At 7:25 on the evening of Thursday, July 6, 1972, the BBC broadcast a three-minute musical performance on a weekly chart show called Top of the Pops that would later be cited by Bono, Robert Smith, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Boy George, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, and roughly every British musician born between 1958 and 1963 as the moment that changed their lives. The estimated viewership was between ten and fifteen million people, roughly a quarter of the British population. The performer was David Bowie, twenty-five years old, performing “Starman,” the lead single from his fifth studio album.
Bowie wore a multicolored quilted catsuit designed by his friend and former flatmate Freddie Burretti, with knee-high red boots. His hair had been cut and dyed bright orange three months earlier by Suzi Fussey at the Evelyn Paget salon in Beckenham. Behind him, his guitarist Mick Ronson wore a metallic gold one-piece and played a gold Gibson Les Paul. Two minutes and forty seconds into the song, on the line “I had to phone someone so I picked on you,” Bowie pointed directly at the camera. During the second chorus he draped his arm around Ronson’s shoulder while the two men sang into the same microphone.
The performance had been taped the previous day at the BBC’s Television Centre in White City, on a backing track re-recorded at Trident Studios on June 29 in compliance with Musicians Union rules. Bowie’s vocals were live. The studio audience, in tank tops and flares, was largely confused. The audience at home, the part of the audience that mattered, was not.
The Starman Broadcast
David Bowie was not a new artist in July 1972. He had released four studio albums under his own name, the first in 1967, and a fifth as Ziggy Stardust the previous month. He had charted exactly once, in 1969, with the single “Space Oddity,” released to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing. The follow-up records had not sold. His record label had been preparing to drop him. By the time of the Top of the Pops broadcast he had spent five years of professional life as what the British music press called a one-hit wonder.
What happened on July 6, 1972, was not the discovery of a new musician. It was the broadcast of an idea about what a musician could be. Bowie had constructed an entire fictional rock star, Ziggy Stardust, an androgynous alien messiah from a dying planet who plays guitar. He had given Ziggy a wardrobe (Burretti), a haircut (Fussey), a face (Pierre Laroche’s later makeup work), a band (the Spiders from Mars), an origin story, and a planned death. The arm around Mick Ronson and the finger pointed at the camera were not performance choices. They were narrative choices. The character Ziggy was queer, alien, knowing, and addressing the viewer directly. For a generation of British teenagers watching at home with their parents, the broadcast was the first time anyone had explicitly told them they were allowed to be other than what they were.
That is what Bono and Morrissey and the rest were remembering. Not a song. A permission slip.
Brixton to Beckenham
David Robert Jones was born in Brixton, South London, on January 8, 1947. His father Haywood was a publicist for the children’s charity Dr. Barnardo’s. His mother Margaret was a cinema usher. The family moved to the South London suburb of Bromley when David was six. He attended Bromley Technical High School, where he played in a school skiffle group and developed a permanently dilated left pupil after a 1962 fight with his friend George Underwood over a girl. The condition gave him what was later universally described as different-colored eyes. His half-brother Terry Burns, ten years older, introduced him to jazz, Beat poetry, and Buddhism. Terry was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the late 1960s and committed suicide in 1985.
Jones left school in 1963 and spent the next six years as the failed lead singer of a series of bands with mod, blues, and folk leanings. He changed his name to David Bowie in 1965 to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees. He trained for a year with the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, who taught him stagecraft and introduced him to the work of the Living Theatre, Kabuki, and Antonin Artaud. He released his debut album in June 1967, the same day as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nobody noticed. He spent 1968 as a struggling cabaret act. In July 1969, he released the single “Space Oddity,” timed to the Apollo 11 moon landing, and got his first hit. The follow-up did not arrive. The albums he released in 1970 and 1971 (The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory) sold modestly. He had a wife, Angie, a son, Zowie, an unfashionably long-haired band, and a manager, Tony Defries, who was running out of patience.
The Ziggy Stardust album was Bowie’s deliberate response to four years of failing to sell records as himself. If David Bowie was a commercial product the record-buying public did not want, then Bowie would invent a fictional rock star they did want and play him instead. The premise sounds simple. Nobody had ever done it.
Ziggy
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released on June 16, 1972. Recorded at Trident Studios in Soho over the previous winter, the album told the story of an alien rock star who arrives on a dying Earth, becomes the universe’s last messiah, accepts the love and worship of his fans, and is destroyed by them on stage. The character was an assembly. He took elements from the British rocker Vince Taylor, who had a 1960s breakdown and believed himself the son of God, and from the obscure American singer Norman Carl Odam, who recorded under the name The Legendary Stardust Cowboy. The hair, the orange-red feathered mullet, was based on a photograph in the September 1971 issue of British Vogue and cut by Suzi Fussey on Bowie’s instructions. The clothes, multicolored quilted jumpsuits and platform boots, were stitched by Burretti, a clothing designer Bowie had met at a London gay club called El Sombrero. The look was finalized weeks before the album’s release. The Top of the Pops broadcast was three weeks after that.
The Aladdin Sane album, released in April 1973, was the sequel: Ziggy in America. The cover photograph, shot in January 1973 at Brian Duffy’s studio at 151a King Henry’s Road in north London, featured a red and blue lightning bolt running diagonally across Bowie’s face. Tony Defries, Bowie’s manager, had commissioned Duffy with a single instruction: make the cover as expensive as possible. Duffy obliged with a Kodak dye transfer process using seven colors instead of the standard four, which made the cover the most expensive album art ever produced at the time. The lightning bolt was filled in with red lipstick by the makeup artist Pierre Laroche, working over a design Duffy had drawn. The teardrop on Bowie’s collarbone was airbrushed onto the photograph afterward by the artist Philip Castle, who had designed the Clockwork Orange poster two years earlier. The image is now the most expensive piece of album art ever sold at auction.
Bowie killed Ziggy on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, in a closing speech delivered before the encore. Most of the audience thought he was retiring from music. He was retiring from a character. The Spiders from Mars found out their employment had ended along with the show. Mick Ronson learned about it from the stage.
Plastic Soul to the Thin White Duke
Between July 1973 and January 1976, Bowie released four studio albums, none of them as the same character. Pin Ups in October 1973 was an album of British 1960s covers. Diamond Dogs in May 1974 was a half-finished concept album about a post-apocalyptic gang, supported by a theatrical Broadway-style tour with moving sets designed by Mark Ravitz. Young Americans in March 1975 was recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, the soul label that produced the O’Jays and Harold Melvin, with a young session guitarist named Carlos Alomar and a young backing singer named Luther Vandross. Bowie called the resulting sound “plastic soul,” meaning soul music made by an Englishman who could not actually sing soul. The album reached number nine on the Billboard 200. The single “Fame,” co-written with John Lennon, was Bowie’s first number one hit in America.
Station to Station, released January 23, 1976, was the album of the Thin White Duke, a third Bowie character introduced as an emotionally vacant European aristocrat. Bowie has said he remembers almost nothing of the recording, which took place over six weeks in Los Angeles at Cherokee Studios. He was consuming significant quantities of cocaine, milk, and red peppers, and almost nothing else. He was sleeping irregularly. He was reading Aleister Crowley and Albert Speer. The Thin White Duke persona was the worst-aging of his 1970s personas because it carried an unmistakable flirtation with fascism. In a Playboy interview that year Bowie said Hitler had been “one of the first rock stars” and that Britain “could benefit from a fascist leader.” On May 2, 1976, returning to London at Victoria Station in an open-top Mercedes, Bowie waved at a crowd in a way that several photographers captured at the exact moment his arm reached its peak, in a frame that resembled a Nazi salute. He later said he had been waving and the shutter caught it badly. He never repeated the gesture.
The Victoria Station photograph, the Hitler quotes, and the Thin White Duke caused Bowie significant lasting damage in the United Kingdom and contributed to his decision later that year to leave the United States and to leave the persona behind. He moved to West Berlin. The Thin White Duke was retired. Bowie was twenty-nine.
Berlin
Bowie arrived in West Berlin in late 1976 and rented an apartment at Hauptstrasse 155 in the Schöneberg district, sharing it for the first stretch with Iggy Pop. The bar next door was a gay establishment called Anderes Ufer, which the two men used as a second living room. Bowie owned a bicycle. He shopped at the local supermarket. He spent two years in a city where, by his own later account, almost no one recognized him on the street and almost no one cared if they did. The friction of being unknown, after four years of being one of the most famous people in popular music, was the friction he had moved there to find.
The work that came out of those two years is the three studio albums known as the Berlin Trilogy. Low, released January 14, 1977, was recorded mostly at the Château d’Hérouville studio outside Paris and mixed at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin. Side one was art-rock songs averaging three minutes; side two was four instrumental ambient pieces averaging six. “Heroes,” released October 14, 1977, was the only album of the three recorded entirely at Hansa, in a studio the engineers nicknamed Hansa by the Wall because its control room window overlooked the Berlin Wall. Lodger, released May 18, 1979, was recorded mostly at Mountain Studios in Montreux and the Record Plant in New York, with overdubs in Berlin. All three were co-produced by Tony Visconti, with Brian Eno, late of Roxy Music, contributing as composer and synthesizer player. King Crimson’s Robert Fripp played guitar on “Heroes.” The drummer was Dennis Davis, the bassist George Murray, the rhythm guitarist Carlos Alomar carried over from Young Americans. Visconti routed Davis’s drums through an Eventide H910 Harmonizer pitch-shifter to produce the punched, foreshortened drum sound that became one of the most copied production techniques of the next decade.
The Berlin albums sold modestly on release. RCA, which had wanted Young Americans II, offered Bowie a mansion in Philadelphia if he would record one. He declined. The records that came out instead became the schematic that almost every interesting British band of the 1980s would build from. Joy Division and Gary Numan modeled their first records on Low. The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, and the early synth-pop bands modeled their sound design on Eno’s ambient passes. Producers, including Visconti himself on subsequent records, copied the Harmonizer drum sound. Brian Eno took the synthesizer textures into his own work and into his production of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree in the next decade. The Berlin Trilogy was the bridge from the album-rock 1970s to the synthesizer-and-art-pop 1980s, and Bowie was the architect of the bridge.
Dylan wrote songs. Bowie wrote selves. Dylan’s persona was a man named Bob Dylan who wrote increasingly serious songs over fifty years. Bowie’s persona was whoever the next record needed: a folk singer in 1969, an alien rock messiah in 1972, an American soul man in 1975, a fascist aristocrat in 1976, a Berliner in 1977. Each persona had its own face, its own wardrobe, its own hair, its own band, its own production style. Every pop star since has been working in Bowie’s grammar. Madonna learned it. Prince learned it. Beyoncé learned it. Lady Gaga learned it. The art form Bowie invented, identity as the medium, has by now been so completely absorbed that it is hard to remember it had to be invented at all.