Do you remember we another person…
The Sunday newspaper supplements in the UK have a couple of nice Bowie bits today. First up (above) The Observer Music Monthly has in its regular full-page
Illustrated with the very first Mick Rock photograph of a young pre-show Ziggy at Birmingham Town Hall on Friday March 17th 1972, (03.17.2002 NEWS: WHEN ROCK MET ZIGGY) and subtitled: On the cusp of fame, Bowie tells Melody Maker he’s gay – and changes pop for ever, here’s what Mr Watts had to say about that auspicious meeting with David all those years ago…
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Two confessions, mine first, as the author of the interview that broke the news: the original article now reads horribly coy.
I met Bowie in his publisher’s office, high above Regent Street. He was dolled up as Ziggy, before the world knew of rock stars from outer space. Skin-tight pantsuit, big hair, huge, red plastic boots – dazzling. Only recently had he stopped wearing a dress – ‘a man’s dress,’ he elaborated. He was charming, slightly flirtatious, but made me uncomfortable with myself. ‘Camp as a row of tents,’ I wrote – did I invent that phrase? – when I wanted to be unmanly and shout: he is unreservedly fabulous.
Soon he was coming out to me. ‘I’m gay,’ he said, ‘and always have been, even when I was David Jones.’ This sounds now like Daffyd in Little Britain, but it wasn’t comical then. In truth, I felt lucky. He’d almost spilled the beans to Jeremy magazine three years before. Did his admission matter? Well, laws on homosexuality had been reformed only five years previously. After Bowie came le deluge. He had shrewdly calculated the consequences, however. Busting taboos stokes the star-maker machinery. He was also just being honest. Sometimes, even in pop, honesty pays.
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Such sweet memories.
Illustrated by the above full-page photo of a very dapper DB and friend, the only Bowie mention in the piece is in this paragraph:
Anyone that has seen the charred carnage ? and there really is no other word for it ? escaping from underneath the numerous arches in Vauxhall at midday on Monday, after a full weekend?s tortuous excess at the pummelling gay clubs, will surely agree that it looks and sounds very much like where Dante put the sodomites in his vision of hell. It looks nothing like Bianca on a white horse, or a young David Bowie and Amanda Lear, posing by the velvet rope for the cameras. Maniacal nightclubs are horrid, period. And that, alas, is where rave culture, Studio 54?s direct legacy, took us.
Strange then that they settled on a picture of David with celebrated transvestite Romy Haag at the Alcazar club in Paris on May 15th 1976. New picture researcher please!
Please note, the bizarre pink stains on DB’s jacket are simply show-through from the preceding page during the scanning process, as opposed to an uncharacteristically colourful fashion statement from The Thin White Duke.