WAS STARMAN’S TOTP DEBUT AS SEISMIC AS HAS BEEN CLAIMED? BOWIE EXPERT DAVID BUCKLEY DOUBTS IT.

THE BROADCAST of Starman on Top Of The Pops on July 6, 1972 has been heralded as a seismic moment in UK pop culture, or “four minutes that shook the world” as journo Dylan Jones put it in his 2012 book, When Ziggy Played Guitar. The reality, however, is a little different.

Released on April 28, the single initially made no impact on the charts whatsoever. It took eight weeks for its first appearance, charting at Number 49 (only a Top 50 was published back then) on June 24. The single had in fact been on heavy rotation in the UK courtesy of Johnnie Walker on Radio 1. Then, on June 15, Bowie and the Spiders recorded Starman for ITV kids’ pop show, Lift Off With Ayshea, a performance broadcast on June 21. Those in the North-west’s Granada region coming home from school may well have had their Starman epiphany then, as Fall guitarist and 6 Music DJ Marc Riley recalled: “I was absolutely gob-smacked. My gran was shouting insults at the TV and I just sat there agog.”

Three weeks later, when Bowie popped up on Top Of The Pops, Ian McCulloch, later the star man in Echo & The Bunnymen, was likewise mesmerised: “All my mates at school would say, ‘Did you see that bloke on Top Of The Pops? He’s a right faggot, him!’ And I remember thinking, You pillocks.”

While not entirely rubbishing the supposed impact of the July 6 broadcast on a generation of future pop stars, it certainly does not appear to have transformed Bowie’s fortunes overnight. Starman managed to climb from 29 to 20 the following week on its way to a peak of 10 in the UK charts (a re-showing of the performance on the TOTP of July 20 may have made more of a difference). While creditable, this was some distance from being a really big hit. For Bowie, those came later, starting with The Jean Genie (released in November ’72 and topping out at Number 2 in the UK chart) and Drive-In Saturday (Number 3 in April 1973).

It is, in fact, the third broadcast of TOTP’s Starman that we see on YouTube and clips shows today. This was December 27, 1973, at 5.45pm (after Tom And Jerry and before a showing of Chaplin’s Modern Times) as part of Top Of The Pops: Ten Years Of Pop Music, 1964-74. The earlier Starman TOTPs of July 1972 appear to have been wiped.

Hosted by Jimmy Savile, Ten Years Of Pop Music is unlikely ever to be reshown, but this was undoubtedly when a really large audience saw the performance. By the end of 1973, Bowie was genuinely big, with the bombshell of his ‘retirement’ that summer leading to six of his albums being in the charts the following January. Crucially, more British viewers had by now bought, or more likely rented, a colour TV, a crucial factor in seeing Bowie and the Spiders in their full peacock glory. Thank goodness for Christmas repeats after all.