Bowie Style

The Aladdin Sane lightning bolt was Bowie’s most
recognisable insignia in the Seventies. “I came up with the flash
thing. But the teardop was (photographer) Brian Duffy’s. He put
that on afterward. I thought it was rather sweet.” Twenty years
later, when Bowie saw what Jones Bloom had painted on to this
Q cover, he described it as “cheeky”.
Bowie later described Aladdin Sane as “Ziggy
goes to America. I’d said all I could say about Ziggy
but I created this bloody thing, now how do I get out
of it.” America was, in Bowie’s eyes, “this alternative
world that I’d been talking about. It had all the
violence and all the strangeness and the bizarreness
and it was really happening. It was like real life. It
wasn’t just in my songs.” Unlike Ziggy, which had
been created in Bowie’s imagination, Aladdin Sane
was about the reality of stardom.
My Death: “I saw him do it in ‘73. I was so impressionable
then that he could have done a Rolf Harris song and I’d have
thought it was mega.” - Echo And The Bunnymen’s Ian
McCulloch.
The studious, Warhol-like detachment which Bowie
had applied to Ziggy Stardust barely got a look-in
during the Aladdin Sane era, which seemed to take
hold during the three-month US tour towards the end
of 1972. When Bowie made a fleeting national