The live album David Bowie called the “one of the most exciting”
When David Bowie was firing all creative cylinders, a peek at his conceptual fancy or alter ego would unveil a scrapbook of influence and artistic pilfering at its most versed.
It could sometimes be all too obvious, Bowie’s Outside dungaree grunge and scrapyard belligerence reeking of Nine Inch Nails at its most on the nose, but during his golden album run with RCA, each record would open a window to a new realm of experimental music, niche cinema, or esoteric literature.
One exposure to the haunting Low would lead to Kraftwerk and the broader Krautrock jams scoring the German underground, attendees to his chilly Isolar Tour would be treated to an opening screening of the surrealist silent short Un Chien Andalou, and further lyrical inspection of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ deceptive jaunt reveals a subtext of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche, a detail perhaps lost on Peter Noone, who recorded the number first.
Yet, no other creation of Bowie’s radiates such an affectionate glow of mosaic influence and inspired collage as his immortal Martian messiah. Sensing the glitter in the air first flashed to the pop charts by frenemy Marc Bolan, Bowie decided to ditch the hippy locks and svelte Pre-Raphaelite clobber and raid the fancy dress box, donning sharp jump suits, knee high boots, and an angular red mullet ready to unleash a new sci-fi poster boy for an army of kids eager for glam’s sugar rush escapism. Released in the summer of 1972, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars would stand as Bowie’s defining album, as well as the perfect jigsaw to his art student approach to his craft.
Whether gazing enigmatically downward on Aladdin Sane or standing triumphantly on stage for Ziggy’s final show at the Hammersmith Odeon, Bowie’s alien persona beamed Gene Vincent’s seductive swagger, Iggy Pop’s ferality, and Lou Reed’s ice-cool social lens. Visually, A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs shaped the Spider’s get-up on their iconic Top of the Pops performance of ‘Starman’, the routine on-stage wardrobe changes were lifted straight from the Japanese kabuki theatre tradition, and his former study of mime under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp instructed his gripping command of movement as the doomed rock archetype.
Yet, another major influence appeared among the Ziggy lore straight from the toppermost peaks of 20th-century R&B. Reeling off a collection of his favourite records in 2003 for Vanity Fair, Bowie reached into the soul canon as a foundational pointer toward some of Ziggy’s numbers, dusting off James Brown’s 1963 Live At the Apollo as an enduring standard.
“My schoolmate Geoff MacCormack brought this around to my house one afternoon, breathless and overexcited,” Bowie recalled. “’You have never, in your life, heard anything like this,” he said. I made a trip to see Jane Greene [sales assistant at Bromley’s Medhurst department store] that very afternoon. Two of the songs on this album, ‘Try Me’ and ‘Lost Someone’, became loose inspirations for Ziggy’s ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’.”
Brown would fascinate much of rock’s enigmatic frontmen, lighting a fire underneath Iggy Pop long before the garage explosion and coaxing a teen Mick Jagger to copy Mr Dynamite’s in his teen Dartford bedroom. Michael Jackson virtually deified him, and Brown’s work would find immortal life in the mountainous samples and breakbeats that formed the spine of hip-hop. Bowie put it plainly when casting his mind back to just how informative that little live record was all the years ago, “Brown’s Apollo performance still stands for me as one of the most exciting live albums ever. Soul music now had an undisputed king.”
