by Pat Gilbert
The Ziggy Stardust tour returns to Britain for the first-ever rock concert held at the eighteen-thousand-capacity Earls Court in London, May 12, 1973.
The enormous Earls Court venue, usually used for trade shows and the like, had never hosted a rock show before, and the poor sound, seating arrangements, and facilities sparked a mini riot, forcing Bowie and the Spiders to leave the stage for several minutes while the promoters calmed down the tumult. Despite this inauspicious start, the Ziggy shows were about to reach their visual and musical apogee, wowing crowds with a rock ’n’ roll show that assimilated elements of kabuki, mime, costume changes, and Bowie’s Japanese-style costumes being ripped off to reveal his skinny body adorned with nothing more than a pair of red briefs. The rest of the tour, which stretched to some sixty performances in May and June, with the group sometimes playing two shows a day, wound up in London on July 2 and 3 for a two-night finale at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The second show was filmed by American documentary maker D. A. Pennebaker, who’d shot the Bob Dylan tour movie Don’t Look Back and Monterey Pop, which meant that arguably Bowie’s most famous onstage moment was captured on celluloid. Before he closed the show with “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” Bowie addressed the crowd, declaring, “Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.”
News that this was Bowie’s last-ever gig came as a complete surprise to the audience, but it came as an even bigger shock to Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey, waiting in the shadows to play the last song of the set. The plan to kill off Ziggy, and Bowie’s live career, had been hatched by the singer and Defries just a couple of weeks before, and only a few others, Ronson among them, were allowed in on the secret. Woodmansey in particular saw it as betrayal and typical of MainMan’s underhand methods. At a glitzy party the following night at the Café Royal, where Mick Rock snapped Bowie, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger enjoying a glass of wine together at the top table, the drummer was conspicuously absent. Meanwhile, Defries confirmed to the press that Bowie would, indeed, never perform live again—though the reasons why he unexpectedly “retired” Ziggy were unexplained. And, since Bowie was no longer giving interviews to the press, they remained so.
A candid shot of Bowie putting on his Ziggy makeup backstage, May 1973.
A promotional poster for the final Spiders from Mars show at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, July 3, 1973.
“The last show that we’ll ever do”: Ziggy makes his final live appearance, July 3, 1973.
Upon its 1973 re-release in the US, “Space Oddity” climbed to No. 15 on the Billboard singles chart.
The obvious motive was that Bowie was completely exhausted by his willing participation in the Ziggy Stardust fantasy, which had made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic but left him doubting his own sanity. Another was that he’d simply grown bored of the concept and wanted to move on to exploring his new Aladdin Sane character. There was also the suggestion that with Gary Glitter, Mud, Sweet, and others on the charts, what had glam rock become but a parody of itself? Yet there was another rationale, too, relating to RCA’s huge investment in Bowie. Fearing it was getting only a modest return on its outlay—Aladdin Sane stalled at No. 17 on the US chart—the label was refusing to fund another US tour, scheduled for September. As MainMan didn’t have the resources to put Bowie on the road again, it made sense to dramatically kill off Ziggy instead. As a footnote, the last shows at Hammersmith played a curious role in advancing the cause of British rock music. Local tearaway and budding rock star Steve Jones, then seventeen years old, crept into the Odeon while Bowie’s equipment was still on the stage and made off with several microphones and a Fender Twin amplifier. Thus the fledgling Sex Pistols nefariously acquired some decent equipment to help them on their way.
Mick Ronson and Bowie at the Hammersmith Odeon. Though the guitarist didn’t know it at the time, it would be his final show with Bowie.
Bowie and various celebrity friends—including Lulu, Jeff Beck, and Ringo Starr—celebrate Ziggy’s retirement at the Café Royal, London, July 3, 1973.
Just a week after the final Ziggy show, Bowie was back in the studio, though with a group that no longer included Woodmansey—sacked on his wedding day via a communication sent to Mike Garson, officiating at the marriage in his Church of Scientology capacity. The drummer’s replacement was Aynsley Dunbar, who’d worked with Frank Zappa and, more recently, with Lou Reed. The group rendezvoused with Bowie at Château d’Hérouville, Chopin’s former residence on the northwestern outskirts of Paris, which in the early 1970s had been turned into studio. (Bolan had recorded his Tanx album there the previous year and recommended it to his friend.) Bowie had little new material, so the idea was to make an album of cover versions celebrating the songs he’d enjoyed listening to during his formative Mod period, 1964 to 1967, when he was an habitué of the Marquee Club. Among the tracks chosen were the Pretty Things’ “Rosalyn,” Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play,” the Who’s “I Can’t Explain” and “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere,” the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things” and “I Wish You Would,” and the Kinks’ “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”—though it was the slinky soul version of the Merseys’ “Sorrow” that Bowie truly made his own and provided him with a hit that summer. The album didn’t pretend to be anything other than a stopgap while he recovered from the eighteen months he’d spent touring the world as Ziggy, but Bowie nevertheless approached the album with characteristic attention to detail. The cover, from a session rejected by Vogue magazine, featured the singer and 1960s icon Twiggy, made up by Pierre La Roche and beautifully photographed by Twiggy’s then-partner, Justin de Villeneuve. Bowie even designed the back cover layout himself, choosing two of his favorite Mick Rock live pictures.
Bowie with Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, and Lulu (standing) at Ziggy’s party.
The original artwork for the third Aladdin Sane single, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”
Released in October, Pin Ups, as it was called, gave Bowie his second UK No. 1, with a fraction of the work it had taken to get Aladdin Sane to reach the same position. But the fact that there was no longer a comprehensive tour of the United States that autumn meant MainMan had to come up with an imaginative way to keep Bowie in the American public’s eye, and the answer came in a TV special commissioned by NBC for their Midnight Special rock slot. The 1980 Floor Show, as Bowie titled the production, was an extravagant affair for its time, filmed over three days in October. The location was the Marquee Club—a nod to Pin Ups’ inspiration—where Bowie assembled with a troupe of dancers and a group featuring Ronson, Bolder, Dunbar, MacCormack, and Garson, augmented by Arnold Corns guitarist Mark Pritchett and a trio of backing vocalists, including Ava Cherry. Much of the show’s spectacle revolved around the high energy of Matt Mattox’s choreography and Bowie’s dramatic costume changes, ranging from a leotard with a large keyhole design—inspired by a similar garb seen in Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist 1923 production of La Coeur a Gaz—to an extraordinary figure-hugging creation with giant fabric hands cupping Bowie’s breasts. A third hand, holding his genitals, was unstitched on the producers’ orders, much to the singer’s chagrin. Musically, there was a genuine treat in the guise of a new song, “1984,” a soul-disco-rock mutation unsuccessfully recorded for Aladdin Sane, and a superfluous turkey in Marianne Faithfull’s tuneless duet with Bowie on Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” Another guest was French actress, singer, and model Amanda Lear, with whom Bowie would have a romance.
Bowie kisses his wife goodbye at Victoria Station as he heads to Paris to record Pin Ups.
The cover artwork for Pin Ups, featuring Bowie and the British supermodel Twiggy.
Bowie and Marianne Faithfull, photographed during the recording of The 1980 Floor Show at the Marquee, London, October 20, 1973.
The 1980 Floor Show was broadcast in the States on November 16, by which time Bowie was planning two ambitious theatrical productions: a stage performance of Ziggy Stardust, fleshing out the story
with additional songs, and a musical of George Orwell’s 1984, for which, of course, he already had the title theme. The first idea quickly fell by the wayside, but the Orwell project progressed as far as Pork director Tony Ingrassia flying to London to sketch out a script, though Bowie soon lost interest. Its death knell was eventually sounded by Orwell’s widow, Sonia, who refused permission for the stage adaptation—though not before Bowie had written several songs with an Orwellian theme.
The Bowies—three-year-old Zowie, Angie, and David—at home in 1974.
Bowie and Ava Cherry watch from the wings as Rod Stewart and the Faces play a show on their US tour in March 1975.
Bowie and Angie were by now living on Oakley Street in ever-fashionable Chelsea, having moved out of Haddon Hall, which after Ziggy had become a mecca for rabid fans. (The future Boy George, then plain George O’Dowd and living in South London, recalled knocking on the door at Haddon Hall and Angie telling him to fuck off.) The Georgian house was close to Mick Jagger’s home on Cheyne Walk, and the two singers become close friends and, according Angie, lovers (though some find this claim rather fanciful). The Oakley Street address was opulently decorated, as befitted a successful rock star, with antique furniture, a Persian carpet costing £4,000, and pictures of Bowie’s latest idol, James Dean. One of the couple’s earliest visitors was novelist William Burroughs, taking part in an interview with Bowie for Rolling Stone magazine. Burroughs’s work would influence a new song, “Sweet Thing,” whose lyrics employed his cut-up method, a technique Bowie would continue to use on and off for the rest of his career. Another early visitor was Ava Cherry, whose presence Angie initially tolerated before it became clear that Cherry and David were getting a little too cozy; Cherry was soon relocated to her own flat nearby. At the time, Bowie was producing a session at Olympic studios in Barnes for the Astronettes, a vehicle he’d created to showcase Cherry’s talent. The album, which was put on ice, included tracks Bowie would later revisit himself, though “Growing Up and I’m Fine,” the superlative original he “gave” Ronson that year for the guitarist’s solo album Slaughter on 10th Avenue, would remain unrecorded by its creator except in demo form.
Bowie on the set of Dutch TV show TopPop, February 1974.
Bowie at the controls during the Diamond Dogs sessions at Trident Studios, London, 1974.
The Diamond Dogs LP cover, painted by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert and featuring a half-human, half-canine Bowie.
Ronson’s new solo career spelt the end of his musical relationship with Bowie, leaving the singer without his trusty lieutenant when sessions for his next album, Diamond Dogs, began at Olympic in January 1974. Ronson’s absence spurred Bowie to play lead guitar himself—which he did, with remarkable confidence—as well as synths and various other instruments, while Herbie Flowers was hired to play bass. The change of studio meant another key collaborator, producer Ken Scott, was missing too. He was replaced by the Rolling Stones’ engineer Keith Harwood, who was later to achieve a curious kind of infamy when he fatally crashed at the same spot as Marc Bolan. The material Bowie had amassed related partly to the abandoned Orwell musical, as titles such as “1984,” “Big Brother,” and “We Are the Dead” attest. There were also hints of the aborted Ziggy play—“Rebel Rebel” and “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me”—and a brand-new character, Halloween Jack, the star of the title track who “lived on top of Manhattan Chase” and led a Droog-like gang of feral, post-apocalyptic survivors, the titular Diamond Dogs. The album’s dystopian, futuristic cityscape, filled with images of drug taking and homoerotic violence, was a disturbing place, reflecting a dark period that Bowie was entering in his private life. By now, his descent into cocaine addiction had begun, accelerated by the pressure heaped upon him to repeat the virtuosity of Hunky Dory, Ziggy, and Aladdin Sane. The destructive energy the drug unleashed was inherent in Bowie’s stirring proclamation at the start of “Diamond Dogs,” intoned over crowd noise lifted from the live Faces album Coast to Coast: “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!”
A 1974 RCA Victor EP featuring UK Top 5 hit “Rebel Rebel,” the lead single from Diamond Dogs.
Diamond Dogs’ cover art, showing Bowie with a dog’s body, was painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert from images of Bowie and an obliging canine taken by veteran 1960s photographer Terry O’Neill—though RCA insisted that the dog’s genitals be airbrushed from the final version. The gatefold sleeve, nonetheless, retained a disturbed, deviant energy commensurate with its content, which Bowie viewed as “political” and looking back to the seismic upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was “my protest,” he explained. But at the start of 1974, it wasn’t just the demands of his art that were troubling the singer; there was also the gnawing realization that MainMan was spending his money almost as fast as he was making it. In New York, Defries had now set up an office on Park Avenue, where the staff had company credit cards and traveled in limousines. This beneficence did not, however, extend to settling the studio bills at Château d’Hérouville and Olympic, and as a result, Diamond Dogs was completed at Morgan Studios in North London and Ludolf in the Dutch town of Hilversum, where Bowie was booked to perform “Rebel Rebel,” a UK hit that same month, on the Dutch TV show TopPop. Further tweaks were made at Tony Visconti’s unfinished new studio in Hammersmith, for which Bowie bought some Habitat furniture as there was nowhere for him and the producer to sit.
A panoramic view of the Diamond Dogs tour, showing the extravagant “Hunger City” set.
Among others cognizant of MainMan’s profligacy was a new recruit to its London office, Coco Schwab, an exotic French-American who would in time become Bowie’s devoted longtime personal assistant. With the help of Schwab and Cherry, Bowie schemed to escape Britain—and possibly his relationship with Angie—and relocate to New York, where he could reinvent himself once more and keep a closer eye on MainMan’s activities. But forensic scrutiny of his management’s business methods may have seemed rather premature, because at his own behest, Bowie was about to embark on one of the most spectacularly expensive and financially ruinous tours of the mid-1970s.
Planning for the Diamond Dogs tour began in March, when choreographer Toni Basil was flown over to meet Bowie in London. Bowie was conceiving his return to playing live as an event that would astonish rock audiences as never before. On his birthday in January, Amanda Lear had taken him to see Fritz Lang’s 1927 expressionist science-fiction epic Metropolis, which together with Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari planted the seed in Bowie’s mind of staging a live show performed amid a giant cityscape, with shadowy skyscrapers, streets, gantries, and walkways. This would be Hunger City, the home of Halloween Jack and his Diamond Dogs. Set designer Mark Ravitz was given three “clues” by the singer to guide his blueprints: “power,” “Nuremburg,” and “Metropolis.” There were to be dancers, special effects, and songs delivered from a cherry-picker raised up high above the crowd. MainMan set to work on a budget, which they estimated at $250,000, including the cost of transporting the set from city to city. The bad news was that, having had its fingers burnt by the Ziggy and Aladdin Sane tours, RCA refused point blank to finance the production, which meant ultimately the expense would be Bowie’s own; with some imaginative accounting, Defries somehow made the figures work.
Bowie sailed to New York with friend and backing singer Geoff MacCormack—now styling himself “Warren Peace”—arriving on April 11. Booking into the luxury Sherry-Netherland hotel, the singer lost no time in exploring the city’s nightlife with Ava Cherry as his guide. One of their first forays took them to the Harlem Apollo, where comedian Richard Pryor was a topping a bill featuring a funky soul group signed to RCA called the Main Ingredient. Bowie was thrilled by the show and to be the palest man in the building. The couple also became a regular at parties hosted by the wealthy art collector and socialite Norman Fisher, where guests were served cocaine in bowls.
Meanwhile, preparations continued for his ambitious stage show, for which
Bowie still needed to enlist several key musicians. Short a guitarist, Bowie asked MainMan to contact his old associate from the Beckenham Arts Lab, Keith Christmas, who was sent a plane ticket to New York. “It was really exciting—though to this day I’m still not sure why he asked me,” Christmas told the author. “I arrived in New York and they put me up in a nice hotel, but I only had about a quid in my pocket. I had no money at all. So I went to MainMan’s office the next morning and asked Tony Defries for some money, which was like asking Attila the Hun for some flowers. It wasn’t a comfortable experience, but I got some. David and I went out clubbing, but the management were all over him like a rash, telling him he should be doing this or that.”
Bowie unveils his new look during the Canadian leg of the Diamond Dogs tour.
At RCA’s studio, Christmas was asked to play electric guitar on “Diamond Dogs,” which he did repeatedly for thirty minutes or so. “The trouble with David was you never knew if he liked what you were doing or not. My guitar didn’t sound very good, so after a while I said, ‘How about a line then?’ He started getting very paranoid, so we walked down these big corridors to the gents and he got out a packet of coke and an old-fashioned, double-sided Gillette razor blade. His hand was really shaking, so I steadied it. We went back and I played the riff again, adding in some notes in the last bar, and he said, ‘That’s good!’ The session ended and I never heard from him again! I hung around a bit in New York, then flew home.”