So simple-minded…
In its regular feature, Last Night A Record Changed My Life, the February issue of
Jim hinted that David Bowie had been somewhat of an influence on him when he first acknowledged that the inspiration for his band’s name came from the above lyric quotation.
A couple of
More recently, the band covered The Man Who Sold The World on 2001’s Neon Lights and on the following year’s Cry album there was a track entitled Spaceface which contained the lyric: “My little spaceface floating round, She’s never coming down,” which was about BowieNet’s very own Spaceface. Actually, it probably wasn’t about her, but it did owe more than a little to the story of the plight of Major Tom.
Anyway, Jim certainly made no bones about the massive impact that the emergent Starman had on him in the MOJO piece. Here follows a large excerpt…
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Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars as told to Danny Eccleston.
Now I’d already heard Starman – this beautiful lullaby with outer-space synth and the rock ‘n’ roll handclaps – and seen Bowie on the cover of Jackie. But it’s not prepared me for Bowie on colour TV. When you’re 13 and you live on a council estate in Glasgow and this guy turns up who you’ve a crush on and you’ve no idea if you’re gay, well that blows your mind. I literally believed he was from Mars, and from that exact second I was saving up for Ziggy Stardust.
There was a Virgin Records in Glasgow, but you couldn’t go in there because people smoked dope, and another shop called Listen had people laying around on beanbags…so I’d have bought it at Boots The Chemist, because there it was £1.60 not £1.80. That 20p was a big deal!
Next spring we heard that Bowie was coming through Glasgow. We could hardly contain ourselves. Green’s Playhouse – which later became the Apollo – was a rough place, there was a riot at every show – and this was my first gig! It was only the matineé, but as soon as that mixture of sound and light hit me, it was electrifying. Bowie came on and sang Five Years and the world changed. I had never in my life seen anything so exotic – back then I didn’t even know what “exotic” meant.
Even Bowie’s road crew seemed really glamorous. I noticed the guy up in the mixing desk had the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life and I thought, this is where it’s at! I realised what it meant to be in a subculture, that this was something that belonged to me and a small group of like-minds. I was excited then, and I’m excited now, just talking about it.
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