Ziggy Stardust turns 50

THE ANNIVERSARY

Ziggy Stardust, the most celebrated persona of David Bowie, turns 50, alongside the icy White Duke. But above all, it's an album celebrating its half-century: "The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars", a record that marked an era, definitively sealing the glam age. Released in stores on the Rca label on June 16, 1972, that outlandish sci-fi comic strip, crowded with androgynous, decadent aliens projected into the dreams of the space age, opened the eyes of millions, tearing down every convention of the time with the energy of its imaginative, transgressive charge. Through his carrot-haired alter ego, Bowie brought to the stage the most instinctive, animal side of rock, one he had personally encountered in flesh, bone (and scales) in the Iguana, 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 flood of glitter, sequins and stardust. False and fatal, contradictory and deceptive as life itself. So much for the myth of the rocker's sincerity.

This is the watershed that — beyond the extraordinary quality of the songs — makes "Ziggy Stardust" one of the most powerful musical testimonies of all time. A record written like a stage play, with a script that, in its author's intentions, could have been staged, but never needed to be, thanks to the natural power of its songs.

Now that the Starman has flown off on his own Blackstar, the force of his lesson remains, the magnetic charge of a blend of sounds and images that keeps feeding on icons as if it were a religion. It's a safe bet that many, these days, will make a pilgrimage to Heddon Street, the London street where Bowie was photographed by Brian Ward for the iconic cover: a black-and-white shot (originally), later colourized at the English artist's own suggestion to give the whole artwork a sense of "hyper-reality", science fiction and strangeness.

There are many initiatives and events around the world celebrating Ziggy's fiftieth anniversary. Almost inevitably, Parlophone has a promotional reissue in the works: on June 17, one day after the anniversary, the album will be reissued in a limited edition, half-speed mastered, on Lp and picture disc, using the same master and featuring a replica of the album's promotional poster. The new pressing of "The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars" was cut on a custom Neumann VMS80 lathe from masters restored at 192kHz from the original Trident Studios tapes, with no additional processing in the transfer. The half-speed mastering was done by John Webber at Air Studios.

Among the more unexpected initiatives is Adobe's, which will let fans transform themselves into Bowie's iconic persona using makeup brushes inspired by the English artist's bold techniques and colours. The digital toolkit, housed in a purpose-built mini-site, is available within Photoshop, Illustrator, Fresco, Substance and Adobe Express. Several options are inspired by the fabrics and patterns of the outfits Bowie wore onstage, with vividly coloured backgrounds and stickers drawing on his most famous artwork, including a section featuring a digital dressing room that opens on July 1 and promises an "immersive" experience.

Half a century on, Bowie/Ziggy's apocalyptic "vision" remains as relevant as ever, even though just a year later, at a famous concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon, Bowie announced he was going to get rid of his creation, in front of a stunned Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and Ringo Starr in the audience. Like the phoenix, Ziggy will always rise again from his ashes, hovering over every vaguely androgynous or alien creature that has appeared in the world of rock over the years (mentioning Placebo or Marilyn Manson, to name just two at random, might seem almost reductive, but for the record we note it anyway). It's practically pointless, too, to underline his decisive influence on the punk era, perfectly summed up by Gavin Friday of Virgin Prunes in the line "Punks were the bastard children of Ziggy Stardust". If some of the sounds of 1972 feel dated today, the power of that failed musical remains intact, and its bond with contemporary society even more so, as if over the years those bewildered Spiders From Mars had truly built a giant canvas able to withstand the wear of time. From Five years (left to cry in) to fifty, and its mystery endures.

But it all fits perfectly into the strategy of the London dandy who, a modern Dorian Gray, always let his portrait grow old, never his spirit. And if it's true, as Fred Frith and Howard Howe write in the essay "Art Into Pop", that "Bowie is a black canvas on which people write their own dreams", all that's left is to close our eyes and keep living forever suspended in his stardust.

THE RECORD

At the dawn of the 1970s, in England, rock becomes a masked ball. Under the garish neon lights, the young "dudes" run wild: neo-freaks who turn their hippie cousins' dreary eco-pacifist gatherings into an unrestrained festival of kitsch. "Peace and love", sure, but without any ideological or political strings attached anymore. Detachment, cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity triumph, in a flood of glitter and sequins, feathers and mascara, boots and space jumpsuits. It's the age of "glam rock" and a new, intoxicating Swingin' London. "Rock'n'roll with lipstick on", John Lennon will sarcastically call it. In this carnival of vanities, David Bowie hits on the perfect mask: Ziggy Stardust. An androgynous alien with awkward movements, made up like a drag queen and sporting a carrot-coloured wig. He is "the man who fell to earth", the messiah ("a leper messiah") of a rock revolution that lasts just one season, the time between his rise and his fall ("the rise and fall"). And in this parable lies the whole of Bowie's artistic vision: the staging of Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame", Dorian Gray's morbid hedonism, the parody of stardom and the fleeting myths of consumer society, and, not least, the omens of a bleak Orwellian future.

But let's take it 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 sharpen his sound on "Hunky Dory", the summation of a new rock vocabulary, at the crossroads of sickly Velvet Underground-style psychedelia, Dylan-esque folk and — indeed — glam rock, in the wake of Marc Bolan's T. Rex. But to fully step into the glam epic, he needed a character able to strike the public's imagination. 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", to use Bowie's own definition.

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. The Earth is on the brink of collapse, five years remain before catastrophe: "We had five years left to cry in". It's Woodmansey's drums that set the pace of "Five Years", which starts as a languid ballad and builds into a magnificent crescendo, until it explodes into Bowie's hysterical scream. Cradled by the swinging rhapsody of "Soul Love", the listener is then flung 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", the symbol of the music business's prostitution. Fired up by Bowie's shrill falsetto, Ronson's dizzying Gibson Les Paul distortion and an explosive sax solo, it's a dazzling electric ride and the ultimate apotheosis of glam rock. Ziggy is the Starman, invoked in the spatial ballad "Starman", one of Bowie's most legendary melodies, and (perhaps) even 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 Beatles' classics. Because, like the Fab Four, Bowie has the rare gift of being able to build, 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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