“Defiantly masculine”: The musician who acted as David Bowie’s perfect partner
It was bound to be difficult for David Bowie to stay with one band for too long.
He was the consummate musical chameleon, and if he was going to make the best music that he could, that meant flip-flopping between musicians and toying with what it meant to get the perfect take of any number of his songs. But even if he fell out with some of his favourite collaborators every now and again, he never took his fellow legends for granted when looking back on his favourite records.
Then again, ‘The Starman’ was never the kind of person to look back very often. It was always about pushing forward whenever he made a new record, and when he did eventually look backwards, he was going to make whatever style he listened to on his own. The only real time that he was overtly nostalgic was on his debut album, but since even he figured that one doesn’t really count, it didn’t take him long to don the massive haircut and strumming away on his acoustic guitar on Space Oddity.
But when he began writing songs that were outside of the usual rock framework, there was a lot more for him to explore. Living his life as one of the reigning kings of glam rock was awfully nice, but chances are he wouldn’t have traded that era for the time that he spent toying with musical parameters with Brian Eno or working with Nile Rodgers to create one of the most danceable records that he ever made with Let’s Dance.
At the same time, you can’t really ignore Ziggy Stardust’s large shadow on his career. Any number of his characters could have been a persona that he could live in for the rest of his life, but the reason why the red-hot mohawked alien survives is because of how much he put into it. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust is one of the clearest masterpieces that he had ever made, but even with all of those fantastic songs, none of them would have worked without Mick Ronson at the helm.
Ronson wasn’t one to get in Bowie’s spotlight all that often, but he was the ideal person to work with Bowie. Wherever Bowie wanted to go with his character, Ronson was usually the one following with him down that road, whether that meant getting the right arrangement ready for one of his tunes, or providing the perfect bit of ear candy on one of his songs, like that iconic guitar figure that opens up ‘All the Young Dudes’.
And once Ronson was no longer with us, Bowie said that he would never forget the kind of partner that he was during those formative years of his career, saying, “Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character. 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.”
Granted, there’s no one really arguing with that logic when looking at how they interacted with each other. Axl Rose and Slash certainly weren’t going to be as sexually charged with each other as Bowie and Ronson were at the height of their androgyny, but it was a lot more interesting seeing them feeding off each other’s energy than whatever run-of-the-mill rock and roll band was clogging up the charts around the same time.
Because as much as people like to spin a certain narrative around their band, this kind of partnership isn’t something that anyone can really fake. Most people can try their best to get anywhere near Bowie and Ronson, but this kind of telepathic relationship is what all great rock and roll bands are built on.
