Week 60 - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie

Guest Listener - Stewart Lee





Who’s Stewart Lee when he’s at home?

I am 48 in April.

I was adopted into a nice family as a small child, and benefitted from a charity bung and part scholarship to a private school, which was followed by reading English at Oxford University. All these factors contributed, I think, to a confused sense of self, an uneasy notion of being out of place, an outsider even, and yet despite these feelings, I never felt it necessary to seek comfort in the music of David Bowie.

Today, I am a stand-up comedian by trade, but I reviewed records for a national newspaper from 1995-2015, and have written for Q, Mojo, Uncut, Bucketful of Brains and The Wire, and yet I have never knowingly listened to a David Bowie album.

Stewart’s Top 3 albums ever?

Today it’s The Fall – Hex Enduction Hour (which is always number 1) and Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, and Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand.

What great album has he never heard before?

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars by David Bowie

Released in 1972

Before we get to David, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Ziggy Stardust

Another Lesson in Persistence.

One day in 1955, Haywood Jones walked into his house in Bromley with a bunch of Rock and Roll singles that some fella had just given him. As far as I know, there’s no record of who that fella was, or why he was going around giving singles away in post war Britain. The important thing, and frankly all that matters, is that he did.

Haywood Jones, who didn’t really like Rock and Roll, decided to give the singles to his 9 year old son - David.

The kid commandeered the family turntable and began to familiarise himself with the music. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers - one by one he went through the 45s with varying degrees of excitement and interest.

Then he played Tutti Frutti by Little Richard and his head fell off.

He would later say that the room filled with energy, colour, and outrageous defiance and, from that point on, Little Richard became his idol. With historical perspective, it’s easy to see why. The sex, the glamour, the outrageous costumes - all fitting motifs that you’d expect to light a fire under Jones. But the truth is probably less aware than that - Tutti Frutti is, of course, a total banger. I stopped writing this to listen to it and had the best 2 mins and 27 seconds of my life since I was 15.

If it’s having that effect on me now, imagine hearing it in 1955 when your favourite song up to that point was probably The Chattanooga Choo Choo.

My head would have fallen off too.





But back to the story.

Jones quickly learnt the ukulele and washboard and formed a little Rock ‘n’ Roll “gang” at school that used to practice under the stairs in between lessons. At evenings and weekends he would spend his time shopping for records in Bromley High Street and hanging out at either of the two Wimpy Bars that had just opened in town. I know, first Little Richard had come into his life, and now Wimpy. Its little wonder that his school report described him, generously, as a “pleasant idler” - he was probably still trying to get his head around the fact you got your burger on a plate with a knife and fork.

Oh, the only other incident worth mentioning from his schooldays is that he had his left eyeball scratched after being punched in a fight over a girl. As a result, he had a permanently dilated pupil which made his left eye appear much darker than his right.

So here he is as a teenager. The '60s are starting to take shape around him and he’s itching to get involved. His instrument of choice is now the saxophone and he’s got different colour eyes.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a while, everything.

He joins a band called The Konrads and the first thing you need to know about them is the amount of chances they were given to succeed. They auditioned for legendary producer Joe Meek, appeared on the TV talent show Ready Steady Win (best name for a talent show ever), and even tried out for Decca, during that phase where they signed everyone after turning down The Beatles. They also met Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles and Eric Easton, co-manager of The Rolling Stones.

As I said, they had a series of open goals and, if they were any good, they definitely would have made it. But they didn’t, because the second thing you need to know about The Konrads is they were bloody awful. And Jones knew it too, eventually leaving them after he wanted to do a cover of Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness and the rest of the band didn’t.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Next up, he joins a group called The King Bees as their singer. The next part of the story is literally the maddest thing I’ve ever heard.

David Jones, with his dad, wrote a letter to a fella called John Bloom - a successful entrepreneur who had made his fortune selling white goods. The letter ended with the following sentence -

“If you can sell my group the way you sell washing machines, you’ll be on to a winner!”

I did warn you. It’s basically the equivalent of sending your demo to Comet.

Remarkably, though, it worked. Bloom was charmed and passed the letter on to his friend Les Conn, who actually did have a track record in managing artists and had nothing to do with fridge freezers at all. Conn went to see The King Bees live and, whilst he thought they were mostly terrible, he was impressed with Jones. So much so that he gets them a record deal and they release a single called Lisa Jane.

But again, they weren’t very good.

The single fails to chart and Jones, impatient, decides to leave his second band and join his third - The Mannish Boys. As you may have come to expect by now, they didn’t get anywhere either - they were basically a '60s version of The Ordinary Boys which was the last thing anyone needed back then. They did however have a fella in the band who went on to create the weird '80s TV show Metal Mickey and so, for that reason alone, I thought they deserved a paragraph.

His next band though, David Jones and The Lower Third, only warrant a sentence - i.e. they were slightly better than The Mannish Boys but without the Metal Mickey angle.

Around this time Jones also has a brief spell in The Small Faces until they decide to get rid of him because he liked Bob Dylan too much - obviously the worst reason to ever sack anyone from a band ever.

So, finally, after jettisoning virtually every band in the '60s, Jones decides to try his luck as a solo artist. In the process, he also changes his name to David Bowie.

“Ah now we’re getting somewhere!” I hear you say.

Well, sort of.

David Bowie’s debut album, brilliantly called David Bowie, was a typical piece of late '60s English whimsy and psychedelia - songs about Laughing Gnomes disastrously mixed with music hall numbers about the Moors Murders. Unsurprisingly, such material also failed to trouble the charts and the whole thing wasn’t helped by an album cover showcasing one of THOSE haircuts.

It would be his last release for two years.





For the first time, his natural positivity now deserts him and he immerses himself in other pursuits for a while - namely dancing, listening to Jacques Brel and, in what must have been his lowest ebb, a bit of miming. But mostly he’s in a world of his own, one of his friends at the time brilliantly describing him as "the sort of bloke who wouldn’t talk about the weather or the latest Who single”.

By all accounts he then spends most of 1968 sitting with his legs crossed waiting for something to happen. And finally it does - he smokes a load of pot and goes to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The song he wrote afterwards, Space Oddity, represented a temporary breakthrough. Not only was it the first time a song came naturally to him, it was also the first time he wasn’t trying to catch a trend. It was different, it had its own sound, and it was REALLY good. Rick Wakeman, who played Mellotron on the song, said it was one of the few times in his career that the hairs on the back of his neck stood up - an anecdote made all the more believable when you actually consider the rest of Rick Wakeman’s career.

Once the BBC realised the Apollo 11 astronauts were home safely, and wouldn’t be stuck in space forever, they added it to the playlist.

It reached number 5 in the charts.

At last - it’s starting to happen.

Bowie then makes alliances with two people who are crucial to what happens next - a wife (Angie) who he meets in a Chinese Restaurant and a hotshot guitarist (Mick Ronson) who was living in Hull and creosoting a fence at the time. Bowie turned up, asked him if he wanted to be in his band, and he obviously said yes.

Both would have a massive influence - Ronson becoming Bowie’s left hand man for the next four years and Angie working wonders with Bowie’s wardrobe, not to mention his hair. There’s a lovely picture of them at the time - strolling around Beckenham, hatching plans and looking like nothing on earth.

You can only wonder what the baby was wearing.





The next album, The Man Who Sold The World, is again an improvement on what’s come before but it still lacks something. Now, you can see where it was going. Then, I’m not sure that you could. Bowie was in danger of being classed as a “one hit wonder” - that guy who wrote that good song about Space a couple of years ago but hasn’t done much since.

And then, massive drum roll, huge deep breath, he finally does it - he moves his piano into a different room in his house and writes some of the best songs ever. Sometimes that’s all you need to do. For all the talk of the muse and the complexities of the creative process, sometimes all you need to do is try a different room.

The result, of course, was Hunky Dory - the best morning album of all time.

What he does next, though, is brilliant.

Hunky Dory hasn’t even been released, he hasn’t yet wallowed in acclaim and adoration, but he’s off already with a new collection of songs that travel in a different direction. For his next album he takes Hunky Dory on a night out - eyebrows arched and dressed to kill. The past is forgotten and, like a new man, he struts around town like no one has ever strutted around town before or since.

He glows in the dark, drawing ALL the attention.

We’re nearly there, it’s almost happened.

Before recording the album, he debuts it live in a small club in Aylesbury. He takes to the stage nervous - dressed in baggy black culottes, red platform boots, and a woman’s beige jacket. With his new band behind him, they begin tentatively before finally taking off, spectacularly. The place goes mad, Bowie surges with confidence, and says to a journalist afterwards - “That was great. And when I come back, I’m going to be completely different”

I know. I know.

It’s because you know you’re about to fall for him. Because, you know, and HE knows, that’s he’s about to become BOWIE.

He records the album, in a basement below an escort agency, and nails Suffragette City, Starman, and Rock and Roll Suicide in one day. He isn’t messing about anymore, he tells everyone he’s going to be huge and that he’s going to be EVERYWHERE.

He still hasn’t even released Hunky Dory yet but, he knows. He absolutely fucking knows.

His wife suggests a new haircut and the band go shopping for boiler suits and wrestling boots. As I said, he wasn’t messing about anymore. He was all in.

Now he goes back to Aylesbury to fulfill his promise.

The queues are around the block because of what he did last time but, now, he goes further. He takes to the stage, without any nerves at all, and he launches Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars at the eager crowd. Now there’s no doubt. Now the audience know as well.

He walks off stage and says, to the same journalist as before, “I told you it would be different.”

The headline in the local paper the next day, a headline that had been such a long time coming, finally gives us the perfect ending -

“A Star is Born”

He’d done it.

The excited child, the “pleasant idler”, the bit part, and the one hit wonder. He’d been through it all, with a smile on his face, and had finally arrived.

And now he was here to stay. Forever.

Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)





The Critics on Ziggy Stardust.

In a retrospective review, Pitchfork gave it 10/10

Rolling Stone Magazine rated it the 35th best album of all time.

So, over to you Stewart. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????

I have listened to thousands of albums.

This year alone so far I have listened, all the way through, to 44. I didn’t like a lot of them. But for the record, some of them were the new one from The Owl Service, Crumbling Ghost’s Five Songs, The Golden Void’s Berkana, The Fall’s Wise Old Man and loads of old stuff like six Stiff Little Fingers albums, a compilation of Australian glam rock, Sam Gopal’s Escalator, every Byrds album, a dj clash of Dillinger And Trinity, Van Morrison’s 1967 New York Bang session, eight Warren Zevon albums, Hendrix’s Are You Experienced?, Yamasuki ‘s Le Monde Fabuleux de Yamasuki, every REM album in order as a kind of endurance test, and, for the first time, The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust.

I don’t know why I have never listened to it, or indeed any David Bowie album. I’m not necessarily an inverted snob who avoids the popular or the canonical – I like Dylan, Miles Davis, Neil Young. But I don’t think I ever really got Bowie and I’m not sure I ever will.

I was already listening to post-punk noise on Peel when I first encountered David Bowie on Top Of The Pops in the early ‘80s. In my mind I remember, because I didn’t know anything about him, and because he was in a Pierrot hat dancing around on a beach to some synth music, thinking he was one of the New Romantics like Duran Duran and Visage, who I disliked on principle. But this must be some kind of false memory syndrome, because Ashes To Ashes predates all that stuff by a year or so. So I don’t know what I remember really.

Either way, as a teenager I’d already bypassed Bowie and had found, via The Fall and the songs covered on early REM b-sides, all those counter-culture legends (The Velvet Underground, Krautrock, Stooges) that Bowie is praised for providing a pop-friendly gateway into. I simply didn’t know he had form, and nothing I saw in his 80s pop-soul incarnations – Let’s Dance, Dancing In The Street, Peace On Earth, Modern Love - encouraged me to think he would be for me. I thought he was like Howard Jones or someone. I didn’t understand.





People tell me if I’d encountered the Berlin trilogy as an impressionable younger man I’d have been sold on Bowie, but I just didn’t know he was this ‘figure’ and by the time I did it was too late to take him on board really, too late to get past the legend.

I remember going to the Phoenix festival in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1996 and not even being tempted to watch him, seeing instead an amazing punk-psyche set by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, a dramatic meltdown from The Fall, The Cocteau Twins in full “sonic cathedral” ™ mode, The Sex Pistols’ unexpected second coming, The Dirty Three, the now venerated Earl Brutus with their art school chip shop aesthetic, The Chemical Brothers, Goldie and the late great Terry Callier, and I still wouldn’t trade having seen any of those sets for Bowie in his drum and bass period in a Union Jack frock coat.

People a generation older than me, best friends, who I trust and respect, spoke upon Bowie’s demise with heartfelt sincerity of how he got them through terrible times, his alien rock star persona speaking to all these confused seventies kids, but I think maybe I was an era too late to buy into it.

Indeed, in 2011, in a supposedly funny article for the Observer about what it means to be ‘an artist’, I believe it was I who wrote…

“For example, if viewed as an “artist”, David Bowie makes no sense at all. He seems to be little more than a perpetually spooked moth in slip-ons, sputtering, in a series of self-shaming leaps towards imagined relevance, from one swiftly guttering fad to another – grunge metal, drum and bass and having a skellington face. But imagine Bowie instead as a cunning lichen, an adaptive tuber or a semi-sentient mould, endlessly reshaping himself in search of the moisture of acclaim, and it is easy to understand him.”

That was what I thought then, in my ignorance, albeit exaggerated for comic effect.

But now I have listened to Ziggy Stardust, at least three times.

You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?

All I knew of the album, honestly, was Starman, Ziggy Stardust and Sufragette City, so the thing as a whole piece in of itself was mainly new to me. But you can’t come to it clean, especially now, after all the obituaries.

I don’t like it to be honest. I’m told it’s supposed to be about an alien who becomes a pop star but I can’t make head or tail of the story.

I hate his voice on the second one, Soul Love, like a weird old lady. It’s so reedy and bloodless and thin. I don’t like the honking sax sound and the showbizzy horn solo.

I hate the opening lines of the next one, Moonage Daydream. “I’m an alligator, I’m a momapoppa coming for you. I’m a space invader. I be a rock and rolling bitch for you. Keep your mouth shut. You’re spooking like a big monkey bird.” This kind of thing is ok if it sounds like spontaneous madness – like say Iggy Pop’s Africa Man – but it sounds really prepared and calculated, like he actually thought it was worth saying that he was an alligator, a momopoppa, and a space invader. Time’s been unkind to words like that. Generations of pop-surrealists (Noel Fielding for example), have made them absurd. I can’t get back into it after that opening. It annoys me so much.





I know this Starman one, of course, and quite like it, but my kids got fed up with me having it on in the car and the five year old was singing her own words over it today, “I’m a poopoo sitting in the loo” and stuff like that, which I can’t get out of my mind. I like the one note morse code guitar lick before the chorus – like the lead in Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman – but I hate the handclaps and the bendy lead guitar sound.

I can’t even think of anything to say about It Ain’t Easy, or Lady Stardust or Star. It’s just not my sort of music. It’s not anything I want. I know lots of people really love this sort of thing. I think it’s a taste issue. It’s not necessarily bad…. I just can’t get it. To be honest, I envy people getting such a lot out of it. I wish I could be transported as powerfully by it all as others have. It’s annoying me now that I’m not seeing it, like when you can’t focus on a magic eye picture.

I really hate Hang On To Yourself. I think that kind of glam-pop thing with an old rock and roll type riff under it is probably my least favorite kind of music. It just sounds like Mud or The Rubettes to me, but not as good. It’s been a real chore having to get through this middle bit of the album over and over again. I never want to have to hear these songs again.

I really like Ziggy Stardust. The lead guitar is brilliant. On my friend James’ cd of the album, which we had on in the car, there was a demo of it as an extra track, and you can see that all the memorable musical parts were there in Bowie’s vision of it, just waiting to be fleshed out. The lyrics get on my nerves – Weird and Gilly, some cat from Japan, a fly that tries to break people’s balls and the leper messiah. For fuck’s sake. The singing annoys me but I like the music so much that it survives it.





Weirdly, the first time I ever heard this song was Bauhaus doing it on TOTP in 1982. I loved it. I didn’t know it was a Bowie song, I thought it was one of theirs. It’s still the definitive version for me, which I appreciate is ridiculous, but that’s how I first encountered it. Bauhaus say more to me, because of who I was at the age I heard them, than Bowie, even though it’s clear that Bowie is ‘better’, objectively. Likewise if I had a choice between Bad Manners’ first album and any Bowie record for a desert island disc, I’d take Ska’n’B because it would make me really happy to remember loving it as a pre-teen rude boy where as Bowie has no emotional ties for me.

Lip up fatty!!!

Actually, I think Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead is genuinely better than this whole Bowie album. I’ve just put it on. I feel purified. It’s cleared all this glam out of my tubes. It’s a proper pop art cultural collision that Bauhaus single, and it’s loose enough to feel spontaneous, whilst still being conceptual. It makes the whole of this album seem stilted and stiff.

Suffragette City is pretty good. I like the insistent piano. But it’s International Women’s Day as I write this and I can’t see that it has anything to say about the Suffragettes.

I don’t like the last one either. I don’t really like this whole album much. I have a quite visceral response to it. It makes me feel physically sick throughout and I’ve not enjoyed living with it. It’s not Bowie’s fault, but because of all that Jimmy Saville Top of the Pops footage that whole early 70s glam rock guitar sound now just makes me think of children being harmed. That’s what it reminds me of, and I can’t get past it, which is awful, but people get a similar thing with Wagner. Something becomes associated in your mind with something and you’re stuck with it, sadly. There’s not much you can do about it. It’s pavlovian.

Although a nice thing happened to me recently – and to believe this you have to bear in mind that I don’t really know what’s going on in popular culture. A few days after Bowie’s death I was in an HMV somewhere on tour and there was this music on – a strange sepulchral space jazz, a kind of weird cold ambient music with harsh atonal free saxophone playing and clusters of beats, like pebbles or the milky way. It was like the sort of experimental music I might buy but, inexplicably, it had the production values of expensive popular music. I loved it. I asked the assistant what it was. “David Bowie,” he said, incredulous that anyone could not know, Blackstar.

I found it genuinely amazing that this was Bowie. I went home and watched it on Youtube, but the video was prescriptive nonsense, full of advertising type overstated imagery, which diminished and permanently disfigured my memory of that incredible moment of coming across – and being astounded by – Bowie in ignorant innocence.

Would you listen to it again?

I will never listen to this album again in my life. I will give the copy I bought away. There are 100s of records I’ve never listened to properly on my shelves in front of me. I would rather listen to something I have never heard before and didn’t know what it was than any Bowie album.

A mark out of 10?

This isn’t fair. It’s a significant, groundbreaking and well made record. It’s just not to my taste. Thousands of other things are. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been asked to think about it. It’s made me think that disliking something doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t any good, and vice versa.

RAM Rating – 9/10

Guest Rating - This isn’t fair

Overall Rating – 9/10 plus “This isn’t fair”, divided by two.

So that was Week 60 and that was Stewart Lee. Turns out he’d never heard Ziggy Stardust before because all the previous incarnations of Bowie has never appealed to him – particularly the one at The Phoenix Festival. So we made him to listen to it and he didn’t like this incarnation either and would rather be on a desert island listening to Bauhaus and Bad Manners. I can only hope that, somewhere now, Pete Murphy and Buster Bloodvessel are high-fiving each other in delight.

Here’s some other bits and bobs that Stewart is involved in -

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is currently on BBC2

His co-writer Baconface currently hosts Global Globules on Resonance 104.4 fm

Finally, he has curated at All Tomorrow’s Parties at Pontins Prestatyn 15-17 April, to which tickets are on sale

Next week, we’re having a week off if that’s ok with everyone but we’ll return on March 25th where Lavinia Greenlaw will listen to something from 1977 for the first time.

Until then, here’s Suffragette City from Ziggy Stardust.

Lots of love

Ruth and Martin

xx