Greg Wilson | Being a DJ. I wanted to write in greater personal detail about David Bowie and the depth of impact his music and words had on me during my formative teenage years – this occurring when I was between the ages of 1. I’d uploaded a blog post once I’d heard about his death, but I’ve found myself needing to revisit what was a magical mystical part of my musical / life initiation, as much for myself as anyone else, both by listening through the records I loved, and still love, whilst getting it all into words somehow. Once I started writing this I couldn’t contain it – it was bursting out of all sides.
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So please excuse me for the tangents I go off on and the jumping about – there’s no easy coherent way for me to express this. For a period following his 6th July 1. Starman’ performance on Top Of The Pops, until 1. I began to disengage, Bowie ruled ok in my world. To accompany this piece, I’ve put together as 3 hour podcast featuring 4.
I became intimate with during the 1. Starman’ single in July 1. Golden Years’ in November 1. I started working as a club DJ (‘Golden Years’ featured on the ‘First Impressions’ podcast that highlighted the records I was playing as I started out). There are, you’ll find, tracks also included from the period 1. Space Oddity’, these were all first heard in retrospect, Bowie’s back catalogue picking up significant sales on the back of the success of ‘The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars’. I selected 4.
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Bowie (4. 1 if you want to add the ‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’ as separate), but also added 4 from Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’ album, which Bowie and Mick Ronson produced directly after recording ‘Ziggy’, and Mott The Hoople’s huge hit from 1. All The Young Dudes’, written and produced by Bowie. Like his post- 7. Bowie’s golden years – the era in which he made the majority of his greatest recordings, whilst being at his most vital as a trailblazing artist. Mixcloud’s agreement in the US not allowing artist compilations, the podcast is unfortunately not available to stream there. To resolve this we’ve now also uploaded the podcast to the Hear This platform, which can be accessed in the US: Whilst I’ve been writing this I chanced upon an old school project I did back in May 1.
I was 1. 3. It was about pop music and contained the following handwritten entry about Bowie (please excuse any youthful inaccuracies): At the age of fifteen David Bowie started playing the tenor saxophone in a modern jazz band. In 1. 96. 4 he formed a group called David Jones And The Lower Third, but it was about this time when an American group called The Monkees were starting to make a name here, so to avoid confusion with a member of that group he changed his name to Bowie. But the name change did not do much to help David. His first recordings went unnoticed until he made a record in 1.
Space Oddity’. The record whizzed up the charts. Bowie took up Buddhism – a subject that had intrigued him from an early age. It was at this time that Bowie became interested in mime and he started formulating ideas as to how music could be expressed by combining the two arts.
His stage act today is indeed strengthened by his ability to project himself both as a musician and a mime artist – hiding behind his white expressionless make- up and elaborate stage clothes. There was a long lay- off after ‘Space Oddity’, but he released ‘Changes’ as a single and ‘Hunky Dory’ as an album. After that Bowie released ‘Starman’, ‘John I’m Only Dancing’ and ‘Jean Genie’ as singles (all were great successes) and ‘The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars’ as an album.
Space Oddity’ and ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ were re- released as albums. All this happened in Bowie’s most successful year 1. So far this year he has released a single ‘Drive- In Saturday’ and an album ‘Aladdin Sane’, but Bowie must thank his single ‘Starman’, which helped re- establish himself as the great artist he is. In 1. 97. 2 Bowie produced and wrote a record by Mott The Hoople called ‘All The Young Dudes’. Bowie and his group The Spiders From Mars. The first David Bowie record I ever heard was ‘Space Oddity’, which was a top 5 hit in the UK in 1.
Apollo 1. 1 moon mission (the title a play on Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film of the previous year ‘2. A Space Odyssey’). As such, the record was regarded as a novelty, and when Bowie’s subsequent singles flopped he was in serious danger of vanishing from the pop scene no sooner had he appeared. To my 9 year- old ears it was a strange exotic sounding record, with equally weird words leaving no resolution, or not the one expected, with the astronaut clearly adrift in the vastness of space, floating around his ‘tin can’. The 6. 0’s, especially the post ‘6.
So, a distinctive out of leftfield track like ‘Space Oddity’ paradoxically wasn’t that unusual (a perfect example from around the time ‘Space Oddity’ was released, was ‘In The Year 2. Zager & Evans, who would fulfill the true definition of one hit wonder on both sides of the Atlantic – their only hit being a #1). Besides, most people would have associated ‘Space Oddity’ with the name Major Tom rather than David Bowie. To establish himself as an artist Bowie needed to follow- up, but it would end up taking him over 2 and a half years and 3 more albums before he finally had his 2nd hit single, ‘Starman’, which peaked at #1. Ziggy Stardust Pandora’s box of the brilliant and the bizarre.
It was his Top Of The Pops performance of ‘Starman’ that would act as the catalyst for his subsequent UK superstardom. Top Of The Pops had a massive audience back then, made up mainly of the youth, but also, in those days of limited TV choice (just 3 channels in the UK at the time) a cross- section of society.
Whole families would watch together, teenagers and parents criticizing each other’s music taste in a weekly ritual. A generation gap had already opened up in the 6. UK, here was a feminine looking man with his arm draped around another feminine looking man (lead guitarist and brother in arms Mick Ronson). What was the world coming to? This was the provocation of Bowie to the war generation, and even a fair proportion of 5. To say you were homosexual in those days would spell the kiss of death for your pop career, yet Bowie pulled a rabbit out of the hat, blurring the lines by declaring himself bisexual, whilst, via his Ziggy alto- ego, presenting himself as androgynous, perhaps even asexual – he was projecting a lot of stuff through this spellbinding persona he’d manifested. Whatever was going on, it was like nothing that had gone on before – Ziggy was most certainly at the cutting- edge, even as Bowie became the biggest chart artist in the UK during 1.
As with The Beatles before him, he’d managed get the balance right between writing great accessible music, which was at the same time ambitious and challenging – hooking the listener in, whilst stretching their horizons. He also had a shit hot band we came to know and love as The Spiders from Mars, or simply The Spiders. I was 1. 2 when ‘Starman’ came on TOTP, and like so many others, I saw Bowie look to camera for the line ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you’, and point directly out of the tele at me! It was a call to arms – he’d brought us into his glammed up spaceworld in a very personal way via a technology viewed by millions. It was an incredible piece of magic theatre, but most vitally a great song with a positive message that really engaged me that evening, along with thousands of others.
Like a modern day pied piper he was about to lead us a merry dance, with his call ‘let all the children boogie’. This TV appearance has since gained legendary status in the fullest sense of the term. Writer Dylan Jones even dedicated an entire book to this cultural milestone in 2. When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie And The Four Minutes That Shook The World’. At the age I was, things initially play out in the schoolyard the following day when people discus what had been on, who was good and who was crap.
On a handful of occasions during this period there’d be a performer / track that would be dissected way beyond the good / crap norm (the first TOTP appearances of Roxy Music and Sparks were also pretty legendary), and following ‘Starman’ there was not only external but internal debate. We lived in a time when being a ‘queer’ or a ‘puff’ still wasn’t social accepted, despite the 1. Top Of The Pops?’ To admit you liked the track yourself was immediately risky, for this could implicate you within the minds of certain people with bigoted opinions passed down from their parents’ generation – you could quite easily be labeled a queer by association.
But the music was undeniable, even to some of those with objections to the moral stance of the artist, and this, as a consequence, forced so many non- homosexuals with a love for Bowie’s music to break from the prejudice of their contemporaries, or their family, in order to reconcile this supposed anomaly within themselves. Bowie’s impact on gay culture was seismic, for here was a proud articulate icon bold enough to say he swung both ways, but he also made a major impression on so many straight people who would subsequently change their views on gay issues, taking a less judgemental stance and adopting more of a ‘live and let live’ viewpoint. I got to know some older lads who’d also fallen under Ziggy’s spell. Some of these were people I’d previously avoided, lads who’d left school and had a reputation for being ‘hard knocks’. Quite a lot of hard lads seemed to gravitate towards Bowie that year – some were now sporting a single earing, having dyed their hair orange / red / sandy and swept it back in the Aladdin Sane carrottop style. I had a go at dying my own hair, not too successfully as witnessed in my school photo from 1. I was 1. 3 and at the height of my Bowie obsession – I’m the one in the second row with the big knot in my tie and the roots coming through.
The height of my obsession was the summer of 7.