David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust

This programme contains some strong language.

40 years ago, in millions of living rooms across the British Isles,

a strange alien creature was beamed onto our television screens.

With bright red hair and multi-coloured space-suit,

his unearthly appearance shocked the nation. But for many teenagers

who experienced this televisual visitation,

it would change their lives forever.

# ..Starman waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us

# But he thinks he'd blow our minds... #

This messianic Martian was with us

only for a year but his impact would be felt for generations to come.

# ..Cos he knows it's all worthwhile... #

Music on Planet Earth would never be the same again.

# Let all the children boogie... #

# Oh... #

Armed with laser-guided melodies and lyrics from another dimension,

Ziggy Stardust heralded a new era of rock music.

# I'm an alligator

# I'm a mama-papa coming for you... #

A time of outlandish fashion...

# People stare at the make-up on his face... #

..outrageous sexuality...

# Wham bam, thank you, ma'am

# Suffragette city... #

..and good old-fashioned, rock 'n' roll music.

# Jean Genie lives on his back

# Jean Genie loves chimney stacks... #

So, what made this mysterious extra-terrestrial

one of the most influential cultural icons of the 20th Century?

# Now Ziggy played guitar. #

This is how Ziggy Stardust blew our minds.

# Well, Annie's pretty neat

# She always eats her meat

# Joe is awful strong

# Bet your life he's putting us on

# Oh Lordy, oh Lordy

# You know I need some loving... #

Ziggy Stardust set David Bowie on course

to becoming one of the world's most famous pop stars.

As the Queen Of The Glam Scene,

he always seemed a step ahead of everyone else.

Where Ziggy walked, others followed,

whether that was his army of screaming fans

or copycat artists struggling to keep up.

David took it to another level. He just wiped the floor with everybody.

It was game-changing.

When we first saw Bowie as Ziggy Stardust,

he looked so complete and so fully-formed.

It almost was as though he appeared from a different planet.

It was extraordinary.

And at that time you didn't realise

that he'd been trying to be successful for ten years.

'I'm just, by nature, a very flighty person.

'I get turned on and off things, all the time, very quickly.'

Born in 1947, David Robert Jones spent his teenage years

trying to make it as a musician.

# Well, I got girl that she's good to me... #

He went through a series of bands playing R&B and rock 'n' roll

before becoming a mod.

# London boy, oh, London boy... #

The belief was, that if you want to do something bad enough,

and you put your mind to it, you can. The trouble is,

he didn't just take one thing.

He took loads of things.

He wanted to be everything.

Aged 20, he changed his name from Jones to Bowie

and released his first solo album on Deram Records.

# Who's that hiding

# In the apple tree... #

It was a strange mix of music hall and whimsical pop.

He even tried his hand at a children's novelty record.

# Ha ha ha

# Hee hee hee

# I'm a laughing gnome and you can't catch me

# Said the laughing gnome. #

I think he was trying on what can I do, and what do people want,

and going through

the trial and error period. And there was a lot of error,

you know, with the laughing gnome, it's like, OK.

# ..And gave him a fag

# Have you got a light, boy? #

The laughing gnome is not a great record, but it is indicative

of what he was doing at the time

because he was obsessed with Anthony Newley.

# What kind of fool am I? #

Anthony Newley was a giant of British popular culture.

As adept as a singer, dancer and entertainer

as he was at creating surreal comedy that paved the way for Monty Python.

I think she fancies me.

He was more than meets the eye,

Anthony Newley, He wasn't just,

"What kind of fool am I?"

Yeah, he wrote that,

but there was many other sides to Anthony Newley.

Films, the Gurney Slade TV thing,

which was ground-breaking when it happened.

So, I think that's what interested David.

It begs the question, if David Bowie had found success

with his Anthony Newley phase, would he have become a light entertainer?

But as both the Laughing Gnome and the Deram album

were the latest in a line of commercial failures,

we'll never know.

But Newley's quirky versatility would certainly later inform

the theatrical DNA of Ziggy Stardust.

'I would try and get involved

'in anything that I felt was a useful tool for a narcissistic medium.

'I was trying to be a one-man revolution, you know.'

Around the same time the Deram album was released,

Bowie met Lindsay Kemp,

a British dancer who specialised in mime and avant-garde theatre.

I was endeavouring to teach him to astonish,

to astonish a public.

I helped him find himself through his movements.

So he could express himself, so he had the right kind of control.

Being my student, he was so keen.

He was like a sponge.

He would absorb anything that took his interest.

Those classes included some mime but mostly dance.

I taught him to dance.

Within a few weeks of meeting,

Kemp and Bowie had created a stage play

called Pierrot In Turquoise,

which they toured together around the UK to critical acclaim.

Offstage, they embarked on an affair,

the choreographer introducing the young singer

to London's gay intelligentsia.

He had an enormous sexual appetite,

which came across on the stage.

I mean, it's a useful thing to have, if one has an outlet.

But the dance troupe didn't pay the bills.

And nor did his next musical direction,

a folk trio called Feathers.

Bowie turned to acting to help finance his music,

taking small film roles

and even starring in an ice-cream ad.

And then, seemingly from nowhere,

he hit upon a formula to finally launch his music career.

Put out to coincide with the 1969 lunar landings,

the single rocketed to number five in the UK charts.

# This is ground control

# To Major Tom

# You've really made the grade

# And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear... #

Space Oddity, that was a game changing record,

was the record that inspired me to make the Elton John record.

I said I just want the sound that's on that record,

cos it was so extraordinary.

# This is Major Tom to ground control... #

Although essentially another novelty record,

it was also a masterful piece of songwriting.

But the songs on the self-titled album,

released to cash in on the single's success,

sounded nothing like Space Oddity.

# Spy, spy, pretty girl

# I see you see me through your window. #

The record buying public couldn't understand

what David Bowie was all about.

It was a strange record, because at the time, he was writing folk songs.

His latest thing was having long hair, going on stage,

crossing his legs, and playing an acoustic guitar.

And, so, consequently, he didn't really click again,

with the public, because his image was quite confused.

Bowie had shown the world a glimpse of his extraordinary talent,

but it would be three years

until he could recapture Space Oddity's success

with Ziggy Stardust.

And as those years rolled by, Bowie became increasingly worried

he was damned to be a one-hit-wonder.

In 1970 he was

fundamentally depressed.

He had no idea where he was going, he didn't know how he was going to fit.

A serious change of direction was needed.

And that, in part, came from Bowie's bride-to-be, Angie Barnett.

Angela was really a driving force behind David.

She was very influential

with the costumes.

She made him brave.

She would have her hair cut first, if she didn't think he'd like it.

She made him brave.

She was encouraging and always

on his side and always positive.

She would always encourage

dressing him and help the image,

and I always found her as a very positive force.

Bowie formed a new band called the Hype

and in February 1970, he unleashed a radical new image.

Was going to do a gig, and Angie said,

we're going to dress you all up.

We did the Round House.

I was supposedly Cowboy man

cos I had a cowboy hat on, and a frilly shirt with some tassels on.

We were just thrown together,

but David's was like, he had

the big knee-high leather boots.

And we just did this gig dressed up, you know. Theatre.

The London audience wasn't ready for superheroes playing heavy rock

and The Hype bombed.

With hindsight, it seems Bowie was just ahead of his time.

Especially when you consider the Hype's make-up and costumes

pre-date Marc Bolan's first glam rock TV appearance

by over a year.

Bowie's plan to create his famous alter-ego

was beginning to take shape.

The proto-glam band the Hype are most notable

because it's the first time David Bowie worked with Mick Ronson,

the guitarist who would become part of the sound of Ziggy Stardust.

Their first studio collaboration was on Bowie's next album,

the heavy, guitar-based The Man Who Sold The World.

But what shocked people the most, wasn't the new hard rock sound,

but the image on the sleeve.

He sells it by positioning himself on the front cover in the very long,

flowing, pre-Raphaelite dress, which was the least macho,

least hard rock image imaginable.

And it's hard to think now how shocking that actually was.

It wasn't until David and Angela walked down Beckenham High Street,

David in a dress and Angela looking remarkably boy-like

that we all started taking notice of him.

I mean, people would recoil.

Literally, the old girls would kind of go, "My God!"

Shocking was what he wanted to be, and shocking was what he was.

The rock scene in 1970 was very much the colour of blue jeans.

Everybody wore denim, everybody had long hair

and the music very much reflected that sort of monotoned culture.

I'm sure that's why the album wasn't a hit in this country

was because anybody who was interested in the music

picked up the cover and said, "No way I'm getting involved in that."

This was not an era when men flirted with camp imagery at all.

Three albums in and Bowie was still failing to find his audience.

He desperately needed someone

who could turn his undeniable talent into record sales.

Somebody did come along and grab me by the empty wallet and said,

"I'm Tony De Fries and I'm going to make you a star."

I said, "Oh, yeah?"

David was great, yes he was,

but he hadn't gotten very far until he'd met Tony.

He was struggling. Tony had a master plan and things started to happen.

"Yeah, you want to be Elvis Presley? I can do that.

"It can be done, David. It can be done."

He financed it, that was the most important thing.

Everything that Bowie did, there was Tony De Fries

with the money to pay for it. Without Tony De Fries,

we would never have had David Bowie, Pop Star, Rock Star at all.

MUSIC: "Venus In Furs" by the Velvet Underground

Tony's main objective was to make Bowie a superstar.

And that meant cracking America. So at the beginning of 1971,

the 24-year-old singer was sent there on a short promotional tour.

Within a few months he returned, signing a deal

with RCA Records in New York,

the company who would later fund the Ziggy Stardust project.

It was during this period that Bowie was introduced

to the subversive world of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

He felt immediately at home

surrounded by New York's counter-culture.

We were all working in underground theatre,

which involved a whole lot of outrageousness.

The rock 'n' roll world at the same time in New York

was becoming very underground.

There were men dressed in women's clothes but not in drag,

they were just wearing women's blouses and things

and a lot of make-up and things.

And everything was getting very bizarre.

Back in London, Bowie continued his fascination with the avant-garde.

He hung out in gay nightclubs with a fashion designer

called Freddie Burretti.

And when an Andy Warhol play called Pork arrived in town,

Bowie and his new wife Angie befriended the American cast.

We invited Angie and David to come see the play,

and they came with Tony De Fries,

and we all started to hang out together.

We met David's incredible, loud, crazy wife Angie, and she was,

"Oh, we have to go do this,

"we have to go do that, we have to outrage the populace."

And we were fine for that.

I was, you know, psychedelic, acid-head, hippie chick.

In those days, we were still pretty outrageous sexually, I have to say.

You know, we had sex in the loos at the Hard Rock Cafe,

even with the owners.

This was, like, every night and a lot of people doing it.

Inspired by the outrageous characters

he'd met in London and New York,

the very beginnings of Ziggy Stardust

began to materialise in Bowie's mind.

Taking his lead from the star-maker Andy Warhol,

he invented his own rock 'n' roll star, Arnold Corns.

What he hasn't yet done is manage to get together the balls

to be that rock star himself, and so he chooses somebody who,

effectively in musical terms, is a blank canvas.

The idea was to take Freddie Burretti,

this beautiful boy that he'd met in the Sombrero Club

and to hand him the songs and dress him up

and get him to be Ziggy, even though he would be miming to David's voice.

Bowie decides that he's going to create a band called Arnold Corns.

Now unfortunately, the music that he's selling is terrible.

It's very early versions of some of the songs from Ziggy,

and they sound really rudimentary, very boring and raw demos.

But that is really the seed of Ziggy Stardust.

# Make me know you really care... #

Although Arnold Corns failed, Bowie was convinced

the idea of a fictional rock star would work.

In the meantime, financial necessity meant Bowie had to submit his songs

to a publisher to sell on to other artists.

# Oh, you pretty things... #

One such song scored a number 12 hit

for the pop-star Peter Noone in July 1971.

Its strange lyrics were inspired

by the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche.

Does make you wonder,

did Peter Noone have any idea what he was singing about?

# Let me make it plain

# You gotta make way for the Homo Superior. #

MUSIC: "Oh! You Pretty Things" by David Bowie

Bowie's own version, recorded a few months later,

revealed the song's compositional brilliance.

His songwriting had shifted up a gear,

and Oh! You Pretty Things was to be just one classic track

on a genius pop album, Hunky Dory.

-# Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

-Turn and face the strain

# Ch-ch-changes... #

Listening to the demos over at the house one evening,

the lightbulb went on at the top of my head.

This guy could actually be someone. The talent was coming through.

It was so very different from what he'd done in the past and just,

"This guy's good."

Bowie brought back two of the musicians

from The Man Who Sold The World to play on Hunky Dory.

Guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey.

When Bowie was left short of a bass player for a radio session,

Mick and Woody suggested their mate from Hull, Trevor Bolder.

Herbie Flowers was supposed to be on it,

and Herbie didn't turn up,

so I was dragged into learning something like 12 songs or something

in an afternoon, then straight after that we did Hunky Dory.

MUSIC: "Life On Mars?" by David Bowie

Bowie didn't know it yet, but the Spiders from Mars had just formed.

He now had in place the musicians

who could help him realise his future Ziggy Stardust dream.

Hunky Dory also provided the perfect platform for Mick Ronson

to really show off his extraordinary musical abilities.

Mick was a very talented musician

apart from being a dynamic guitar player.

He was instrumental in arrangements. He'd been classically trained.

# Is there life on Mars? #

He was one of the great rock musicians in history ever,

as an arranger, piano player as well.

It must have been like having Stravinsky in your band.

On its release in November 1971,

Hunky Dory was widely praised by the music press,

in both the UK and America.

But with little publicity, it failed to chart.

Bowie's manager was actually very keen

that Hunky Dory should not be a success

because if Hunky Dory was a huge album then it would not be possible

for Bowie to transform himself into Ziggy Stardust.

We only had a two-week break between Hunky Dory and starting Ziggy.

It was all kind of written and ready to roll,

and we just had a break and went straight into Ziggy.

I said, "You've got to be crazy."

and he says, "Management company want me to do another album,"

and he said, "You're not going to like this one." I said, "Why?"

He said, "Cos it's rock 'n' roll. It's more like..."

I can't remember if he said Iggy Pop and the Stooges

or Velvet Underground. It wouldn't have mattered

because I didn't know of either of those acts at that point anyway.

The Velvet Underground influence can clearly be heard on Queen Bitch,

the one track on Hunky Dory that links the album to Ziggy Stardust.

When Bowie performed on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test

in February 1972, he might have played songs from Hunky Dory

but the transformation into his alien alter-ego had already started.

# Well, I'm up on the 11th floor And I'm watching the cruisers below

# You know my heart's in a basement My weekend's at an all-time low... #

By the time Hunky Dory was completed,

Bowie had his Ziggy Stardust album already written.

He had drawn on nearly a decade of experience

to create the record that would finally make him famous.

And this time he got it spot on. Ziggy turned Bowie into stardust.

Ziggy Stardust was the thing that really catapulted him into the universe.

It's an extraordinary record and it still sounds amazing.

He revolutionised the music business.

It is the greatest record of the 1970s for me.

It is one of my favourite LPs still.

It lit the blue touch paper of imagination and creativity for a lot of people.

# I can make it all worthwhile as a rock 'n' roll star... #

The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars was David Bowie's first hit album.

The record that made him a superstar.

It tells the story of a doomed alien who takes human form as a rock star.

It inspired me. It was an album that had a beginning and an end and told

a story. It was like a rock opera.

This superstar is killed by his own fans. Rock 'n' Roll Suicide.

He's eaten alive by their energy that he's fed them with. It was a brilliant idea.

It was an idea that suited the dystopia of the period.

There had been economic chaos in the late '60s and so the Conservatives came in

with the idea of battening down the hatches. The short, sharp shock for everybody.

London was extremely poor and, in many ways, it was still in the shadow of the Second World War.

In 1972, there were bombs sites still everywhere. There was a recession.

There was the Cold War as well

and I think what David and Ziggy were offering was a creature of fantasy come to save us.

He sang, "There's only five years left of the Earth,"

and actually in 1972, you did believe there was probably only five years.

# We've got five years stuck on my eyes

# Five years

# What a surprise

# We've got five years

# My brain hurts a lot

# (Five years)

# That's all we've got... #

The album was made at London's Trident Studios,

previously home to recording sessions by The Beatles and Elton John.

It was the job of the Spiders from Mars to turn Bowie's demos into rock 'n' roll.

What he used to do for us was play a song on acoustic guitar and we'd quickly go through the chords

and then we'd play the song.

Trevor and I would be going, is there a chorus next? What comes after?

Does it end on chorus, what? You know.

So you've only just got the bare bones of it in your head and then he's going, "OK, let's go for it!"

You were on the edge

and you knew from experience

that he didn't like going more than three takes.

You only had three shots and then, wooh!

Then, what shall I say? The atmosphere might change.

# Come on, come on

# If you think we're going to make it, you better hang on to yourself. #

As a performer, I haven't come across anyone better.

95% of every vocal I recorded with him was one take from beginning to end.

It was amazing.

# Well, the bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar

# You're the blessed

# We're the Spiders from Mars... #

It sounds quite first takey, quite lively and almost improvised.

It sounds like a group who's excited to be there. It's not ponderous. It's very light on its feet.

# You better hang onto yourself... #

Bowie based the Ziggy character on an eclectic group of his favourite singers

from the early rock 'n' roll of Little Richard to the theatrical chansons of Jacques Brel.

The album was influenced by The Velvet Underground, it was influenced by a lot of early rock 'n' roll.

Gene Vincent, Vince Tailor.

Vince Taylor, who was the fatal English rocker who famously took too much LSD

and declared he was Jesus Christ.

I think David took all this and created this character with an amalgamation

of all the bands we've seen.

When you think about Screaming Lord Such, he did a great show, when he came out of a coffin.

And there was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and all these great bands that were theatrical.

You know, great theatre as well as rock 'n' roll. That's what David wanted to do.

He wanted to mix it all up.

Another singer who had taken rock 'n' roll theatre to a deranged new level was Iggy Pop,

who Bowie had met in New York a few months prior to recording the album.

Iggy was a big influence and, of course, Iggy became Ziggy but no-one had gone that extra bit

and made their performance a piece of concept art.

Part of that concept was the creation of a new image,

so essential to the success of Ziggy Stardust.

Bowie began by making the Spiders from Mars look like a gang.

He took us to see Clockwork Orange and that's basically where he got a lot of his ideas for the clothes.

We were the droogs.

Freddie Burretti, within a week, had designed the clothes for Ziggy Stardust.

The sort of mock boiler suits from clockwork Orange.

I always thought they were great because they used curtain fabric from Liberty's

and it was very inventive, those little velvet suits and those great space boots.

They were great. I really liked them.

He called us into his kind of lounge. He had some drawings that he'd done.

-He said, these are the ideas for what we're going to wear.

-And, er, we were kind of...

Woody said, "I'm not fucking wearing that!" That was Woody's initial thing.

It took him a while to convince us.

Especially Mick.

He said to Angie, "You won't get me wearing that, you know what I mean? I'm a musician.

"I've got friends that are going to watch me!"

Also to change was Bowie's long, Pre-Raphaelite hairstyle.

I said, I think you should cut your hair off because everyone's has got long hair.

You should do it a different style.

That started... looking through the magazines.

Me, Angela and David

eventually decided on a combination of three hairstyles.

That was the original Ziggy cut.

The next day I dyed it bright red. For me, that was the day Ziggy was born.

The first single from the Ziggy Stardust album was Starman, released on 28th April, 1972.

At first it didn't sell, but two months later he appeared on Top Of The Pops.

And that changed everything.

# There's a Starman waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds

# There's a Starman waiting in the sky

# He told us not to blow it

# Cos he knows it's all worthwhile

# He told me, let the children lose it

# Let the children use it

# Let all the children boogie... #

Starman was the Eureka moment in rock 'n' roll.

This creature appears on Top of the Pops and he was so shocking, so androgynous, so otherworldly.

It was so different. It was like, wow! No-one had ever seen anything like that before.

# I had to phone someone so I picked on you-oo-oo... #

Let's not forget David's magic as well.

There's a line in it where he sings, "I had to phone someone, so I picked on you",

and he looks straight down the barrel of the lens and I was sure he'd picked on me.

He arrived at a time when there was a sort of vacuum in popular music.

He had a generation of people who were too young for the '60s because they were kids

and we were ripe for exploitation. Then suddenly there was David Bowie.

And we all said, that's what we want.

# There's a Starman waiting in the sky... #

For any of the older generation who were watching, it probably hadn't escaped their notice

that the singer in the multi-coloured jumpsuit might not be entirely heterosexual.

Looking at it now, it looks so tame but at the time it was a real gesture.

When he put his arm around the guitarist, it was a very sexual thing.

The arm-draping gesture was even more sexually provocative to readers of the Melody Maker,

because Bowie had declared he was gay in the music paper several months earlier.

To go that extra mile and say, I'm gay, was so outrageous.

Of course, gay men at that time weren't characters on soap operas on TV.

They weren't outed comedians.

It still was very subversive.

Angela said to him, the shit's hit the fan.

It was the kind of thing a popular singer didn't say

whether it was true or whether it wasn't, in those days.

Angela also said to him, look, you might at least have said, I'm bisexual.

# People stare at the make-up on his face... #

No-one had paid any attention when Bowie hung around the gay scene with Lindsay Kemp several years earlier.

But after the Top Of The Pops performance had made him a household name,

his sexual orientation became a national talking point.

Bowie probably did make homosexuality fashionable.

It's not somebody naff saying, I'm gay and nobody cares. It's somebody who's super-hip.

At the time, people were feeling so repressed and it was dangerous. They were getting beat up.

So he liberated a lot of people. I thought he was doing a really good thing.

Whether he was gay or bisexual, at this point in time Bowie was married with a son

and so the ambiguity gained him a huge amount of press attention.

It also seemed to make him even more attractive to women.

David Bowie is hot!

He's gorgeous. Yes, androgynous. Gorgeous. Physically striking.

I just wanted to have sex with him, I didn't want him to be gay.

Performing on Top Of The Pops gave Bowie the power to unleash Ziggy Stardust

to 15 million people in just three minutes.

The single was soon on its way to number ten in the charts,

Bowie's first hit since Space Oddity, three years earlier.

Bowie mania happened immediately.

You'd go to school and in, I would say, in three days people had the haircut.

When you see big, fat, hairy truckers with short, Ziggy haircuts is, it's quite a revelation!

My goodness me!

To go out to the shop,

you had to go out the back garden and climb over a wall

and sort of disguise yourself and then walk down an alleyway

because the street was covered in kids. There was kids everywhere.

We went out shopping and we came back with all our shopping

and we hadn't spent a penny.

Bowie's was even worse. There were at least 100 kids out there all the time waiting to see him.

When the album smashed into the top five,

Bowie knew the ghost of the one hit wonder had finally been laid to rest.

After a decade of attempts, he'd finally cracked it.

The success of Ziggy Stardust coincided with the emerging glam rock scene

but Bowie was more interested in creating his own, super-hip clique.

The first part of this plan was to donate a song to the much-loved, but struggling Mott the Hoople.

It became an even bigger hit than Starman.

# All the young dudes

-# Heh! Dudes!

-Carry the news

# Where are you?

# Stand up!

# Carry the news... #

You grew to hate him, Bowie. Not only was he writing all his own and....

he's revived Mott the Hoople's career from a funeral pyre.

Pegasus here! He wrote this great, great song that will live for ever.

Next, he turned his attention to two of the artists who had been a huge influence on his music for Ziggy.

The first was the Velvet Underground's Lou Reed.

The brilliant thing about his friendship with Lou Reed

is that Lou Reed was successful before he came along.

I mean, the Velvet Underground -

the most influential group of all time -

yet, "Come here. I'll take you under my wing.

"I'm going to turn you, Lou Reed, into a pop star in the UK." Really clever.

# Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side... #

In the summer of 1972, alongside Mick Ronson,

Bowie produced Lou Reed's Transformer album. Still Lou's most successful album to date.

A few months later, Bowie was at the mixing desk for Iggy Pop and The Stooges' Raw Power.

Today, it's considered as a massive inspiration for the punk rock movement.

We'd never heard of Iggy pop, we'd never heard of Lou Reed.

Bowie revealed those to us. They'd become part of his coterie so we wanted to listen to them.

I can't stand the premise of going on

in jeans and being real. It's not normal!

The first Ziggy Stardust tour had started back in February with little commotion

but after Top Of The Pops, the dates began to sell out.

Bowie's chemistry with guitarist Mick Ronson

was evolving into one of rock's great partnerships.

If you really want to know what sound Ziggy Stardust is, apart from David Bowie's voice,

it's Mick Ronson's guitar.

It just felt like an animal begging to be released whenever he played.

He was a brilliant guitar player. He wasn't one of these technically fast players,

but he played beautiful guitar. His melody work was just so good.

You listen to the end of Moonage Daydream and the solo on the end of that, it's simple but genius.

For me, he was the best guitarist around in those days.

He was the guitarist to have.

He contributed so much. He looked great too. They made a great couple.

You'd see those two onstage, it was exciting.

David going down on Mick's guitar. Revelation!

When my mother saw that paper,

she threw it on the table and said, "Is this who you're working for?"

I said, they're just pretending, Mum.

For some reason, he just did things like that.

Of course, somebody took a picture and the next thing, it's in the press

and its supposed to be sexual and God knows what else, you know.

The final dates of the UK tour in August were at London's Rainbow Theatre.

Bowie would perform in front of some of the biggest names in pop

and was keen to show he'd come a long way since Space Oddity.

Helping change the show from a rock gig into a theatrical spectacle

was his old dance tutor, Lindsay Kemp.

David was fascinated by what I had to teach him,

what I had to tell him about the Kabuki.

Kabuki is that wonderful Japanese theatre where men played the female roles

and, of course, they move in a very stylised way.

Music is a very important part of the spectacle and spectacle it is.

# Don't fake it, baby

# Oh, lay the real thing on me... #

It was the first time a pop star had combined rock music with exotic costumes,

theatrical lighting, choreography and mime.

It certainly had the desired effect.

When he came out as Ziggy Stardust, it was like an art installation. It was like, wow!

His stage presence is quite extraordinary. David was so glamorous and so beautiful and androgynous.

And sexual.

David as Ziggy commanded the stage. You just wanted to be him. You adored him.

Quite honestly, I'd never seen anything like it in my life. It was so exciting.

For manager Tony De Fries, breaking Ziggy in Britain was the easy part.

Cracking America would be a whole different ball game.

Even though he'd signed to RCA the previous year,

the record label hadn't raised Bowie's US profile at all.

Tony's plan was to open an office in New York

and use RCA's money to pretend David was already huge in America.

Just as Bowie had pretended with Ziggy.

Some old Warhol friends were drafted in to help.

He had two bodyguards and he dressed them bodyguards in karate costumes.

They flanked him wherever he went.

Everyone assumed that he was just as big as Mick Jagger and Elton John and, of course, he wasn't.

We were having to create this myth.

We all had 24-hour limos, first-class tickets on aeroplanes,

everything paid for around the world. It was madness.

Tony was good at telling them,

I need that much money and we're going to do it like this.

You're going to do that, that and that and... Pff!

They were afraid of us.

We were all in make-up. They can't tell the men from the women.

All they wanted to do, when we were sitting in their offices making outrageous demands,

they just wanted to get us out of their offices.

So they would just say yes to anything.

"The house lights are about to go down for the appearance of David Bowie."

CHEERING

A 28-date US tour was booked, kicking off in September. One of the stand-out gigs was at Santa Monica.

A bootleg recording of the concert immortalised the raw power of the Spiders from Mars.

All of a sudden, the strobe lights are going and everything was bright and just blew people's minds.

# Hey, man, don't be unkind... #

Everybody is on the phone saying, you've got to see this new show -

David Bowie. He's something else.

People couldn't believe it because it was so different.

I remember David saying he thought the audience weren't responding very much.

I said, "David, you've got to remember they're staring at you with their mouths open."

"They haven't quite worked out where you're from, you know. Another planet or something!"

The tour featured one addition to the Spiders who would be instrumental in changing

the sound of future David Bowie records, Mike Garson.

The keyboardist came from a completely different musical background.

It was a big shock coming from jazz, very loose kind of playing

but I realised they had a vibe that was very, very cool.

I just found a way to lock into it and they were very accepting.

While Bowie had impressed auditorium audiences near the East and West coasts,

when the tour progressed through the more conservative states of America, the reception wasn't quite so warm.

Nobody wants to see this guy who says he's gay and is playing these strange songs and wears make-up.

They want to boogie. They want people in denim who look like them.

So, he's playing arenas across America and some nights he's getting 200 or 300 people along.

Despite some poor attendances,

the management continued to circulate the idea that Bowie was a huge celebrity.

But their luxury living was on borrowed money.

By the time we got to Hollywood, they've put us in the Chateaux Marmont,

which you don't get any better than Chateaux Marmont really in Hollywood.

But, no. I'm on the phone and said, this won't do - we have to stay in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Room service, for one room, was about 12,000

or was it more than that? I don't know.

Perhaps that was just me!

Everything we wanted we just signed for. I think we spent something like 40,000 or something like that.

I don't know what we spent it on! But it went!

And we stayed there for six weeks.

Not only the whole band, but all the roadies,

all the...everybody. Iggy was there.

All on RCA's money and, by this time, RCA was so far in debt that they couldn't get out of it.

It sounds really, you know, hippy dippy

but it just worked beautifully it really did.

This fantasy lifestyle gave the Spiders the impression

they were going to be very rich.

A chance conversation between drummer Woody

and new boy Mike Garson put an end to that theory.

I was sitting on an airplane with him

and I was reading a magazine.

And there was a Lamborghini in it and I went, "Oh, that's nice."

And he went, "Why don't you buy one?"

And I went, "Yeah, I wish."

And he went, "Well, you must be able to afford one."

And I went, "Well, actually no."

I was getting a salary and it seemed fair,

and I just assume that the other guys were getting more

cos they were there several years.

I went, "What do you think I get?" You know.

And he went, "Well, I know what I get."

And I went, "What do you get?"

He told me and it was like three times what I got.

We went to Bowie and said, "Look, you know,

"unless things change and you give us some money, we're going home."

Kind of the final straw was really De Fries saying to us,

"I would rather pay the road crew more than you."

Right? And I just went, "There's no game here."

The Spiders eventually renegotiated their contracts,

but the whole saga tainted their relationship with Bowie.

As the tour continued around America,

the news coming out of Britain was that glam rock had exploded.

# Oh, yeah, yeah! #

The previous year, Marc Bolan was the leader of the scene,

having chalked up four number one singles.

By 1973, the balance of power was shifting.

# ..Metal Guru is it you? #

Bolan opened the door for the whole glam rock thing

and Bowie just took it completely somewhere else

and turned it into kind of like an art form.

And Roxy Music, of course, were part of that as well.

They, again, were very original, with a sci-fi and '50s glam mix.

I think the whole three of those together were the real kind of core

of what glam rock was about.

Everything else was just something that came in on the bandwagon.

# We just haven't got a clue what to do. #

When you saw bands like The Sweet, who kind of had that great '70s,

lorry drivers, dressed in drag, kind of feeling.

# See my baby jive... #

There was a couple of quite good records, as pure records.

But they were not that interesting.

My brain was full up with Baudelaire, Byron and Shelley

and all these, you know, lunatic poets, artists.

And, you know, I couldn't see any link there. Whereas with David,

you could see a clear link in the sophistication of what they were doing.

In January 1973, Bowie returned to Britain

as glam rock's leading light,

performing a brand-new song on Top Of The Pops.

# Jean Genie lives on his back

# Jean Genie loves chimney stacks

# He's outrageous He screams and he bawls

# Jean Genie, let yourself go. #

Something about that rock attitude

and that blurring of sexuality

is very, very alluring to young people,

especially teenagers with the confusion of growing up.

I think there was a very sort of urban, working-class, male-dominated

love of the Ziggy look, because who was going to argue

with a bloke who looked like that who was pretty tough?

You were taking your life in your hands to wear mascara to school

in Liverpool in 1973.

Or dyeing your hair bright red,

you know. My parents were horrified.

HE LAUGHS

You know, "What have I done to deserve this walking freak show for a son?" You know?

Aladdin was more in the area of Ziggy Goes To America.

Here was this alternative world that I had been talking about,

and it had all the violence and all the strangeness

and it was really happening. It wasn't just in my songs.

# Let me put my arms around your head

# Gee, it's hot, let's go to bed Don't forget... #

Ziggy And The Spiders' next TV appearance was

on The Russell Harty Show, performing another new track.

Drive-in Saturday was taken from Bowie's next album,

Aladdin Sane,

which had been almost entirely written and recorded in the USA.

It's the perfect example of how Bowie's American experience

influenced his songwriting.

You could feel him absorbing it.

Many times I was in the limo with him, and he'd be working

on the music, working on the lyrics, listening to great American music.

But I never expected the album to come out so soon.

And it just shows his prolificness.

I think that is the genius of David, he could write and play

and travel all at the same time.

It did feel still like Ziggy, but it was a much more exotic album.

I always think of Aladdin Sane as Ziggy Stardust on tour,

and these are my postcards home.

This is what I've seen when out there -

the madness, the wild excesses of America.

He can see the glamour, but he can see the horror underneath as well.

# He laughed at accidental sirens That broke the evening gloom

# The police had warned of repercussions

# They followed none too soon. #

Bowie took ideas from everywhere,

something he's done throughout his career.

He called me in to listen to some songs.

I said, "That's a Jayne County lyric."

And he said, "Oh, yes, isn't it nice?

And I said, "David, you know, it's not yours, it's Jayne's."

And he said, "Well, no, everything I get is from someone else.

"What I do is I know which things to steal."

He is an incredible magpie,

and a lot of people think that's a huge negative,

because he cherry-picks.

He cherry-picks ideas, people, clothes, everything.

But I think it is extraordinarily clever.

Bowie had seen something he could cherry-pick from Mike Garson.

The session musician had been brought in to play keyboards

on the first American tour, and Bowie thought his jazz background

would be perfect for Aladdin Sane.

For me, Mike Garson's piano was what lifted that above anything

anyone else was doing at that time, made it exotic, made it decadent.

Musicians like Garson were playing jazz stuff

that isn't written on the chord sheet for the song.

Garson's playing is eccentric

and wild and beautiful at the same time.

They showed me songs like, for example, Time.

You know, David was looking for something that

was from the 1920s, but twisted, like he does with his songs.

So I go...

You know, something like that. Or Lady Grinning Soul.

He wanted this more romantic thing, so...

By February 1973, Aladdin Sane was completed,

and Bowie was straight back into another American tour.

In the space of just 18 months,

he'd released three of his greatest albums,

played two extensive tours and was about to embark

on a new live schedule that involved nearly 100 gigs.

# She'll come, she'll go

# She'll lay belief on you. #

It was exhausting, cos we were doing two shows a night,

and he constantly did...David had to do all the interviews,

had to do all the press, had to do everything else,

and then go out and perform and do that. That must've been

really hard for him.

I don't think he was healthy by the end of that tour, you know.

His entourage were getting very concerned about his physical health,

because he wasn't eating properly, he wasn't sleeping.

Bowie said of that period,

he couldn't stand the noise of the band ringing in his ears,

whether he was on stage or not.

I wasn't getting rid of him at all, in fact,

I was joining forces with him.

The doppelganger and myself were starting to become one

and the same person.

And then you start on this trial of chaotic

psychological distraction, you know,

and you become what's called a drug casualty at the end of it all.

# ..star. #

When it really hit big and people wanted interviews,

they didn't want to talk to David Bowie,

they wanted to talk to Ziggy Stardust,

and you could see the struggle.

Bowie was giving interviews saying, "I seem to have created this monster

"and it is taking me over, and I don't really know who I am any more."

It was always Ziggy.

Even when you're in the car, you kind of had Ziggy with you.

After two months in America, the tour moved to Japan.

There was already a big buzz surrounding Ziggy's arrival

because of his use of Kabuki make-up and clothes.

Bowie also wore outfits created by the country's leading fashion

designer, Kansai Yamamoto.

When the tour came to Tokyo, Kansai presented Bowie

with a whole load of specially designed Ziggy regalia.

In the BBC documentary Cracked Actor, filmed a year later in 1974,

Bowie explained their significance.

Aladdin Sane was a schizophrenic,

that has accounted for lots of the...

why there are so many costume changes,

because he had so many personalities that, as far as I was concerned,

each costume change was a different facet of his personality.

# Oh, yeah! #

Released in April 1973,

Aladdin Sane went straight to the top of the UK charts.

It was Bowie's first number one record

and it wasn't long before all his previous albums charted too.

The next month, the momentous tour

rolled into Britain for its final stretch.

I had said all I could say about Ziggy and I thought, "Well,

"I am very tempted to go further with this Ziggy thing only because it's

"so popular, but actually it's not what I really want to do."

I mean, I've created this bloody thing,

how to do I sort of get out of it?

The extensive UK tour drew in hordes of teenage Ziggys,

many desperate to see their idol in the flesh.

60 performances in 53 days - and every ticket sold.

# So, come on So, come on

# You've really got a good thing going

# Well, come on Well, come on

# If you think you're going to make it

# You better hang on to yourself! #

The audiences were screaming, people jumping off the rafters.

You saw people getting knocked down coming on stage by the bodyguards.

The level of enthusiasm and the joy of the audience was

more honest and deeper than the US.

# Watch that man

# Oh, honey, watch that man. #

Being there in the front, I just remember being lost

in the whole kind of emotion of the whole thing, you know.

It was incredibly powerful, and I'd never seen a band like that before.

You really wanted to be a part of it, and it was part of belonging

to something, as well as being part of a culture, part of a gang.

I used to run David up, get him in the car, get the band in the car.

Within a couple of months, it was a mob scene. It was the same...

It was like The Beatles!

You know, there we were, and people were climbing on the car.

It wasn't just the fans that were struggling to catch a glimpse

of Britain's biggest star.

In fact, the last tour we ever did with him,

we'd only see him on stage.

We'd walk on stage, we'd play the show,

he'd get in his limousine and clear off.

And we'd all go back to the hotel

and we would see him the next day on the stage again.

We thought it was odd. We had started out as a band.

Really, that's what he wanted was a band.

And then the bigger and bigger it got, the less we saw of him.

The tour was set for a triumphant end at the Hammersmith Odeon.

The whole event was filmed by documentary maker DA Pennebaker,

who had been commissioned by Bowie's record label to capture

history in the making.

The BBC was there too,

filming for the Nationwide current affairs programme.

What's it like with all these girls loving your husband so much?

Absolutely fabulous. Wouldn't you love to be loved by so many?

Nearly a decade after he had started on his quest for fame,

David Bowie was the most famous pop star in Britain.

Amongst the excited Ziggy clones queuing outside, celebrities

arrived to catch the conquering hero at his homecoming gig.

Can I ask you why you've come to see David Bowie?

He's a fine performer, isn't he?

As usual, he went through his extravagant pre-show preparations.

Everything was set for an electric performance.

And Bowie delivered with cool composure.

# Making love with his ego

# Ziggy sucked up into his mind

# Like a leper messiah

# When the kids had killed the man

# I had to break up the band. #

Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars were playing

the concert of their lives.

Both the band and the audience were high on the energy

buzzing around the venue.

Backstage was buzzing too,

with the rumour of a special announcement.

Just before we went on stage, David came round to me

and he said,

"Don't start Rock 'n' Roll Suicide until I give you the note."

It was decided in Japan. Mick was sworn to secrecy.

"And if you do this for us, you're going to be the next star,

"you're going to be doing this next thing, but you can't tell the boys."

Just before the final song, David Bowie approached the microphone

and, with a few words, broke the hearts of millions.

Of all the shows on this tour, this...

this particular show will remain with us for the longest

because not only is it the last show of the tour,

but it's the last show that we'll ever do.

Thank you.

We all went, "What the fuck's he on about?"

Um, quite shocked.

I kept looking at Woody, and Woody was playing away going,

"I don't know what's going on," you know.

It didn't quite connect with what we'd been talking about

three days earlier.

So we didn't know whether that was true or not.

Everybody knew except for Woody and Trevor. I knew.

The sound guy knew. I think that was horrific to have done that to them.

It was not a big deal to me, but to the other guys, they thought,

it certainly could've gone on for another five or ten years,

but David was done with it.

And any artist at any time is entitled to be done with something.

Those people who are lead singers and stand alone, they have to.

They have to change. They can't do the same show every time.

So, in other words, could be calculated,

but it's a brilliant calculation,

because not many people would have the wit or the knowledge

or the intelligence to do that.

Nearly a year to the day after he appeared on Top Of The Pops

for the first time, Ziggy Stardust was over.

Just as Bowie had prophesised on Rock 'n' Roll Suicide -

the final song on the Ziggy album -

art had become life and life had imitated art.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye, we love you.

I said I'm going back to big, heavy melodrama,

and you don't fit into my scheme of things.

And... But I finished it.

A cruel and cutting blow, but it had to be done.

Sometimes you've got to be cruel to be kind.

Less than a week after Ziggy's dramatic retirement,

Bowie was in France recording a new album, Pinups.

But it was more of a stock album - no original songs,

just a collection of covers.

Drummer Woody wasn't even invited to the studio sessions.

Soon Bowie had dropped the Spiders completely.

# Where have all the good times gone? #

The safe thing to do would have been to keep being Ziggy

for the rest of his career,

but he had the courage that very, very few pop stars

have ever had to take the thing which is most loved and say,

"I'm not doing that any more."

The rest of the decade saw Bowie in a creative frenzy,

producing seven ground-breaking albums in just as many years.

He was to the '70s what The Beatles were to the '60s.

Despite devising more characters over those years,

Bowie struggled to exorcise the ghost of Ziggy Stardust.

In the immediate aftermath of the alien's demise,

Bowie sank into a dangerous drug addiction,

battling to leave the past behind.

I had a kind of strange, psychosomatic death wish thing,

I think.

But that's because I was so lost in Ziggy, I think. Again.

It was all that schizophrenia.

And he really grew sort of out of proportion, I suppose.

Got much bigger than I thought Ziggy was going to be.

I didn't ever see Ziggy as big.

Ziggy just overshadowed everything.

David Bowie's incredible career spans over 40 years, but, for many,

it's Ziggy Stardust for which he'll be best remembered.

It's so iconic.

You can track pop culture from that very point,

and it all leads back to Ziggy Stardust.

We wanted to know what he was wearing,

what he was singing about, what his videos were like.

Because he was the leader of the artistic side of rock 'n' roll.

You look at punk, and, basically, they are more monochromatic,

more aggressive versions of the Ziggy construct.

'80s music wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for Bowie.

When it came to be our turn in 1979, dressing up was where it started.

Make-up was where we started.

Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, in a way,

where the blueprint for Frankie Goes To Hollywood in a kind of...

lock up your daughters and your sons sense.

Anyone who challenges the norms of today are doing a Ziggy,

in a sense.

You know, it went through to the '90s with Suede and Pulp.

His tentacles reach out and are still being taken on board today.

I mean, if you look at someone like Lady Gaga, her whole act,

it's Bowie, it's Ziggy Stardust. OK, she's put a 21st-century slant

on it, but she's not really doing anything

that Bowie didn't do 40 years ago.

I am very happy with Ziggy.

I think he was a very successful character

and I think I played him very well.

But I am glad I'm me now.

# Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am! #

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