The David Bowie album that changed Cherrie Currie’s life: “The first concert I ever went to”
Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways has one of the great introductory sequences in the otherwise murky world of music biopics. Dakota Fanning meticulously does her makeup based on the cover of Aladdin Sane, cutting and dyeing her hair into that iconic ginger shock. She then stands, trembling in full David Bowie get-up, as the curtain rises on her slot at a high-school talent show.
She lip-syncs to ‘Lady Grinning Soul’, and when the first few heckles come through, she seems to solidify. Standing her ground and raising her middle fingers to the audience to deafening cheers. It says everything you need to know about Currie. Shockingly young, yet just as shockingly brave. Insecure yet strengthened by the bile of others. She still has a drive to perform but still holds part of herself back. Above all else, though, her totem, her strength, is the man born David Jones in Brixton.
Currie was a rock icon before the age of 20. Accurately described by Bomp magazine at the time of The Runaway’s formation as “the lost daughter of Iggy Pop and Brigitte Bardot“. Her rock-star persona was a mix of many influences, but she was a Bowie die-hard and has been her entire life. To the point that when The Runaways actually formed in 1975, each member was told to model their image after a rocker of their choice.
According to the documentary Edgeplay: A Film About the Runaways, Joan Jett picked Suzi Quatro. Lita Ford couldn’t decide between Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore so went with both. Drummer Sandy West picked Roger Taylor and bassist Jackie Fox went with Gene Simmons. For Currie, there was only one possible choice for her.
Currie elaborated on this in a list of the albums that changed her life she made for Goldmine Magazine in 2023. Alongside fellow titans Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin, Bowie’s deafening 1974 epic Diamond Dogs takes pride of place at number one on the list. Of the record, Currie says it “really turned me on to David Bowie. I was 14, I believe when I first got that record. And it was the first concert I ever went to, at the Universal Amphitheater, and it changed my life. It turned a surfer chick into what turned into The Runaways’ lead singer.”
This absolutely checks out. Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane are the moments that Bowie truly threw himself into the world of thunderous seventies hard rock. Sure, Ziggy Stardust’s heaviest moments still pack a punch, but those two records begin from moments like ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy’ and intensify from there. One needs to look no further than Diamond Dogs’ staggering title track, the sleazy slide guitar and crunching, overdriven blues riffs crafting a blueprint The Runaways would follow their entire career and beyond.
It’s a sign of how intensely influential Bowie’s work is that he more or less inspired an entire subculture with a trio of albums, let alone a subgenre of music. It says even more about how he immediately moved on from that and did the exact same thing with an entirely different subculture on his Berlin trilogy. Would all of us be so keen to adapt to the times and move on from outdated states of mind?
