We can show you a good time…
Last weekend’s
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David Bowie at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1972 by Paul Morley
This was one of those times when everything seemed to change. Bowie was pretty much a one hit wonder for ‘Space Oddity’, a cult album artist, just beginning to play around with his image by appearing to come out in a notorious Melody Maker interview. He began the year releasing ‘Changes’, off the back of the arty-fairy December 1971 release Hunky Dory, and spent the rest of the year changing by the day as if profoundly offended that it wasn’t a hit, that he wasn’t yet a superstar, forcing everyone around him to change with him, to keep up.
Bowie willed it to happen that year, he was a force of tarted-up nature, and on 21 April 1972, in Manchester, he was at the absolute theatrical peak of his hyper-ambitious powers of persuasion. I was 15 – fresh innocent fan putty in Bowie’s hot, shameless 25-year-old hands – and it was only something like my fifth live gig, and there’s nothing quite like seeing a fully made up codpiece-sporting man-thing inspired by Clockwork Orange, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, Marc Bolan and Iggy Pop suddenly burst into dead, drab Manchester and set your life on fire.
Even better, he pretended, or actually believed, that he was a skinny alien pop star called Ziggy Stardust keen on mock-fellating his silver-suited guitar player in strobe-induced slow motion. This was what you wanted a pop concert to be – sort of a dream of sex turned into loud, fierce rock and roll theatre, every song a desperately sensational story about feeling weirdly alive and possibly immortal. He was already trashing his way through the life story of Ziggy Stardust. There were only a few hundred denim-clad earthlings in a theatre that could hold a couple of thousand, early fanatics inspired by fishy sightings of Bowie in orange hair and red plastic boots smooching with Mick Ronson on The Old Grey Whistle Test while playing music that seemed to fuse Led Zep with Liza with a Z, the Who with Dali. Acoustic Hunky Dory songs were the dippy-trippy soft centre for some impossibly exotic hard core Ziggy fantasy.
I was in the eighth row of the stalls – a 60p ticket nabbed the morning the box office opened – a couple of rows behind an adoring Angie Bowie. Bowie, as single minded as any performer I’ve ever seen, was some kind of demon acting like some kind of superstar ignoring the empty spaces in the hall, committing himself to turning us on, so he could turn himself on. By the time he returned to a sold-out Manchester Hard Rock in September later that year he had become the dramatic superstar he promised he would be. Fans were already dressing like Ziggy. The Free Trade Hall show was the spectacular sighting of something strange, wonderful and slightly sinister speeding towards its fantastic entertainment destiny.
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Long term BowieNet members may remember a review of the same show, (that we posted almost five years ago) from another of the few eye-witnesses, Tony Husband. If you didn’t see it back then, go check it out now, it’s a great read. (
In the same issue of OMM, Brett Anderson attempts to play down the Bowie comparisons in a regular feature called Soundtrack Of My Life. However, he still chooses Low as one of his five all-time-favourite albums. Here’s what he had to say…
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The whole Bowie comparison was overplayed, but if I had to choose one album that sums it all up for me it would be Low. I love the bleak, cold, machine-like nature, and the fact that it was such a brave move: at the height of punk he disappeared to Berlin and did something equally groundbreaking, but in a totally different way. The second side has strange instrumentals and the first has hook-laden classics like ‘Sound and Vision’, and both are as powerful as each other. Bowie is rare in being a huge influence who doesn’t disappoint in person. He’s very funny, extremely charming and slightly silly.
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Finally, in the review section, the Optimum release of The Man Who Fell To Earth gets a five star review from film critic Mark Kermode, who reckons “Only one man could have played the other-worldly lead in this timeless space oddity…”
Here’s the review.
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The Man Who Fell to Earth (Optimum)
‘David Bowie isn’t a great actor,’ says screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, ‘but he is a brilliant amateur.’ In fact, Bowie had effectively been rehearsing the title role of The Man Who Fell to Earth for years, his androgynous alien pop persona dovetailing perfectly with this tale of a stranger in a strange land.
Adapted from a novel by Walter Tevis, Mayersberg’s script (which he penned to the strains of ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Life on Mars’) posited a starman who comes to earth in search of water and winds up succumbing to the evils of drink. Peter O’Toole was briefly considered for the lead role, but director Nic Roeg saw Bowie as the natural choice after witnessing him in the documentary Cracked Actor
The combination of frailty, charisma, and exotic other-worldliness seemed a perfect fit for the enigmatic Thomas Newton, with Bowie’s mismatched eyes merely adding to the mystery. Bowie immersed himself in the role, allowing Newton’s extraterrestrial reflection to filter back into his pop career, with images of him featuring on the cover artwork of both Station to Station and Low – the latter featuring music inspired by the film. As co-star Candy Clark observed: ‘David really was the man who fell to earth.’ Thirty years after its first release, and in the month in which Bowie turns 60, this remains a heady, adventurous oddity. His fan base may have been young, but, like Roeg’s Performance and Bad Timing, this was X-rated fare, sold to the public as ‘a shocking, mind-stretching experience in sight, in space … in sex!’
This DVD includes the succinct 2003 doc Watching the Alien in which the significant players (but, sadly, not David) recall the creation of an off-kilter Seventies sci-fi classic.
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The Man Who Fell To Earth is released on region 2 DVD via Optimum on Monday 29th. As I mentioned previously, (01.20.2007 NEWS: PRESTIGE DVD AND BLU-RAY PLUS TMWFTE REGION 2 DVD ) we are hoping to run a contest, but I’ve not yet received the DVDs…fingernail-less fingers crossed.