Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

yet most of them had been assembled with
astonishing speed within the previous few weeks. In
the wake of Hunky Dory’s writing blitz, this was
impressive. Yet that was, literally, only half the story.
Bowie’s on-stage chatter at Aylesbury showed him
struggling to articulate his obsessions with
Americana, figureheads like Dylan, Reed and
Warhol, and the ‘presumptuousness of the
songwriter’. Bowie’s invention of Ziggy Stardust, a
concept that would encompass all these diverse
obsessions was simple, like all great ideas.
In later years, David Bowie would claim the idea
of Ziggy Stardust came to him in a dream – gifted by
the same god who had told his father to find a job at
a children’s charity. If so, like ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’,
it was an unconscious embodiment of all the skills
that he’d mastered in the last few years.
David had experimented with a ‘rock opera’ back
in 1968, when he’d worked on a sequence entitled
‘Ernie Johnson’ at Ken Pitt’s apartment – a bizarre,
camp, cockney epic which culminated in the titular
hero’s suicide. In comparison, Ziggy Stardust wasn’t
really an opera, more a collection of snapshots
thrown together, edited later into a sequence that
made sense. The notion that Ziggy would be David’s
own alter-ego emerged only at the last minute; it was
a bodge-job, later refined into a concept.
Ziggy was David’s homage to the outsider; the
main inspiration was undoubtedly Iggy, the singer
with whom David was obsessed and whose
doomed, Dionysian career path had already built its
own mythology. David was well aware, though, that