The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Released June 16, 1972

What I did with Ziggy Stardust was build an artificial, completely believable rocker,’ Bowie said of his most important alter ego. “My rock & roll singer was much more plastic than anyone else’s. It was what was needed at the time.” Indeed, what Bowie invented with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, was much more than a novel, coherent and intelligent concept. This was a song cycle that offered a visionary direction and set a new standard for rock & roll theatricality, presenting the world with its ideal rock star, synthetic, exaggerated sex appeal and full of power.

“Listening to it was like going to college, like the Beatles,” says Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, who has covered Lady Stardust in concert. “The composition of the lyrics is amazing… I love every song on that album.”

Bowie had been preparing for something like Ziggy Stardust for a long time. But the basic inspiration for the album’s theme came from his past. In the mid-1960s, Bowie had met British rocker Vince Taylor, who had recorded the 1959 classic Brand New Cadillac. After many drugs and an emotional breakdown, Taylor joined a cult and decided that he was an alien god that had fallen to Earth.

Bowie’s fascination with space travel and science fiction had already been evident in space oddity Y Life on Mars?, but this time he was drawn to something more far-reaching. “Until that moment”, he would later say, “my attitude was receptive and transparent towards music. I found it interesting to create something different, like a musical in which the artist plays a role.”

He began to develop the character based on Taylor and other eccentric figures. “He would always talk about how he would take bits and pieces from everywhere, mix them in a pot and they would come out as him,” said producer Ken Scott.

Bowie named his new creation Ziggy Stardust (he took the name from a tailor shop). As he incarnated, Ziggy became an omnisexual alien rock star, sent to Earth as a messenger. The plot told that Humanity had reached its last five years of existence and Ziggy was sent to bring a hopeful message: he was a hedonistic and wild figure, but deep down he communicated peace and love; he was the ultimate rock star. And in the end he was destroyed by his own excesses and his fanatics.

“Ziggy is advised by the infinities in a dream to herald the coming of a star man who will save the Earth,” Bowie explained to William S. Burroughs during an interview with Rolling Stone. “Ziggy begins to believe all this and assumes that he is a prophet of the men of the future. He develops his spirituality and lives on thanks to his disciples. When the infinities arrive, they take pieces of Ziggy to make themselves real, because in their original state they are antimatter and cannot exist in our world. And they destroy it on stage during Rock’n’Roll Suicide‘”.

It made some sense. At least the same sense and coherence that it had, for example, Tommy by The Whos. But it is still not clear whether Bowie planned Ziggy Stardust as a narration or if he adapted the story after having composed the songs. “For me, there are three songs with the same thematic arc —Ziggy Stardust, Lady Stardust Y Star Beyond that, it’s just a collection of songs that go well together,” said producer Scott. “I’ve heard people say it’s about a guy who came from space to save the world,” bassist Trevor Bolder said, “but to me it’s just songs.”

The band that Bowie had put together during the sessions for hunky dory —guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick Woodmansey—lived in a longhouse. Renamed The Spiders from Mars, they went to Trident Studios in November 1971 and made most of the album in 10 days (Ziggy Stardust it was almost ready before hunky dory was released in December). “They had to get the songs out really fast because David was bored,” Scott said. “If he took more than three or four tries, it made him want to do other things… David is the most amazing singer I’ve ever worked with; 95% of the vocals I did with him, as producer of four albums, are first recordings”.

But when Bowie took the recordings to RCA Records, the label said there was no single. For the first time, the label was right. In response, Bowie wrote Starmanwhich would become the label’s most famous song.

When the recording was done, Bowie focused on the bigger plan he had for Ziggy. He started talking about an apocalyptic epic in the media. “She wanted to change the music industry,” says Bolder. “She thought she was boring.” She took the band members to ballet and theater, telling them to focus on lighting and not acting. “That was a revelation,” Woodmansey said. “We set out to create a show instead of just making music.”

Bowie spent months crafting the clothing and image of the Spiders with the intention of surpassing the glamorous concert image of Marc Bolan and Alice Cooper. Before the show in which he debuted ZiggyBowie gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he announced that he was gay.

Despite that shocking and dizzying exposure, the album’s success was a long time coming. An electric presentation of Starman in july in Top of the Pops it changed everything, and brought the sexual Ziggy into every English home. The record began to sell massively, and by the summer of 1973 Bowie had five albums in the British Top 40, and three of them in the Top 15. By the time he and the Spiders went on a US tour in September , the album was a phenomenon.

Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Lou Reed were around during rehearsals. When they passed through Moscow they were stopped by armed guards and taken to see Red Square in a limousine with tinted windows for fear that their appearance would incite a riot. The boundaries between Bowie and Ziggy began to blur, which began to affect the singer. “At first, I was just taking on the character on stage,” he said. “Later, everyone began to treat me like Ziggy: as if he were a chosen one, as if he had the ability to move masses. I convinced myself that he was a messiah. He was very scared. I woke up relatively quickly.”

Then, in the summer of 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon, with documentary filmmaker DA Pennebaker’s cameras rolling for a video, the singer proclaimed that this was Ziggy’s final show. That was almost a year after the appearance in Top of the Pops that had unleashed Ziggy-mania.

“Most of the rock characters you create are short-lived,” Bowie explained. “I don’t think they’ll last album after album. You don’t want them to get too cartoonish.”

Sometimes Bowie disdained the Ziggy Stardust phenomenon. “Most people want their idols and gods to be superficial, like cheap toys,” he told Cameron Crowe. “Why do you think teenagers are the way they are? They run around like ants, chewing gum and dressing a certain way for a day; that’s all the depth they want to reach. It doesn’t surprise me that Ziggy was a huge hit.”

But Ziggy had accomplished what Bowie set out to do: he changed the music industry by introducing the notion of the rock star as a fearless character who could change whenever he felt the need to, even if audiences weren’t ready yet.

Years later, Woodmansey, the sole surviving member of the Spiders from Mars, tried to describe the experience: “You walk into a room and there are 20,000 people trying to look like you,” he said. “Sometimes you think, ‘Wait a minute, I’m from Driffield!’ But everyone thinks you’re from Mars.”