Ziggyology by Simon Goddard

Author:Simon Goddard [Goddard, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

BY THE END of 1971 David Bowie had everything he needed to become somebody else.

He had the name, Ziggy Stardust.

He had the band of Mick, Trevor and Woody, his Ronno, Weird and Gilly.

He had enough songs for a new album which he’d started recording at Trident that November, even before Hunky Dory was in the shops. ‘You’re not going to like it,’ he warned producer Ken Scott. ‘It’s much more like Iggy Pop.’

He had the beginnings of the haircut after Trevor, a former hairdresser, chopped away his luxurious Katharine Hepburn tresses leaving him looking like an elfish Japanese warrior: spiky on top, thin on the sides and with thin straggles wilting around his shoulders like dead ivy.

He also had the first set of bespoke Starman clothes thanks to dear Freddie: a patterned grey-green windcheater and turned-up trousers giving the appearance of part superhero, part art-deco sofa. David chose the fabric himself, telling anyone who asked that it was from Liberty’s department store on the edge of Soho. They needn’t know the unglamorous truth it was from one of the discount schmutter shops up Tottenham Court Road; for all anyone could ever prove it was from the Jupiter branch of Macy’s.

For the ‘stuffed crotch’ of the trousers, he’d taken inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s new film, his first in over three years since 2001: A Space Odyssey. As its poster declared, ‘Being the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.’

The film was A Clockwork Orange, from the novel by Anthony Burgess. First published in 1962, and very roughly first adapted as Warhol’s Vinyl, its plot had been triggered by the brutal assault on Burgess’ wife by American deserters during the war, his experiences in Russia observing the stilyagi street gangs, and a visit to Hastings where he stood and watched ‘mods and rockers knocking hell out of each other’. Boiled down to a cosmic-yob concentrate, Burgess created Alex, a Beethoven-mad delinquent who robs, assaults, rapes and terrorises for fun until he’s arrested for accidentally murdering one of his victims. Sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Alex is given the opportunity for quick release by volunteering himself as guinea pig in a radical technique to rehabilitate criminals, brainwashing them into submissive drones incapable of free choice. Kubrick’s version remained faithful to the American edition of the book, which ends with Alex returned to his fierce old self after becoming a political pawn in the next government election; Burgess would always mourn the fact Kubrick never read the original British version with its extra final chapter where Alex relents and resigns to the responsibilities of adulthood.

David had yet to see A Clockwork Orange – just out in America that Christmas, due in Britain in early January 1972 – but he’d taken cues from pre-publicity stills of Kubrick’s interpretation of Burgess’s droogs: space-age hooligans in bovver boots and codpieces. He wanted the look, codpiece and all, but not the ultra-violence, keeping the street-gang chic but colouring in the droogs’ whites with bright floral prints and soft quilted fabrics.

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