‘For me, it was very much “There but for the grace of God go I.” . . . I did feel at times close to madness myself. I can remember being in the canteen at Abbey Road [during the Dark Side sessions. I was] sitting at the table with everybody, and suddenly there was no pain; everything – the table, all the people at it – receded. The sound became tinny, and the room looked like I was looking at something through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.’
Eclipse, as such, would be superseded as the album title by the time recording started in earnest. Clarity was the order of the day. Hence, the printing of the lyrics for concert-goers even when the suite was just a performance piece – a conscious attempt to strip any residue of spacey ambiguity from their current work. Gilmour remembers Waters stating that ‘he wanted to write it absolutely straight, clear and direct. To say exactly what he wanted to say for the first time and get away from psychedelic patter and strange and mysterious warblings.’ This lurch towards a certain lyrical articulacy was perhaps Dark Side’s greatest departure from Floyd’s already redolent history. Even as they embarked on their latest month-long sojourn, culminating in four nights at London’s Rainbow, the members of the band sensed that maybe they really had managed some kinda breakthrough:
Dave Gilmour: The process went on, the rehearsing, the writing, the performing live . . . All these things came together and it became clearer and clearer, probably gradually, that we had definitely made progress and that this was going to be a bigger, better thing than [anything] we had previously done. [2003]
The Rainbow shows – which ran from 17 to 20 February 1972 – were the first point at which the world began to sit up and take notice of the new Floyd opus (though not, as legend would have it, because of the famous Tour ’72 bootleg, which contrary to myth, was not issued at the time; nor when finally released a year later did it sell in anything like the kind of numbers that have long been attributed to it). The reviewers for the music press were out in force, and took it as read that a new Floyd stage show was something worth writing about.
These shows also brought the curious, the already converted and the general prog-rock concert-goers out in their thousands. Among the curious was one Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, who had hoped to sneak in to the show incognito: only for the unfortunate lad to bump into Mike Leonard, the man responsible for all those innovative early Floyd light-shows. As Leonard recalls, ‘I [had gone] to a post-Syd Pink Floyd concert in Finsbury Park, quite an important one for them, and I met Syd lurking in the hall. I don’t think they’d even invited him, he’d just come on his own.’ If Leonard thought ‘he looked a bit . . . gaunt’, it seemed ‘he was still Syd’.
So Barrett was once again keeping tabs on ‘his band’; and one imagines that, after hearing ‘Brain Damage’, he gave the boys in the band one of those trademark quizzical looks, especially if he caught that last couplet right – the most explicit of references to his time in the band: ‘And if the band you’re in starts playing out of tune27 / I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.’
At the Portsmouth concert, this preceded the music coming to a shuddering, synth-induced halt, like a sonic depiction of the dying of the light, but at The Rainbow ‘Brain Damage’ segued into a new piece, ‘Eclipse’, that seemed like a concession to the kind of hippy idealism the rest of the album rejected. Waters, ever one for the grand gesture, says he ‘felt as if the piece needed an ending . . . The [‘Eclipse’] lyric points back to what I was attempting to say at the beginning.’ It was rather a way of making the album end with a comradely call to all of those ‘people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone’, as opposed to the wholly Barrettian ‘Brain Damage’. Nonetheless, one imagines the so-called lunatic left the hall at last impressed by a Gilmour-era Floyd show.
Syd now had something to follow, which, four days later, is exactly what he set out to do. It could well be he was at The Rainbow that night precisely to check out the opposition before he debuted his new band, ironically christened Starz, at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, sharing the bill with Detroit’s loudest rabble-rousers, the MC5, who were now very much on their last, drug-addled legs. Having wondered aloud to Mick Rock back in December whether there was someone out there he could play with, Syd was in full rehearsal mode by the beginning of February with a band that also comprised the ever-industrious Twink of Pink Fairies/S.F. Sorrow fame and bassist Jack Monck. It was an impromptu jam session with Twink and Monck, after an Eddie ‘Guitar’ Burns gig at the Kings College Cellars on 26 January, which convinced him to give it one more go. Again, though, he had placed too great a burden on his sagging shoulders, and for those – like Melody Maker reviewer Roy Hollingsworth – who expected some epiphany, the 24 February gig proved to be the night of the big letdown.
It all began swimmingly with a slow version of ‘Octopus’ – Barrett resuming at the very point he had previously left the stage – followed by competent renditions of ‘Dark Globe’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’, ‘Baby Lemonade’ and ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, before he ignited the night with what Rob Chapman called in his Terrapin review, ‘a remarkable version of “Lucifer Sam”’. Misguidedly, instead of segueing into ‘See Emily Play’, a song they had rehearsed that afternoon, and leaving the crowd wanting more, Barrett decided to try to rediscover the spirit of that initial jam session. As such, in Chapman’s words, he ‘concluded [the set] with a couple of shapeless ragged 12-bar instrumental, [which] ended [only] when Syd’s right index finger began bleeding rather badly’. Hollingsworth – the man who later the same year would dismiss the New York Dolls as a bad joke – concentrated on the latter part of the set in his review, reinforcing the cliché that was Madcap Syd:
He played and played and played. No tune in particular, no tune in fact. He sounded out of tune most of the time anyway. But the tune was most certainly in his head . . . I don’t know how much Syd Barrett remembered, but he didn’t give in. Even though he lost his bassist and even though Twink couldn’t share Syd’s journey, Syd played on . . . As the clock ticked into the small hours of Friday morning, Syd retreated to the back of the stage, trying to find one of those [guitar] runs. He messes chords together. There is no pattern. But if you think very hard, you can see a faint one, you can see some trailers in the sky . . .
With a single stroke of his injudicious pen, Hollingsworth signed Starz’s death warrant. As Twink told Kris DiLorenzo: ‘The reviews [sic] were really bad, and Syd was really hung up about it; so the band folded. He came ’round to my house and said he didn’t want to play anymore.’ Hollingsworth later insisted it was not his intention to press the autodestruct; but if he did not realize how fragile Syd’s ego was, he was a reviewer in a million. According to one Floyd biographer28, Barrett’s own response to the Corn Exchange gig was even more dramatic and emotive. After the show he had returned to the Hills Road house, where he started smashing furniture before retreating to his bedroom in the cellar, where he commenced smashing his head repeatedly against the ceiling.’
Shortly afterwards, he turned up at the door of Sheila and Mick Rock’s London home. As Mick remembers it: ‘For a moment he was thinking of doing something in London, but it just seemed to pass through his mind briefly . . . It wasn’t like he said, “Fuck it, I’m never going to play again.” . . . [but] he knew he wasn’t wired for a life like David Bowie . . . He was just trying to make up his mind, really, about getting off the bus.’
*
Just as Barrett got up to get off the bus, who should he pass on the stairs but sorcerer’s apprentice David Bowie. The last time he heard that man’s name he was reviewing Bowie’s Deram single, ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, for Melody Maker’s Blind Date column back in 1967, when still having a laugh. Back then, he called Bowie’s effort ‘a joke number’, but not in a bad way. As he helpfully explained, ‘Jokes are good. Everybody likes jokes.’
And now Bowie was namechecking him in the very weekly that was sending Roy Hollingsworth to slag off Starz. The increasingly androgynous boy from Brixton was
on the front cover of England’s most popular music magazine, pronouncing himself gay. In the 22 January 1972 issue of Melody Maker Bowie unveiled his Ziggy persona for the first time, and the only English rock star he referenced (alongside Iggy and Lou, the two Americans he was explicitly courting) was Syd Barrett. Bowie described to Michael Watts how ‘it is because his music is rooted in this lack of [self]-consciousness that he admires Syd Barrett so much. He believes that Syd’s freewheeling approach to lyrics opened the gate for him.’
Ever one to seize a vacant mantle, Bowie already knew that Barrett had abdicated his pop throne by the time he took Ziggy Stardust on the road in February 1972. He was soon spending his nights and days with the last man to see Syd standing: Mick Rock himself. When he and Angie heard that Rock was coming to see a show at Birmingham’s Town Hall on 17 March, they were both secretly thrilled. For Angie, it may have been Rock’s position as Rolling Stone correspondent that excited her, but Bowie surely knew the name from the sleeve of his copy of The Madcap Laughs, and maybe even the 23 December 1971 issue of Rolling Stone, which had just carried Syd’s last interview. Rock was certainly left in no doubt about how highly Bowie regarded Barrett: ‘Bowie worshipped Syd. He always saw him in the same bracket as Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.’
The Ziggy persona that Bowie formally introduced during a February 1972 TV appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test had actually been given a quick spin around the block already, in a less measured guise, with the two singles by ‘Arnold Korns’ that first gave the world unrealized renditions of ‘Hang On to Yourself’ and ‘Moonage Daydream’. Korns, originally conceived as a transvestite singer ‘discovered’ by Bowie, took his name from another famous transvestite, the one Barrett celebrated on the first Floyd A-side, ‘Arnold Layne’. Indeed, if the androgyny of Ziggy had a prototype in English pop, it was from Barrett, a debt Bowie openly acknowledged: ‘[He was] the first bloke I’d seen wear make-up in a rock band to great effect. Me and Marc Bolan both noted that.’ The fact that Syd always had ‘this strange mystical look to him, with [his] painted black fingernails and his eyes fully made up’, provided Bowie with just the inspiration he needed to go the whole hog, dye his hair, put eye shadow on, and generally prostitute his art along lines he’d outlined a year earlier.
Barrett also had a profound effect on the style of songs that Ziggy sang. As Bowie duly acknowledged in the same year he recorded his own version of ‘Arnold Layne’ in concert29: ‘Along with Anthony Newley, Syd was the first guy I’d heard sing pop or rock with a British accent. His impact on my thinking was enormous.’ From the first line of Bowie’s 1972 album, ‘Pushing through the market square . . .’, sung in an accent that would have made Eliza Doolittle glow, there is no mistaking the singer’s proximity to the bells of Bow. In a world where a transatlantic accent, or a Jaggeresque Southern slur, were almost de rigeur, Ziggy placed himself full square in the little cul-de-sac off Regent Street, where he was snapped for the album’s iconic cover. At the time, Bowie even joked that his ability to switch between ‘stone the crows’ cockney and BBC English was ‘part of me general schizophrenics’; while Ken Pitt well recalls the way ‘he would sometimes come into a room looking like a ravishingly beautiful girl then, ten minutes later, he’d be a “Gor blimey” yobbo. He would turn the cockney persona on and off.’
In constructing Ziggy, Bowie continued taking a leaf or two from the Dylan he was still nightly celebrating in song (nor should one discount the effect of Anthony Scaduto’s widely read biography, published the previous autumn). Where Dylan had constructed his backwoods folkie persona from archetypes who were either dead (Hank Williams, Cisco Houston, Robert Johnson) or artistically moribund (Woody Guthrie), so Bowie carefully built his own iconic alter ego around recent casualties found at the side of the road to excess. And of those figures, Barrett and Hendrix were the ones that seemed to loom largest. This pair, rather than the colourful but essentially inconsequential Vince Taylor, would be the true templates to Bowie’s new alias. (Mark Paytress exposes Bowie’s likely motive for repeatedly citing Taylor in his slick monograph on the Ziggy album: Although it is easy to see in Ziggy elements of all the casualties of the counterculture – especially Hendrix, [Peter] Green and Barrett – Bowie’s . . . citing of the obscure Vince Taylor as his defining model [is] typical of his desire to wrap himself, and his work, in the cloak of mystery.’)
Bowie has continued to muddy the waters ever since he was first asked, whither Ziggy? In a 1992 Life article he brazenly claimed that his first inspiration in rock ‘was John Lennon, [along with] some of the Stones and Kinks, and then it got hammered in with guys like Bryan Ferry, King Crimson, Pink Floyd . . . [before I started] applying Dada, creating those absolutely frightening, extraordinary monsters of rock that nobody could possibly love’. But portraying Ziggy as some Dada creation – more Dalí than dahling – merely provides further evidence ‘of his desire to wrap . . . his work in the cloak of mystery’. In early 1972, Bowie’s main points of reference were strictly musical. Art was the one with a voice in Simon & Garfunkel. As Simon Frith astutely observed in Let It Rock the following June, ‘Ziggy Stardust is the loving creation of a genuine rock addict.’
This is not to say that Bowie hadn’t self-consciously decided to bring the theatrical side back to pop music. In this he was inspired not only by the theatricality of early English glam-rock (and Alice Cooper) but by the Warholian antics of a New York acting troupe who descended on London in the summer of 1971, to perform the risqué Pork. When he met the American cast after opening night he even told troupe-member Tony Zanetta, who would end up working for him: ‘I’m going to play a character called Ziggy Stardust. We’re going to do it as a stage show. We may even do it in the West End. When I’m tired of playing Ziggy . . . someone else can take over from me.’
He had been ruminating on creating a stage caricature of the rock star for some time now, telling Rolling Stone back in February 1971: ‘My performances have got to be theatrical experiences for me as well as for the audience. I don’t want to climb out of my fantasies in order to go up onstage – I want to take them on-stage with me.’ In the late 1990s he duly confirmed that ‘the initial framework [back] in ’71, when I first started thinking about Ziggy, was [essentially] as a musical-theatrical piece. And it kinda became something other than that.’ Understatement of the year of Glam.
The theatrical idea was already some way advanced by the time Bowie began recording Ziggy’s intended repertoire in November 1971. When during the sessions he met up with music journalist George Tremlett – who had interviewed him a number of times over the years – ostensibly to promote his latest album, Hunky Dory, Tremlett asked him whether he had finished arranging the new stage act he had mentioned to him the previous April. Bowie responded, ‘That’s what we’re working on now.’ What sort of stage act would it be? ‘Outrageous. Quite outrageous, but very theatrical . . . It’s going to be costumed and choreographed, quite different to anything anyone else has tried to do before.’
Bowie was already professing to have little time for ‘anything anyone . . . tried to do before’, even as he entered the choppy waters of glam-rock a full year after other pop pioneers first started glitzing up pop. He gives Alice Cooper short shrift in his January 1972 interview with Michael Watts, refusing to recognize Cooper’s Detroit credentials or the trailblazing nature of his early stage-act. And looking back in 1993, he was especially bitchy about British glam-rockers The Sweet, who ‘were everything we loathed; they dressed themselves up as early Seventies, but there was no sense of humour there’. Actually it was Bowie who missed the joke, from a band whose tongues remained firmly in their cheeks throughout a series of gloriously camp hit singles such as ‘Little Willy’ and ‘Wigwam Bam’. (The real source of his later enmity may be their appropriation of the ‘Jean Genie’ riff for their own tail-chasing chart-topper, ‘Blockbuster’.)
Thankfully for Bowie, by spring 1972 he had chanced upon the fully conceptualized Roxy Music – contempor
aneously championed by another Melody Maker journalist, Richard Williams – who were starting to make waves of their own. At the same time he began encouraging the likes of Mott the Hoople, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to glitter up and pout their lips, hoping to create a second wave of glam that would be altogether more exclusive. As he later claimed, ‘We took ourselves for avant garde explorers, the representatives of an embryonic form of postmodernism. [Whereas] the other type of glam-rock was directly borrowed from the rock tradition, the weird clothes and all that. To be quite honest, I think we were very elitist.’
Meanwhile, his friend Bolan continued holding the high ground, chart-wise, all the while camping it up with a series of five memorable back-to-back number-one singles, ‘Hot Love’, ‘Get It On’, ‘Jeepster’, ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’. But as far as Bowie was concerned, all of those who glammed up before him were not really transgressive. Their campness was an act, and obviously an act; not so much the gesture of a social deviant as the archetypal music-hall cross-dresser.
He had far grander ambitions with his creation, or so he would claim twenty years later: ‘From a very early age I was always fascinated by those who transgressed the norm, who defied convention, whether in painting or in music or anything. Those were my heroes – the artists Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí and, in rock, Little Richard.’ If, as seems to be the case, he was expressing a genuine viewpoint here, it was couched in artistic reference points he learnt to apply after he gave up on rock.
If we can believe his right-on mother, Peggy – who told a reporter in the early 1980s of one occasion when, as a little boy, she found him wearing her make-up and ‘told him that he shouldn’t use make-up. But he said, “You do, Mummy.” I agreed, but pointed out that it wasn’t for little boys’ – Bowie was just as confused about his sexual identity as the young Barrett. He made an allusion to such experiences in the second of his Ziggy-era conversations with Michael Watts, prior to his legendary August 1972 Rainbow concert: ‘I spent all those formative teenage years adopting guises and changing roles . . . just learning to be somebody . . . I’ve always been camp since I was about seven . . . My interests weren’t centred around obvious seven-year-old interests, like cowboys and Indians. My things were far more mysterious.’
All the Madmen Page 21