David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of the Real Ziggy Stardust

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He was the bisexual androgynous alien rock god sent to Earth to save us all. At the moment Ziggy Stardust first appeared on British TV in 1971, the base of rock and roll changed forever. Otherworldly, seductive, and strangely alluring, Ziggy not only helped kick off the glam rock explosion but also mainstreamed a new era of sexual and gender experimentation. Had he been a real man, his short period of stardom would have been influential enough to be talked about today. But of course, this glitter messiah wasn’t real; he was a character, one of many from Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke, who helped transform popular music in Europe and America. The man behind these characters was David Bowie, a working-class kid from London. Bowie was also a one-man artistic powerhouse. Nominally a rock star, his eclectic dabblings in fashion, video art, and music producing would turn out to be at least as influential as his actual songs.

But where did this master of reinvention come from? How did ordinary David Jones manage to turn himself into so many extraordinary characters? The answer lies in the tale of a musician unlike any other. If Peggy Jones had ever had any doubts about her son being different from the other boys, they were likely dispelled one day in 1950. Walking in, she found three-year-old David by her open cosmetics bag, trying without much success to put on makeup. Disapproving, weary Peggy tried to explain that boys don’t wear lipstick, but her son simply looked at her in confusion. “You do, Mummy,” he said.

Born on the 8th of January 1947 in the working-class London district of Brixton, David Bowie’s early life would turn out to be filled with these sorts of moments—little snapshots of the ever-changing otherworldly singer that he’d one day become. There was the psychic midwife who, at his birth, declared, “This child has been on Earth before.” There was the change of identity he underwent before he was even a year old, as the boy born David Robert Burns took his parents’ new married name, becoming his longest-lived character, David Jones. There was the interest in women’s clothing and fashion, the makeup he borrowed from Peggy, but most overwhelmingly of all, dictating every part of the boy’s childhood was music. From his primary school days, Bowie was obsessed with learning instruments and perfecting his singing. It was such an all-consuming obsession that he even turned down a place at the local grammar school to instead study music at a technical school. By the time he was in his mid-teens, he could play saxophone, piano, guitar, and the ukulele.

Yet Bowie’s strange fascinations didn’t stop at music. The paintings of German expressionists mesmerized him, as did the jagged set design of Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi classic Metropolis. Voraciously reading on the subject, the teenager would soon develop a mad romantic fascination with the city that birthed the movement: Berlin. By the time Bowie graduated high school in 1963, he was musically trained and graced with an otherworldly look, in part thanks to his whip-thin frame and pale skin, and in part thanks to a permanently dilated pupil, the result of a schoolyard punch-up that nearly blinded him. He was also ambitious. Over the next few years, he repeatedly joined or formed new bands, leaping between styles and genres. The only problem was that ambition was going nowhere. Across the 1960s, Bowie released multiple singles with multiple bands, all of which made even less impact than your younger cousin’s funny dance videos. These failures were usually followed by Bowie immediately exiting the band, leaving behind unpaid debts and a whole lot of frustrated people in his wake. Still, this era of failure was at least giving him time to experiment, time to try on new guises, new ways of looking and acting. Some of this was clearly personal, such as Bowie’s increasing tendency towards dressing in feminine clothing or his developing relationship with Buddhism, perhaps the major spiritual influence in his life. Some of it, on the other hand, was clearly just done for attention, such as when he went on the BBC’s Tonight program claiming to be president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, his first-ever TV appearance.

Finally, in 1965, he settled on the most lasting guise of all. That year, David Jones changed his stage name to David Bowie after the Bowie hunting knife. At first, there were few signs this new persona would last. His 1967 debut album was an almost legendary flop, pulling in so few sales that Bowie briefly pivoted from music to studying mime. Yet this latest change of career wouldn’t last. Within two short years, he would have returned wholeheartedly to music, and this time he wouldn’t stop until it made sure everyone in Britain knew the name David Bowie.

The turn of the decade saw Bowie refining his sound, shedding the folk-tinged stuff for something more rock-oriented. These were the wilderness years, an era in which sales were mostly low and critical attention mostly non-existent. But there were still signs here and there that things might change. The biggest was “Space Oddity,” a single that introduced music fans to the lonely astronaut Major Tom, and it became Bowie’s first actual hit. Sadly, this failed to translate into sales for the accompanying album or its more rock-oriented follow-up, “The Man Who Sold the World.” But while it must have been frustrating putting out challenging work only to be met with a universal shrug, it was Bowie’s personal life that was the biggest source of pain in these years. Between 1969 and 1970 came the one-two punch of his father’s death and his half-brother Terry Burns being long-term committed to a psychiatric hospital. Mental ill health and addiction had always run in the family; his father had been an alcoholic, and now schizophrenia had caught up with his brother. Bowie was terrified it might come for him next.

Even nominally good things in this era seemed to be filled with poison. In 1970, Bowie married the model Angie Barnett, with whom he’d have a son, Duncan Jones. They’d also have an open marriage. Like Bowie, Angie was bisexual, and the two initially delighted in being able to be with other men and women. Before long, though, this arrangement had turned as toxic as the inside of a reactor. Bowie later claimed living with Angie was like living with a blowtorch. By 1971, Bowie was professionally unfulfilled, stalked by fears of mental illness, and embarking on the relationship equivalent of a disaster. The only solace must have been the way his music continued to evolve. His third album, “Hunky Dory,” was well underway, a mix of pop, serious rock, and callbacks to cabaret and musicals. It’s the album that would give the world future classics like “Changes” and “Life on Mars.” It was also the album where Bowie found his kooky, esoteric voice—Nietzsche references, pop art shout-outs, and all.

The trouble was, the general public still wasn’t buying it. When “Hunky Dory” dropped, it received rave reviews but disappointing sales. Bowie might have been finding his sound, but he still needed to find his audience. It’s at this point that he hit on a plan that would change British music forever. In 1971, with “Hunky Dory” not yet released, Bowie found himself working on two ideas. The first was to take his gigs to another level, away from being just some guys with instruments and into a full sensory experience—more theater than concert. The other was something about the former rocker Vince Taylor, a one-time British star. Taylor had wound up taking too many drugs, having a nervous breakdown, and declaring himself an alien god who’d been sent to Earth. As these two concepts swirled around Bowie’s mind, they slowly began to merge into something he created: a character based on Taylor, a pansexual alien rock star who would come to Earth in its dying years with a message of hope, only to be destroyed by his own ego. He named the character Ziggy Stardust after a Taylor’s shop that he glimpsed from a train. He recruited some of the best musicians he’d worked with on previous albums and christened them the Spiders from Mars. This loose concept, not yet fully settled, saw the band go into the studio that November and record the bulk of the album in just 10 days. Later, other songs would be added that fleshed out the sci-fi and apocalypse themes. But recording was only half the work because Bowie already knew that he didn’t want Ziggy to be just another Major Tom—an abstract character name-checked in a song. No, he wanted Ziggy to be real—so real that David Jones would vanish, sucked up into his mind, leaving only this alien presence. His instinct would turn out to be right. When Ziggy was finally unleashed upon the world, even David Bowie would have trouble remembering which one of them was real.

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For a generation of British youth, one of their defining moments came on the 6th of July 1972. That evening, kids across the nation tuned in to Top of the Pops, not to see yet another band play yet another song, but rather a visitor from another world. In full color, Bowie stood in the middle of the stage, his face white with makeup, dressed in a patterned gold, red, and blue suit, somewhere between court jester and cosmic figure, smiling and waving and looking so fine as he appeared seductively at the camera. In the four or so minutes it took him to belt out “Starman,” a revolution was kick-started—one that would do for kids of the 1970s what the Beatles had done for their older siblings a decade earlier. Yet for Bowie, getting to this one fleeting moment had been anything but easy. The amount of work that had gone into Ziggy’s creation could be a video in and of itself. The winter of 1971-1972 had been spent in a fever dream as Bowie rushed to refine his new character. The costume Ziggy and the Spiders would wear had taken months to design. Getting the band to wear them had taken longer still. As guitarist Mick Ronson later recalled, his initial response to the sparkly gold outfit had been, “You can forget it; I’m not wearing that.” But slowly, Bowie had worn them down, convincing them that the band had to be so glam, so out there, that they’d make other acts look ordinary. At the same time, he was taking them to the ballet, telling them to observe the way lighting was a part of the performance, as integral as anything happening on stage.

Behind the scenes, he was attracting press attention any way he could. In 1972, Bowie famously came out as gay in an interview with Melody Maker. The Spiders’ next gig was sold out. Today, obviously, there’s something a little uneasy about this—a non-gay man playacting gay to increase ticket sales. More to the point, his coming out announcement really did help plenty of queer youth struggling to survive in a Britain where gay love had been decriminalized only five years earlier. At a gig on the 29th of January 1972, the Ziggy phenomenon finally came together. On stage, Bowie was becoming this alien erotic figure, dancing with male band members, seductively interacting with Mick Ronson’s guitar. Freddie Mercury himself, just a couple of years away from stardom, was at that gig, left bowled over by what Bowie was doing. The final piece of the puzzle came shortly after. Unhappy with the record Bowie had delivered, RCA told him to go back and write something they could market as a single. So the singer went and penned “Starman.” After that, everything was in place. “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust” dropped on June the 16th. Two weeks later, London saw its first gay pride march. A week after that, Bowie and the Spiders went on Top of the Pops. Apparently, people at the BBC canteen before the show mistook them for extras from Doctor Who, but there was no mistake about what Britain’s youth saw. “Starman” exploded amid a potent swirl of social currents—a glitter bomb dropped into the drab, economically depressed 1970s. A fabulous two fingers to homophobes and gender norms. Forget about famous overnight; Bowie became a superstar in just 3 minutes and 50 seconds. It’s almost impossible to overstate the effect Ziggy had in Britain that year. Bowie mania became the new Beatlemania. Album sales soared on the streets. Young straight working-class men were suddenly sporting glitter and makeup, and glam was exploding. In short, it was a phenomenon one pre-famed Bowie could have only dreamed of. Yet within a year, it would all be over. Ziggy Stardust would be dead, killed by his creator. For the man behind the costume, though, this was only the beginning.

From our modern vantage point, killing Ziggy Stardust was probably Bowie’s best career move, starting the cycle of reinvention that would power his greatest work. At the time, though, it could have been fatal. The news of Ziggy’s 1973 demise spread like a shockwave through the music scene, especially when Bowie further declared—falsely, it turned out—that he would no longer tour or play gigs. Only Bowie himself knew how necessary the change was. He knew how the sudden fame had gone to his head, blurring the lines between Ziggy Stardust and David Jones. He knew how, in a weird dark corner of his mind, he’d actually started to believe that he was a messiah. In this context, killing Ziggy Stardust was necessary for Bowie’s mental health. Sadly, his next phase would tax his sanity even more.

There are two ways of telling the story of David Bowie in the mid-1970s following his move to Los Angeles. The first is to focus on his work on the succession of albums, from the iconic “Aladdin Sane” to the dark, surreal vibe of “Diamond Dogs.” Certainly, this is a story worth telling—how Bowie finally broke the U.S. with his “plastic soul” album “Young Americans,” how that evolved into the strange funk and rock mix of “Station to Station,” how he took his first major movie role playing an alien in “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” But it’s the other side of the story that’s perhaps more revealing—the side simply titled “breakdown.” In L.A., Bowie got so deep into drugs, particularly cocaine, that he lost all grasp on reality. Constantly high, Bowie almost stopped eating, subsisting only on milk and raw peppers. He had periodic overdoses and began descending into an intense paranoia that saw him store his nail clippings in the fridge, lest witches try to steal them. Addiction had always run in the family, and now it had gotten its claws into him in the nastiest possible way. As he vanished into a haze of white powder, Bowie’s interests started getting weirder and weirder. From Nietzsche, he moved into dark magic and fascism, began collecting memorabilia. Always someone who tried to make his characters more than just a stage presence, he began to constantly act the part of his latest creation, the Thin White Duke—a loose far-right aristocrat who sang passionate love songs while feeling nothing. The Duke was even more alien than Ziggy; it was Reinhard Heydrich resurrected and repackaged for Watergate America. As with Ziggy, Bowie blurred the line between himself and the Duke, culminating in several wild interviews where he declared, “I believe very strongly in fascism, and I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.” Years later, when the drug abuse was finally behind him, Bowie would offer heartfelt apologies for those statements in 1976. Though at a time when the neo-Nazi National Front was marching across Britain, the damage was immense. Bowie’s apparent pro-fascism was one of the key reasons Rock Against Racism was founded.

As that summit gave way to fall, David Bowie was on a knife edge. His marriage failing, so high he couldn’t even remember recording “Station to Station,” he claimed later of his mental state, “It was like being in a car where the steering had gone out of control and you were going towards the edge of a cliff. Whatever you did with the wheel, it was inevitable that you were going to go over the edge. I had almost resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to be able to stop, and that would be it.” Clearly, something needed to change if he wasn’t going to wind up dead. A change of scene, a change of style—anything that might save him. In the end, that anything would turn out to be getting out, leaving L.A. behind and turning instead to a city that had fascinated him ever since he was a teenager: David Bowie was moving to Berlin.

The West Berlin Bowie arrived in couldn’t have been more different from L.A.—a tiny oasis in a sea of communism. The Berlin of the 1970s was a tense, weird place, divided by a wall, kept artificially alive by Western powers. Half-empty yet crawling with spies, it was a city of militant leftists, cheap rents, dive bars, artists, and students. In short, it was the perfect place for a man driven mad by the glamour and excess of L.A. Well, eventually, when Bowie first arrived with his friend