David Bowie: the show “Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars” airing on Rai5. It was the epilogue of the glam alien saga

“Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, the concert film made for the show that David Bowie performed at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 3 July 1973, will air on Friday 19 September at 11pm on Rai 5 (later streaming on RaiPlay): it is

Shot on 16mm by D.A. Pennebaker, then remixed by Bowie and Tony Visconti in 1981, the film documents the final concert of the tour that cemented the success of the London dandy with the Spiders from Mars, the band that accompanied him during this period, and that handed down to rock history his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous, flamboyant character he created for his 1972 album “The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars”. A film that represents a historic moment in Bowie's career, at the end of his glorious glam arc, as well as a classic of music documentary filmmaking.

Here is the setlist from that historic concert:

Hang On to Yourself

Ziggy Stardust

Watch That Man

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud

All the Young Dudes

Oh! You Pretty Things

Moonage Daydream

Changes

Space Oddity

My Death

William Tell Overture

Cracked Actor

Time

The Width of a Circle

Let’s Spend the Night Together

Suffragette City

White Light/White Heat

The Jean Genie ft. Jeff Beck

Love Me Do ft. Jeff Beck

Around and Around ft. Jeff Beck

Rock 'n' Roll Suicide

Speaking of the Ziggy Stardust era, Parlophone Records recently released a monumental box set dedicated to that period of David Bowie's career. It's titled “Rock'n'Roll Star!” and contains 5 CDs and 1 Blu-Ray, with 29 previously unreleased tracks, including early demos, outtakes, alternate versions, recordings by David's band The Arnold Corns, rehearsals at Bowie's then-home Haddon Hall, BBC sessions and live performances.

Meanwhile, the David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts has opened to the public in the beating heart of London's East End, a new cultural hub entirely devoted to the art and legacy of the “White Duke”.

Housed inside the V&A East Storehouse – the new satellite site of the Victoria and Albert Museum, designed by the Diller Scofidio + Renfro studio – the centre holds more than 90,000 items from Bowie's personal archive: stage costumes, musical instruments, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, memorabilia, fan letters and previously unseen material charting five decades of popular culture, from the London beat scene of the 1960s to the artistic metamorphoses of the 1980s and beyond.

Unlike a traditional museum, the David Bowie Centre was conceived as an open archive, a living space where the artist's work is not simply preserved but continues to inspire new generations. “Bowie would have wanted this archive to be a tool to fuel other people's creativity,” curator Madeleine Haddon explained during the press preview.

Ziggy Stardust, more than 50 years after his birth, remains David Bowie's most celebrated persona, alongside the icy White Duke. Credit for that goes above all to an album, “The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars”, which defined an era, sealing once and for all the glam age. Released in stores by Rca on 16 June 1972, that sprawling sci-fi comic strip, teeming with androgynous, decadent aliens projected into the dreams of the space age, opened the eyes of millions, smashing every convention of the day with the energy of its imaginative, transgressive charge. Through his carrot-haired alter ego, Bowie brought to the stage the most instinctive, animal soul of rock, one he had personally encountered in flesh, bone (and scales) in the Iguana himself, Iggy Pop, his inseparable “American friend”. At the same time, through that farcical, grandiloquent staging, David Robert Jones mocked all the blood-and-sweat macho stereotypes, in a profusion of sequins, paillettes and stardust. False and fatal, contradictory and deceptive as life itself. So much for the myth of the rocker's sincerity.

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