“ANYTHING ZIGGY DID NOW WOULD JUST BE REPETITION”
ALTHOUGH BOWIE WAS KEEN TO MOVE ON, KILLING ZIGGY STARDUST WAS EASIER SAID THAN DONE, FINDS MARTIN ASTON.
EVEN BEFORE DECLARING “THIS IS THE LAST SHOW we’ll ever do” Bowie had built the dramatic device of selfdestruction into Ziggy’s narrative. As far back as 1967, Bowie’s mime piece The Mask had weighed up the power of illusion, the danger of what lay behind the mask when finally removed, and the cost of success. The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust was proof of the prophecy.
“It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character,” Bowie told Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe in 1976. “I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah.”
Bowie had hit the reset button ample times since joining The King Bees in 1964, but never before had he called time on a wildly successful incarnation. Yet removal of the Ziggy mask does not appear to have derailed him. In fact he forged forwards, adding Lulu and Ava Cherry to his extra-curricular projects while he furiously plotted his own moves: the covers LP Pin-Ups, and a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.
“I had a certain idea of what I wanted my rock’n’roll star to be like,” he said soon after Ziggy’s retirement. “I’ve gone as far with that as I possibly can. The star was created; he worked, and that’s all I wanted him to do. Anything he did now would just be repetition, carrying it on to the death.”
If Ziggy left Bowie with any residue of madness, it was the obsessional need to escape him, or at least keep the momentum going. Marc Bolan had launched the ’70s but Bowie had launched the revolution: boys could be girls, girls could be boys, a pop or rock star could transcend denim and leather and be anything they liked. As his doppelgänger Brian Slade says in Todd Haynes’ 1998 glam rock fiction Velvet Goldmine, “Strange people are chosen, and through their art move progress along.”
Ziggy had personified those ambitions, so there was no way to completely exorcise his presence. Vestiges clung on in the costumed stagecraft of NBC’s TV special, The 1980
Floor Show – recorded in October and broadcast in November 1973 – and Pin-Ups’ Twiggy-and-Ziggy artwork, both featuring two-thirds of the Spiders, Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder. Ziggy’s flame-orange feathercut remained for the promo campaign for Rebel Rebel and its parent album Diamond Dogs, even though Bowie was talking up a new persona, Halloween Jack. Rebel Rebel and LP cut Rock’n’Roll With Me were also intended for a proposed Ziggy Stardust: The Musical, a plot that Bowie discussed in a shared interview with dystopian sage William Burroughs.
The Diamond Dogs tour of late ’74 introduced a new wedge hairdo but ‘future shock’ sci-fi was still the main script, staged in a post-apocalyptic cityscape and with Rock’n’Roll Suicide still the final encore. After the musical artifice of Young Americans/‘Plastic Soul’, the arrival of Station To Station’s Thin White Duke, though less flamboyant than Ziggy, rekindled the latter’s mythology: the imperious outsider who sucked up into his mind.
THE IDEA OF BOWIE-ASalien – arguably the foundation of his subsequent mystique – wasn’t lost on movie casting agents seeking convincing extra-terrestrials, and the singer seriously contemplated joining an adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger In A Strange Land (the film was never made) before committing in 1975 to The Man Who Fell To Earth. Ziggy and Thomas Jerome Newton’s storylines even overlapped: “Someone who was dropped down here, got brought down to our way of thinking and ended up destroying himself,” said Bowie. Having fallen to earth himself, via cocaine addiction and related dissociative states, Bowie dropped the sci-fi, characters and costumes and went ‘au naturel’ for what we now call the Berlin era. But fans would not let Ziggy go (in 1977, Bowie lamented that they would still approach him and say, “What’s happening on Mars at the moment?”) and he was back in the mix when Bowie suggested the Spiders re-form for his 1978 World Tour. Nixed by Mick Ronson, the idea was Bowie’s first sign of backsliding, though the five-song Ziggy Stardust interlude in the setlist was suitably modernised. Ziggy’s DNA could even be gleaned in Bowie’s Pierrot outfit on the cover of Scary Monsters (& Super Creeps) and Ashes To Ashes promo, echoing Bowie’s manifesto for Ziggy and rock: “The music is the mask the message wears – music is the Pierrot and I, the performer, am the message.”
Looking back, whenever Bowie took risks in the spirit of Ziggy, both in performance and music, staying one step ahead of his imitators and eschewing commercial decisions, he made his finest and most influential work. In the ’80s, with Let’s Dance and the emergence of ‘Dave From Brixton’ – a nor
“THE IDEA OF BOWIE-ASALIEN WASN’T LOST ON MOVIE CASTING AGENTS.”
mal, bankable mainstream rock star – he turned away from the idea of rock as something psychically transformative, and Ziggy could be viewed as a quaint relic. “I find it very refreshing to look at,” he said in 1984. “It was an extraordinary phenomenon in rock at the time.” Ziggy nostalgia could be discerned in the circus of costumed stagehands (not forgetting the title) of 1987’s Glass Spider Tour. But this wasn’t a risk, more a desperate act of self-preservation, with Bowie at an all-time creative low.
That wasn’t the case when Bowie revived the possibility of Ziggy: The Musical in 1999, to be launched in time for the album’s 30th anniversary – “I’ll develop him and his environment and his society,” he promised, with bonus photographic, theatrical, cinematic, online and album material. Perhaps the scale of the task overwhelmed him, or by 2002, he’d moved on. That year, reviewing ageing and mortality on the Heathen album, Bowie covered I Took A Trip On A Gemini Spacecraft, written by Legendary Stardust Cowboy, whose name and unstable personality Bowie had siphoned for his alter ego.
In 2015, Bowie eventually settled for Lazarus, AKA the musical of The Man Who Fell To Earth, a brave and baffling stage drama steeped in multiple personalities and fractured imaginations but, curiously, no Ziggy-era songs bar the contemporaneous All The Young Dudes, Bowie’s gift to Mott The Hoople that formed part of Ziggy’s end-times narrative. Lazarus’s ambitions were mirrored by Bowie’s swansong
Blackstar, with its astronomical gaze, and the storyline of the title track’s video, centred on a jewelled skull found inside a space helmet. The final resting place of Major Tom, or, given its alien aura, perhaps Ziggy’s remains?
Fifty years – not five – after the iconoclastic birth of Ziggy, it’s staggering to consider his catalytic impact, not just in terms of broadening gender and sexual roles but pop and rock’s entire trajectory, as Bowie invested in the concept of music as performance spectacle and the artistic principles of transformation. Ziggy’s blueprint is manifest in Madonna and Prince, Lady Gaga and St. Vincent, in the energy of renewal that inspired punk rock and other pop mavericks to step outside of ‘what you see is what you get’ with another kind of tension. Ziggy’s life also epitomised the connection between star and fan that still persists today: you’re not alone, gimme your hands. Far from a rock’n’roll suicide, Ziggy will outlive us all.