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INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Record Collector MAY 2022 - by Rob Hughes

WOULD YOU BELIEVE?

On June 16, 1972, David Bowie released The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. This would have been momentous enough an event were it not for the fact that, on that very same day, Roxy Music issued their groundbreaking self-titled debut album. But this wasn't the only coincidence in their careers. As Rob Hughes discovers after speaking to various members of Bowie's and Roxy's camps - from Woody Woodmansey to Phil Manzanera - their stories, especially in 1972, were often intertwined...

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The Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park has form. Back when it was known as the Astoria, The Beatles held Christmas shows here, it's where Jimi Hendrix first set alight his Fender Strat in March 1967 and The Beach Boys chose to record a live album under roof. More recently, The Who toasted its reopening in spectacular style, Frank Zappa took a tumble from its stage and Pink Floyd held a mini residency.

Tonight, however, marks something altogether different. It's Saturday August 18, 1972 and David Bowie is playing the first of two sell-out shows at the venue. Currently riding a wave of popularity with hit single Starman and parent album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars - a sci-fi song-suite about a rock'n'roll alien and the impending apocalypse - Bowie has chosen the Rainbow as the setting for his most extravagant show to date. There are outrageous costumes, multi-level stages, dancers, elaborate lighting, Lindsay Kemp's mime troupe and giant film projections.

Flame-haired Bowie and his band, The Spiders From Mars, are making a statement, lighting a torch under the '70s. Out with the old, in with the other. It's a triumph of performance art. Looking on, Lou Reed gushes that it's "the greatest thing I've ever seen". The NME calls it "perhaps the most consciously theatrical rock show ever... It made Alice Cooper look like a third-form dramatic society."

"It was about taking a rock'n'roll band into a different area," explains Spiders drummer Woody Woodmansey today. "Everything had become very muso in the late '60s and early '70s, all T-shirts and jeans and not much rock star viewpoint. But rock'n'roll is supposed to be entertaining, it's supposed to be a rebellious art form, shaking up the establishment. We used to sit and chat in Bowie's lounge about how it needed a kick up the arse. That's what we were trying to do."

Roxy Music were Bowie's support act at the Rainbow. Offering a more eclectic, though similarly futuristic take on British pop, the sextet had released their debut LP only a month earlier. In Bowie's words, "They were the only other band in Britain at that time doing anything remotely interesting."

"Playing at the Rainbow was an incredible event," recalls Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera. "And you knew it was different. We played for half an hour or so and ended with Re-Make/Re-Model, which is just a humdinger to finish on. The audience was very appreciative, because for those people who were into Bowie, it was a case of anything he likes must be good."

Just as an androgynous Bowie had caused a sensation on Top Of The Pops that July - famously draping a suggestive arm around guitarist Mick Ronson during Starman - so Roxy Music grasped their TV close-up. They appeared on the show four days after the Rainbow gigs, performing debut single Virginia Plain. A thrilling compression of art-rock poise and pop glitz, Roxy alluded to glam rock while appearing to stand outside of it. Again, like the equally flamboyant Bowie, something more strategic and conceptual seemed to bubble beneath the face slap and flashy stage-wear. The message was deliberately ambiguous. It wasn't about confusion, but liberation.

"You go on Top Of The Pops all dressed up, looking like you come from the planet Zod or wherever," says Manzanera. "And people go, 'What the fuck is that? Are these guys straight? Are they gay? Are they trans?' So many people have come up to me since, saying that when they saw us on Top Of The Pops they thought, 'Oh, we can be musicians, too. If they can get on, we could dress up and do it as well. We could do something.' We'd given them permission, which felt fantastic."

Roxy Music and Bowie shared a common perspective. Their relative sound and approach often varied, yet each proposed a forward route through the rest of the decade. And while it was purely coincidental that The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars and Roxy Music were released on the same day (June 16, 1972) it represented a perfect convergence of intent.

"Bowie and Roxy Music were both so different," says Dana Gillespie, who sang on the Ziggy album and attended one of the Rainbow shows, "and it was so refreshing to hear something edgy, left-field and challenging. It made you think, 'Here's something new.'"

Compared to newcomers Roxy Music, twenty-five-year-old David Bowie was already long in the tooth by 1972. At least in music business terms. He'd made his recording debut as Davie Jones, fronting The King Bees, with 1964's Liza Jane. There followed a string of flop singles with short-lived bands until 1967, when he cut a solo album for Deram. Alas, it, too, failed to find an audience.

Undeterred, Bowie's interests continued to spread. Fascinated by musical theatre, he studied mime under Lindsay Kemp, formed a multi-media trio called Feathers, appeared in a surreal black-and-white film short (The Image) and founded a folk-centric arts lab in the back room of a pub on Beckenham High Street. None of these endeavours were successful, though they all would prove to be valuable preparation for Ziggy.

The moon-landing buzz of '69 helped propel Space Oddity into the upper reaches of the British charts that summer. Bowie's hit-making days didn't last long, however. For all its hippified folk charm, a second self-tided album - issued later in the year - completely tanked. He would introduce Ronson and Woodmansey on 1971's The Man Who Sold The World, a thrilling assimilation of proto-metal and weird prog, before bringing in bassist Trevor Bolder for the softer-edged splendour of follow-up, Hunky Dory. Despite the bountiful merits of both albums, and often glowing reviews, sales figures remained disappointing. To most of the record-buying public, Bowie was still viewed (if remembered at all) as a one-hit wonder.

He was determined to press on regardless. At home in Beckenham's Haddon Hall with wife Angie and the band, Bowie considered his next move. "When I first met him, you could immediately see the ability," explains Woodmansey. "David could act, he could write, he could do mime, he could sing - he had no problem singing something to me in the lounge, five feet away - and his voice had so much presence. He had great fashion sense, too. But for some reason, he didn't feel confident. He hadn't put everything together yet."

It might not be too much of a stretch to suggest that Bowie was a somewhat reluctant frontman. Certainly, he appeared to delight in mentoring others. Old schoolmate George Underwood had taken lead vocals on Song For Bob Dylan during Bowie's BBC session for John Peel in June 1971. On the same programme, Dana Gillespie had sung another track destined for a makeover on Hunky Dory: Andy Warhol. Also involved that night was Geoff MacCormack, a trusted friend from Bowie's earliest days in Bromley. "He was kind of taking people along with him," says MacCormack, "and writing songs for me, George, Dana and Freddie Burretti. He was really a songwriter at that point, that's what he liked doing. And they were coming thick and fast."

Freddie Burretti was a London fashion designer who'd first met Bowie and Angie at El Sombrero, a gay discotheque in Kensington.

On returning from a promotional trip to the US in February 1971, Bowie devised a nebulous band, Arnold Corns, as a way of trialling new compositions without the knowledge of his Mercury label bosses. Renamed Rudi Valentino, Burreti took on the role of frontman, with Bowie offering the freshly minted Moonage Daydream and Hang On To Yourself. "I think David just wanted a way to get his friends to sing his songs," says Gillespie. "Unfortunately, Freddie couldn't sing at all, which didn't help. But he was very pretty, which did help. And he made marvellous clothes."

Burreti didn't actually appear on the resulting 45, released that spring. Bowie's initial plan - to turn Freddie into the next Mick Jagger - was more or less redundant from the off. Unsurprisingly, the single stiffed. "When Freddie walked into a room, you thought, 'God, it's one of Michelangelo's statues come to life,'" Woodmansey recalls. "He looked like the obvious frontman until he actually got in front of a microphone and couldn't sing a fucking note. David's ideas were coming out really fast and he was just trying them out, putting them all on Freddie. But it soon became obvious that it wasn't going to work."

The Burretti experience wasn't entirely fruitless. Consciously or not, it served as a dry run for Ziggy Stardust. "We carried on with the project, only with David backing it up with his voice," adds Woodmansey. "He was only at the start of, 'This is what I want to write,' but he hadn't seen whether he could pull it off himself. Because he had talent and potential in so many areas, it must've been hard to focus in on one thing."

George Underwood, whose psychedelic painting had adorned the rear sleeve of 1969's David Bowie , was a regular visitor to Haddon Hall. As such, he was well positioned to document Bowie's artistic growth in the early '70s. "His songwriting was definitely taking off," he says. "David was getting his skills honed, listening to other songwriters like Neil Young, Lou Reed and Biff Rose, among others. He was bringing all his influences together and creating his own individual style." In a short while (January 8, 1972, to be precise), Underwood and assorted guests would witness Bowie at his birthday bash at Haddon Hall, wearing a green quilted suit - co-designed with Burretti - and sporting a cropped, proto-Ziggy hairdo.

Woodmansey, meanwhile, was already witnessing the evolution of Bowie's new incarnation. "I distinctly remember him walking down this ornate staircase in Haddon Hall one night, wearing the dress that he'd worn on the cover of The Man Who Sold The World," he says. "And then he just started to get into this creation of himself as a rock star. It was like, 'OK, this is happening, this is going somewhere.'"

While Bowie was launching his career with The King Bees in 1964, eighteen-year-old singer Bryan Ferry was joining his first covers band up in Newcastle. The Banshees lasted less than a year, superseded by City Blues and, shortly afterwards, The Gas Board. All three outfits showcased Ferry's love of American R&B and soul, yet music only partly accounted for his early creative life.

In September '64, Ferry enrolled at Newcastle University to study Fine Art. One of his key influences was tutor Richard Hamilton, the celebrated progenitor of Pop Art. Under Hamilton's stewardship, Ferry and his fellow students (including Nick de Ville, who would go on to jointly conjure Roxy Music's visual aesthetic) began to appreciate how consumer culture, iconography, old-school glamour and irony could co-exist as one interchangeable whole. In short, everything was up for grabs in the name of art.

On graduation in 1968, Ferry moved to London, renting a flat on Kensington High Street with ex-Gas Board bassist Graham Simpson. The initial plan had been to pursue a career as a painter, but Otis Redding's show at the Roundhouse the previous year had convinced Ferry to choose music as his primary focus. As Ferry told biographer Michael Bracewell, watching Redding up close was "a turning point, a Road to Damascus situation". Simpson - already skilled in violin, cello and guitar - set about teaching him how to play piano. Ferry supported himself by driving a van, restoring antiques and teaching ceramics at a girls' secondary school in Hammersmith.

Unlikely as it may seem, the spring of 1970 found Ferry auditioning for Greg Lake's vacant role in King Crimson. Robert Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield remain the only two people to have heard Ferry sing 21st Century Schizoid Man and The Court Of The Crimson King. They decided he wasn't the right fit, but saw enough to direct Ferry towards King Crimson's management company, E.G.

In contrast to Ferry, the classically trained Andy Mackay was already a consummate musician by 1970. He'd studied English Literature and Music at Reading University, where he'd hung out with the hippest members of the art department and become part of a performance collective, the Sunshine Group. Mackay's involvement with 'happenings' and his love of avant-garde music - particularly the possibilities of electronica - had brought him into contact with Brian Eno, then at the nearby Winchester School Of Art. Eno had passed through a number of college bands, most of them highly experimental. He was no musician, but, armed with an insatiable curiosity and the idea that art, science and music could all feed off one another, started to dabble with synthesisers.

All this chimed with Ferry's vision of an avant-rock band that could incorporate pop and electronics. Alerted to Mackay by a former university buddy, he formed a rudimentary version of what became Roxy Music in January 1971, alongside Simpson. A chance meeting with Eno on a Bakerloo tube line led Mackay to bring him into the fold. It transpired that Eno was the only person he knew with a tape recorder. It also meant that Mackay was able to concentrate on saxophone and oboe, allowing Eno free rein to get anarchic on synth.

As Roxy Music gained shape over the spring of '71, so did their ideology. It was a place where art, pop and fashion were inseparable. There was no distinction between high and low art, as Bowie himself was keen to point out a year later. At the time, music was dominated by muso prog and earnest blues-rock, with its claims to rootsy authenticity. Roxy Music rejected all of that. Theirs was a postmodern celebration of artifice and decadence, rearranging pop culture to suit their own needs. Ferry called it "combined amateurism".

Crucially, too, they were Velvet Underground disciples. Just as Bowie would funnel the VU into his work in various forms (be it lifting The Laughing Gnome's rhythm from I'm Waiting For The Man to a namecheck on Hunky Dory's sleeve), so Roxy could draw through-lines to their own early music The VU's connection to Andy Warhol and Pop Art was another factor. "That was the sort of baggage that Bryan and I brought to the band," Eno explained to this writer in 2016.

Also critical was the notion that rock'n'roll had been around for fifteen years or so, which meant that its cumulative mass - from doowop to Elvis, Beatles to Beefheart - was large enough to recycle and reconfigure at will. Another Pop Art idea. "We felt that it was completely legitimate that that could be the material with which we worked," said Eno, who'd studied under Roy Ascott, one of Richard Hamilton's most talented proteges, while at Ipswich School Of Art. "We liked the idea that culture was self-regarding. It drew in other subjects all the time but kept redigesting itself as well. Clever people thought that was what was bad about pop music: the same old ideas. And we said no, that's what's good about pop music, those are the strengths of it."

Roxy Music's wild dilettantism needed an anchor. Enter drummer Paul Thompson, who'd been gigging around the north-east club circuit since the mid-'60s. Thompson answered a Melody Maker ad for 'Wonder Drummer for Avant-Rock team' in late '71. 'When I rang the number, it was Bryan Ferry who answered the phone,' he recalls to RC. "He was happy to hear my accent and we got on pretty well. I'd been used to playing in bands up here with two guitars and maybe the odd keyboard, but when he described the line-up - especially saxophone, synthesiser and an oboe - I was really interested. It was kind of semi-progressive and I've always been into the experimental side of things. When I went to audition, Bryan said: 'We're heavily influenced by The Velvet Underground.' I hadn't even heard of them."

Various members came and went during that first Roxy phase, among them David O'List, previously with The Nice. Phil Manzanera's arrival on guitar, in February 1972, cemented the classic early line-up. "I'd heard some tracks on John Peel's show in January '72 and I knew they were going to be successful," says Manzanera, whose grounding included prog, rock'n'roll and Latin American music. "I came into the process late and was thrilled to be in there with them. I wanted to be part of the gang because I could tell these guys were special."

While Roxy Music were preparing their first demo tape, David Bowie was busy gaining some creative momentum. He'd finished recording Hunky Dory in the summer of 1971 but didn't hang about to admire the results. Within weeks, Bowie was back at Trident studio in Soho.

"David was on a roll," explains Woodmansey. "Everything he was writing in the house was like, 'Holy shit, that's good!' And they all seemed completely different from one another. I'm not saying he wrote bad songs before, but there was a new level of quality and communication about what he was doing. He'd really found his feet."

If Hunky Dory was a classic singer-songwriter album, Bowie's new songs were more overly rock'n'roll, built for live performance. Hunky Dory's outlier was closing track Queen Bitch. A punky extrapolation of VU and Eddie Cochran, saturated with imagery, it signposted the sort of the songs we'd later hear on The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.

"David had returned from his promotional tour of the States and brought back Velvet Underground albums and an Iggy Pop video," Woodmansey notes. "So, we got a real good look at what was happening on the American underground. Everything about Lou Reed's attitude and sound was totally decadent, but it also had that new rock'n'roll spirit to it. And he seemed to write about anything he wanted. He didn't really give a shit whether people got it or not. It was a bit too New York for us, but we definitely took things from it. We liked that decadence as communication. That's what David had in mind when he wrote Queen Bitch."

As early as August 1971 - still four months before the release of Hunky Dory - Bowie was talking up the idea of Ziggy Stardust to the music press. His initial idea was a stage musical, possibly in the West End, for which Bowie would compose the score and play the main character. In the meantime, he was still busy with new songs.

Sessions for The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars began in earnest in November '71, as Bowie and the band cut Star, Five Years, Lady Stardust, Soul Love and Ziggy Stardust, plus fresh versions of Moonage Daydream and Hang On To Yourself. It was still a bunch of songs at this stage - some with a loosely connected theme, some without - rather than anything conceptual. Indeed, as recording inched towards Christmas, the album's provisional tide was Round And Round, named after the cover of Chuck Berry's Around And Around that Bowie planned to include in the final tracklisting.

The requisite parts of the Ziggy persona only started falling into place early the following year. In January '72, Bowie took the band to see Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange at the ABC cinema in Catford. "I went to watch it with him, too," says Gillespie. "That was another thing that affected him greatly. He carried that jumpsuit look over into his new outfits." Bowie immediately commandeered elements of the 'droog' look for the album photo shoot, particularly the bright leather lace-up boots. The Spiders' stage clothes would also borrow from A Clockwork Orange, while Beethoven's Ode To Joy (used in the film) would become Bowie's entrance music. "I think the whole Ziggy thing was kind of formulated on the go," opines MacCormack. "It wasn't like a concept idea. Things were happening so fast around that period and David was always good at utilising whatever was on the table. So, the idea germinated."

On the eve of an extensive UK tour, the new-look Bowie was giving it the hard sell. His interview with Melody Maker's Michael Watts made the front page, largely due to his sudden pronouncement that he was gay, despite the fact he was married with a child. In later years, Bowie would admit that it was a position he adopted for effect, an appealing construct for the Ziggy narrative. He and The Spiders then appeared on BBC TV's The Old Grey Whistle Test, cutting loose on Queen Bitch and previewing a new track, the disquietingly portentous Five YearsFive Years, with its looming vision of global destruction.

The public unveiling of Ziggy in early February couldn't have been less auspicious: The Toby Jug pub in Tolworth, just off the A3. There were sixty people in attendance. Bowie and the Spiders nevertheless began as they meant to carry on, projecting big. "It was unreal, because our stage movements and sound were like we were playing a big stadium," Woodmansey recalls. "It must've looked so strange, but we never thought about that. We were like, 'Fuck it, this is what we're about.'"

Bowie had his hair dyed bright red and spiked with Guard setting lotion at the end of March, completing the Ziggy look. The effect, intensified by crimson stage lights, was startling. And while there was next to nothing in terms of a tour budget, the crowds gradually started to swell, mostly due to word of mouth. "I remember doing a gig at Ebbisham Hall in Epsom [May 27, 1972]," says Nicky Graham, Bowie's live pianist who also doubled as tour booker. "The sound man and I went around the area with A4 photocopies of Ziggy and stuck them on trees, with a flyer [designed by George Underwood] advertising the show. It was very low-level marketing. We did a soundcheck in the afternoon, went out for a meal and there was a queue around the block when we came back.

"To see David's development and his popularity evolving in front of us was fantastic," Graham continues. "And as we went on, the audiences started to emulate Ziggy. They were identifying with the character and dressing up. In turn, David's outfits became more and more outrageous. He was very bright. He had it all planned."

Just as the crowds grew incrementally, so did Bowie's immersion into the Ziggy Stardust character. "Looking back, I think he was constantly searching for this thing where you're not looking at David Jones," reflects Woodmansey. "So, his acting ability came into the live performance. All the ideas that he'd learned over the previous ten years - mime, fashion, theatre lighting, stage sets, the whole works - started to come forward. To the point where he was Ziggy. And we needed to follow suit. We had to go onstage as if we were from another planet, who also happened to be the best shit-hot rock'n'roll band that you've ever seen."

For Nicky Graham, the band dynamic was spectacular: "Trevor and Woody made such a great rhythm section and Ronno was brilliant, a phenomenal guitar player. He looked every inch the rock god, with his flaxen blonde hair and skinny trousers. David and Ronno looked amazing together, especially when they were camping it up."

The pair's onstage relationship took a new turn at Oxford Town Hall in mid-June. Bowie sidled over to Ronson, slipped between his legs and began simulating fellatio on his guitar. Photographer Mick Rock, who would be responsible for so much Bowie iconography, was at hand to capture the moment. Afterwards, Bowie and manager Tony Defries wasted no time in blowing up the photo and taking out a full- page ad in Melody Maker, with Bowie's scrawl down one side: 'Thanx to all our people for making Ziggy.' Bowie had truly arrived.

A week after the Oxford show, the Ziggy tour pitched up at the Greyhound in Croydon. Such was the demand that nearly a thousand ticketless fans were unable to get in. Bowie had chosen Roxy Music as his opening act. "He must've seen what we were about and liked us," says Thompson. "And supporting Bowie was interesting. It made me feel like we were getting somewhere, going up the ladder." The Croydon show also marked Bowie's first meeting with future collaborator Brian Eno, who he found "bright and mercurial". They hit it off immediately.

Roxy's figurative journey to the Greyhound had been less public than Bowie's, but no less eventful. Manzanera's entrance in February '72 coincided with the band signing to E.G. Management. The previous two months had seen Roxy play their first-ever gigs, record a session for John Peel's Sounds Of The Seventies and retain an ardent champion in the music press: Melody Makers Richard Williams. Now it was time to record an album.

Manzanera has dug out his old diary for Record Collector. Affixed to the cover is artist Malcolm Bird's original promo flyer, handed out to band members, depicting a cartoon cityscape and a bi-plane puttering out 'Roxy Music' in its smoke trail. "My first gig with Roxy is on February 18 at the Hand & Flower pub, which was opposite Olympia," says Manzanera, flipping open the page. "The next day it's Leicester University and then Bristol University on March 3. And then in the studio on March 14, with only three days' rehearsal before that."

This accelerated baptism into Roxy may have come as a shock for their new guitarist, though the band had already been fine-tuning the album's songs for some time. Keen to keep tabs on their young charges, E.G. assigned King Crimson's Peter Sinfield as producer. Roxy were duly ushered into Command Studios (then also in use as a cinema) in Piccadilly.

"The band were a bit eccentric, a bit mad," recalls Sinfield. "They all seemed like classic art school people, really. They reminded me of friends of mine who'd been to Chelsea. But they'd been rehearsing those songs for a while, so they were quite bedded in. We did it all in ten days and just about had enough material."

Roxy Music's first album was the product of a myriad influences. Invention and ideas took precedence over technical finesse. If every band exists in the space between their own limitations and the scale of their ambitions, then early Roxy are perhaps the purest example.

"It was absolutely that," agrees Manzanera. "In some ways, it was better that everything wasn't technically brilliant, because those bits were then juxtaposed against the others and they'd clash, creating something beautifully anarchic. We wanted that enthusiasm. And there is a lot of it on that album. That's why we used to call ourselves inspired amateurs."

The songs were all Ferry's, but everyone weighed in with contributions. Mackay's ghostly oboe, underpinned by an Eno drone (an approximation of a lunar landing, as requested by Ferry), sets up the remarkable Ladytron. The stunning Re-Make/Re-Model finds the band at full dazzle, distorted by synths and lungfuls of sax. Bitters End sounds like white noise doowop - part-'50s pastiche, part-lab experiment. A tribute to Humphrey Bogart, 2 H.B., invokes Ferry's fascination with celluloid glamour and image projection. The Bob (Medley) feels like arty prog. And somewhat improbably, If There Is Something marries country guitar to roomy mellotron reveries and atonal sax, with Ferry warbling lyrical about roses around the door and growing potatoes. Bowie would go on to cover it during his Tin Machine days of the early '90s.

"I knew we were dealing in a different currency, which was creating a musical context for this guy with an extraordinary voice, who looked amazing," Manzanera explains. "And that was different to what Bowie was doing. We adored Bowie, but it wasn't about musical textures behind him. He didn't have the colours that we had. Andy was coming from a classical direction, so he didn't play sax as a jazzer. And there was Eno with his electronics stuff. There were very few other people - maybe just the Floyd - who had a VCS3 at that time. And, of course, we had the great Paul Thompson, who made sure we all didn't disappear up our own arses."

The environment played its part, too. "Command was really an old BBC studio from the '50s," Sinfield recalls. "It had the original flooring from Mrs Dale's Diary, which they used to record there. We'd use the original echo chamber, especially when it came to oboes and saxes. And that gave a wonderful sound. They were inventive people, quite extraordinary. And they had wonderful textures. Roxy's advantage, unlike Crimson, was that there was no snobbery there. Eno was all flash and feathers and very clever with electronics. He was putting the guitars through his VCS3, using switches. Sometimes Bryan's piano-playing had to be brought up to scratch, but he was a brilliant songwriter. And still very overlooked, I think."

Sinfield's only issue, to begin with at least, was Ferry's suitability as a frontman. Prior to the album sessions, he'd caught Roxy live. "First time I ever saw him I thought, 'Oh my God,' because he was just so awkward onstage," he remembers. "And management got sort of worried, because, unlike a rock star, he was doing all these strange, quirky movements. Very odd. He seemed very mannered, but it also fitted the songs. So, it worked out very well in the end."

With Island Records agreeing to release the album, presentation was key. Ferry and Nick de Ville conceived the cover art, which featured model Kari-Ann Muller as a '50s-style pin-up in a pastel bodysuit and heavy make-up, staring upwards into the camera. It was a striking symbol of the Roxy aesthetic retro glamour, cool detachment and a knowing sense of irony both arch and playful. Inside the gatefold were carefully staged portraits of each band member, from Eno in leopard print to Mackay in leather, an excessively bequiffed Ferry to Manzanera's wraparound fly glasses. The credits gave equal billing to the band and its coterie of stylists. Music and visuals granted equal importance. As Ferry would later quip: "Other bands wanted to wreck hotel rooms; Roxy Music wanted to redecorate them."

Packaging was one thing but extending the visual idea to live performance was another. Back out on the road in the early summer of '72, Roxy raised the fashion stakes. "We had a lot of fun wearing ridiculous outfits," recalls Manzanera. "Everything else seemed a bit too serious and our look was about showbiz. But underneath all that was a very sound basis in pop music, electronic music, avant-garde music. So, there was a lot of depth there. Superficially, we could dress up and be crazy because we knew that some of the stuff was pretty cool underneath. We wanted to have a bit of a laugh when people were throwing water bombs at us. I remember supporting Rory Gallagher at Liverpool Stadium and a whole load of them coming our way. But we would just stay determined."

If certain audiences found Roxy Music hard to accommodate, Bowie was a little easier to digest, at least musically. He and the Spiders were essentially serving up hyper-stylised rock'n'roll. The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars was studded with the kind of populist anthems - Suffragette City, Moonage Daydream, Starman, Hang On To Yourself - that countered some of the more abstract lyrical conceits of its other songs. Ziggy may have been sent to Earth as a saviour, only to die a leper messiah, but he had a ball while he was at it.

Bowie's masterstroke was the creation of a fictional persona that connected with his audience in a way that was unfeasible as plain old David Jones. Mindful of his own privacy, it also put him at one remove from the very people who worshipped him, leaving Ziggy to navigate fluid notions of gender, identity, and fame. The hard part was keeping the two separate. As Bowie later revealed to Melody Maker. "I thought I might as well take Ziggy to interviews as well. Why leave him onstage? Looking back, it was completely absurd. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity."

By the summer of '72, though, Ziggy was working. The album was still fresh when Bowie performed Starman for the first time on TV, on Granada's regional Lift Off With Ayshea. But the big bang happened on July 6, when Bowie and The Spiders appeared on Top Of The Pops. A riot of colour, attitude and camp - with Bowie decked out in a gaudy Burretti two-piece, wiggling an index finger down the camera lens - it has since become embedded in the Ziggy mythos.

"Starman was really the take-off point," says Woodmansey. "It was kind of a milestone for everybody. Starting out as a musician, Top Of The Pops was the place to head for. It was an indicator that you were doing something right. Status Quo were appearing on the same night, and I remember lining up next to them in the corridor. They were all there in denim, and we were on the other side, three feet away, in our gear. It just looked fucking surreal. It was like, 'That's what rock'n'roll was, this is what rock'n'roll is from now on.' Francis Rossi said, 'Fuckin' hell, guys, you make us feel really old!'"

The single rose into the UK Top 10, while The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars would eventually peak at Number 5 in the album charts. Bowie was national news. His profile was certainly high enough to justify two nights at the Rainbow, which sold out within hours. he was in demand by other artists, too, taking time off from rehearsals (with Ronson) to co-produce Lou Reed's Transformer over at Trident. A month or so earlier, Bowie had also presided over sessions for Mott The Hoople's All The Young Dudes, having already gifted them its title track. After a handful of warm-up shows, Bowie's next stop would be America.

Starman was Bowie's gateway single. Over in Roxy Music's camp, however, nobody heard one. Students at The Royal College Of Art had shot a promo video for Re-Make/Re-Model, and Roxy had marked their TV debut on The Old Grey Whistle Test with a distended version of Ladytron, but Island weren't convinced of either song's hit potential.

Ferry mentioned that he had an unfinished tune called Virginia Plain, named after a Pop Art painting - an outsized cigarette packet adorned with a pin-up girl - that he'd done at university in 1964. The song was strikingly visual, too, a free associative gush that represented Ferry's own American Dream, complete with Warhol acolyte Baby Jane Holzer. But it also doubled as an aspirational hymn for the band themselves, with its allusions to opening doors, signing deals (Robert Lee, Roxy's solicitor, gets a mention) and making the big time.

Roxy were duly herded back into Command Studios in the second week of July, with Peter Sinfield returning as producer. "Bryan had these three chords and had written a brilliant lyric," recalls Manzanera. "Virginia Plain really sums up the whole essence of Roxy in just two minutes and fifty-eight seconds. In terms of a calling card, it couldn't have been better. You've got a very short song with some wacky playing. And Eno on synth bass. You've got namechecks, you've got art references, you've got film references, which are all so Roxy."

It certainly defied pop protocol. The breathless Virginia Plain has no chorus and only a passing nod to structural convention. "From the first line to the last, I thought it was extraordinary," Sinfield remembers. "There was such a unique feel to it. And it was very English, it wasn't American. King Crimson was a very English band, too, so I understood that."

Virginia Plain was released less than a week after Roxy Music had made the Top 30 album listings. Their subsequent Top Of The Pops debut on August 24 - taking their place alongside Slade, Duncan Browne, Lynsey De Paul, Mott The Hoople and Alice Cooper - was momentous. It wasn't just the fact that arty electronic pop was suddenly breaching the mainstream. Roxy Music were the model of unflappable, otherworldly cool.

A mascara'd Ferry, all sharp collars, black glitter, and shoulder pads, preens over the piano. In silver gloves, Eno looms over his EMS synth like some exotic vulture. The imposing Mackay and Manzanera dominate the centre - the latter sporting a lurid pink jogsuit, the former a luminescent green vampire jacket, saxophone slung across his chest. And while bassist Rik Kenton looks comparatively low-key, Paul Thompson thumps away behind the kit in a leopardskin caveman number. Six weeks earlier, Bowie's epicene star traveller had gatecrashed the show. Now came a coterie of cosmic fashionistas, simultaneously trashy and sophisticated.

Roxy's debut LP was already slipping back down the charts prior to Top Of The Pops. Their appearance turned it back around, finally peaking at Number 10 in late September. Virginia Plain, meanwhile, was nearly unstoppable, Ahead of a fresh round of live dates, the single went to Number 4.

"Even when we were recording it, we got the vibe that it was going to be successful," Thompson admits. "The whole thing sounds so alive. I remember we'd been playing at Lancaster University one night and Radio One had just started to play it. We were driving back to London, and it came on the radio. The other cars on the road were almost in convoy and they must've all had the radio on because we could see them reacting to it. Meanwhile, Bryan's sitting in the front, dancing about."

As with Bowie, their next stop was America. US label Warner Brothers organised a reception for Roxy's arrival in New York that December, armed with excitable press quotes. The next big thing? Very possibly.

Bowie and Roxy Music tended to draw similar kinds of people over in the States. The latter found themselves supporting acts like Ten Years After, Jo Jo Gunne, The J Geils Band and Johnny Winter - none of whom had a fanbase that was ever likely to be Roxy-conducive. Instead, as Manzanera remembers it: "We attracted the weirdest people in every city, typically the people out on the edge: gays, lesbians, freaks. Every kind of person who felt alienated. So, we'd play for half an hour, then bugger off and party with all the freaks from every town." They were back in Britain a month later.

Bowie had given it a more concerted effort, starting off at Cleveland Music Hall in September and winding up with a couple of shows at Philadelphia's Tower Theatre in early December. He returned home for a month, only to resume touring the States in February '73. Along the way, Bowie and the band had shot a video in San Francisco for a riffy new song, The Jean Genie, and recorded its parent album, Aladdin Sane , during sessions in New York and London.

Roxy had wasted no time getting back into the studio, either. Co-produced with Chris Thomas and John Anthony, For Your Pleasure felt like a more assured, diligent work than their debut. It was still boldly experimental in places, and deliciously pop-savy in others, but presented these twin poles of the Roxy aesthetic in much sharper relief. Similarly, Aladdin Sane out-rock'n'rolled the Ziggy album, Bowie and The Spiders having directed their experience of America into something harder and more abrasive. The addition of avant-garde jazzer Mike Garson was crucial, too, the pianist bringing an edgy sense of discovery and disquiet to certain tracks.

For Your Pleasure and Aladdin Sane were released within three weeks of one another in the spring of 1973. And as the year pushed on, both artists followed similar trajectories. Roxy toasted their ballooning popularity with a major tour of the UK (emulating Bowie by headlining a couple of nights at the Rainbow), before heading off to Europe.

Meanwhile, a post-America Bowie and Spiders were greeted like conquering heroes as they fulfilled the final leg of the exhaustive Ziggy tour. His stock was now high enough to warrant a turnout of 18,000 at London's Earls Court, the venue's first ever rock concert. "We used to play four encores in many places, because the crowd noise was just horrendous," Woodmansey recalls. "They just would not leave. A lot of times the promoters would say, 'We've gone over time, but you've got to go back on and do another one. Otherwise, I've got a riot on my hands!'"

Bowie killed of Ziggy at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, shocking his adoring audience by declaring: "Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it's the last show that we'll ever do." The wails of disbelief are audible on DA Pennebaker's accompanying film. The previous night, two hundred miles north, at a festival in York, Roxy Music played their final show with Brian Eno. His relationship with Ferry had deteriorated badly over the previous few months. The band simply wasn't big enough for the two of them. Eno knew his time was up when he drifted off while onstage, contemplating his laundry.

Both events were pivotal moments in Bowie and Roxy's careers. Bowie had finally established himself as a superstar, connected to a mutable sense of identity that would serve him deep into the future. Without Eno, Roxy would never again be as unpredictably fabulous, but would instead transition into the smooth sophisticates of British pop, with Ferry as their rakish totem.

But 1972 was where it all began. Without the platform provided by Roxy Music and The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, neither artist could possibly have achieved lift-off to the same extent. And half a century on, both albums have lost none of their transgressive spirit, their remarkable vitality undimmed by the years.

"When I think back to that first Roxy album, I can really visualise the studio," says Manzanera. "It's like I'm watching a film in my mind. It's all dark and I can see these characters walking around, recording. And that album still feels special. And different and unique and naive and enthusiastic."

Woodmansey feels the same way about Bowie and The Spiders. "I think it's a testament to the quality of the Ziggy album that it still sounds so fantastic, especially without being greased and pushed," he concludes. "It's just kind of floated through time. And great albums do that. They never go away."

GETTING PALLY WITH DALÍ

Roxy Music tended to attract unexpected followers. While touring Europe in April 1973, they were invited for tea in Paris by surrealist art legend, Salvador Dali´. The common denominator was model and muse Amanda Lear (cover star of the recently released For Your Pleasure, complete with black vinyl dress and black panther), who was romantically linked to Bryan Ferry for a short time.

"Bryan was in that crowd with Amanda Lear," explains Phil Manzanera. "And she was one of Dali's ladies. He had this permanent hotel suite [at the Hotel Meurice], so we all gathered in the middle of this huge room, having a cup of tea together. What a strange character he was, just extraordinary. It felt like an out-of-body experience. There I was with Salvador Dalí just a few feet away from me, wearing pinstripe trousers and a black coat and cane. And with that moustache."

Ferry would later recall sitting on a crocodile in the hotel room, before he and the band were whisked off to a restaurant in a Cadillac, accompanied by half a dozen blonde models, with a waiter assigned to each member of the party. Dal´, meanwhile, spoke no English at all. "Surreal is the right word for it," Manzanera says. "At that stage it was like, "What's going to happen next?' You just couldn't predict it. Everything was happening so fast for us."

WATCH THAT MAN

Ziggy meets The Boss

On February 5, 1973, during a break from rehearsals for the US leg of the Ziggy tour, Bowie called in at Max's Kansas City in New York. Accompanied by photojournalist Geoff MacCormack, he wanted to catch a performance by singer-songwriter Biff Rose, whose Fill Your Heart Bowie had covered on Hunky Dory.

"It was a small room upstairs and David and I sat at a little table," MacCormack remembers. "Biff wasn't really my thing and I think David was underwhelmed, too. Then when he'd finished, this other bloke turned up and sat at the same piano, making this dreary noise. His vocals were just as depressing. He went on for a while and we were like, 'Oh God, please.' We were sitting right at the front, and there were only about five other people there, so we didn't want to get up in front of him and just leave. It's just impolite, isn't it? But he suddenly stood up, strapped on a Fender Telecaster and a band joined him. Then he started playing Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street? David and I were awestruck, because it was one of the most amazing sets I've ever witnessed. It turned out to be Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band. Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. was on our turntable the next morning."

Bowie became the first artist to cover Springsteen when he recorded Growin' Up, with Ron Wood on lead guitar, during the Diamond Dogs sessions later that year. The summer of '74 saw him cut another Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. track: It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City. Soon afterwards, he and Springsteen met for the first time at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia, midway through sessions for Young Americans.

"I was out of my wig," Bowie told Musician in 1987. "I just couldn't relate to him at all. It was a bad time for us to have met. I could see what he was thinking: 'Who is this weird guy?' And I was thinking, 'What do I say to normal people?' There was a real impasse. But I still think he was one of the better American songwriters around in those days."


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