Star Vehicle
It’s not quite there yet, David… discarded tracklisting puts Ziggy’s spine out of place.
David Bowie
Waiting In The Sky (Before The Starman Came To Earth) ★★★
Parlophone 5054197604454 (LP)
The Bowie estate’s repackaging industry continues to move like tigers on vaseline, as this limitededition 11-track LP (released for Record Store Day, and part of another forthcoming box set) gives us the December 1971 rough tracklisting – later, obviously, much changed – of the peerless Ziggy Stardust album. It subs in the four dropped songs, which later showed up on B-sides: the Chuck
Berry cover Round And Round, the Jacques Brel song Amsterdam, Holly Holy and Velvet Goldmine. Famously, Bowie and the Spiders went back into Trident Studio in early ’72 and, inspired afresh, came up with Suffragette City, Rock’n’roll Suicide, and a certain life-changing, career-making, worldwarping Starman. These are left off this displaced oddity as, less harmfully, is the eternally incongruous Ron Davies composition It Ain’t Easy.
Does messing about with the contents of the album which turned the adolescent existence of many of us from monochrome to multicoloured improve it? Does it my God-given ass. You take away Starman, you take away the gateway drug.
You take away Suffragette City, you jettison some of the jive and juice. And you remove Rock’n’roll Suicide as the grand finale, and the whole big bang ends with a whimper. (The closer on this version, Lady Stardust, is mighty fine, sure, but the deranged dream-journey of Ziggy as the record which redirected a generation was reliant on the climax being a full, unabashed, tortured yet triumphant teenage lament projected with the passion of Maria Callas at La Scala.)
So yeah, thank goodness Bowie went back to his canvas and braved a few bigger brushstrokes. Those last-minute additions also helped the very loose Ziggy “concept” hang together slightly more cohesively. Nobody in 1972 really needed another Chuck Berry cover: Ronson and gang may have been “jamming good”, but so were Quo, so were Uriah Heep or whoever. Such a bog-standard, good-ol’-boogie move would have diluted our belief in the glam alien messiah as the radical new thing. The apocalyptic awe of Five Years shouldn’t share digs with a generic romp bashed out after five beers.
The other three restorations are, nonetheless, the nazz. Amsterdam is angsty and vivid. But another cover, another tribute to one of Bowie’s heroes, again would have diverted our focus from Ziggy being the hero, or anti-hero, or slightly scary motivational supreme leader. Holly Holy and Velvet Goldmine could, objectively, have held their end up on the album. But asking us in 2024, when most of us have been emotionally attached to Ziggy for half a century, if they’d have sat better within the album’s flow than the now carved-in-stone running order is like drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. OK, interesting bit of iconoclasm, Marcel Duchamp, point taken, but can we have the one we know and love back now, yeah? Don’t take it all too far.
Look, this is a fun collectable, a cute curio and a pleasure to listen to. But there’s only room for one Ziggy Stardust, and you don’t have to squeeze it.
“Thank goodness Bowie went back to his canvas and braved a few bigger brushstrokes”