On the evening of 6 July 1972, an event took place that would have an electrifying, life-changing impact on legions of young music fans who witnessed it.
At 7:25pm that evening a television audience estimated at between 12 million and 15 million people tuned in to watch the UK’s biggest weekly televised music show, BBC TV’s Top Of The Pops.
That week’s edition was hosted by the perennially upbeat DJ Tony Blackburn and kicked off with a promotional film of Dr Hook & The Medicine Show, performing their new single, Sylvia’s Mother. Five minutes into the broadcast, as the soft-rock strains of Dr Hook faded, a camera honed in on the bright blue body of a 12-string dreadnought guitar.
Latest Videos FromMusicRadar
The camera panned out to focus on the person playing it – the strikingly flame-haired David Bowie, wearing a body-hugging multi-coloured jumpsuit and red knee-length astronaut-style boots.
Bowie was flanked by three musicians from Hull – guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey – all kitted out in shiny jumpsuits and platform boots.
Together they made up Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and the song they were playing was Starman, the lead single from Bowie’s fifth album.
That album was titled The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Ziggy was Bowie’s androgynous, intergalactic rock star alter ego.
Earlier that evening, after the dress rehearsal, Bowie and the band had dropped into the BBC bar, where they reportedly caused a stir among company staff who assumed they were extras from the Doctor Who TV series. Back on set, they looked for all the world like glamorous, impossibly cool, aliens.
The cultural impact of their performance that evening was massive. Artists such as Robert Smith, Boy George, Siouxsie Sioux, Morrissey, Bono, Ian Curtis, Gary Numan, Ian McCullough and Gary Kemp all reportedly cited this performance as a life-changing moment. In the drab, grey austerity of early ’70s Britain, it was like someone turning the lights on.
“I remember sitting on my couch at home with my mother, watching this spectacle unfold,” recalled Lol Tolhurst of The Cure in his 2016 memoir Cured: The Tale Of Two Imaginary Boys. “And at the point where Bowie sang the line, ‘I had to phone someone, so I picked on you,’ he pointed directly at the camera, and I knew he was singing that line to me and everyone like me. It was a call-to-arms that put me on the path that I would soon follow.”
Gary Numan was 15 years old when he watched Bowie and the band’s performance that evening. “I think it stands as one of the pivotal moments of modern music, or, if not music, certainly a pivotal moment in show business,” said Numan in Marc Spitz’s 2009 book Bowie: A Biography. “It must have taken extraordinary courage and/or a monumental amount of self-belief. To say it stood out is an epic understatement. Even as a hardcore T. Rex fan I knew it was special.”
One minute into the performance, a moment occurred that was an epiphany for many, as Ronson joined Bowie at the microphone and Bowie casually draped his arm around him.
“That was like the gay moon landing,” wrote Caitlin Moran in The Times. “That was where suddenly, being gay, people knew what it was. It outraged the older generation. The younger generation were going, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s how I feel.’”
Marc Almond performed Starman as a tribute at the 2016 BBC Proms. Almond recalled that watching Bowie perform the song on Top Of The Pops was “a life-changing moment for so many teenagers, such as me. David Bowie made us look at the world through different eyes.”
When Bowie released Starman on 28 April 1972, it was his first hit single since Space Oddity in 1969, back when he was an earnest folkie with a bubble perm.
Ziggy Stardust was light years away as a concept and was an audacious, brazen concoction, inspired by influences such as ’50s English rock ‘n’ roll singer Vince Taylor, Iggy Pop, A Clockwork Orange and Japanese Kabuki theatre.
Trident Studios in the heart of London’s Soho was the studio of choice for the recording of the album that became The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Ken Scott, who produced Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory, was back behind the desk and the album was completed by the end of January, 1972. But when RCA executive Dennis Katz heard it, he wasn’t happy.
“We’d finished recording the Ziggy Stardust album at that time and it went into the record company,” drummer Woody Woodmansey told The Quietus. “They said: ‘We can’t release this. It doesn’t have a single on it.’ So, we came out of the studio and in about a month he had written Starman… It was an obvious single. I think Mick [Ronson] and I went out in the car after David played it for us the first time, and we were already singing it, having only heard it only once.”
Bowie and the band recorded Starman on 4 February 1972, along with Suffragette City and Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.
At the time, Bowie, his wife Angie and their eight-month old son were living in a flat in Haddon Hall, a grand yet decaying Victorian mansion in Beckenham, Kent. This is where the band jammed and rehearsed.
For Bowie, honing his vision for the Spiders from Mars took relentless tenacity. Convincing the three plain-speaking Yorkshiremen in his band to wear shiny jumpsuits and make-up had been a particular challenge.
“At first we were very reticent about the outfits and the make-up,” Woody Woodmansey told Rob Hughes of Uncut magazine in 2009. “Mick Ronson hated the outfits. In fact, he packed his bags and left. David asked me to go after him and handle it. I spent a good hour or so on Beckenham train station with him.”
Lyrically, Starman focuses on the extraterrestrial character of Ziggy Stardust, conveying a message of hope to the Earth’s youth through the radio. Bowie outlined the lyrics in an interview with William S. Burroughs for Rolling Stone magazine in 1973.
“Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes Starman, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard,” said Bowie. “So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the Earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping.”
![David Bowie - Starman (Official Video) [4K] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/t365MuktYQs/maxresdefault.jpg "“Mick and I went out in the car after David played it for us the first time, and we were already singing it, having only heard it only once”: How one of David Bowie’s greatest songs had a life-changing impact on a new generation of musicians 21")
Sonically, there is a full and warm, almost folk-like foundation to the sound of Starman, with Bowie’s 12-string strumming dominating in the mix. Bolder and Woodmansey were a formidable rhythm section. On Starman, Woodmansey created a real bounce of a groove while Bolder’s tasteful bass playing injected melody and dynamism.
Mick Ronson reportedly used his 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom on the song, his primary instrument with the Spiders from Mars. The soulful melodicism of Ronson’s playing really comes to the fore on the lead solo and the outro, where he blends glam rock power with a glittering spaciousness.
Ronson had also become a gifted arranger and he created the string parts on Starman, which bring a cinematic grandeur to the song. He also played Mellotron.
One of the defining features of Starman is the Morse code-like pulses that feature on the stops before the chorus.
“That Morse code sound is actually a piano and two guitars, an octave apart, then we bounced them all down together to make one track,” Ken Scott told Uncut magazine in 2009. “It seemed to make sense in that there was this idea of something coming from some distant planet. So we then put it all through a phaser.”
Then, of course, there is Bowie’s vocal performance, which is enigmatic, intimate and otherworldly. Born in Brixton and raised in Bromley, Bowie harnessed the vowel sounds of his native south London, a nod to artists he admired such as Anthony Newley and Syd Barrett.
At the same time, he peppered the lyrics to Starman with American slang – such as “boogie”, “that’s far out” and “some cat was laying down some rock ‘n’ roll” – which add a hip exoticism to the track.
The first lines of Starman are laidback and conversational in tone: “Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low/I leaned back on my radio…”
But on the lift into the chorus, it opens up and soars, with Bowie’s higher register imbuing the song with a sense of wonder.
In the 2012 book The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s, author Peter Doggett suggests that the chorus of Starman is loosely based on the song Over The Rainbow from the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz. Doggett alleges that the octave leap on the word “Star-man” is identical to that of Judy Garland’s “Some-where”.
It’s a connection noted in the 2016 book The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, who recalled that Bowie changed the chorus to “There’s a Starman, over the rainbow” during his performances at The Rainbow Theatre, London, in August 1972.
Starman was released on 27 April 1972 as the lead single from The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. The song reached No 10 in the UK Singles Charts and helped propel the album to No 5 in the UK Albums Chart.
That performance on Top Of The Pops in July 1972 made Bowie a star overnight and embedded Ziggy Stardust in the nation’s consciousness.
The single remained in the UK charts for 11 weeks yet peaked at No 65 in the US in August of that year.
In many ways, the message that Starman conveyed was mirrored by the colossal cultural impact and influence that it had on a whole generation of young people, desperate for new beginnings and a sense of identity.
At the time they recorded the song, Woody Woodmansey and the band feared that it might be too poppy. “It might seem strange, but we just hadn’t done anything that commercial before,” he told Uncut magazine. But they soon came to recognise the importance of what they had helped create.
As Woodmansey said: “Starman was along the same lines as Space Oddity and Life On Mars, two other favourites of mine. It’s the concept of hope that the song communicates. That we’re not alone, and ‘they’ contact the kids, not the adults, and kind of say, ‘Get on with it – let the children boogie.’ It made the future look better.”
