Everyone says 'Hi!'...!

She's so swishy in her satin and tat In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat Oh God, I could do better than that...

Look up there…he’s in heaven. And is that his light we can see? Let’s sparkle and hope he’ll land tonight…

What to say that hasn't already been said? And what to add to an already filled to the brim canon of criticism, analysis, and appreciation of David Robert Jones; Bowie to you and me, and the rest of the world…and possibly even worlds far above our own? I’ve been here before, of course I have, as anyone who’s read my scribbles here can attest. And, of course, I did write a piece on the occasion of his premature passing away back in 2016, which I subsequently revisited and enlarged for one of my earliest Reasons to be Cheerful for this very same medium.

So, here I sit, much prompted by so many other great commemorative posts from some excellent Substackers, and I’m taken back in time and space to a me that had yet to have him in my orbit…or rather, me in his.

The 1970s weren’t, contrary to most reports of that period, really all that bad; well, not for me anyway. Or is that, yet again, memory proving itself to be an unreliable companion for life’s journey into the future as the past retreats in the rear view mirror, as it keeps on insisting we turn back and take this or that turn that we missed along the way? So of course I can’t be sure of everything memory insidiously whispers in my ear, but there are moments that simply must be true; they were true then and they remain true now, because they were always true. And how I know this is by moments I recall that are, well, just as fresh today as they were five years ago, ten years ago, and even more than fifty years ago. They are memories that feel as though they could be just a day old, so strong is their imprint.

And some of those immutable and indestructible memories do date back to the 1970s, which is why I can say with some confidence that it was not a bad decade for me. Yes, some terrible stuff happened to me, such as getting beaten up twice; once was caused by my and my friends’ stupidity, so I’ve no real complaints about that, and the other happened entirely because one of my parents was born in India, over which I had no control, and so, consequently, I’ll never fully be able to reconcile that event. So, you see, those are two very good examples of memory and I being in assured complete accord, albeit rather darkly.

But a lot of very good things came into my life in the 1970s, one of which, obviously was David Bowie, which is why we’re here, after all. But before we get to him, I’d like to take you back to me before him, and the atmosphere we were all breathing in before the alien landed. What was the Earth like onto which that man fell?

Even the grass was brown…This is the car most widely used to denigrate the 1970s, the Austin Allegro; released in 1973, the same year Life On Mars? was released as a single, the Allegro came from Birmingham, where, perhaps, some might also have enquired as to the validity of life there in 1973…We had an Allegro, or was it a Marina? Who knows…they all looked the same. Image found at https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/cult-classics/austin-allegro/, which is a fabulous treasure trove of auto cornucopia.

Often described as beige or brown in tone, with the monochrome Swinging Sixties long left behind in a cavern on Carnaby Street, and its bastard offspring of the Technicolor tie-dyed gorgeous hippy dream now revealed to be a soul destroying iniquitous lie as it changed into dull faded denim to match the dim-witted dullards who fell for it, the early Seventies had settled into a miasma of what the young folk today might call ‘Meh! Colour was, albeit only briefly, absent from both our real lives and on the burgeoning television screens now intruding ever further into our lives from the corner of the front room. And that magic box went ‘Pop!’

I loved pop music, and the 1970s was a great decade for all things ‘pop’; well, that’s how I remember it, anyway. But I experienced my teenage years entirely in that ‘brown and boring decade’, so of course it was a significant, and highly subjective, time for me. And yes, subjective memory always trumps any attempts at critical objectivity, but I’m aiming for verity here, which is why I will say that a ‘great decade for pop music’ doesn’t necessarily mean the music was always great. Because, as Joe Dolce, Clive Dunne, and hundreds of others amply testify, there was an awful lot of plain old dross littering the charts, too. But it was immensely varied and never boring, but often it was, well, a little uninspiring, and especially so to little old me, and others like me, looking for a peg to hang our coats on or trying a hat that fits. In other words…to find ourselves or, better yet, make sure our parents and our teachers and every other authority figure knew we were not like them. That we were different, and not only that, but that we were the first generation in the history of mankind to have ever been as different as we were. Separate from the rest of the pathetic lot that had come before us. Yes, of course, we were the first…hmm.

And that raging was made much easier by what was happening in front of our very eyes on Thursday evenings as we sat with bated breath and adolescent tingling in front of our television screens, and the evidence was incontrovertible. The Sixties were dead and buried in the same grave occupied by the Fifties, and the birth of the Seventies saw it plugged into a life support machine as artists gasped for air in a popular culture atmosphere that now turned a little fetid, polluted as it was by the cream souring. It wasn’t quite yet the time of ‘No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones’, but that guillotine was about to be sharpened and trundled out for the baying mob. But not quite yet.

And so, as we scanned the horizon, like Jason, searching for the Golden Fleece, or Montezuma on the beach with the waves lapping at his feet, looking out over the Atlantic with dread and wondering what was coming over the curvature of the earth, we were waiting…and Ernie, fast as he was, was not ‘it’, and neither were Middle of the Road, nor any of the other incantations and incarnations of this brave new variety-filled world.

But there were very encouraging green shoots breaking through the lumpen earth. And the greenest of those was Marc Bolan’s T Rex, for he was the first to bang the gong and announce that satin and tat, glitter and glam, were going to deliver the ‘Wham Bam, thank you, Mam!’ that we had been looking for…though, of course, we didn’t really know it then, but in the same way we also knew Ernie’s Gold Top wasn’t it, either.

Yes; Bolan was the first, which is too often forgotten, but is worth restating for as long as it’s ever necessary that without him it’s arguable the rest of the Seventies might not have turned out as brilliantly as they did. For without him, there’d be no ‘Bowie, Roxy, or the Sex Pistols’ for future generations to diss and bitch about. Plus ça change, no? So, yes; Marc Bolan really was the man who started it all, and what’s more, surely his long friendship, dating back to the 1960s, with that other fellow traveller and good friend, David Bowie, led to Bolan’s producer, Tony Visconti, going on to be, ultimately, Bowie’s greatest and most successful collaborator. Would Bowie have had any other significant other as significant as Visconti if it hadn’t been for Marc Bolan? I suspect not, and if that’s so, then would Bowie himself have had the career he had without Visconti in his life? Again, I think not. So, let’s bang a gong for the Metal Guru…The Godfather of Glam.

But, of course, if satin and tat and glitter and glam alone were all that were needed, we might today be celebrating the greatness of Brian Connolly, Les Gray and the still (thankfully!) very much alive and kicking Noddy Holder. Which is not to say that any of the three above were not great themselves, for they most certainly had their moments of truly great pop stardom, but none of them, as yet, has a whole V&A warehouse of pop culture ephemera dedicated solely to them. As yet…but who knows? Because Sweet, Mud, and most triumphantly of all, Slade, all got on the Glam Express to Pop Stardom and near-permanent Top of the Pops residencies. And if a direct musical line is hard to trace from T Rex to the rest, and even to Bowie himself, then the sheer exuberance evident in the look and the style and the vitality that Glam insisted upon was common to all. Ballroom Blitz, Tiger Feet, Cum On Feel The Noize, and yes, Jean Genie, were simply irresistible to those of us looking for colour in a colourless world, and needing that hit to the heart and the central nervous system that only 3 minutes and 30 seconds of 7 inches of plastic at 45 revolutions per minute could supply. There is a reason why the dark side of the moon is dark, and that’s because no light shines on it (which I know isn’t scientifically correct, but we’re here for the heart, not the brain, so…) and that’s why Pink Floyd aren’t as great as both they and their admirers think they are, because they simply can’t, and never could, make a 7-inch piece of plastic as great as any of those four singles above. And certainly nothing to match any of Bolan’s string of masterpieces from 1970 onwards. Which is why I chose to dance in the cosmic light, and not gaze at my navel in the gloom.

But satin fades and loses its lustre, tat is eventually revealed to be just tat, and glitter and glam must, eventually, be washed away, and so it came to pass that all those great bands, with some truly great songs that remain great songs to this day, faded and lost their lustre, too. Bolan burnt as brightly, if not the most brightly and most briefly of all the great pop stars in history, as it was humanly possible to do, and that proved, as inevitably and sadly as nature dictates, unsustainable. But that run of hit singles from 1970 to 1973 is one of the greatest achievements in all of pop history. And that should never be forgotten whenever we talk about Pop.

And then there was one. Well, two actually, for have I mentioned these art school chancers yet? Plenty of satin and tat on show here, no? But plenty of genius, too, and not just, as some would have us believe, emanating from the other Brian…

Roxy Music are, by any reckoning or measurement, or listing of talent and influence, or, well, just by any and all critical judgement, severely underrated. Severely. For, just as with Marc Bolan and the ostensible centre piece of this wayward and divergent recollection of both Bowie and the world he transformed in the 1970s, it really is hard to see how the late ‘70s punk revolution would have come about in the first place, let alone evolve into post-punk and all that jazz the early 80s threw at us, without the very being of the musically brilliant and visually fabulous Roxy Music.

‘Hyperbole!’, I hear some young Turk at the front say, aided and abetted by an older man at the back who really should know better by now that Prog can’t beat Pop, and certainly not when that ephemeral ‘throwaway’ pop is as fantastic and enduring as Virginia Plain. But am I hyperventilating? Are the first five Roxy albums not a match for the Beatles’ first five? Or the Rolling Stones’? In terms of consistency, musical invention, and sheer style, I’d rank them, as a quintuplet, higher than the Fabs’ first five…and they’re certainly better than Bowie’s first five. Heresy, I know, and especially as I’m here to say ‘Hi!” to the great man, but sometimes you’ve just go to say it as it is; and in the early 1970s, this is how it was. And, what’s more, along with these great albums came a series of blistering singles that made Thursday evenings in front of the box even more compelling. Bye, bye denim and long lank hair; hello space-age futurism, synthesisers, buzzsaw guitar riffs, saxophones and oboes (?!), US Army surplus uniforms, feather boas, and every shimmering and spangly fabric, plus leopard and tiger prints, known to man…

So to deny Roxy Music’s substantial fertilising of the rows furrowed by T Rex in which the grand Dame would later come swishing along in his bipperty-bopperty hat would be both wrong and churlish in the extreme. Yes, both Bolan and Roxy were different in terms of musical heritage and roots, and they arrived at their respective peaks along very different paths, but the one thing they had in common was their shock of the now… and the NEW. And how!

And then, of course, along came the man who would be King, and in the end, fully ascended to the throne of…whatever it was, but whatever it was, it was undeniable and it was omnipotent.

Which means we have arrived here and, sadly for some but very happily for me, must at least add just a few more words to the veritable Himalayan range of essays and tributes about this video…never in the field of cultural criticism have so many given their all for a mere 3:33 minutes of POP.

Compare and contrast. What differences can you spot between this ‘event’ and the other ‘event’ at the top of the page? They’re both landmark events and they’re only separated by a period of around five months; one was seen by a relative handful of people watching a late night BBC Two ‘serious’ music programme on a dark winter night in February 1972, and the other by the millions of teenagers (and their perturbed and anxious parents) who sat transfixed in front of their TV screens to watch Top of the Pops over on BBC One on a light and bright Thursday evening in June of the same year.

So; similarities first, shall we? Red PVC knee-length boots? Yep! Similar but different space-age jumpsuit? Uh-huh! Electric blue (blue, blue electric blue…) 12-string acoustic guitar? You betcha! Three resoundingly blokeish blokes visibly disconcerted by the, erm, satin and tat their ringleader has forced them to wear, but still managing to churn out a cracking tune? That’s the Spiders from Mars for you. Fantastic songs performed brilliantly by a charismatic singer backed by a musically superb band? Yes…of course!

And what about the differences, then? Well, about five months of consistent touring of this new and ch-ch-ch-changed David Bowie as he introduced Ziggy Stardust to the world at large certainly didn’t harm; and the dawning realisation that something was in the air, however nebulous or unformed that ‘something’ was, it was definitely there. And the 1972-73 Ziggy Stardust tour that started in small venues but ended on that cataclysmic and final note at the Hammersmith Odeon in July, 1973, was perhaps one of the key elements in whatever was in the ‘air’.

Oh! And the hair. The barnet that launched a thousand, if not millions, of dodgy copies as kids, yep…like me, rushed out to our family barbers up and down the country with a tightly clutched copy of the Ziggy Stardust album in hand, and demanded of these poor white-jacketed scissors and Brylcreem wielders, whose stock in trade was the classic short back and sides, that they reproduce Suzi Fussey’s (who would go on to become Suzi Ronson; yep, that Ronson) brilliantly inspired ‘Ziggy’ cut on our own delusional crowns. Can you see the subtle change between the two styles in these two videos? The spikes are there in the first, but the colour is all David’s. By the time Starman made its debut on Top of the Pops, Suzi had added the flame red-orange dye that cast the die and turned Dave from Bromley into Ziggy from Mars…or who knows where, but definitely not from here! The haircut, and the man on whose head it sat, had well and truly fallen to Earth. And so did we…in our thousands and millions.

As to the legend and its many mythic and continuously propagating chapters, I can only add my own impressions of that night. But, truth be told…I can’t remember much about it, other than I did see it, just as I’d seen the earlier, but only by a matter of weeks, debut broadcast of a very similar performance of the song on Lift Off With Ayshea, which was a teatime pop programme broadcast solely in the Granada TV region of Manchester and its north west England environs. That tape is sadly lost in time, but even if it had survived somewhere, either in an archive or somebody’s loft, it would have been overtaken and subsumed by that Top of the Pops broadcast. For it was huge…but not yet for me. I was only 11-years old and still some way from my teenage rampage that, though prepared by Bowie, was only fully inflamed and instigated by the summer of 1976 and you-know-who. But, and it’s a huge but, I later, but not much later, at that, understood the significance of that Starman performance, because within it are all the signals and signs, freedoms and permissions, inspiration and influence that would lead, not just Bowie fans, but, seemingly the whole country, out of the monochromatic gloom of the early ‘70s and into the Technicolor future that awaited us further down the road.

Compare and contrast. Here’s just a sample of what else was on Top of the Pops that evening: Dr Hook, who were imploring Sylvia’s Mother to spill the beans as to her whereabouts and quick…as they only had 40 cents for the call!; Sweet and their Little Willie…not what you think, and no match for their Blockbuster; Donny Osmond and his love for his puppy…or have I got that wrong?; and the highlight for the dads, Pan’s People shaking their bits to Frederick Knight’s I’ve Been Lonely For So Long…no, me neither. So, no contest, then…but Gary Glitter’s Rock ‘N’ Roll (Part 2) was on that evening, too, and though it was better than any of the other songs bar Starman, Paul Gadd (Glitter) is distinctly, and most assuredly deservedly so, persona non grata today, so we have to disqualify him, if not entirely erase him, from the history books. And that’s despite him being one of the biggest beneficiaries of Bolan, Bowie, and Roxy’s frequent trips to London’s satin and tat haberdashers.

And who could have foretold the colossal cultural tidal wave that ensued when Bowie draped an arm around his only slightly less effeminate mate’s shoulder, and smiling suggestively while doing so, then stretched his arm out to point and waggle his finger straight down the camera at…who, me? You? Us? Again, that moment, and at that time, was lost on pre-teen me, but I knew something had happened because the next day at school, the less enlightened of my class mates were more exercised by the question of whether David Bowie was a ‘puff’ or not, than they were by United’s slippery slope to relegation. And, of course, because there were no ‘puffs’ (Ha! right…of course there weren’t) in my hard-knock life secondary school, there were no restraints or bounds on how gay people were talked about (though, of course, we’d never even heard the term ‘gay’ at that time to describe homosexuals; sadly, queer and puff were the order of the day). And, as you can imagine, it was grim.

And it was something I was acutely and squirmingly aware of, as I distinctly remember my sense of discomfort at the idiotic and ignorant sneering jibes thrown about by some of my ‘friends’ concerning people they had absolutely no idea of…or, even knew. And of course I kept quiet, and didn’t protest, because for as long as they were occupied and exercised by that ‘puff’ Bowie, then they wouldn’t be focussing their other favourite idiotic and ignorant energies on Pakis (me, but technically not me; my Dad was born in India and my Mum was Harpurhey born and bred indigenous working class white, but…brown skin and all, so hey…), niggers, wogs, sambos, and chinks (sometimes me, depending on how imaginatively their numbskull minds were working…or not). Because those words were often directed at me, and the handful of other non-white kids in my working class comp in 1970s Manchester, I can’t in the context of this piece, not write out those words fully, and neither should I. And though I’m not gay, I was aware that those insults, triggered by Bowie’s appearance, directed at gay people would be just as hurtful as the songs about Paki-bashing sung in my school playground. So, I knew, even then, that David Bowie was not like every other pop star. Not like Donny Osmond or David Cassidy, or even Bryan Ferry and Marc Bolan.

This was the world as it was when the Starman landed. Not a good place. Life on mars couldn’t have been more inhospitable than this place if you weren’t white or straight. Only one of those applied to me, and that was more than enough for me…God knows how someone who hit both those bullseyes coped with life in Manchester in 1972.

Count the sambos and nig-nogs, and all on prime time British television…

Or how about this? Colour me gay…? Or merely an invitation for the bootboys to lace up their Doc Martens and kick a few sensitive heads in?

And in this inhospitable terrain for outsiders, he provided an atmosphere that allowed us to breathe…and live. And flourish. But the bar was low, was it not? Even so, not many other contemporaries of Bowie’s were approaching that bar head on, let alone clearing it. Not Elton John; not Freddie Mercury; not even dear old housewife’s favourite, Cliff Richard, who’d been at the game for so long you’d have thought he’d have found the door that would let him out by the mid-’70s…but no; he’s still securely ensconced in whatever or wherever that sanctuary is. Which is not a criticism of him, nor of his updated version, St Stephen of Stretford, who definitely saw Starman on Top of the Pops, and yet…well, that’s their business. But Bowie wouldn’t, simply couldn’t, tolerate any societal or music business pressure to conform. He said be whatever you want to be. Be whatever you have to be. And above all, just BE. And he was the greatest exemplar of that philosophy.

And so we did. Just be ourselves. Perhaps not as gloriously as this, but then who else could have carried this off as fantastically as he did? Not Gary Numan, for one, but I don’t blame him for being in thrall to Bowie because, after all, so was I. Just boys really, but he swung…

Starman came and went, and was quickly followed by a succession of terrific singles, and an even more impressive series of albums, some of them made back to back, giving the impression that David Bowie, despite his appearances seemingly everywhere in both the music press and in the gossip columns, ate, drank and slept in the recording studio. But we know, and knew even more vitally then, in a pre-internet world where access to new information and experiences had to be hard earned or lived vicariously through ciphers such as Bowie. And he was forever out in the world and just absorbing everything he could lay his hands on, and then talking about it…to us, his willing disciples. Books, films, theatre, painting, and, yes, music, were all up for grabs. He was a human sponge that just absorbed every kind of cultural artefact or happening and yet never seemed to ever get saturated or even remotely sated, so huge and voracious was his appetite for life.

And as he moved from Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane and through the dystopian Orwellian year of the Diamond Dogs, the doors swung closed behind me and I found myself in ‘that’ room… and I’ve never left it to this day. Never wanted to; who would? And in that room, filled with endless possibilities and opportunity, I lived and flourished and shrugged off fears and anxieties. I realised that I would always be different, and would always look it, too, but instead of fearing how those differences marked me out, as they did when neanderthals called Bowie a ‘puff’ and me a Paki, I now revelled in them. Because I knew I was right, and they were wrong. I knew that I was better than them; not because I was smarter or superior, but because I was living freely. I had been shown there was another way.

Yes, of course, there were moments, for how could there not have been for someone who’d always lived just outside two circles, two cultures, and two countries, when I retreated back into those performative tropes that dictated assimilation above all else. But for the most part, and so it has proved right up until the present, I have celebrated my difference, my true self…my unique me. And, yes; we all of us have that ‘unique me’ within us, but sometimes, and especially more so for some of us, that gets lost or even hidden by our desire to be just like everyone else. To fit in and, in return, be allowed in, to be accepted and treated just like everyone else, so that skin colour, religion, or sexual preference never becomes the main determinant of who you are.

This might seem a terribly overblown case to make, namely, that David Bowie freed us all up and banished racism, misogyny, homophobia and general misanthropy in the wider world, which, of course, is neither true nor what I’m saying. But what I most definitely am saying is that he seemed the only one at that time to be saying that it was OK to be gay, or to be a perennial outsider, and that art was important to life; that we should, all of us, devour life. And that if you were different, then relish it and celebrate that which made you stand apart from the herd.

Was anyone else saying this in the early 1970s? Because if they were, their messages never reached my ears in Manchester. But his did, and reassured us that we were not alone when he encouraged us not to blow it. Well, we didn’t, and, yes…he did blow our minds.

I made my usual bleary eyed descent down the stairs, fixated on the first coffee of the day, and then planning how to survive the mad half hour in which I had to turf the kids out of bed and make them get ready for school as I fed the dog, fixed breakfast for them, and tried to wake up myself. Before the coffee had time to sit and brew in the cafetière, and then, thank the Lord, be poured, my next autopilot action was to turn on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. Heroes came drifting out of the radio, which, because it was tuned permanently to Radio 4, somehow neither seemed or sounded right. But then I remembered the great shock Where Are We Now had caused when it was released out of the blue three years earlier, and that, too, had garnered a big Today programme news spot. Oh! Fantastic…this must be because of the great stir Blackstar, released just a few days earlier, had caused. Did the Today programme have an exclusive interview with the by now reclusive pop star? As the song continued and I waited for my morning cup of coffee, I looked down at my phone and saw a veritable number of missed calls and unusual activity…and it very quickly became evident that there would be no new interview. No new anything…only shock and a sense of loss that I couldn’t satisfactorily put into words then, and still can’t really do so to this day. Yes, I still feel the loss sometimes, but much more than that I feel the joy, and I know I’m lucky, and very, very grateful that David Bowie said ‘Hi!’ to me. And always there will be the songs and the music and the creativity and the expression of cultural and personal freedom. Always.

I don’t believe in heaven, but if I’m wrong, then David Bowie most certainly is up there now.

But we can’t leave without this, surely? Recorded in Manchester’s Granada studios for Marc Bolan’s TV show, there’s a nice circling back for the Glam Master and his Apprentice who would watch and learn and go far…very, very far.

David Bowie recorded this segment on 07/09/1977. Marc Bolan died in a car crash just over a week later on 16/09/1977. The original Lady Stardust was gone…but like, Ziggy, always with us still.