The 1969 movie that inspired David Bowie’s creation of Ziggy Stardust
As David Bowie’s most recognisable and well-known alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust also felt like the most fleshed out, with a background, a plotline, and a message, because most of all, he was the product of a whole world of inspirations.
The name alone is an amalgamation of things that were influencing Bowie at the time. “the Legendary Stardust Cowboy,” the artist listed as one of his key inspirations here, and that’s not just another name he had for the character. Instead, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy was another musician, signed to Mercury Records. “He was a kind of Wild Man Fischer character; he was on guitar, and he had a one-legged trumpet player, and in his biography he said, ‘Mah only regret is that mah father never lived to see me become a success’,” Bowie said, fascinated by this eclectic man.
He stole Stardust from him, and Ziggy was a combination of his love for Iggy Pop and a tailor he used to pass by on the train. Combining rebellion and clothes, it felt like a perfect fit, but finding Ziggy’s attitude was harder. How does a person step into a role like that of a doomed, slightly dark, super dystopian rockstar? Ziggy needed to have an ego but also be an omen of sorts. By the time the first gig as the character came around in 1972, he’d nailed it, though, telling Melody Maker right before, “I’m going to be huge,” already in the mindset of the figure.
There were lots of key influences behind this as well, Iggy Pop again, the blossoming glam rock scene, space travel and so on, but the missing piece of the puzzle came from Stanley Kubrick.
Bowie was no stranger to the director, as his 1969 hit ‘Space Oddity’ was a riff on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then, around the time that Ziggy was taking shape, the filmmaker shared a new project.
When A Clockwork Orange was released in 1969, Bowie was struck. So shocking and so controversial that it was swiftly banned, struggling to find distributors who could get it anywhere apart from in seedy independent cinemas, with the film’s intense violence and also its futuristic glamour appealing to Bowie.
“My key ‘in’ was things like Clockwork Orange: that was our world, not the bloody hippy thing. It all made sense to me,” he said. Ziggy had to be far removed from the peace and love generation, and it suddenly felt like Kubrick gave him a realm to exist in.
In particular, it was the style of the film that stood out as the artist explained, “The idea of taking a present situation and doing a futuristic forecast, and dressing it to suit: it was a uniform for an army that didn’t exist. And I thought, ‘If I took the same kind of thing, and subverted it by using pretty materials…’ That Clockwork Orange look became the first uniform for Ziggy, but with the violence taken out of it.”
Obviously, Ziggy doesn’t quite dress like a droog in all white. But once you know the film’s influence, it’s easy to see the shape of it in the shape of his outfits; in the tight, high-waisted trousers, taking what Bowie saw as a futuristic fighting look but giving it a sparkly glam edge. That way, Ziggy wasn’t just an alien rockstar, but he was a sign of the end times, a dark omen for the future, a ball of chaos just like Kubrick’s film or Anthony Burgess’ characters.
