When everything was Hunky Dory

Much has been written lamenting the demise of the analogue world of the 1970s, a period of gatefold album covers and fantastical poster art, when rock music and the printed image seemed to be inextricably linked. It can be argued that 1976, the year in which our film Hunky Dory  is set, marked the end of that era with its famously hot summer.

As 1976/77 was my last year at school, it is perhaps inevitable that I should see it as an era-defining time – but there is a historical basis for the argument. By the time ‘77 came around, things started to feel different. Elvis was dead and photocopiers, cassette recorders and glue were being employed for a more DIY approach to both music and images.

Jamie Reid took over from Roger Dean  and the high art and grandiloquence of double (and occasionally triple) concept albums such as Tales From Topographic Oceans  and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway suddenly seemed very silly indeed.

Of course, to claim that any single 12 month period is a kind of ideologically pure ‘year zero’ is futile. Rock family trees are as surprising and confounding as any episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and however different Johnny Rotten might seem to, say, Peter Gabriel, the two are undoubtedly distant cousins.

But it’s funny how certain artists can emerge from all this historical confusion untainted, with a kind of epoch-defining status all of their own. For the Seventies, the one who seems to shine, literally, brighter than any other is David Bowie.

1972 was Bowie’s anus mirabilis, when he was catapulted into superstardom by one image in particular, which appeared as a full-page ad in Melody Maker in June of that year. Mick Rock, who photographed Bowie on his knees ‘fellating’ Mick Ronson’s guitar while on stage at Oxford Town Hall tells how Bowie both recognised and grasped the moment by getting him to crop all the stage lights out of the picture (so it no longer looked like a provincial town hall) and by signing ‘Love ya, Ziggy’ across it in a kind of lipstick smear. The resulting image created such a stir that Mick Ronson’s family had paint thrown at them in Hull.

In July of that year came All the Young Dudes by Mott The Hoople, which was written by Bowie, and in November came Lou Reed’s breakthrough album Transformer, which was produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson.

By sprinkling some of his stardust onto the terminally arty Lou Reed, it was as though Bowie had co-opted New York’s Velvet Underground into his androgynous cosmic club. And his lyrics to ‘All The Young Dudes’ showed he was already very aware of his unique position in rock history. (‘And my brother’s back at home / With his Beatles and his Stones/ We never got it off on that revolution stuff / What a drag, too many snags’.) The Bowie phenomenon was born.

John Lennon later said Bowie’s music was just ‘rock and roll with lipstick on’, and his onstage persona clearly owed a lot to Mick Jagger, but even if Bowie was no sui generis genius he was so much more than the sum of his parts. He was uniquely adept at combining image and music, and using his invented alter egos to bring his ideas to life.

More than anything, he knew how to spark and ignite teenage imaginations, which is why, when we embarked upon Hunky Dory, a film about a school rock musical, he became a kind of touchstone for the whole project. For a text, we took Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as it seemed to be the most science-fiction-like of his works (it famously the basis for the film Forbidden Planet). But, for everything else, we referred directly, or indirectly, to Bowie, the last of the concept album artists and, in so many ways, the first British punk.

He dressed up in homemade clothes, wore make up and inspired a whole generation of teenagers who felt themselves to be extra-terrestrials just like him. Spotty boys put on their sisters’ make up and dreamy girls longed to be taken away in his cosmic love craft, freaking out on his moonage daydream.

For me, the image that best encapsulates this world is the back cover to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, photographed by Brian Ward. Bowie, the newly landed androgynous alien, looks out from a red British phone box.

You can almost smell the stale cigarettes inside but he beams at us with a beautiful defiant smile. What is he doing in there? Phoning home, perhaps, or calling up Dial-A–Disc? We will never know. It’s an image that belongs to another country, if not another planet, called the Seventies.

Marc Evans is the director of the forthcoming film Hunky Dory.  

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