Mick Ronson was the secret to the success of Ziggy Stardust: “The perfect foil”
A lot of people think of David Bowie as being a singular force in rock and pop music, someone who always carved his own path and was impossible to wrangle because of his lofty creative ambitions.
Throughout his career, he changed tack many times, with very few of these shifts in style and image ever proving to be a dramatic failure, and even when it did, Bowie possessed an almost infinite well of creative juice that allowed him to be able to recover and reinvent himself in an equally sublime and novel fashion.
Because of the fact that he used to create lots of different alter-egos as well, who would sit at the centre of everything, people often assumed he was the sole driving force behind it all. While only Bowie could truly be responsible for taking these creative risks that moulded his career in different ways, sometimes it was necessary for him to lean on the assistance of others in order to allow these high-concept ideas to come to fruition.
There have been a number of key secondary figures who helped bring his visions to life, some of whom were only present for a short period of time, and others with whom he repeatedly worked across multiple decades. Regardless of the duration of their time as Bowie’s collaborators, they were all integral to the development and evolution of his craft over time.
For example, his long-term production partner Tony Visconti oversaw many of the greatest transitions in his career, while the trilogy of albums he created in Berlin in the late ‘70s has the assistance and input of Brian Eno to thank, and on top of this, many of the guitarists he has worked with over the years, such as Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, have all been significant figures, making it hard to single out any particular individual as having been the most impactful.
However, when we think about the genius of Bowie, many people will gravitate towards his Ziggy Stardust era as the high point, where he established himself as the ultimate rockstar, only to deliberately kill off the character in an inspired move, and while the entirety of this period is perceived as the epitome of Bowie’s creativity, it couldn’t have been done alone, and there was one figure who he claimed was integral to it working.
The guitarist during this period, Mick Ronson, was an incredible musician who Bowie leaned upon heavily in the early ‘70s, with him working on five of his studio albums over a period of four years. While Bowie was clearly the force behind Ziggy Stardust’s existence, he claimed after Ronson’s death in 1993 that he was the ideal person to have on board to make the persona stand out.
“Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character,” he stated. “He was very much a salt-of-the-earth type, the blunt northerner with a defiantly masculine personality, so that what you got was the old-fashioned yin and yang thing. As a rock duo, I thought we were every bit as good as Mick and Keith or Axl and Slash. Ziggy and Mick were the personification of that rock & roll dualism.”
While there are many significant figures in Bowie’s career, Ronson is perhaps the single most important person Bowie ever worked with, one who propelled him to another level of greatness by being his trusty sidekick during a period where he was at his creative peak. To put them on the same level of duality as the core members of The Rolling Stones and Guns ‘N Roses seems like a bold claim, but in truth, the chemistry they had was something truly magical and rarely seen even in the greatest rock bands.
