AN EARLIER BOWIE INVENTION CONJURES SHADES OF ZIGGY, REPORTS MARTIN ASTON.

ERNIE JOHNSON: an earthbound name if ever there was. Yet the musical that David Bowie demoed in 1968 is the most tantalising of his remaining buried treasures, and suggests early stirrings of Ziggy Stardust.

Ernie Johnson came to light in Bowie manager Ken Pitt’s memoir The Pitt Report, published in 1985, but only when the internet spread news of a tape bearing eight (some reports say 10) songs being auctioned at Christie’s in 1996 did the story truly emerge, as Pitt writes, of “Ernie’s suicide party, described by Tiny Tim, one of the guests, as a ‘Most exquisite party, darlings. Everyone was there. They busted me for masquerading as a man. How dare they?’”

The minutiae of the plot – including a conversation (unfortunately un-PC) with a tramp and a trip to Carnaby Street to buy a tie – is by-the-by; it’s the references to ambisexuality, masquerade and self-destruction, unified by a stage concept, that Bowie kept in his locker for future recycling. And like the Ziggy

Stardust album, Ernie Johnson lacked a cohesive plot. It seems that the suicide never even takes place. In other words, we’re left guessing.

Fortuitously, Ernie never made the grade. One sample lyric – “Knock-knock/ Who’s there?/Three dollies more/I’ve caught me stocking in yer door” – makes it sound like a half-baked slice of Anthony Newley-esque farce. But Space Oddity was coming over the horizon and, with it, Bowie’s eyes were raised from terrestrial realism to extra-terrestrial fantasy and, ultimately, Ziggy Stardust: a less earthbound name if ever there was.