement, this I’m bisexual androgynous ‘I’ll fuck anything’ kind of thing. Who really knows what anyone else does sexually unless you’re in the same room or in more recent times if you’ve made a home video and it gets into nefarious hands! I really only know about what I got up to, and I ain’t telling. Everything else is just fodder for the rumor-mongers.”
“There are rumors that he did it with Lou Reed, but maybe they just did it to get acquainted. I don’t know,” Danny Fields says. “I don’t think he was sexually motivated toward males, but it was handy. He saw that gay men were setting the pace for a lot of the culture that was happening then.”
“He was skilled in dealing with a journalist,” says Charles Shaar Murray. “David and Marc Bolan were sixties people who made it late. They were actually the contemporaries of people who had made it in the sixties. You have to remember that the Who made it when Pete Town-shend was nineteen. Bowie’s big breakthrough came when he was twenty-five. Both Marc and David had been in the business much longer than the sixties heroes had been when they made it. When the Beatles broke through George Harrison was nineteen. When the Kinks broke through Dave Davies was seventeen. Bolan and Bowie were around for much longer before they broke through. They were that much more grown up and that much more experienced. I think Brian Ferry was near thirty when Roxy made it. Much more mature when they had their first taste of serious success. They’d been consuming media for a long time and on a smaller scale they’d been dealing with media already. Much better idea of what to do and how to present themselves than their sixties forebears; their sixties forebears were making it up as they went along.”
While Angie writes that she assumed Tony Defries would be shocked when he saw the copy run in the January 22 issue of the weekly, there are others who note that the perfect timing and timber of the piece had to be some kind of inside job.
“That was one hundred fucking percent set up,” Shaar Murray says today. “I can’t remember. Mick was probably in on the gag to begin with. It wasn’t journalism, it was collaboration, a calculated move and a great one. Beautifully done all ’round. A perfect media event. Let me lay this on you. Get me in a certain mood and I will say that the major artistic project of the whole Ziggy exercise from spring of ’72 to summer of ’73, the major work of art, was actually the media events. The records and the shows were part of the superstructure. The real masterpiece artwork was the media event.”
The Melody Maker interview made David, technically still a one-hit wonder, a media star before the Ziggy Stardust album even came out. “I bought the paper and it looked all right,” he has said. “But from then on, the way other papers picked up on it and just tore at it like dogs on meat! They made this enormous thing out of it.”
His mother, Peggy, never publicly commented on David’s sexuality in her lifetime, and in private, it’s likely that she did what she always did when something troubling came up and simply refused to address the issue. It must have been bitterswee
t for her to observe his skyrocketing success after years of struggle and not be able to fully embrace it. (Bowie would tell Dick Cavett in 1974 that he and his mother were not close but that they had “an understanding.”) John Jones never lived to see his son reach such professional heights, and while Terry followed David’s career well up to his megastardom in the early eighties, because of his institutionalization and the growing phalanx of freaks, fans, business partners and bodyguards surrounding David, his access was severely limited, and there is no record of him sharing any commentary on the method and detail by which his younger half brother conquered British pop. One thinks Terry would have appreciated the intellectual subtleties and camp disclaimers a bit more than his mother might have. Ronson’s mother up in Hull heard about it and had to be assured by Angie that her son was not being corrupted. Ironically, by the start of 1972, David had become the gay superstar that Ken Pitt always dreamed he would be. Why it didn’t happen in ’69 or ’70, despite Bowie’s access to the media and Pitt’s insistence that this potential fan base is among the most loyal in history, may come down to Pitt’s outdated referencing of Judy Garland as a career model rather than her young hip, activist fans who resisted a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village the week that she died in June of ’69. Bowie was inspired to finally do so after absorbing much edgier elements of modern gay culture, such as the classic 1963 novel City of Night by John Rechy. City of Night is the sexual flipside to Kerouac’s On the Road, full of male hustlers, fag hags, drag queens and closet cases. Having grown up on Jack Kerouac and been excited by the Sombrero scene, Bowie found the book irresistible.