Hallucinogenic dream

One of the great things about working in a collapsing industry is the cornucopia of possibilities that begins to open up of all the stuff you could do instead. In the past 18 months I have toyed with becoming: a speechwriter, a radio shock jock, a YouTube cult, a think tank senior visiting fellow, a TV star, a corporate communications director, an internet entrepreneur, a self-help book author, a Buteyko guru, a truck driver at an Australian mine, a gold bug, a fixer, an after-dinner speaker, a stand-up comic, an MEP. Some of it might actually happen.

So I think I have a pretty good idea what David Bowie was going through in 1972 in the run-up to recording Ziggy Stardust — whose 40th anniversary was celebrated by Jarvis Cocker and friends in a BBC4 documentary this week (Friday). Bowie knew he was destined to be something really special. He just couldn’t quite make up his mind what, that’s all.

You can hardly blame him for his confusion. For ten years, by that stage, he had been slogging away at his showbiz career, mostly to little effect. He’d dabbled with being: a mod ‘face’, a mime artiste (with Lindsay Kemp), a winsome folkie, an actor in an ice-cream commercial, a novelty pop one-hit wonder (‘Space Oddity’ — which went to number one on the back of the Apollo 11 landing), Tony Newley…

Had his career as a proto-Tony Newley taken off, one commentator observed, Bowie might easily have ended up in light entertainment. Instead, the first Bowie experiment that truly caught the public imagination was his proto-glam rock concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Within three days of performing it on Top of the Pops, he had gone from virtual nobody to Beatles-like levels of adulation — mobbed wherever he went, desperate girls camped outside his home, quite unable to go shopping without being given everything free.