David Bowie pointed at a camera, and the world seemed to change
“It was a pudding, you know? It really was a pudding. It was a pudding of new ideas, and we were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past.”
— David Bowie
David Bowie was reflecting on the creation of Ziggy Stardust — character, persona and album, all wrapped up in a shiny, gender-fluid cacophony of colour and sound — in a 2003 interview when he made this remark.
While Ziggy was being cooked up in 1971, the world didn’t get to meet the alien rock star until the next spring. The album came out in mid-June. A few weeks later, in early July, Bowie joined the fellow Spiders from Mars on a telecast of the BBC’s Top of the Pops.
And, with a rendition of Starman, the universe kind of changed.
I read about this performance years later, in the early Eighties I think, and (YouTube being more than two decades away) didn’t get to see the actual performance for some time. It was definitely the stuff of legend, and still is.
There’s a real moment in the performance. In the second verse, after getting through some hazy cosmic jive and the chorus, Bowie sang the line “I had to phone someone, so I picked on you,” while looking straight into the camera.
He raises his arm, points to the “you” at home, and wiggles an index finger with a delighted smile.
It’s not an understatement to say that David Bowie transformed his career that night — and appears to have influenced many other careers, too. Those who would later say the performance had a dramatic effect included The Cure’s Robert Smith, U2’s Bono, Siouxsie Sioux and so many future performers. In the foreword for a special David Bowie edition of the British music magazine Mojo, Sioux indicated she was 15 and at a crossroads when Bowie pointed a direction.
“He was tearing down all the old cliches, but he was also having a lot of fun doing it. Bowie was well into clothes and dressing up, and that had a lot of resonance with me,” she wrote.
A high-resolution video of the performance is above. I’ve watched it many times over the years.
One of the things I love about the Top of the Pops performance? The fans in the background. While Bowie and his band are in full costume, the kids surrounding the band look like they came in off the street, wearing sweater vests and ordinary shirts; I love the joy in watching these kids shuffle their feet and clap along.
Plenty of other people were taken by Starman, too. In a third-season episode of The Crown, Princess Anne (played with consistent snappiness by Erin Lloyd) sings the song to herself while driving back to Buckingham Palace, and then hums the melody before heading into an ambush of a meeting with her parents and elders. (She turns the tables on them with drop-dead coolness.) The song seems like a symbol of change underfoot at the highest level of society.
British journalist Dylan Jones, an adolescent himself in 1972, was so taken by the performance that he wrote a book about it, When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes That Shook the World.
Later, after Bowie’s death in 2016, Jones conducted dozens of interviews for David Bowie: The Oral History, which I’m currently reading. In the opening pages, he has a personal anecdote about the telecast, and also how it’s human nature to embellish our memories. It starts with him telling his father why he wanted to write an entire book about the Top of the Pops performance.
When he asked me why, I reeled off the various elements of his performance that had been so challenging, so inspiring, and so transgressive. I described the way in which Bowie had toyed sexually with his guitarist Mick Ronson, the way in which he had dressed like a pansexual spaceman, the way he sashayed across the screen like a 1920s film star and, saliently, the way in which his flame-red hair, his Day-Glo jumpsuit, and the general glam colour fest had almost colonized the program. I explained that this was the moment when the ’70s finally outgrew the ’60s, when the monochrome world of boring, boring southeast England had exploded in a fiesta of colour.
My father looked at the floor, took a moment, and then said, very quietly: “You know we had a black-and-white television, don’t you?”