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Pop’s first space invader
For me, the 70s were the start of the 21st century, writes David Bowie in his introduction to Moonage Daydream, an extravagant coffee-table book that collects Mick Rock’s photographs of the chameleon rock star as Ziggy Stardust, his first, and arguably most successful, artistic alter ego. Bowie became Ziggy in 1972, melding the sci-fi futurism of writers like William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard with a hard-rock sound and campery borrowed from Lou Reed. In a moment of utter reinvention, the erstwhile mime artist and folkie swept aside the hippie trappings that had defined rock music since the mid-60s, and underwent the first of many persona changes whose collective impact still resounds 30 years later.
Bowie was Britain’s first post-modern pop star, a man who hid behind image after image and who challenged all the notions of ‘authenticity’ that had held sway ever since English white boys with guitars had somehow discovered an affinity with black blues music. Bowie as Ziggy was an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to make music look and sound not just futuristic but alien. It was the shock of the new, writ large in six inch platform shoes, body suits and anorexic cheekbones.
And it was unapologetically white music, fired by cocaine rather than weed or hallucinogenics and echoing all manner of strange precedents, from American rocker Gene Vincent to English oddball Anthony Newley. Bowie was nothing if not a disseminator: of styles, sounds, ideas. Everything he borrowed, though, he transcended.
Like previous big, boxed, photo-heavy books on the Stones and the Who, Moonage Daydream is being marketed as an artifact — a limited edition of 2,500, each signed by Rock and Bowie, costing a cool pounds sterling 295.
If there is nothing here that really justifies the price, there is more than enough for both the casual Bowie fan and the obsessive. These photographs trace the birth of one of the biggest, most influential pop ideas ever: the notion that a pop performer could, on record as well as on stage, reinvent himself creatively by inhabiting various personae. Ziggy preceded other Bowie alter egos such as Aladdin Sane (who made the 1973 album of the same name), and the Thin White Duke (who made the icy Station to Station in 1976 and then rented space in pre-unified Berlin to record Low and Heroes in 1977). In between, Bowie found time to produce Iggy Pop’s extraordinary return to form, The Idiot; star in The man who fell to Earth, a celluloid version of his stage self; and indulge in a provocative, but brief, flirtation with fascism.
This book is all about Ziggy, though. Early on, between photos of Bowie as a fledgling Martian, the man himself pinpoints his major influences: Stanley Kubrick and, wait for it, Professor George Steiner.
“Steiner had nailed the sexy term post-culture,” writes Bowie, “and it seemed a jolly good idea to join up the dots for rock.” Kubrick, though, as the singer points out, had already provided the map reference points. “It was Kubrick’s doing on the whole...2001 and A Clockwork orange ...who pulled together all the unarticulated loose ends of the past five years into a desire of unstoppable momentum. Both these films provoked one major theme: there was no linear line in the lives that we lead. We were not evolving, merely surviving. Moreover, the clothes were fab.”
Likewise, of course, Bowie’s own sartorial take on futurism, which was implemented by one Freddie Burrett, a singular fashion designer who traded under the name Burretti. His partner, Daniella Parmar, was, as Bowie recalls, “the first girl I had seen with peroxide white hair with cartoon images cut and dyed into the back.” She became the template for Bowie’s own experimentation.
Out of this melange of half-baked ideas, sci-fi theories and full-blown sartorial exploration, the teetering figure of Ziggy Stardust emerged, skeletal, androgynous and iconoclastic. He conquered England, Europe and, against all odds, America, where Bowie, for a while, was the biggest Britpop export since the Beatles. It is hard to imagine that happening now. On stage, in a figure-hugging white jumpsuit, Mick Rock freeze-frames Bowie: cross-dressing and ear-splitting, apocalyptic rock a full three decades before Marilyn Manson.
Bowie famously retired Ziggy at the Hammersmith Odeon show on July 3, 1973. Rock’s images capture the audience melodrama of that heady time, counterpointing it with some almost serene backstage images of Bowie, a man already preoccupied with where he was going next. (At an aftershow party in the Cafe Royal, Bowie sits flanked by a smiling Mick Jagger and Lou Reed, both of whose mantles he had successfully stolen in the previous year.)
In Fred and Judy Vermorel’s prescient mid-80s book, Starlust: the secret fantasies of fans, Julie, a 25-year-old Bowie obsessive, wrote: “When he killed off Ziggy, that really disturbed me...I was crying a lot, and everybody was crying...the sweat and the smell was really horrible...I had to keep watching him...I went home sort of shocked...it’s a terrible thing he did really.”
That was Ziggy mania in all its intensity, part utter identification, part desperation. It is a world away from today’s manufactured (pre-)teen hysteria. In this big, overpriced book you can glimpse the madness and devotion that Bowie as Ziggy inspired. For all its futuristic trappings, though, it looks like an impossibly distant time and place. It looks like another planet. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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