When “Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly”, the world woke up to a new kind of rock star. It was a time (1972) when The Beatles had broken up, the Rolling Stones were gathering moss, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were dead and the future of rock was anybody’s guess. But a new world was just around the corner and Ziggy Stardust aka David Bowie aka David Robert Jones was one of the most outrageously talented performers in that place.
Time magazine once described Mick Jagger as a “sexual lepidopterist”. Sensibly, it tried no superlatives with Bowie and his androgynous Ziggy persona. He was a shape-changer extraordinaire, a chameleon in both his musical and personal life, a one-time bisexual who admitted to being a “closet heterosexual” and a performer who tried his hand at almost every style in popular music. In his Wiki thumbnail the header “genres” has art rock, glam rock, art pop, electronic and experimental. That last is an economical description of the rest of what he did. Most performers can be recognised by what might be called their musical signature. We know what Paul McCartney does, more or less, and the same could be said for Madonna. That is difficult to do with Bowie as the glam rock Ziggy, for instance, was a relatively short-lived phenomenon, dispensed with once he decided to do something new. His Berlin Trilogy (1977-79) was a performance in electronic and cemented his place in the critical galaxy as well.
The rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the late 1950s and ’60s was a release of dammed musical energy that poured out in an extraordinary flood of creativity. When Bob Dylan sang, “The times they are a changin’”, he had captured the zeitgeist. For musicians in the West it was as if boundaries had melted. The future was plastic with promise. David Bowie was among the people who shaped and reshaped, both himself and the sound of music, in a way that it is hard to tell if he was adapting to change or fashioning a new trend. As Ziggy contemplates the stardust around him, it is tempting to believe he may be humming an entirely different sort of tune but perfectly in pitch with his new surroundings.
