“THE KIDS HAD KILLED THE MAN”: DAVID BOWIE'S 'THE RISE + FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS’ (3 of 3)

(First part here)

”I’m A Space Invader” 

The amount of science fiction in Ziggy can be overstated. There's at least as much animal imagery. But, much like gay culture, futurism and pop music seemed like natural bedfellows. It promised, in the famous phrase, tomorrows' sounds today. Tomorrow had already been the name of a Sixties psychedelic band. Phrases then still hip, such as “far out” (used on the album), also suggest this connection. Three years after Ziggy, the equally glammed up Slade would sing “many years from now there will be new sensations/ and new temptations/ how does it feel?”

Back then a pop star seemed so exotic, so at odds with your drab existence of school ties and table manners, that to see him as an alien didn’t seem so much of a stretch. Bowie effectively played with this with the video to the earlier single ’Life On Mars’. It’s essentially a succession of close-ups of him, filmed like his brightly made-up face is Mars. The cover to ’Ziggy’ shows the space invader juxtaposed with standard, drab London locations – backstreets and phone boxes.

Perhaps the most overtly science fiction song is ‘Starman’. And reasonably enough, someone first hears Ziggy by stumbling across him on the radio. (Yes, the man playing a rock star so he could become a rock star made a hit single about hearing a hit single.) He immediately picks up the phone: “I had to phone someone so I picked on you/ Hey, that's far out so you heard him too?” (I like to imagine that he phones a total stranger.) The radio and the phone are of course rock song staples, going back to the Fifties. But there’s a special significance to the radio here.

Bowie said of his own suburban teenage years: “I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player.”

And for my generation it was the same. A strange mixture of introspective self-isolation and exile from the world. And despite that drab normtown, every now and again something brightly coloured would fly briefly past your window. You’d only recently discovered you had your own will, and didn’t seem to have much of anything else. So you imagined you might be able to will another world into being. Having lived in that bedroom isolation, Bowie knew how to write directly to people still inside it.

Lemmy has said, when it first appeared, “rock ’n’ roll sounded like music from another planet.” But for their generation, that has an extra poignancy. Radio One didn't begin until 1967, when Bowie was already twenty. He’d have spent his formative years catching the new music through pirate stations, broadcast by necessity from beyond British shores. This strange new music was beamed in from outside, beyond the workaday world of suburbs and school uniforms. Alien form and alien content were in perfect alignment.

(Bowie himself recalled “It was very hard to hear music when I was younger. And therefore had a call to arms feeling about it”. The song compares radio waves to cosmic rays - “That weren’t no DJ, that was hazy cosmic jive.”

And that theme was in the airwaves back then. Back in ‘66 the Byrds had released ‘Mr. Spaceman’ about hitching a ride from a UFO like a souped-up hippy van. And, tho’ not in the lyrics, Roger MgGuinn had speculated about aliens hearing his song through the ether. The psychedelic band Gong released the ‘Radio Gnome Invisible’ trilogy of albums centred round a telepathic radio station, the first appearing only a year after ‘Ziggy’.) 

Yet ‘Starman’ is also based on the musical number ‘Over The Rainbow’, to the extent that live Bowie would sometimes swap the lyrics over. And as science fiction is really only useful as a metaphor for otherworldly, ’The Wizard of Oz’ meshes quite tightly. Bowie’s only real change was that he was now bringing someone from Oz to Kansas.

Also, science fiction was cosmological and quite often eschatological. And Ziggy is at least in part an angel, sent down to rescue the fallen of the earth. This is a belief system triggered by a starman rather than a star, but same difference.

In ’The Death and Resurrection Show’, Rogan Taylor argues “showbiz was the stump of shamanism”, surviving in disguised form into modern times. Unsurprisingly, it takes in Bowie and focuses on the Ziggy era. Bowie's described as “celestial… the most beautiful example of a modern master of heavenly flights” and “an Upperworld shaman”. He goes on:

”Uncontainable by any one mould, he was bound to become a sex-change shaman. Aerial spirits are very often depicted in myth as either sexless or androgynous, as in the paintings of medieval angels. It is as if their refusal to be bound by the either-or-ness of sexual identity provides them mysteriously with their power of flight. They cannot be held down in any one classification, so they drift upwards in consequence.”

And of course a shaman primarily has a healing role. The album repeatedly suggests only rock ’n’ roll can save the world – “I could make the transformation as a rock ’n’ roll star.” And if that seems more a Sixties than a Seventies notion, especially for the man simultaneously writing ’All the Young Dudes’ then Ziggy is very reminiscent of the title character from the earlier song 'Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud', “the missionary mystic of peace/love”. (The only track from the first album, bar 'Space Oddity' itself, to get played at the final Ziggy gig.) And the whole album is in the slipstream of the elegiac 'Memories of a Free Festival', which “talked with tall Venusians passing through.”

To date the furthest Bowie had taken this was 'Oh You Pretty Things' with its suggestion youth were “the homo superior”.

“Look at your children
”See their faces in golden rays
”Don't kid yourself they belong to you 
”They're the start of a coming race”

Yet, to quote myself (well somebody has to) when looking at ’Quatermass’: 

“It’s difficult to capture in retrospect just how contrapedal Seventies culture was. And how science fiction, which had always held to a view of the future which was bifurcated verging on bipolar, was the ideal arena to capture that. The future would either turn into a fluorescent silver techno-fix or else fall into pieces, with neither middle ground nor third option.”

It's easy to get the idea from this that the Seventies were ideologically split between hope and despair, dystopian and utopian SF flicks occupying alternate weeks at the cinema. But, as was not at all uncommon, in Ziggy the two are compressed together. This juxtaposition is at its keenest on 'Lady Stardust':

”Lady Stardust sang his songs

”Of darkness and dismay
”And he was alright
”The band was all together”

Early Bowie songs had tended to be epic, sprawling, multi-part numbers. But with 'Ziggy' they grew shorter, fell into conventional verse/chorus structures, both music and language becoming more direct. (The stream-of-consciousness style of 'Diamond Dogs' lay in the future.)

Bolan had made a similar journey from Tyrannosaurus Rex to T Rex, and it’s scarcely a secret Bowie used him as a role model. But there’s more than concision and simplicity, it’s also the sound of T Rex which is borrowed.

As Simon Reynolds pus it: “It is precisely as a lightweight that Bolan was a marvel. T Rex took the ponderousness and grit out of blues-based tock, made it lithe and succinct…. Cock rock became coquette rock. Instead of wham-bam bombast T.Rex songs moved to a reciprocal groove… active and passive roles slipped and flipped around.” (‘Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy’)

Bowie’s songs are more theatrical, less playful, less fey than Bolan’s. But he uses lightness positively in a similar way. Rock ’n’ roll has greasy knees protruding from ripped jeans. Rock ’n’ roll commonly cries “Get down!” Here the music seems to gleam and glide. The album sounds, in a literal sense, unearthly. This isn’t just true of the more show-like tracks such as ‘Starman’. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ is riff-based, but soars spaciously.

In other words, for an album about rock ’n’ roll mythology Bowie gives it a very un-rock ’n’ roll sound. A sound Simon Reynolds describes as “not particularly cosmic or futuristic but… cleanly produced rock and soul tunes… Rock is the theme that governs the album, but it’s not really the sound here which is lean and clean, light and almost unbodied.”

Think of Taylor’s description of Bowie as celestial, unweighted. Think of the line “Look out your window, I can see his light.” Perhaps we should even see Ziggy as some kind of Gnostic saviour, a being of light projected down into our tawdry material realm. It’s as if he arrived not from another planet but some ideal realm, where everything “sparkles” and nothing is worn-down or debased.

Perhaps the strangest part of Taylor’s description is “sexless”, particularly when Bowie was considered such a sex symbol at the time. As said earlier, the album has a predilection for nudge-nudge animal metaphors. (“I’m an alligator”, and so on.) But despite that, it’s not particularly sexualised. The animals are more flamboyant than bestial, strutting peacocks not rutting stags. Even on the jaded ‘All The Young Dudes’ they scoff at “television man” for “saying we’re juvenile delinquent wrecks.” (Though he may have a point about their shoplifting.) A thick line of innocence runs through it.

And this is made clearer by including one song which was all grit, all grind, very much wham-bam bombast. If the rest of the album is polished till it gleams, ‘Suffragette City’ sounds like a raw slice of something. And this time, that something is definitely sex. In lines like “don’t lean on me man, cause you can’t afford the ticket”, with a garnish of implied violence.

The album’s known for borrowing Nadsat slang from ’Clockwork Orange’, but it’s actually only used on this track. And Burgess’ gang of street-aristo apex predators are quite removed from the Dudes.

Again, serendipity saves us. This was the song Bowie first offered Mott the Hoople, perhaps because it sounded so unlike the rest of the album. Only when they refused it did he offer them ’All the Young Dudes’. 

Which means that the album starts out sounding ‘clean’ but gets dirtier as it goes along, the groupie tale ‘Hang On To Yourself’ leading into ‘Suffragette City’. From purity and innocence to decadence and corruption. (Which may be reading too much into it. Then again, that’s pretty much what we’re here for.)

Bowie’s next single (bar one) was ‘The Jean Genie’, described as “all muscle and sinew.” 'Starman' was a song, 'Jean Genie' a riff with an attitude wrapped round it taking the form of a lyric. It heralded a sound much less influenced by Bolan and much more influenced by the Stones.

Admittedly we’re now moving to the next album. But then, chronologically as much as with Bowie’s character, it’s hard to pin down where Ziggy ends. 'Aladdin Sane' never mentions him by name, but its concept was often described by Bowie as “Ziggy in America”.

And where best to get lost? Arguably the songs there take up the missing section from ’Ziggy’, and chronicle the character’s dissolution. Taylor called Bowie “an Upperworld shaman”. Yet, in the shamanic flight as anywhere else, what goes up must first go down. Ziggy merely lived the story in reverse.

In fact, so powerful is the rock ’n’ roll myth that, as if it possessed its own inexorable force, Bowie’s subsequent years mapped to it. After 'Diamond Dogs’, he became increasingly isolated, paranoid and delusional, sensing black magic plots against him everywhere, his lifestyle effectively a slow form of suicide. Simon Reynolds describes his state of mind as a kind of private apocalypse:

“In the nadir of cocaine dysphoria, Bowie made a total identification between his fractured ego and ‘World Collapse’. That’s Daniel O’Keefe’s term for narcissism turned apocalyptic: a state of mind that’s the inverse of being in love. Where romantic ardour reaches out for ecstatic fusion with the Other, paranoia withdraws from an external reality that’s become all Ominous Otherness.” 

And what’s the solution but to invert the inversion, try to find that ecstatic fusion once more? And, being Bowie, as seen another time, he tries to bring that about by writing a song about it. ‘Station To Station’ sounds nothing like ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, but follows the same formal structure – dissolution leading to renewal, disconnection yielding to reconnection.

And this may be part of the appeal of ’Ziggy’. If it kicks off a Glam trilogy it’s the only album to have this idealised sound. A friend once told me he always likes the idea of bands more than the actual band. ’Ziggy’ may be the ultimate album where it exists just so the idea of it can exist, and that idea is itself the idea of rock ’n’ roll.

The Stations of Rock ’n’ Roll

The closing 'Rock and Roll Suicide' cyclically brings us back to the themes of 'Five Years' - an isolated figure wandering the streets. We’re used to that, but it should feel odd. If this is the height of Bowie’s dalliance with Glam, then Glam was not normally given to this sort of downer vibe. Marc Bolan, Bowie’s big inspiration to go into Glam, wrote songs with titles such as ‘Life’s A Gas’ and ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’. Melancholia was the business of blues-based rock music. At least at the time Glam was seen as pop music, its home turf the singles not the album chart.

Almost every other track is sung about him, this one is sung to him. And this time Ziggy himself is the fraught, isolated figure. (It’s not specified it’s him, but come on - it is. Certainly, this is the only second-person song on the album, unless you count the filler ’It Ain’t Easy’.)

Bowie did explain at one point “it was his own personality being unable to cope with the circumstances he found himself in, which is being an almighty prophet-like superstar rocker who found he didn’t know what to do with it once he got it.” The man who’d showed up to save others, turned out he can’t even save himself.

In ’Shock and Awe’, Simon Reynolds points out that “Pop is a personality cult; it’s based on the belief that some people are extraordinary and that the ordinary can achieve elevation only by direct contact or through emulation”. But, when discussing Bolan’s later plummet from stardom, he comes back to refine the point:

”Charisma could be the attribute of a gifted preacher, a miracle-worker, someone endowed with gifts of oratory or oracular utterance. But charisma could also be possessed by the congregation itself, which in the early days of the Christian church was more like a band of outcasts than the hierarchical bureaucracies of subsequent centuries. It is arguable that charisma of this kind – collective single-mindedness – is a ‘vibe’ that generates itself within any cultic group that shares a marginal world view and renegade value system.”

And live music is all about the transference of energy between the performer and the audience, each giving back to the other. And this is formalised by the ritual of the encore, the star disappearing and having to be called back. It’s our “we believe in faeries” moment.

The song’s conceit is to start out descriptively, as if a dispassionate and omnipotent narrator is recounting the character’s actions. But then it jumps into addressing him directly, as if deciding it couldn’t stay uninvolved after all. At which point, as it cries “you’re not alone”, it becomes as rousing as a chorus. If Ziggy came down to save the kids, it’s they who now save him.

And in a sense he does die. The end of the album means the end of the character, this is in Bowie’s well-known phrase “the last show we’ll ever do”. But what dies is his ego, he discards his messiah status and accepts his own mortality. (Hence the “time takes a cigarette” opening.)

Try to think back to it. Those teenage years alone in your room, feeling at odds with the whole world, what did you most want to hear, but “no, you’re not alone”? Live this must have been magnificently effective.

In the film 'Velvet Goldmine’, loosely based on Bowie’s life, a character reflects sourly on the Glam era: “We set out to change the world... ended up just changing ourselves.”

Which is the story of most of our lives, I’d imagine.