As a great vocal dramatist and with his cross dressing and gender bending, Bowie knew how to cull a personality. Around this time he announced he was bisexual while married to his wife Angela and drew a line between himself and the very hetero male rockers of the early seventies.
The lines between the real person and his contrived character began to blur. He became obsessed with his creation and started to introduce himself as Ziggy Stardust on tour and in interviews.
With Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie had succeeded in turning a popular art form, pop music, into high performance art. He lived and breathed the character of his own construction until it nearly consumed him. We also like to share breaking podcasts, behind-the-scenes looks, and all the music content that drives you.
Jump in today! Sign in. Log into your account. Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Join the Community Shop About Contact. Rechristened the Spiders From Mars, they went into Trident Studios in November and bashed out most of the album in 10 days remarkably, Ziggy Stardust was largely completed before Hunky Dory was released a month later in December.
Once the recording was done, Bowie turned his attention to the broader Ziggy plan. He started talking up the apocalyptic epic to the media. Bowie spent months crafting the clothing and image for the Spiders — including his own signature orange mullet — looking to out-glam and out-shock acts like Marc Bolan and Alice Cooper. Immediately prior to the show that would debut the Ziggy material and staging, Bowie gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he announced that he was gay.
But the first Ziggy Stardust tour of the U. The album exploded, and by the summer of , Bowie had five albums in the British Top 40, three of them in the Top By the time he and the Spiders set off for a U.
Fans were convinced the band really were space aliens. When they stopped in Moscow, on the way to Japan, they were detained by armed guards and taken to see Red Square in a limo with blacked-out windows, for fear their appearance would incite a riot.
The adulation, and the blurring of the lines between Bowie and Ziggy, began taking a toll on the singer. I became convinced I was a messiah. Very scary. And that was what was needed at the time. Stardust was a bisexual rock star from another planet sent to Earth ahead of an impending apocalyptic disaster to deliver a message of hope, according to the album narrative.
Bowie sought inspiration for his creation in disparate sources, all the better to confront and defy convention. In a interview with the BBC Bowie said real-life failed rocker Vince Taylor played a part in his most iconic theatrical persona. Quizzed about the genesis of his creation during a NPR Fresh Air interview, an amused Bowie cited a more general dissatisfaction with the then status quo.
Bowie glamorized and subverted the notion of a rock star, becoming a different version of himself armed with a new look and new sound. It was a rock star as a changeling, adapting to and interpreting the evolving world, filtering then transforming his look and music into something new. Was he the Thin White Duke? Hunky Dory?
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