1973 ziggy stardust tour

• Ziggy Stardust Tour

Live: Hammersmith Odeon, London

David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust Tour culminated with two consecutive nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. This was the first of the shows.

It was the 153rd date of the tour. Attending the show was film maker DA Pennebaker, who had been contracted by RCA to deliver 30 minutes of live footage. However, once the concert began it became clear that a feature film was a far better prospect.

We hurried to the Hammersmith Odeon, where the next-to-the-last concert was about to take place. I had never seen an audience like that… made up of one gigantic group of back-up singers… they were wonderful. We were only supposed to do a half-hour show for RCA. It was supposed to be a thing on this new record they’d invented that could do visual and audio at the same time called SelectaVision and they only wanted half an hour. Five minutes into that night’s concert, I realised that there was a feature film here, crying to be made. That night we filmed bits of the concert, as well as the audience to check the lighting. It was an incredibly exciting concert experience, a long way from the Dylan concerts I had filmed for Don’t Look Back. And Bowie himself was stunning. I have never seen anyone turn on an audience, men as well as women, the way he did that night. The minute he strode out on stage I could see that he was a character looking for a film.

Peter Harvey from the Record Mirror interviewed Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Mick Woodmansey of the Spiders From Mars, at London’s Hertford Hotel where, among other subjects, they discussed a forthcoming tour of America. That tour never took place, and the following night Bowie sensationally broke up the band.

The first show was brilliant, probably spurred on by it being a London gig and that extra adrenalin you seem to find when the finishing line is in sight. These two gigs had been added to replace the cancelled Earl’s Court gig – the disaster a distant memory by now.

Steve Jones, later to become the Sex Pistols’ guitarist, lived in Hammersmith at the time, and sneaked into the Odeon with a friend before the show. They stole Bowie’s microphone, Trevor Bolder’s spare bass guitar amplifier, and two of Mick Woodmansey’s cymbals. Cook confessed the theft to Woodmansey when the drummer appeared on the radio show Jonesy’s Jukebox in April 2016.

‘I want to make amends for that, on aid,’ Steve said. ‘How much do I owe you for the cymbals?’ I still thought he was joking at this point, so with a straight face I replied, ‘A hundred and twenty thousand pounds.’ ‘No, I’m serious,’ he said, taking a sheaf of dollars out of his pocket. ‘Two hundred dollars,’ I said, which he promptly handed me. ‘Good, I feel better about that,’ he said. ‘It’s been on my conscience since then.’

Bowie returned to the Hammersmith Odeon on 30 June 1983 during the Serious Moonlight Tour, and 2 October 2002 for the Heathen Tour.

The setlist

• ‘Hang On To Yourself’
• ‘Ziggy Stardust’
• ‘Watch That Man’
• ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’
• ‘All The Young Dudes’
• ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’
• ‘Moonage Daydream’
• ‘Space Oddity’
• ‘The Width Of A Circle’
• ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’
• ‘Suffragette City’
• ‘White Light/White Heat’
• ‘Round And Round’
• ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’

Also on this day...

• 1997: Live: Pistoia Blues Festival, Pistoia
• 1992: Album release: Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby
• 1990: Live: Moncton Coliseum, Moncton
• 1989: Live: Tin Machine, St George’s Hall, Bradford
• 1983: Live: National Bowl, Milton Keynes
• 1974: Live: Curtis Hixon Hall, Tampa
• 1972: Live: Rainbow Pavilion, Torquay
• 1966: Live: David Bowie and the Buzz, Lion Hotel, Warrington

Want more? Visit the David Bowie history section .

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David Bowie’s Final Ziggy Stardust Concert: The Full Story

Having become ‘completely bored’ with Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie performed his ‘last’ show to 5,000 shocked fans on 3 July 1973.

When David Bowie took to the stage of London’s Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973, few knew what he had planned that night – not the fans who’d queued for hours in their Pierrot costumes, dyed mullets and lightning-bolt make-up, waiting to be allowed into the venue; not the camera crew hired to film the gig for posterity; and not even his entire band, The Spiders From Mars, with whom he’d been touring his breakthrough album, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars , since February the previous year. But when Bowie, trying to catch his breath after performing the latest in almost 200 gigs in under 18 months, declared that it would be the final Ziggy Stardust concert, fans and band alike were stunned. Having skyrocketed to fame with his alien alter ego, Bowie had just announced his character’s retirement live on stage. For those who saw no separation between Bowie the man and Ziggy the persona, there was one urgent question: what would Bowie do now he’d killed off his most famous creation?

This is the story of David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust concert and what it meant for him. Expect loud music, obsessive fandom and a rock’n’roll suicide.

Listen to David Bowie’s final ever Ziggy Stardust concert here .

The backstory: “i was wasted and miserable”.

Released a little over a year earlier, in the summer of 1972, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars launched Bowie into the stratosphere. Its follow-up album, Aladdin Sane , written while touring Ziggy Stardust through the US, sent him super nova: the music was more ambitious, the lyrics more enthralling, and yet Bowie’s commitment to the role of Ziggy had become all-consuming. Speaking to Rolling Stone ’s Cameron Crowe in 1975, while recording his Station To Station album , he admitted, “I fell for Ziggy, too. It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character… I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy.”

As the third leg of his UK Ziggy Stardust tour came to a close, planned European shows loomed, with a third US leg to follow. Potential live dates stretched into 1974, but Bowie couldn’t wait that long for it all to be over.

“I was now writing for a different kind of project and, exhausted and completely bored with the whole Ziggy concept, couldn’t keep my attention on the performance with much heart,” he wrote in the book Moonage Daydream , a collection of photographer Mick Rock’s images of the era. Not that fans noticed. Demand for Ziggy had become impossible to meet, even after Bowie began playing two shows a day when required.

“It was sold-out pandemonium and all the fans wanted a piece of Ziggy,” Mick Rock recalled. Speaking to Dig!, Spiders pianist Mike Garson adds that, not only did fans want a piece of Ziggy, many of them wanted to be Ziggy: “I remember looking to the audience and seeing so many faces with the David look,” he says. “It felt like Clonesville or something.”

Bowie, however, was done, his decision to “kill” Ziggy Stardust hastened when insatiable audiences began ripping seats from their fixings. “We got banned at a couple of places because of it,” Bowie later said. “I was wasted and miserable.”

The decision to retire Ziggy Stardust: “I wasn’t quite sure whether he meant he wasn’t going to perform live ever again”

Privately, Bowie had begun to confide in a few close associates about his plans for the future, and offered to help Spiders guitarist Mick Ronson launch a solo career without him. “I told him that I was close to wrapping the Ziggy thing up and he almost welcomed it as he was dead keen to have his own career as a solo artist,” Bowie later explained. “He asked me if I’d write a couple of songs for him, as writing wasn’t really his forte, to which of course I agreed. I would also do some back-up vocals as well.”

With the third UK leg of the Ziggy Stardust tour set to close with two nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Bowie began to set the wheels in motion. Though unaware of just what he’d be filming, director DA Pennebaker ( Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop ) had been commissioned to document Bowie’s final Ziggy concert, though a plane strike caused him to arrive in the UK with only enough time to see Bowie’s penultimate performance for reference. Meanwhile, Mick Rock was given a couple of days’ advance warning, enabling him to prepare to capture history in the making, even if he wasn’t entirely clear on Bowie’s intentions. “I wasn’t quite sure whether he meant he wasn’t going to perform live ever again,” Rock told Uncut magazine 30 years later, “or whether he just meant as that persona.”

The final Ziggy Stardust concert: “I had never seen an audience like that”

With the cameras rolling, both backstage and front of house, Bowie knew his final Ziggy Stardust concert had to be memorable. The Hammersmith Odeon’s house announcer, however, couldn’t have guessed how right he would be when he announced the start of the show: “Ladies and gentlemen, straight from his fantastically successful world tour, including the Unites States Of America. Japan. Now his home country. For the last time: David Bowie !”

As Mick Ronson hammered out the riff to Hang On To Yourself, Bowie leapt forward to the microphone, clinging on as The Spiders took the Ziggy Stardust cut at a rapid pace. But if Bowie was listening to the lyrics (“Well come on, come on/We’ve really got a good thing going”), he didn’t have time to process what they might, in hindsight, have meant to fans who were unwittingly witnessing Ziggy’s last stand. With the song barely over, in the first of many costume changes that evening, Bowie’s wide-legged metallic red, black and blue suit was ripped in half by stagehands, revealing one of his skimpy silver kimonos for Ziggy’s theme song.

Prowling the front of the stage in pale face, dark, ringed eyes and dark-red mullet, under low lighting Bowie appeared every bit the alien rock god he’d become, goading the audience into a frenzy as stage lights roamed like electric eyes, picking out the space-faces in the front rows. “I had never seen an audience like that,” Pennebaker would later say. “It’s almost as if the entire audience was made up of one gigantic group of backing singers.”

If Bowie was the space invader that night, Mick Ronson was his co-pilot, adding flair with one-handed solos and bringing songs in to land with a flick of the wrist and a thrust of his guitar. Introducing a new sense of theatrics to the rock concert in the early 70s, the Ziggy stage show would often see Bowie and Ronson circling each other mid-song, sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes aggressively, the guitarist even leaping on top of Bowie during Time as he unleashed metallic squalls of noise from his instrument.

For his part, Bowie brought all that he’d learned under mime artist Lindsey Kemp to the stage. A psych-tinged folk song when it was originally released on his self-titled second album , in Ziggy-era Bowie’s hands Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud was refashioned as a star-gazing set piece that built to the arrival of All The Young Dudes. Elsewhere in the set, the Man Who Sold The World ’s opening song, The Width Of A Circle, became a 14-minute epic complete with costume changes, a staged fight between Ronson and bassist Trevor Bolder, and a favoured mime act in which a “trapped” Bowie breaks through a wall and flies free in time for the song’s climax.

But nothing would be quite as dramatic as Bowie’s announcement before the final song of the night.

The announcement: “Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do”

After an encore in which Bowie paid tribute to some of his musical heroes, covering The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat and inviting Mick Ronson’s idol Jeff Beck onstage for a medley of The Jean Genie and The Beatles ’ Love Me Do, plus a take on Chuck Berry’s Around And Around (long locked in the vaults, the first anyone would see of the Beck footage was in Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream documentary ), Bowie, now in tight black trousers, a see-through netted top and open-toed platform-heeled sandals, hushed the audience for the announcement he’d been planning to make all night:

“Everybody, this has been one of the greatest tours of our life. We really – first, I’d like to thank the band. I’d like to thank our road crew. And I’d like to thank our lighting people. Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do. Thank you.”

With many members of his band as shocked as the audience, the closing Rock’n’Roll Suicide had never sounded so poignant. After being rescued from fans desperately trying to pull him off the stage, Bowie took three bows, blew a kiss and allowed himself a moment to survey the wreckage before leaving venue – taking Ziggy Stardust with him.

The aftermath: “What have I said? I don’t think I really meant that at all”

Indicating that Bowie was fast becoming one of the most influential musicians of all time , both The Beatles’ Ringo Starr and The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger attended the final ever Ziggy Stardust concert, and many more 60s icons were waiting to greet Bowie at the afterparty, which was held at the Hotel Café Royal, in Mayfair, and went on until 5am. But though the guest list included Paul and Linda McCartney, The Who’s Keith Moon, Lou Reed, Sonny Bono, Cat Stevens and Barbra Streisand, Bowie was too distracted by what he’d just done to take it all in. “I have absolutely no recollection of this party at all,” he would later say in response to seeing photos of the event. “Except that I do remember feeling incredibly relived that it was all over, the touring particularly.”

Writing in music weekly Sounds , rock critic Martin Hayman would call Bowie’s final Ziggy show “one of the best concerts I have ever seen”. But it was NME that got the real scoop. Having written of the rise of “Bowiemania or Ziggymania or a combination of the two” just six months earlier, in his report on Bowie’s 1972 Christmas Eve concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre , the magazine’s Charles Shaar Murray was the only outsider let in on Bowie’s secret.

“When Bowie retired Ziggy at Hammersmith Odeon in the summer of ’73, I was the one who got the tip-off,” Murray revealed 20 years later, “thereby enabling NME to have its ‘Bowie: That’s It, I Quit’ cover story rolling off the presses before Bowie had made the onstage announcement.”

There was no going back, even if Bowie felt some trepidation over what lay ahead. “About 48 hours later, I’m sitting there thinking, What have I said? I don’t think I really meant that at all. I’m feeling better already,” he admitted in 1993. “But too late.”

Bowie’s next moves: “He had made the shift. I think he felt freer”

Ziggy would have an encore of sorts, with Bowie sporting the character’s burnt-red mullet on the front of his Pin Ups covers album and wearing Ziggy-inspired costumes for The 1980 Floor Show , a TV special filmed across three days in October and broadcast in the US a month later. But though he hadn’t immediately ditched the Ziggy regalia – his most famous character’s haunted visage stared out from the front sleeve of 1974’s Diamond Dogs album , as rendered in an iconic Guy Peellaert illustration that remains one of the best David Bowie album covers of all time – Bowie committed to the next in a series of reinventions which would take place with increasing speed.

Less than a year after retiring Ziggy Stardust, he was back on the road with the Diamond Dogs Tour and an even larger-scale stage show which would soon morph into The Soul Tour, paving the way for his “plastic soul” album, 1975’s Young Americans . But only pianist Mike Garson remained from the Ziggy band. “I know I really pissed off Woody [Woodmansey, drummer] and Trevor,” Bowie acknowledged. “They were so angry, I think, because I hadn’t really told them that I was splitting the band up. But that’s what Ziggy did, so I had to do it, too.”

“Things like that happen in all bands,” Garson tells Dig! today. “I really think his creative energy and his Renaissance-man abilities to just change – the real chameleon that he was – he didn’t want to milk it for another 18 months, which we easily could have done. He was somewhere else in his head, and he didn’t want to get stuck in that space… When we did the Diamond Dogs Tour, he had made the shift. I think he felt freer.”

The release: “People would come out cross-eyed”

Bowie may have left Ziggy Stardust behind, but fans continue to want more. After ten years, several edits and a handful of small screenings, DA Pennebaker’s footage of the 3 July 1973 concert was finally given a worldwide cinema release as Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars – but it didn’t tell the whole story. Allegedly concerned that his flares made him seem out of place alongside Bowie’s space-age Spiders that night, Jeff Beck refused to clear his performance footage for use. And though a 2003 DVD reissue – with expanded soundtrack album – featured remastered visuals and a new sound mix from Bowie’s long-term producer, Tony Visconti, it has taken a full 50 years for the complete version of Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust concert to see the light of day.

Trailered by a one-night-only global cinema screening on 3 July 2023, the Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture (50th Anniversary Edition) 2CD and Blu-ray and limited-edition gold double vinyl reissues feature the entire Hammersmith Odeon show, with Jeff Beck’s appearances finally reinstated.

Over decades of screenings, private and public, Pennebaker came to understand that he’d captured a landmark David Bowie performance. “People would come out cross-eyed,” the director recalled while rewatching the footage 30 years later. “It has a profound sexual effect on people – any kind of person. Man, woman, dogs. They come away as if they had gone through some amazing sexual experience… It’s strange but – it’s partly the music and partly just the way he keeps the whole thing in the air. He never lets it fall.”

Buy the 50th-anniversary ‘Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture’ reissues here .

• David Bowie
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Vintagerock's Weblog. Just another WordPress.com weblog

David bowie ziggy stardust tour 1972 and 1973.

Posted January 9, 2012 by vintagerock in David Bowie . Tagged: blues , concert , concerts , gig , gigs , music , prog rock , punk , R&B , rock , rock n roll . 16 Comments

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Posted by Stuart Forster on October 1, 2012 at 6:53 pm

I was in the front row of the balcony, A22. £1.50 as well. He only played 1 night but the original 7.30 show was put back till 8pm and an extra show was pushed in at 6pm. the gig was briefly cancelled a week or 2 earlier in favour of a leeds gig. the evening chronicle quoted ‘bowie on off concert on after all’. i still call it the aladin sane tour.

Posted by Colin Crammond on January 9, 2021 at 10:35 am

My great school pal, Paul Ralph and myself queued overnight to get front row balcony tickets for the 8.00pm show. We arrived early, just after the 6.00pm show had started so that we could listen outside. We were at the front entrance of the Newcastle City Hall when this couple came out, around half an hour into the performance. They were complaining that Bowie’s ‘Sold Out’ and he was a disgrace. They were not prepared for the Aladin Sane era I think. My pal and me quickly picked up their ticket stubbs and knocked on the doors to be let in, explaining we’d had to pop out to make an urgent phone call. (No mobiles in them days). Amazingly, they let us in. So we caught both shows. A night I will never forget, absolutely magic.

Posted by vintagerock on January 9, 2021 at 12:27 pm

Great story, of happy memories Colin. Happy days Peter

Posted by vintagerock on October 1, 2012 at 6:56 pm

Aha Your memory is better than mine. I’ll edit my post accordingly. Now that you remind me I remember everyone coming out of the early show as we were waiting to go in.

Posted by Stuart Forster on October 1, 2012 at 7:37 pm

i’ll get a copy of the evening chronicle quote to you.

Posted by Stuart Forster on October 2, 2012 at 7:02 pm

i’ve got the article from the chronicle. email me and i’ll send it. [email protected]

Posted by brian Gibson on January 29, 2013 at 10:04 pm

Best Gig i ever saw june 1972

Posted by Rich & Lou Duffy-Howard on August 15, 2014 at 5:53 pm

Fantastic blog and stories, Similar memories of the Leeds gig – awesome and life defining! http://loudhailer.net/letters-from-starman/

Posted by vintagerock on August 15, 2014 at 6:32 pm

Happy days Cheers Peter

Posted by Brian Gibson on June 8, 2015 at 6:55 pm

My long term memory kicking into gear .. I am sure Bowie and spider performed Cream’s I feel Free at the 72 city hall gig with strobe lighting whilst bowie went off stage for a costume change . On the 73 gig during Jean Genie whilst playing harmonica he went into The Beatles Love me do .

Posted by vintagerock on June 9, 2015 at 5:30 am

Hi Brian Yes I think you are correct about them playing “I Feel Free” I don’t recall “Love Me Do” but that is also very likely Happy days Peter

Posted by noname on September 20, 2015 at 3:04 pm

Interesting. I remember, I think, the price was 60p for the ticket. Let me throw in a few memorybites & see if anyone makes a connection: Ziggy LP: US import [flexidisc] £3.15 when all LPs were about £2.50 at that time. Collingwood Buildings & a school in Fenham. Oh, & `St Moritz`. Ring any bells? …G.

Posted by vintagerock on September 20, 2015 at 3:46 pm

St Mortiz Aha! Gitanes for me Cheers Peter

Posted by martin Carrell on January 15, 2016 at 12:42 pm

Was at the Sunderland gig and you are correct he wore jeans, no costume. The Spiders as I recall wore white face makeup. It wasnt full as you say.

Posted by Julie Weightman on March 19, 2022 at 10:06 pm

I was there and loved it

Posted by vintagerock on March 20, 2022 at 12:23 pm

Magic happy days Julie best wishes Peter

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"It was glorious technicolor": Memoir by Ziggy Stardust's hairdresser is an engrossing, raucous read

Suzi ronson first met a woman in her 50s, whose son turned out to be david bowie. from there, it's history . . ., by kenneth womack.

David Bowie didn’t invent Glam Rock. That sparkly honor is generally credited to T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, who created a sensation when he sang “Hot Love,” decked out in a flashy silver ensemble, on the BBC’s "Top of the Pops" in 1971. But the Thin White Duke wasn’t far behind. Within a matter of months, he would emerge as the movement’s standard-bearer in the form of his flamboyant alter ego Ziggy Stardust .

In "Me and Mr. Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars,"  Suzi Ronson captures the origins of Bowie’s Ziggy persona in glittering detail. Fed up with school at age 15, she enrolled in the Evelyn Paget College of Hair and Beauty. Scant days after taking up hairdressing in a southeast London salon, she finds herself face-to-face with 57-year-old Peggy Jones. 

For Ronson, Mrs. Jones seems like just another client. “She’s a woman of about my mum’s age, wearing a tweed skirt with sensible shoes and the ever-present English cardigan. Her hair is thick and I’m sure it will take forever to dry. Like most other customers, she starts talking about her family the moment I get started. ‘My David is such an artistic boy,’ she says. ‘He’s always been that way, plays guitar and piano. He doesn’t have a lot of time to see me but I’m so proud of him.’”

And that’s when Mrs. Jones dropped a bombshell. “He was in the Top 10, you know.” The song was “Space Oddity,” the proud mother announces to Ronson with a smile. Her curiosity piqued, Suzi makes her way into the orbit of Bowie and his wife Angie.

In short order, Ronson is overseeing Bowie’s makeover from longhaired popstar into Ziggy Stardust. The musician once described the androgynous, otherworldly character as “my Martian messiah who twanged a guitar. He was a simplistic character . . . someone who dropped down here, got brought down to our way of thinking, and ended up destroying his own self. Which is a pretty archetype storyline” (Tim Morse, "Classic Rock Stories," 1998).

As it happened, Ronson’s makeover proved to be the icing on the cake when it came to establishing Ziggy’s alien image. Indeed, she would never forget the moment she caught a glimpse of the album cover for "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." “I gasp. My haircut is on the album cover,” she recalled. “David looks out of this world.”

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter , Crash Course.

Riding on Glam Rock’s satiny coattails —  and a new look, courtesy of Ronson — Bowie transformed himself into an international star. In the process, Ronson found herself traveling the world in Bowie’s touring party, an all-male affair that included her future husband, guitarist Mick Ronson . 

In her thoroughly engrossing memoir, Ronson shares one raucous episode after another as the globetrotting musicians and their fish-out-of-water hairdresser crisscross the globe. But that was then. These days, “my life flashes by in photographs,” she writes. “The day I met [Bowie’s] mother; the day I met Angie; the day I met him; the day I did that iconic Ziggy haircut; the first time I saw them play. My life was all black and white until I met David, and afterwards it was glorious technicolor, as bright as the hair on his head.”

about this topic

• Never forget David Bowie masterminded "the biggest art hoax in history"
• 50 years ago, David Bowie and Roxy Music made history
• That cover song at the end of "Stranger Things" Season 3 has its own backstory

Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography of the life and work of Beatles producer George Martin and the host of " Everything Fab Four ," a podcast about the Beatles distributed by Salon. He is also the author of " Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles ," published in 2019 in celebration of the album’s 50th anniversary, " John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life " and the authorized biography " Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans " (November 2023).  Womack is Professor of English and Popular Music at Monmouth University.

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David Bowie’s Final Gig as Ziggy Stardust Documented in 1973 Concert Film

in Film , Music | January 20th, 2014 2 Comments

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly brought you the ori­gin sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust , David Bowie’s first and most flam­boy­ant rock & roll char­ac­ter, as well as his lat­er rec­ol­lec­tions of those times in a 1977 inter­view on Cana­di­an tele­vi­sion. Above, see the doc­u­men­tary that marked the end of that piv­otal era, D.A. Pennebaker’s Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars , a con­cert film of Bowie’s last show as the glam rock kabu­ki space alien. (Part 1 can be found above, remain­ing parts reside here .) Bowie had grown tired of the char­ac­ter, feel­ing forced by his man­ag­er Tony DeFries to put on big­ger, more elab­o­rate stage shows (though there is spec­u­la­tion that record com­pa­ny RCA refused to finance planned US and Cana­di­an sta­di­um shows). In a lat­er rec­ol­lec­tion , Bowie stat­ed he was ready to move on:

I want­ed the whole Main­Man thing away from me. It was cir­cusy. I was nev­er much of an entourage per­son — I hat­ed all of that. It’s a relief for all these years … not have a con­stant stream of peo­ple fol­low­ing me around to the point where, when I sat down, fif­teen oth­er peo­ple sat down. It was unbear­able. I think Tony [DeFries] saw him­self as a Sven­gali type, but I think I would have done okay any­way. Now, I look back on it with amuse­ment more than any­thing else.

Along with broth­ers Albert and David Maysles, who made Gimme Shel­ter , Pen­nebak­er had an uncan­ny knack for being in the right place at exact­ly the right time in music his­to­ry. His Dont Look Back defined Bob Dylan for a gen­er­a­tion and launched the much-imi­tat­ed pro­to-music video  with cue cards for “Sub­ter­ranean Home­sick Blues.”

The epony­mous Mon­terey Pop doc­u­ment­ed the explo­sive 1967 fes­ti­val that “crystallize[d] the ener­gy of a coun­ter­cul­ture that by then seemed both bless­ed­ly inevitable and dan­ger­ous­ly embat­tled,” accord­ing to Robert Christ­gau . In 1973, Pen­nebak­er found him­self again posi­tioned per­fect­ly to doc­u­ment a piv­otal moment—the end of Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­dust per­sona at London’s Ham­mer­smith Odeon in what became known as “The Retire­ment Gig.”

Pen­nebak­er, who’d only just signed on dur­ing the final Lon­don leg of the tour to make a full-length film and who knew lit­tle of Bowie’s music, was as sur­prised as any­one when Bowie announced Ziggy’s retire­ment by say­ing “this show will stay the longest in our mem­o­ries, not just because it is the end of the tour but because it is the last show we’ll ever do.” No one knew at the time that Bowie would return, trans­formed into Aladdin Sane in an album of the same name  that year (with the same band—watch them do a ver­sion of Lou Reed’s “White Light/White Heat” above at 1:18:10, a track record­ed for, but cut from, 1973 cov­ers album Pin Ups ). The farewell con­cert opened with a med­ley of Bowie songs on solo piano per­formed by Mike Gar­son , who called the show “phe­nom­e­nal” (hear Garson’s med­ley above, begin­ning at 2:30, after the intro­duc­tion).

The retire­ment gig was the 60th of 40 tour dates on the third Zig­gy UK tour and was, in fact, a replace­ment for a can­celled gig at Earl’s Court. Find a full list of the set here . Bowie and the Spi­ders were joined onstage by Jeff Beck for two songs before Bowie’s farewell speech, but Beck lat­er had him­self cut from Pennebaker’s film, unhap­py with his solos, and per­haps his wardrobe. Though Beck was Bowie gui­tarist Mick Ronson’s hero, Ron­son remem­bers being too dis­tract­ed to be over­whelmed: “I was too busy look­ing at his flares. Even by our stan­dards, those trousers were exces­sive!” See grainy boot­leg footage from the show of Beck and his trousers in “Jean Genie,” and a snip­pet of “Love Me Do” (above), and Chuck Berry’s “Round and Round” (below).

via Net­work Awe­some

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

Lego Video Shows How David Bowie Almost Became “Cob­bler Bob,” Not “Aladdin Sane”

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (2) |

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Comments (2), 2 comments so far.

Actu­al­ly, “Aladdin Sane” was released three months before the Bowie retire­ment gig, not lat­er that year. The film shows peo­ple in the crowd with the light­ning bolt from the LP cov­er paint­ed on their faces. And “Pin Ups” was record­ed with the Zig­gy band, minus only drum­mer Mick Wood­mansey, who was replaced by Ayns­ley Dun­bar.

Oh this is won­der­ful ! I could­n’t real­ly see Jeff Beck­’s bell bot­toms It was clas­sic to me Mick and David look so strik­ing in their make­up Thank you very much Good text too

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When David Bowie Launched His U.S. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ Tour

David Bowie brought Ziggy Stardust to the Cleveland Music Hall on Sept. 22, 1972 for the opening night of the U.S. leg of his tour. His album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars  had been released three months earlier; this was America's first-ever glimpse of the budding superstar.

Accompanying Bowie were the Spiders From Mars: guitarist Mick Ronson , bass player Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey. Mike Garson also joined the U.S. tour as keyboardist, the fourth person to fill the role since April.

"He sailed over; he won't fly, his wife said," Cleveland Plain Dealer  writer Jane Scott said, shortly before her death in 2011. "Orange-haired Bowie, one of the most important figures of '70s rock, seemed a little awkward at an earlier press conference, but after his smash show, he eluded his security guards and was eager to talk about coming shows. We reporters sensed that a star was born that night."

Scott was spot-on with her assessment. A sold-out performance at New York's Carnegie Hall six days later turned the nation's heads and led to the tour being extended for another two months.

But as much as Ziggy was loved, Bowie was ready to move on by the next year – possibly due to a rift over money with the Spiders. In July 1973, on the last night of the tour, Bowie told the crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon: "Of all the shows on the tour this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.”

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David Bowie Setlist at King George's Hall, Blackburn, England

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• May 29 1973 Victoria Hall Hanley, England Add time Add time
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• Jun 03 1973 Coventry Theatre Coventry, England Add time Add time

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• markgw_bateson
• MutinyInHeaven

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“Ziggy Stardust”: How Bowie Created the Alter Ego That Changed Rock

A deep dive into the making of 1972 masterpiece ‘the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars’.

“What I did with my Ziggy Stardust was package a totally credible, plastic rock & roll singer – much better than the Monkees could ever fabricate,” David Bowie later said of his definitive alter ego. “I mean, my plastic rock & roller was much more plastic than anybody’s. And that was what was needed at the time.”
 In fact, what Bowie concocted on 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was more than just a fresh, clever concept. Ziggy was a tight and cohesive song cycle that laid out a visionary direction for pop music, setting a new standard for rock & roll theatricality while delivering his synthetic ideal with campy sex appeal and raw power.

“Listening to [ Ziggy Stardust ] was a bit like going to college, like the Beatles,” says Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, who has covered the album’s “ Lady Stardus t” in concert. “The songwriting is incredible … [I] loved every single song on the album.”

Bowie had been building up to something like Ziggy Stardust for a while. But the root inspiration for the album’s theme went deep into his past.

During the mid-Sixties, Bowie had met pioneering British rocker Vince Taylor, who had recorded the 1959 classic “Brand New Cadillac” (later covered by the Clash on London Calling ). After too many drugs and an emotional breakdown, Taylor had joined a cult and decided that he was an alien god on Earth.

Bowie’s fascination with space travel and science fiction had already surfaced in such songs as “ Space Oddity ” and “ Life on Mars? ” but he was being drawn toward something grander in scope. “Until that time,” he later said, “the attitude was ‘What you see is what you get.’ It seemed interesting to try to devise something different, like a musical where the artist onstage plays a part.”

He began developing a character based on Taylor, as well as on other eccentrics like Texas “psychobilly” singer Legendary Stardust Cowboy and Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto. “He always described how he’d take bits and pieces from all over the place, put them in a melting pot and they’d come out being him,” said producer Ken Scott.

Bowie dubbed this new creation “Ziggy Stardust” (first name taken from a tailor’s shop that he saw from a train). As he fleshed out the concept further, Ziggy became an omnisexual alien rock star, sent to Earth as a messenger. Bowie’s plot, loosely, was that humanity was in its final five years of existence, and Ziggy was dispatched to deliver a message of hope: He’s a wild, hedonistic figure (“well-hung and snow-white tan”), but at his core communicates peace and love; he’s the ultimate rock star. And in the end, he is destroyed by his own excesses and by his fans.

“Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman … this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the Earth,” Bowie explained to William S. Burroughs in a Rolling Stone interview. “Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starmen. He takes himself up to the incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real, because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist on our world. And they tear him to pieces onstage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.'”

It made a certain amount of sense – at least as much as, say, the Who’s Tommy. But it’s still unclear whether Bowie had planned Ziggy Stardust as a narrative, or if he retrofitted the story after he had the songs. “To me, three songs link together – ‘ Ziggy Stardust ,’ ‘ Lady Stardust ‘ and ‘ Star ,’ because they’re all about the same person – and after that, it’s a bunch of songs that work together,” said producer Scott. “I’ve heard people say it’s about a guy who comes to save the world from outer space,” said bassist Trevor Bolder, “but to me, it’s just songs.”

The band Bowie had solidified during the Hunky Dory sessions – guitarist Mick Ronson, Bolder and drummer Mick Woodmansey – was living together in a communal house. Rechristened the Spiders From Mars, they went into Trident Studios in November 1971 and bashed out most of the album in 10 days (remarkably, Ziggy Stardust was largely completed before Hunky Dory was released a month later in December). “They had to get the tracks fairly quickly because David gets bored,” said Scott. “If it took more than three or four takes, he’d want to move on. … David was the most amazing singer I’ve worked with; 95 percent of the vocals on the four albums I did with him as producer, they were first takes.”

“He made you play on a knife-edge,” said Woodmansey. “You couldn’t go for anything you weren’t 110 percent committed to.” The eventual opening track, the dramatic and ominous “ Five Years ,” was a “kind of end-of-the-world song,” said the drummer. “It had to set off the atmosphere for the album.” These sessions also included the mission-statement title song and five other tracks that would make the album.
But when Bowie delivered the music to RCA Records, the label said they didn’t hear a single. For once, this judgment proved wise; in response, Bowie wrote “ Starman ,” which would be the record’s breakthrough track, replacing a cover of Chuck Berry’s “ Around and Around .”

In February 1972, the band cut the new song, as well as final takes of the snarling glitter rave-up “Suffragette City” and the riveting “ Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide .” One song recorded during the Hunky Dory sessions, “ It Ain’t Easy ,” was also added to the Ziggy lineup; it featured keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman – who said that Bowie had asked him to join the new band, but that Yes had invited him to be part of their group on the same day. Once the recording was done, Bowie turned his attention to the broader Ziggy plan. He started talking up the apocalyptic epic to the media. “He wanted to change the music industry,” said Bolder. “He thought it was boring.” He took the band members to the ballet and the theater, instructing them to watch the lighting instead of the performances. “That was a revelation,” said Woodmansey. “We got into the practice of creating a show, rather than just making music.”

Bowie spent months crafting the clothing and image for the Spiders – including his own signature orange mullet – looking to out-glam and out-shock acts like Marc Bolan and Alice Cooper. Immediately prior to the show that would debut the Ziggy material and staging, Bowie gave an interview to Melody Maker in which he announced that he was gay.

But the first Ziggy Stardust tour of the U.K. landed with a thud, and when the album was released in June, it started slowly. An electrifying July performance of “ Starman ” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops changed all that, delivering the sexually charged Ziggy in full regalia into England’s homes. The album exploded, and by the summer of 1973, Bowie had five albums in the British Top 40, three of them in the Top 15. By the time he and the Spiders set off for a U.S. tour in September, it was pandemonium.

Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Lou Reed were hanging around rehearsals. Fans were convinced the band really were space aliens. When they stopped in Moscow, on the way to Japan, they were detained by armed guards and taken to see Red Square in a limo with blacked-out windows, for fear their appearance would incite a riot.

The adulation, and the blurring of the lines between Bowie and Ziggy, began taking a toll on the singer. “At first, I just assumed that character onstage,” he said. “Then everybody started to treat me as they treated Ziggy: as though I were the Next Big Thing, as though I moved masses of people. I became convinced I was a messiah. Very scary. I woke up fairly quickly.”

So in the summer of 1973, at the Hammersmith Odeon, with legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s cameras rolling for a concert film, the singer made the stunning proclamation that this was Ziggy’s final show. He confirmed in an NME interview that “from now on, I’ll be concentrating on various activities that have very little to do with rock and pop.” It was almost one year to the day after the Top of the Pops performance that had kicked off Ziggy-mania.

“Most rock characters that one creates usually have a short life span,” Bowie explained. “I don’t think they’re durable album after album. Don’t want them to get too cartoony.”

Bowie was sometimes dismissive of the Ziggy Stardust phenomenon. “Most people still want their idols and gods to be shallow, like cheap toys,” he told Cameron Crowe. “Why do you think teenagers are the way they are? They run around like ants, chewing gum and flitting onto a certain style of dressing for a day; that’s as deep as they wish to go. It’s no surprise that Ziggy was a huge success.”

But Ziggy had achieved what Bowie set out to do – he altered music forever by introducing the notion of the rock star as a fearless changeling who could recast image and persona when necessary, whether the audience was ready or not.

Years later, Woodmansey, the only surviving original member of the Spiders From Mars, tried to describe the experience: “You walk out into a place, and there’s 20,000 people all trying to look like you,” he said. “You occasionally think, ‘Hang on, I’m from Driffield!’ But everyone thinks you’re from Mars.”

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Like Some Cat From Japan

Bowie pictured in Chicago in 1973 on his Ziggy Stardust tour, sporting an outfit designed by influential Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto.

David Bowie with his friend Geoff MacCormack.

Golden Years

Bowie writing lyrics for Station to Station . “He would often do this right at the last moment for this and other projects,” MacCormack says. “I like the serenity of the image and wish I’d clocked which track it was he was working on.”

Mixing tracks for his 1976 album Station to Station with producer Harry Maslin at Cherokee Studios in L.A.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

Bowie laying down vocals for Station to Station at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood in 1975. “He looks to be in conversation with someone outside the booth,” MacCormack says.

Wild is the Wind

This photo shows Bowie signing autographs for fans en route to a vacation in Rome after the Ziggy / Aladdin Sane world tour in 1973. “David didn’t stay long, he wasn’t one to lounge around sunbathing and returned home after a couple of days, probably to get back to writing!” MacCormack recalls.

The Morning After

“We had a little party on the Trans-Siberian Express. We had a few drinks (copious) with some tourists and young Russian soldiers who said they were in the construction unit. David came off second-best on this occasion and I managed to snap the aftermath!”

Mirror Mirror

“This powerful image taken on the set of The Man Who Fell to Earth was a reflection in a mirror when David was having his make-up applied.”

Trans-Siberian Express

While traveling on a ship to Siberia to catch the boat train to the Trans-Siberian Express in 1973, Bowie signs an autograph for a fan while sitting with MacCormack.

One Magical Movement

A recently discovered image from The Man Who Fell To Earth set, 1975.

The Old Rancid

En route to Japan, 1975. MacCormack and Bowie dubbed the boat “the Old Rancid” (the real name was SS Oronsay ).

The Flamingo

Another shot from The Man Who Fell to Earth ‘s set, 1975. “The flamingo pose was a force of habit for Bowie,” MacCormack says.

Rock-n-Roll With Me Cover

The cover of Geoff MacCormack’s book David Bowie: Rock ’n’ Roll with Me , published by ACC Art Books, which is available now.

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‘Me and Mr. Jones’ Is a First-Hand View of David Bowie’s Rise to Superstardom, in All Its Glory and Cruelty: Book Review

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Considering the vast number of books published every year about David Bowie — or, for that matter, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Prince — a new one had better have either fresh info or fresh insights. Thankfully, Suzi Ronson’s “Me and Mr. Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars” delivers on both counts.

She was swept up into that whirlwind quickly, initially joining for British dates, then a long American tour and then, over just the first half of 1973, another American tour, two weeks in Japan, and two more British tours. During this time Bowie soared to superstardom and became the most successful artist in Britain since the Beatles — and then abruptly “retired,” although all he was retiring was the Ziggy character.

Through it all, Suzi Ronson not only spent many hours with Bowie – she handled his and the band’s wardrobes and was waiting with a cigarette and glass of wine when he came offstage every night – she had a front-row seat to the drama of his rise and its impact on him and everyone around him. Most fascinatingly, she experienced the fluctuations in his behavior, common to so many superstars: the way he could shift from cold and distant to intensely attentive from one day to the next — and how, on one night, a haircut appointment turned into an intimate dinner and the one time she slept with him (he and Angie famously had an open marriage).

Yet she also saw the brutal callousness he could display when it came to business (the musicians in the Spiders From Mars were notoriously underpaid) and when he sensed betrayal. When the group rebelled during the first American tour, after learning that guest pianist Mike Garson’s salary was literally ten times more than theirs, he launched a campaign that found him parting ways with all of the Spiders within a year. Drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, who had spoken disparagingly to and about Bowie during the tour, and bassist Trevor Bolder were seemingly singled out for exceptionally cruel treatment: Bowie not only didn’t tell them he was breaking up the band — they didn’t find out until he announced onstage at the end of the tour’s last concer t — Woodmansey was told on his wedding day that he was fired.

Suzi did not begin a romantic relationship with Mick Ronson until the very end of his time with Bowie, but they would remain together from that point until his death from liver cancer in 1993 (the same disease that would take Bowie nearly 25 years later). Mick had a more agreeable parting with Bowie and Defries, the latter of whom was positioning him for solo superstardom. But despite the over-the-top tactics that had worked so well for Bowie – a billboard on Sunset Strip, limos, expensive hotels – Ronson, although an enormously talented and charismatic musician, was not a superstar frontman. The book also covers that era, and whether intentionally or not, the sense of entitlement Mick and Suzi felt during that time comes through.

As has happened countless times, the lofty treatment and talk of superstardom went to their heads, although it wouldn’t be long before they came crashing back down to earth (and realized that those limos and hotel rooms were recoupable from Ronson’s earnings). Ronson was back in his more-comfortable role as guitarist and collaborator before 1974 ended, and the book covers his subsequent work with Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter and Bob Dylan – although it drops off, rather curiously and abruptly, in the late ‘70s.

Suzi, who would not see Bowie or Angie again after they parted ways late in 1973, is unvarnished and unforgiving in her opinions about the star’s cruelty. “He blamed [disloyalty and] cocaine for his bad behavior. I laugh when I
read this and don’t believe it for a second,” she writes. “It was raw, naked ambition, and a bloody-mindedness that is particular to a few people… It was revenge and control.

The talent, charisma, ego and survival skills it takes to become a superstar also tend to make people manipulative at best and cruel at worst, and this book displays all of the above in Bowie and more. “Me and Mr. Jones” is a first-hand view of the glory and brutality that comes with a rapid rise to stardom.

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