David Bowie

Punks were the bastard children of Ziggy Stardust

Gavin Friday (Virgin Prunes)

At the dawn of the '70s, in England, rock becomes a masquerade ball. Under the garish neon lights, the young "dudes" run riot: neo-freaks who turn their hippie cousins' dreary eco-pacifist gatherings into an unrestrained festival of kitsch. It's still "peace and love", in short, but without any ideological or political constraints left. What triumphs instead is disengagement, cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity, in a profusion of glitter and sequins, feathers and mascara, boots and space-age jumpsuits. This is the age of "glam rock" and of an intoxicating new Swingin' London. "Rock 'n' roll with lipstick on", as John Lennon would call it. In this carnival of vanities, David Bowie nails the perfect mask: Ziggy Stardust. An androgynous alien with awkward, jerky movements, made up like a drag queen and topped with a carrot-colored wig. He is "the man who fell to earth", the messiah ("a leper messiah") of a rock revolution that lasts a single season, the time that passes between his rise and his fall ("the rise and fall"). And in this parable lies the whole representation of Bowie's art: the staging of Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame", the morbid hedonism of Dorian Gray, the parody of stardom and of the fleeting myths of consumer society and, not least, the omens of a bleak, Orwellian future.

But let's take things in order. It's 1972, and a year earlier David Bowie, already the author of works as promising (the gem "Space Oddity") as they were uneven, had finally managed to bring his sound into focus on "Hunky Dory", the summation of a new rock vocabulary, at the crossroads between the sick psychedelia à-la Velvet Underground, folk of Dylanesque descent and — precisely — glam rock, in the wake of Marc Bolan's T. Rex. But to fully enter the glam epic, he needed a character able to seize the public's imagination. One with a rock soul and a story to tell: that of "The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars". Recorded by the same ensemble as "Hunky Dory" — the band renamed for the occasion "The Spiders from Mars": Mick Ronson (guitar and piano), Trevor Bolder (bass) and Woody Woodmansey (drums) — together with producer Ken Scott, it's a concept album about the rise and (self-)destruction of a "plastic rocker", in Bowie's own words.

Romantic and voluptuous, ambiguous and brazen, "extraterrestrial", and therefore free from the sexual taboos that shackle humanity, Ziggy Stardust is the quintessence of the glam spirit. Past and future coexist within him: a child of the decadent aura of pre-war Mitteleuropean cabaret, he is also thrust forward into the futuristic drive of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), whose opening notes would open the Ziggy Stardust Tour shows. He's the mask that embodies every rock stereotype filtered through glam's grotesque lens. A caricature of the star, destined to be idolized by the public and crushed by the star-system. His models are rock's noble fathers (Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix), but also unlikely figures, such as Vince Taylor, the "French Presley", a Sixties rocker who died mad and by suicide, whom Bowie would cite as a direct inspiration for his "creature", and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, aka Norman Carl Odom, a bizarre American bluesman who would even be honored with a cover ("I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spaceship") on "Heathen" (2002). The stage fiction, however, soon overrides reality, and Bowie merges with his alter ego to the point of sacrificing him on stage, granting him immortality. Yes, because it's on the dichotomy of "ephemeral versus eternal" that the whole work is staked. And the fact that in the end the latter prevailed (the record is still considered a classic today) proves that, for the London dandy, marketing and art are a winning, inseparable pairing.

Musically, the album is a collection of romantic ballads and electrified, breakneck rock'n'roll, bordering on punk. Music to be played at full volume, as the back cover itself recommends. Across the eleven tracks, the full glam arsenal is unleashed: from raucous, effeminate vocals to razor-sharp guitars, from pompous string arrangements to aching melodies. But amid so much melodrama, Bowie never takes himself too seriously: his songs are a sneer at prudish morality, an exercise in ironic transgression and, often, pure nonsense. To stoke the sensation further, he would confess to Britain's Melody Maker: "I'm gay, and always have been". True or false, it doesn't matter: the scandal is created, because "fame, what you need you have to borrow", as he would theorize in "Fame" (1975).

The saga of Ziggy begins with an apocalyptic prophecy. Earth is on the brink of collapse, with just five years left before the catastrophe: "We had five years left to cry in". It's Woodmansey's drumming that sets the pace of "Five Years", which opens as a languid ballad before swelling into a magnificent crescendo, culminating in Bowie's hysterical scream. Cradled by the swinging rhapsody of "Soul Love", the listener is then plunged into a waking dream: "Moonage Daydream", the Lunar Age has arrived, and with it its messiah: "I'm an alligator, I'm a mama-papa coming for you/ I'm the space invader, I'll be a rock 'n' rolling bitch for you". Ziggy is a redeemer, then, but also "a whore", a symbol of the music business's own prostitution. Charged by Bowie's shrill falsetto, Ronson's dizzying Gibson Les Paul distortion and a blistering sax solo, it's an electrifying ride and the ultimate apotheosis of glam rock. Ziggy is the starman, invoked in the cosmic ballad "Starman", one of Bowie's most legendary melodies, and (perhaps) an inspiration for the plot of the sci-fi film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" five years later. The famous chorus ("There's a starman waiting in the sky/ He'd like to come and meet us/ But he thinks he'd blow our minds") is a masterpiece, worthy of standing alongside the classics of the Beatles. Because like the Fab Four from Liverpool, Bowie possesses the rare gift of building from just a few syllables what Americans call "hooks" — fishhooks capable of capturing the listener forever.

Bowie's melodic gift triumphs in the swooning "Lady Stardust", with saturated guitars and Ronson's poignant piano figures accompanying his crooner-like vocal delivery. It's a tribute to Marc Bolan (in the original demo it was actually titled "A Song For Marc"), but the "Femme fatales emerged from shadows" line takes us straight back to the Lou Reed of "Velvet Underground & Nico". The album's only cover, meanwhile, bears the signature of Ron Davies: "It Ain't Easy", a kind of space-country tune with an almost gospel chorus. Breaking up this dreamy 1930s-musical mood are a couple of proto-punk raids launched at breakneck speed by the Spiders from Mars: "Hang On To Yourself", which by the Sex Pistols' own admission would inspire "God Save The Queen", and "Suffragette City", an ode to prostitutes complete with a post-orgasmic exclamation ("Ohhh, wham bam thank you ma'am!"), which would provide the soundtrack to Bowie and Ronson's sexual pantomimes on the stage of the Ziggy Stardust Tour.

Having now become "Star", Ziggy can finally be celebrated by the immortal riff of the title track: Ronson's rasping guitar underscores the story of the star who "he'd shrug and ask to stay / Leper messiah" - wait, actually: who "would flash a light but leave them stiff" - no, the story of the star who "strutted his stuff" - and ended up devoured by a horde of fan-executioners: “Facendo l’amore col suo ego Ziggy fu risucchiato nella sua mente/ come un messia lebbroso/ Quando i ragazzi l’hanno ucciso, ho dovuto sciogliere il gruppo”. Bowie disguises himself as a passionate balladeer, but in truth he's behind the curtain, pulling the strings of his creation with aristocratic sarcasm. Just as he would do a year later, when, Hamlet's skull in hand, he would script the exploits of his Hollywood "Cracked Actor" in "Aladdin Sane". The album's natural conclusion can only be a “rock and roll suicide”, played out in the most theatrical of fashions, cigarette in mouth (“Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth”) and pleading for one last gesture of affection (“Gimme your hands, cause you're wonderful”), a moment Ziggy would mime in his live shows by reaching out into the crowd. The Spiders From Mars build another terrifying crescendo, the ideal backdrop for Bowie's hallucinated, high-strung vocals. Staged like a Brechtian cabaret sketch, "Rock And Roll Suicide" is the album's farewell, the very song with which, on July 4, 1973, during a concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon, Bowie would announce the death of Ziggy, to the tears of his fans. The "dudes" would stay afloat a while longer (Bowie would even dedicate the generational anthem "All The Young Dudes" to them, handing it over to Mott The Hoople), and Bowie himself would touch up his make-up for a couple more records in that style ("Aladdin Sane" chief among them), but the glam epic would soon dissolve into its hero's stardust.

A couple of interesting details worth noting: the album cover portrays Bowie sporting a Greta Garbo-style hairdo on a rainy Heddon Street, just a few steps from Regent Street in the heart of London; the remastered CD edition includes five bonus tracks: "John I'm Only Dancing" and "Velvet Goldmine" (two excellent 7-inch b-sides), the previously unreleased "Sweet Head", and demo versions of "Ziggy Stardust" and "Lady Stardust".

Hopelessly dated, yet at the same time the herald of so much rock still to come, the melodrama of Ziggy Stardust tears down the sterile boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. Because Bowie – as he himself put it – "is Nijinsky and Woolworth's rolled into one". Anyone who has ever grappled with the relationship between performer and audience over the years has had to reckon with this alien in a leotard. "He was a creature born to be idolized by fans – Bowie would later reveal – I built him using the simple conventions of rock'n'roll". A marketing product, in other words, but one crafted down to the smallest detail. Like a work of art.

In Bowie's own words, "we thought we were avant-garde explorers, representatives of an embryonic form of post-modernism". A "total" art form, in which music merges with theatre, music-hall, mime, cinema, comics and the visual arts, yet never loses sight of the ultimate goal: fame. "I'm going to be a star", Bowie himself had vowed before the release of "Ziggy Stardust". So those who call it "a commercial record" aren't wrong. They're only wrong if they think art and commerce are incompatible. A misconception that becomes colossal the moment you utter the name David Bowie.

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27/10/2006