by Paul Trynka
As a spokesperson, David needed someone to spread his message. The old, sixties writers, people who’d written about David already, were out. Then Dai Davies, newly recruited as David’s press mastermind, told David about the new generation of journalists, writers who were interested in theories, in manifestos, not in a pint and a chat in the pub. Together, they would approach Michael Watts first; he’d read Norman Mailer, and was developing a new, long-form feature style at Melody Maker. Next, they’d take David’s new manifesto to Charles Shaar Murray at the NME.
In later months, Davies wondered about the manifesto. There were gaps in it, bits that didn’t make sense, and he wondered if David knew that and decided it didn’t matter. Later still he realised what David had been doing. ‘He’d read about Elvis, and he’d read about Hollywood in the thirties and forties, And he was building a brand – before that language had even been invented.’
Watts met Bowie upstairs in Gem’s Regent Street office. The Melody Maker staff were well aware of Bowie’s regular presence at the Sombrero; there was a sense that David had ‘something to get off his chest’, and a hope that Watts would get a scoop, which is exactly what happened.
Watts remembers Bowie being ‘slightly flirtatious’ all the way through the interview; and indeed there was a delicious coyness about the whole piece, with Watts feigning a worldly, unshocked demeanour, as David holds forth, self-consciously messianic. ‘I’m going to be huge,’ he tells Watts, ‘and it’s quite frightening in a way.’ In his words, one can sense the teenage brio that so entranced the Deram staff, but here it’s augmented with a consummate display of name-dropping (Lindsay Kemp, Lou, Iggy and the Tibet Society) and a new playfulness, a sense that he is playing a game and is a master of it. When he tells Watts, ‘I’m gay – and always have been, even when I was David Jones,’ Watts comments that there is ‘a sly jollity about how he says it’. It was obvious that Watts was transfixed by what Bowie’s next interviewer, Charles Shaar Murray, describes as ‘a genius for inducing a powerful, platonic man-crush in fundamentally straight guys’.
For all the playfulness, this was a momentous announcement; utterly without precedent, and ravishingly brave. Gay sex had been nominally decriminalised in July 1967, but arrests for ‘Gross Indecency’ had tripled over the following three years, while many of David’s contemporaries would remain firmly in the closet for decades to come. Gem staff attempting to get Bowie airplay at the BBC had already encountered the objection that ‘we don’t have perverts on this show’. There was a precedent for David’s announcement, of which he was almost certainly aware, namely David Hockney’s overt declaration of his own sexuality with his We Two Boys Together Clinging painting, back in 1961, when gay sex could land a man in prison. Bowie’s move was more flagrant, aimed at the mass-market, rather than a coterie of critics. It was a thrillingly high-risk strategy – and one that David had only discussed with Dai Davies, not Defries, who anyway took the view that any publicity is good publicity.
David’s sexual and image makeover had already been anticipated by Marc Bolan – who’d glammed up in the spring of 1971 and proclaimed, ‘I’ll go up and kiss guys if I think they’re nice,’ in Sounds. But Marc lacked David’s chutzpah, his willingness to gamble everything, and David, of course, was in second place and needed to outdo him.
In later years, gay-rights activists would criticise Bowie’s coming out as mere ‘androgyny as chic’. Some of their cynicism was probably justified, given that after David outed himself, he inned himself a few years later, complaining about the commercial damage that his image had caused him in America. Rarely has such a spontaneous act of courage been followed by such a considered act of cowardice. Yet David’s later retraction is irrelevant: he had let a genie out of the bottle and it would never fit back in. This was a generational shift. Steve Strange, later of the Blitz club, was twelve when Bowie made his announcement, and for him and his peers, Bowie demonstrated he was not alone. ‘I grew up in Newbridge, in Wales – and as a kid I was the freak of the village. I didn’t know what being gay meant, there was no sex education, but I knew it wasn’t right.’ Bowie’s appearance was a beacon that would eventually draw a generation of kids to London or to a new life.
David was careful to have his cake and eat it in the interview – pointing out his ‘good relationship’ with Angie and Zowie, leaving the implication that his gay side was as camped up as the ‘50,000’ sales of The Man Who Sold the World in the US. This is the interpretation David would push in the 1990s, claiming that the excitement of hanging out in the Sombrero outweighed anything physical, which was ‘something I wasn’t comfortable with at all’. This pained recollection seems to confirm the criticisms of those who regard his gay phase as a pose, a marketing stance. Yet for David, the marketing, the pose, was part of his essence.
Witnesses like Tony Zanetta and Leee Childers were integral members of the organisation that painted David as a poster boy for bisexuality; but the pair, put on the spot, conclude that David’s gay stance was primarily about culture, rather than sex. ‘He was bisexual, but what he really was, was a narcissist – boys or girls, it was all the same,’ says Zanetta. ‘He was attracted to the gay subculture because he loved its flamboyance. Sometimes it was just an expression of communication – sometimes it was a way of … assimilating someone. But it was never his primary thing, and once the girls came flocking it didn’t matter.’ Michael Watts, who once commented ‘sometimes, honesty pays’ about the revelation he extracted, today says simply, ‘He knew exactly what he was doing.’
Within a few days of the Melody Maker interview, David had to contend with a much more sceptical audience; his three musicians from Hull. He had primed Mick, Woody and Trevor by taking them to see A Clockwork Orange and explaining that the costumes being designed by Freddie Buretti were ‘futuristic’, rather than something ‘poofs’ would wear. When the three were presented with their catsuits – blue for Trevor, gold for Woody and pink for Ronson – ready for the debut of their new set, David was faced with one of the trickiest acts of salesmanship of his career. Bolder frankly admits he was not impressed – ‘To be honest, it took a lot to wear that stuff’ – and remembers Mick, destined for the pink jacket, as the most vociferous objector. ‘Mick was not up for it. Not at all.’ Worn down by Bowie’s pure persistence, ‘We just sort of went along with it in the end.’
It was possibly the wardrobe disputes that meant that when it came time to premiere the band’s makeover on 29 January, 1972, the backstage area at Friars Aylesbury, now David’s favourite warm-up venue, was closed off. The crowd was double the size of September’s show, kids from London – among them, Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor – had taken the train up for the show, and as Walter Carlos’ ‘Ode to Joy’, from A Clockwork Orange, struck up, a ripple of excitement passed through the mostly teenage audience. ‘Then there was the climax, with the strobe and he was standing there in this blue-grey check jumpsuit and it was, Blimey! Unlike anything I’d ever seen,’ says Kris Needs.
The band unleashed their full Ziggy assault, launching into ‘Hang onto Yourself’, and then ‘Ziggy Stardust’ – a sonic slap in the face for the kids who expected to see and hear the David Bowie of Hunky Dory. Some of those already familiar anthems – ‘Life On Mars?’, ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ – followed, complete with a long version of ‘I Feel Free’, Bowie disappearing to change his catsuit as Ronson let rip on his Les Paul. ‘By the time they hit “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” the place was in total uproar,’ says Needs.
Dizzied by the experience, Kris made his way to the dressing room after the show. David was exultant. ‘Told you I’d be different,’ he told him, before planting a kiss firmly on the seventeen-year-old fan’s lips. ‘It was life-changing stuff,’ says Needs of that evening. ‘That night invented the seventies, and everything that came after, glam or punk – that was the defining moment.’ The local newspaper’s review of the show was titled ‘A Star is Born’.
The sense of manifes
t destiny and utter confidence – ‘I’m going to be huge – it’s quite frightening in a way’ – that was surging through David would permeate their whole tiny operation over the next few weeks. Over the winter Tony Defries had taken to wearing an enormous fur coat, invariably accompanied by a huge cigar; together with his prodigious nose and halo of frizzy hair he cut ‘the weirdest figure’ according to RCA’s Barry Bethel, who remembers that the entire record company was in awe of this intimidating figure. Defries loved gathering young people around him, enthusiastic teenagers, unconstrained by convention, who enjoyed his mockery of record companies. Defries was a good listener, though, and took note of RCA’s concerns when they heard the initial album acetates. ‘RCA told us Ziggy Stardust was great – but we needed a single,’ says Robin Mayhew, ‘something they could pull straight off the album – so David went off and wrote what he called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. His Starman song.’
‘It was at that point that the [Ziggy] concept finally happened,’ says Ken Scott, ‘it was the perfect single.’
In stories of the songwriting of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, the rivals with whom David would soon be compared, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ has been singled out as an early peak, a knowing song that packs in so many arresting songwriting devices – a ‘joyous energy and invention’, as writer Ian MacDonald puts it – that its hit status was inevitable. ‘Starman’ represents the same euphoric peak in Bowie’s writing, a moment of technical supremacy.
The opening minor chords are cheekily self-referential, a quote from David’s one hit, ‘Space Oddity’; then the story is mapped out like a novel, with supreme economy. ‘Didn’t know what time it was,’ the narrator tells us, to a claustrophobically tight tune. The lyrics are set against the beat, adding to the intrigue, with the last word in each line – ‘low-oh-oh’ – drawn out, pulling the listener in syllable by syllable, like a fish on a line. Then the key changes from minor to major, Ronson’s staccato guitar fires up like a searchlight in the gloom and we hit the chorus – and as David leaps an octave, over the word ‘starman’, we hit escape velocity, and take off.
As modern as it feels, though, the song is classic, and if it feels like the music has gone from monotone to Technicolor, that’s because the starman waiting in the sky so closely matches Judy Garland’s evocation of somewhere over the rainbow – note for note. It draws on the same emotion – a yearning for escape, from the depression and monochrome of 1939 or 1972 – and the listener’s response is instinctive, drawn in by the familiar, intrigued by the alien.
‘Starman’ was completed in the last session at Trident on 4 February, and in the following weeks the band grew to share David’s belief that ‘there was never a doubt that this wasn’t going to work’, says Bolder. ‘Everything was in place.’
In typical Defries grandstanding, the manager was building up his own management empire before David had even hit the charts; Dana Gillespie was already on the Gem payroll, and Iggy – now named Iggy Pop – joined her March 1972. Although signed as a solo artist – Defries was only interested in ‘stars’ and considered musicians as mere drains on his income – Iggy smuggled in guitarist James Williamson, and then the remaining Stooges, who holed up in Kensington, picking up girls, locating drugs suppliers and ignoring Bowie’s suggestions that he produce their album. With Defries’ artists descending on London, showing up at parties or T. Rex shows and Iggy’s legend already being celebrated in papers including Melody Maker, the sense that 1972 would be David’s, and Defries’, year was inescapable.
As David and the band prepared for a string of live shows running up to the Ziggy album’s release date, each of them was convinced that ‘Everything seemed right,’ says Bolder. ‘That was the weird thing, we didn’t even have to think about it.’ Then Woody painted the front of his Ludwig kit with the words ‘Spiders’ and they were a band.
The short tour opened at a tiny pub named the Toby Jug in Tolworth, Surrey. The stage was just a foot high, and the roadies had crammed a full PA and lighting rig into the room; the audience, numbering fifty or sixty were as transfixed as those at Aylesbury, and in the fourteen shows that followed, David recruited hard-core fans – in their dozens, not in their hundreds – but each of them, like audience member Pete Abbott, who witnessed the show at Imperial College, remember, ‘It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. We knew about Bolan, but that was pop music. This was serious.’
At Imperial College David attempted to emulate the feat he’d seen Iggy perform, in a short snippet of footage at Cincinnati, of walking into the audience and being held up; he toppled to the floor, one of several tumbles he took in those weeks. ‘He would never let the audience know [it had happened],’ says Bolder. ‘He would just get back up and carry on.’ The band roved up and down the country, David, Angie and band in two used Jags, with the crammed one-ton van bringing up the rear. In show after show, David was putting his moves together, expansive gestures that, when he finally played big halls, would reach the back of them. ‘He was a really good front man. He knew exactly what he was doing.’
By the time David arrived at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on 21 April, and attempted to crowd surf once more, the audience held him up. Angie’s input was ‘vital – she drove the whole thing, made it happen’, says Robin Mayhew; she operated the lights on the first shows, organising the costumes, the food. But on stage it was Mick Ronson who was king; there was no clue that this was the man who’d pored nervously over studio arrangements, for he was in total control. ‘If the thing was getting shaky, he would hold it together,’ says Mayhew. ‘If Bowie noticed something, say the finish of “Ziggy Stardust” was dragging, it was Ronno would stay and direct things. No shouting or screaming, no egos.’
When The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust was released on 6 June, plenty of reviewers were irritated by the audacity of the concept. Melody Maker described Bowie as a ‘superb parodist’; Sounds, which had applauded Hunky Dory, declared, ‘It would be a pity if this album was the one to make it … much of it sounds the work of a competent plagiarist.’ Their words illustrated the irrelevance of the music critic, for over the next three or four weeks it became obvious an unstoppable juggernaut was on the move. Early in the month there was the announcement that MainMan would be presenting both Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in concert – recruiting two of America’s hippest acts as supporting attractions in the Bowie circus – while just one week after its negative album review Sounds decided the Bowie live show ‘just needs to be packed with sweating teenagers to pull it off’. Over just a few short weeks, a consensus was emerging; if Ziggy was merely a joke, everybody wanted to be in on it.
There was one wobble, after the Oxford Town Hall show on 17 June. This was an amazing performance, where Mick Rock – the brilliant photographer who’d joined the MainMan cavalcade at the Birmingham show on 17 March – captured David knelt in front of Mick, his arms grasping Mick’s thighs as he bites at Ronson’s guitar strings with Ronson and the audience transfixed with laughter; instant glam pornography, the ‘guitar fellatio’ shot would be printed as a full-page ad, purchased by Defries, in the next week’s Melody Maker. There was a flurry of concern from Ronson – not a fear of the reaction of homophobic gangs in Hull, as has been speculated, ‘but because the musicians, Mick and his muso mates, thought bands like Sweet were unbearably naff, manufactured. He was caught in a divide,’ says Dai Davies, who spent hours reassuring the guitarist that the music would be taken seriously, despite such gimmickry. Bowie would later explain that he and Marc Bolan were high glam: conceptual. Brickies in satin, like Sweet, were low glam.
As the band toured through the spring, there was the sense both of a groundswell of support, driven through word of mouth, and a potential backlash from critics, who found Bowie and Defries’ operation considered and manipulative. The perfect response to such cynicism came with the song that would seal the deal between David and his fans, the ultimate example of the spontaneity that co-existed with his meticulous planning.<
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Late in March, David had discovered that Mott The Hoople – one of his favourite bands, whom he imagined as ‘a heavy biker gang’, says singer Ian Hunter – were splitting, and after begging them to reconsider, he invited them down to Gem’s Regent Street office, and played them a song which he’d just finished with them in mind. ‘He just played it on an acoustic guitar,’ says Hunter. ‘I knew straight away it was a hit. There were chills going down my spine. It’s only happened to me a few times in my life: when you know that this is a biggie. We grabbed hold of it. I’m a peculiar singer but I knew I could handle that.’ ‘All the Young Dudes’ reimagined Mott, in reality well-behaved Hereford boys, as heavy-duty punks, Clockwork Orange Droogs. Against a stately, descending chord sequence, the lyrics name check juvenile delinquency, acne, cockney rhyming slang, TV and suicide at twenty-five; ‘All the Young Dudes’ was a glorious celebration of youth, in all its glamour, ephemerality and heroism. It would be as sincere a love song as Bowie would ever write, to his most enduring love: rock ‘n’ roll.
Now, having written the definitive anthem of the seventies, David simply gave it away. Some thought that this was a self-serving act, designed to underline his own musical omnipotence. Bob Grace, the man who’d overseen most of Bowie’s recent songs, is emphatic that in giving away the song, Bowie paid a price. ‘I thought that was a mistake. If David had put out “All the Young Dudes” himself that autumn, he would have been huge beyond our comprehension. It was great he gave [Mott] the song, but I’m convinced it cost him.’ Both arguments ignore the fact that Bowie remained, at heart, a fan. This was a simple act of spontaneity, helped by the fact that the music was in any case simply pouring out of him.
Mott The Hoople recorded ‘Dudes’ on 14 May at Olympic in Barnes, with David producing. Mott, too, had now joined the MainMan empire, and it seemed likely they would provide its first hit, for David’s own ‘Starman’ had now hung around for a fortnight, without troub ling the charts. But show by show, in little towns like Torbay or Weston Super Mare, David and The Spiders won over their audiences: a dozen here, a hundred there, before the single made a modest entry into the UK singles chart on 24 June, at number forty-nine. The following day, Dai Davies announced, with only marginal exaggeration, that ‘1000 fans were turned away’ from The Spiders’ show at The Croydon Greyhound, where Roxy Music were the support act. But ‘Starman’ still languished at number forty-one when David and the Spiders walked into the Top of the Pops studio on 5 July.