How Bowie became Ziggy | Babelia

If we value it only from an artistic point of view, Ziggy Stardust (colloquial version of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) is not the best album of David Bowie’s career. But its social and cultural impact is so great that it has become the author’s most important work. Among other things, because it catapulted the musician to success, which is curious because the central character of the album is an aspiring rock star from another planet. If the Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ baptized the pop of the sixties, Ziggy Stardust did something similar when it was released in June 1972. Over the next few years, Bowie, the first rock star of the new decade, broke new ground for pop music at the same speed as the Liverpudlians had done in the previous decade. What did teenagers across the Western world need then? A voice that spoke to them. An idol who would tell them that no matter how misfit they felt in not fitting into normative sexuality, no matter how much they were bullied at school or in the neighbourhood, they were special. And there Bowie was, renewing that old rite of passage, with his orange hair, his garish attire, reminding them all – at the end of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ – that they were not alone. Another era had begun.

Bowie told teenagers of the time that even if they didn’t fit into normative sexuality, they were special.

The success of Ziggy Stardust It was the way its creator had chosen and mixed the ingredients with which it was made. He understood the importance of inventing a character that, in turn, embodied a fantasy beyond the power that comes with getting on stage. To compose this theatre he took the rock and roll of the fifties, some of the folk that he had tried to cultivate without success, he took good note of the sexual transgression of Warhol’s Factory and the exoticism of the collection that Kansai Yamamoto presented in London in 1971. His only success up to that time, ‘Space Oddity’, released in 1969, had been inspired by the arrival of man on the Moon. Three years later, the challenges and mysteries imposed by the space age constituted an infallible hook: if you are young and you feel that the world does not want you, the immensity of outer space is the best refuge. As he had already done in Divine Symmetry in 2023 regarding the creative process that led him to record Hunky Dorybox Rock ‘n’ Roll Starrecently released, documents the rapid evolution that would crystallize in the album that, in turn, officially inaugurated the reign of glam In England. Ziggy Stardust was recorded just a few weeks after Bowie had finished his previous album. The intricacies of that journey are spread across the five CDs and Blu-ray contained in this box set, and extensively explained in the accompanying booklets.

Bowie told teenagers of the time that even if they didn’t fit into normative sexuality, they were special.

Bowie had already recorded a couple of the songs that ended up being part of Ziggy Stardust with a phantom group called Arnold Corns, whose image fell to the designer Freddie Burretti, responsible for the singer’s outfits until there was enough money to commission clothes from Yamamoto himself. ‘Hang on To Yourself’ and ‘Moonage Daydream’ appear on the first disc, dedicated to rehearsal recordings, demos and the Arnold Corns single, which also includes one of the songs that would be re-recorded during the sessions of Ziggy and which has remained unreleased until now, ‘Looking for a Friend’. When RCA heard the version of the album presented to him in December 1971, he told the manager that he missed a single. The answer was ‘Starman’, the sketches of which are included here.

That was not the only variation that the album underwent (the original version of which was recently published on vinyl under the title Waiting in the Sky, (and included on the Blu-ray along with the original mix of the album, its singles and additional tracks rescued from the 2002 reissue for the 30th anniversary). ‘Soul Love’, ‘Lady Stardust’ and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ also appear as rudimentary demos on that first disc that opens with a note of what would become ‘Moonage Daydream’, ‘So Long Sixties’, recorded in 1971 in a hotel in San Francisco. The discarded tracks, belonging to the version of the album that RCA discarded, reappear on another of the CDs in the box, as well as tracks that were once left unfinished or discarded (‘It’s Gonna Rain Again’, ‘Shadow Man’, the aforementioned ‘Looking for a Friend’; from that batch only ‘Only One Paper Left’ is missing).

Among his favourite artists were two American bands that were almost unknown in England, The Velvet Underground and The Stooges.

Bowie always took note of what his contemporaries were doing. When his friend Marc Bolan abandoned Tolkien-style fantasy folk to mix it with the riffs In addition to the most basic rock and roll, he also capitalized on that idea. It is also true that, among his favorite artists, there were two American bands that were almost unknown in England, The Velvet Underground and The Stooges. Both served as inspiration, but not as a reference, to design a more electric, more basic sound. That transition is also reflected in this box, which dedicates two discs to compiling sessions for the radio programs of John Peel and Bob Harris, appearances that were almost the same as doing experiments in a laboratory in front of the public. These appearances were made partly during the promotion of Hunky Dory, but they are already dominated by the more electric themes contained in Ziggy Stardust. Without the band that accompanied him, The Spiders from Mars, led by the indispensable guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson, completely mimicked with Bowie, the mutation that made him a star would perhaps never have taken place. They sound concise and wild, but under control, they are the perfect expression of that hormonal feeling that made Ziggy Stardust was much more than just another release from that distant summer of 1972. The summer in which, at the end of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’, Ziggy begged us to take his hand because we were not alone.

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