Ziggy Stardust steps out

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000

On July 15, 1972, David Bowie and his band performed at Friars, a club held inside the assembly hall in the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, for the third time in less than a year. On his previous visits, Bowie had been an amiable, approachable figure, happy to chat to audience members after the show as a friend rather than an icon. Now Bowie was accompanied by a busload of journalists flown in by MainMan from America; flanked by security guards; preceded onto the stage by strobe lights and Walter Carlos’s theme from the movie Clockwork Orange; and then kept safely apart from the same fans whom he’d greeted warmly a few months earlier. They wrote distressed letters to the pop press: what has happened to David Bowie?

It was not Bowie who appeared at Friars that night, however, but Ziggy Stardust: the conceptual art project who had become a rock’n’roll star. “I’m continually aware that I’m an actor portraying stories,” Bowie admitted the following day, “and that’s the way I wish to take my performance.” Ziggy was the guise he had chosen to adopt, “for a couple of months.” In an unguarded moment, he could confess that impersonating Ziggy had imposed a bizarre sense of dissociation from his “real” self: “It’s a continual fantasy. . . . I’m very rarely David Jones any more. I think I’ve forgotten who David Jones is.”

Salon.com > Peter Doggett

Ziggy Stardust steps out