Gig 002 David Bowie

David Bowie
Oxford New Theatre
Tuesday 26 May 1973

My classmate Mick said he had a spare ticket to see David Bowie, did I want it? By Spring 1973 David Bowie was the biggest thing since the Beatles, all his albums, including the early ones which had done nothing first time round, were high in the charts, he was all over the papers and he was on an endless UK tour playing towns such as Taunton and Bridlington. This was the fourth show at the New Theatre on the same tour, demand was such that dates just kept being added. On Monday 25 July he would play two Oxford shows on the same day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. Mick offered me a ticket for the last of the Oxford dates. Yes, I wanted it and my parents, who were just the kindest people, said I could go. Wow.

Mick lived on the council estate adjoining our school. I’d been friends with him for a few months, like Richard he was a big music fan, his two older sisters had cool records which we used to sneak out of school at lunchtime to listen to. He was intelligent and funny but a bit troubled, moody, unpredictable. A few times I had come into town to hang out with him and a couple of girls from our school, Dawn and Hilary; we used to buy cheap cigarettes out of a machine outside the newsagent and just, well, hang out in town or by the river – it didn’t seem to matter that there was nothing much to do, nor that I didn’t like the taste of cigarettes. A small-town thing was a big step-up from the village thing I had been used to and being there seemed enough; with Mick you couldn’t be sure it would happen again. And anyway, what could I offer in return? Come and hang out in the village? There’s a shop, and a post office, and… In the early 1960s someone had stolen a wheelbarrow and people still talked about it. I’m not even joking.

Much – I mean reams and reams, whole rainforests – has been written about David Bowie’s appearance on Top of the Pops, 6 July 1972; a few more words can’t hurt, and the temptation is to be contrary and say it was no big deal. In fact I remember it as being pretty great. I’d heard Starman on Radio Luxembourg and liked it, that weirdly dissonant strummed intro, a taut minor melody leading into a sunburst major chorus, a guitar-led singalong outro with that elegiac thing going on. It was a sophisticated composition, and if it weren’t for the unmistakeably English vocal I’d have imagined was the work of a seasoned LA or New York tunesmith in double denim, possibly with a moustache. I had no idea what Bowie looked like so suddenly to see this insouciantly charismatic otherworldly figure, mildly amused by how much the camera loved him, was really something, even in black and white. The significance of Bowie draping his arm round Mick Ronson rather passed me by, I was only 12 and it just looked like he was being friendly. So yes pretty great, but not the defining tune of that summer – that would be All The Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople. Musically ATYD is Starman inverted (almost as if they were written by the same person), starting with a bittersweet guitar figure climbing down the major scale, arriving at a chilly minor 4^th before settling on a more reassuring major dominant. The verses follow this sequence, as does the chorus, but two bars in the dominant switches to a seriously menacing minor before lurching back into the original sequence via three staccato chords and one skipped beat. Lyrically ATYD shares with Starman the knowingly corny US hipster lexicon of the time (‘some cat was laying down some rock’n’roll’, ‘hazy cosmic jive’, ‘hey that’s far out’, ‘I’m a dude dad’, ‘what a drag’), but Ian Hunter’s vocal sounds world-weary, casually dismissing the Beatles and the Stones who by 1972 were like, square, man. The dudes weren’t having that hippy peace and love crap either (‘we’re juvenile delinquent wrecks’). An extra layer of menace comes in Hunter’s ‘you with the glasses’ monologue as the song fades, which felt like the start of some ghastly initiation into adolescence – at 12 you know it’s just around the corner, unavoidable, thrilling and vaguely terrifying. Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange had been released the previous year, creating widespread moral panic: amoral sex- and violence-fixated youth were out of control, ‘decent’ society under threat, bring back conscription etc. Bowie had co-opted the look, the dudes were the droogs, it was scary and exciting.

The evening of the gig I remember standing in the doorway of a shop opposite the theatre with Mick, Dawn, and Sarah, another girl from our school, slackjawed as the dudes gathered for the show. In the public mind Oxford is a seat of privilege, all tweedy aristocrats, braying toffs and future tory cabinet ministers, and yes it is a bit like that, but it has another side and that side was out tonight: mainly late teens, some in their early 20s, tough-looking lads from Cowley and the sprawlng estates beyond the ring road who might have worked all day on the car production line at British Leyland, done up for the evening in their sisters’ slap; their sisters looking impossibly glamorous and even tougher. Like the droogs, you wouldn’t want to mess with these characters, their flamboyance contained a definite element of ‘you want to make something of it?’. Bowie, like Roxy Music, attracted a predominantly working-class crowd, drawn to the inclusive transgressiveness of it all. To be into Bowie was more than just to enjoy a few tunes, but beyond the sheer confrontational frisson, it opened up whole new vistas: the New York avant-garde, Anthony Newley, Dylan, Jacques Brel, Weimar cabaret, Japanese kabuki theatre, Marcel Marceau, William Burroughs. Personally I fell big-time for Brel, was never that big on mime, and find loathesome cowboy Bill an insufferable pranny; my point is you didn’t get that from The Sweet.

If you’ve seen D.A. Pennebaker’s film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, filmed exactly one week later, essentially you’ve seen the gig I saw. The New Theatre is a compact venue and we were high up in the balcony, some way above the stage but with a clear view of the spectacle. A few specific memories: the opening number Hang On To Yourself, a fast tune played faster, Mick Ronson switching places with Bowie for the guitar solo and subsequent chorus, the single most exciting moment of live music I will ever witness; Bowie and Ronson stalking each other through the instrumental section of Moonage Daydream; the mirror ball spangling the auditorium during Space Oddity; the invisible-wall mime moves; numerous costume changes (kimonos and leotards, not quite as cool as the first Ziggy glam-droog look imho); All The Young Dudes!; the way the crowd loved Ronson almost as much as Bowie. Every song, including the slow ones, was lean and punchy – even given my limited frame of reference for live music I could tell this group, who had been on the road almost non-stop for two years, were tight as a gnat’s chuff. We had to leave during the first encore (Cracked Actor) which was fine, I couldn’t have taken much more.

The next day at school I was still in a daze, wanting to tell everyone who would listen. Mick wasn’t speaking to me, I never knew why, that’s just how he was. I can’t hold it against him, life-changing experiences are rare and he’d allowed me one of the best. Later on he would become a petty thief and, I suspect, an alcoholic; the last time I saw him he was passed out blind drunk in the garden at a party in posh Boars Hill. I hope things turned out ok for him. The following week at the Hammersmith Odeon Bowie announced that ‘this is the last show we will ever do’ – I didn’t understand that Ziggy was a persona so I thought that it was all over. Shattered doesn’t begin to describe it.