Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer…
Continuing the promotion for his latest book, Johnny Come Home, (04.10.2006 NEWS: JAKE ARNOTT TALKS BOWIE ON BBC 6 MUSIC) Jake Arnott has written a lovely piece about his memories of glam rock for today’s edition of the UK publication, Observer Music Monthly.
The four-page feature, entitled Blown Away, is illustrated with a double page spread of the classic Ziggy/Ronno shot above. Here are a couple of excerpts from the piece:
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Glam rock was cheap, trashy and kitsch – and for a brief moment, it offered a lifeline to a boy on the brink of adolescence and unsure of his own sexuality. Novelist Jake Arnott revisits the world of David Bowie and the temptations of his youth.
Pete was my best friend and role model back then. He was, at 13, two years older than me, and always ahead of the fashions. His big sister, Sue, had even hung out with Bolan (sitting in the back of a limo he had told her, rather ominously, that he ‘hated cars’). With his share of his mum’s prize (Pete’s mother had just won a competition, allowing her to spend £1,000 in the newly-bulit oversized Woolies) he bought a stereo. The LPs he got to go with it were Rod Stewart’s Never a Dull Moment, and Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie.
He also bought a pair of bright blue loons and a pair of girl’s platform shoes in blue and yellow from Sasha in Oxford Street. Bowie had launched his Ziggy persona at the Borough Assembly Hall in Aylesbury in January 1972, a week after he declared to Melody Maker that he was bisexual. In June he had languidly draped his arm on Mick Ronson’s shoulder as they performed ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops. That summer Pete hennaed his hair carrot-red, like Ziggy. I remember being in his back garden, playing at being Bowie and Ronson, and feeling a strange sense of excitement as he put his arm around me.
Pete was straight; he just had a healthy narcissism I could only long for. I was worried about being queer. There’s a line in ‘Lady Stardust’ by Bowie where the voice of a fan muses: ‘I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey.’
‘I think rock should be tarted up,’ Bowie had declared. ‘Made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be a clown, the Pierrot medium.’ In projecting his Ziggy alter ego, he demonstrated his theatrical understanding of the genre. He had taken the Gay Liberation Front’s concept of ‘radical drag’ and made it even more provocative simply because he looked so good. Much has been said of the American influences on his style – the Velvets, the Factory crowd and, of course, Iggy Pop – but there was something essentially English about his lineage back to one of Shakespeare’s famous fools. In his great finale, ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’, Ziggy implores, ‘Give me your hands’ which, unconscious or not, is a direct reference to Puck’s speech at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
(Blammo Note: I presume Jake is referring to this: “So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.” Tenuous.)
David Bowie retired Ziggy in the summer of 1973. ‘I felt somewhat like a Dr Frankenstein,’ he told Melody Maker. Marc Bolan had his last top 10 hit (‘The Groover’) that year. That he named his band after a dinosaur proved horribly apt. He just couldn’t evolve. ‘Sadly, Marc would never develop further than the three-minute single,’ said Tony Visconti, who produced both Bolan and Bowie. ‘I wish he had. With David the glam rock smoothly segued into a kind of art rock.’
Glam was a brittle confectionery, a fragile artifice that could scarcely bear its own weight. It was an adolescent thing, not meant to last. Bowie went on to transform himself with a bewildering series of images, sounds and personas throughout the Seventies, keeping us all on our toes until punk came along. Ziggy had been an appeal to something higher, a glimmer of hope at a time when everything else seemed so dull. ‘If we can sparkle he may land tonight’ is the evocation in ‘Starman’. It’s easy to ridicule but there was a forlorn melancholia to it; perhaps glam’s brash pyrotechnics were simply distress flares fired upwards through the gloom of the early Seventies.
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I know there are a few BowieNetters about the same age as Jake, (including me) who must have gone through some very similar experiences to him. Though I have to admit it’s hard to imagine BlueBlue ever questioned his sexuality! };-)
You can read the full article by clicking on Ziggy’s clip-on.
