The rock icon David Bowie called “a mindless twerp”
To say that David Bowie was a chameleon throughout his career would be a drastic understatement. From one album to the next, Bowie was known for taking his sound in every direction that suited him, going from glam-rock messiah to new wave troubadour to MTV darling within a few years. While Bowie was known for moulding himself into an icon, he felt that one of his fellow legends was far from what he was made out to be.
Even before he secured a proper record deal, though, Bowie was known for going against the grain. After spending the first half of the 1960s strumming an acoustic guitar and playing folk tunes, The Starman finally crashlanded on Earth with ‘Space Oddity’, boasting one of the sharpest melodies he would ever write.
From there, Bowie sought to take his space-age visions even further, eventually crafting himself into an alien icon with Ziggy Stardust. On the alien’s namesake album, Bowie was known for toying with the confines of rock and roll, playing songs that were indebted to the genre’s glory days like ‘Suffragette City’ while also making songs that were more atmospheric like ‘Moonage Daydream’.
Of all the songs on Ziggy Stardust, though, ‘Hang On To Yourself’ would be a progenitor to an all-new genre. While Bowie had tried his hand at heavy music on The Man Who Sold The World, the energy and speed behind this one track would be useful years later when the punk movement began picking up steam.
Adding a dose of nervy energy into rock and roll, bands like Ramones and The Clash were making songs that cut to the chase from the moment they started, either singing about the dangers of living in the city or rallying against the world’s injustices. Even though many artists could claim to represent the punk ethos, no one took that chaotic mindset as seriously as the Sex Pistols.
While John Lydon was known for making some of the most shocking lyrics of all time on Nevermind the Bollocks, the real icon of the band was Sid Vicious. Despite not being the most capable musician, Vicious represented everything that punk stood for, from the spiky hair to the leather jacket to the general ‘piss-off’ attitude that he carried with him every single day.
By the time the band had crashlanded in England, though, Bowie was long gone from glam, having traded in his sound for more adventurous artistic statements on albums like Low and “Heroes”. While Bowie may have been able to appreciate what punk represented, he thought that Vicious was one of the most overrated symbols of rebellion he had ever seen.
When discussing the punk movement in the 1980s, Bowie was candid about how little he thought of Vicious, telling Rolling Stone, “I only met Sid twice, I think. [He was] just a mindless twerp. I didn’t find anything at all romantic about him or even interesting. I think he was just completely under the charisma of Rotten. Whatever Johnny said, Sid would jump on it”.
That’s not to say that Bowie didn’t appreciate punk, becoming lifelong friends with the genre’s godfather, Iggy Pop. While Sex Pistols may have spat in the face of everything that Bowie had stood for in the 1970s, ‘The Starman’ was already off in search of new lands by the time the group had split up.
