within. Depicting Bowie reclining on
a couch in a dress, it was to be an early
venture into the androgyny he explored
more fully in such later albums as Ziggy
Stardust and Aladdin Sane. With much
of the album being typical of the British
rock movement that was going on at
the beginning of the 1970s, The Man
Who Sold the World also touched upon
the likes of glam rock and Latin
sounds – sounds that Bowie
would use more and more over the
following years.
Bowie’s follow-up to The Man
Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory,
would come out only a year later.
The album saw a partial return
the folkier sound of Space Oddity,
with songs such as Kooks, as
well as more harrowing tracks
such as The Bewlay Brothers,
Oh! You Pretty Things, and the
Velvet Underground inspired
Queen Bitch. Hunky Dory was a
major foray into showmanship,
something that Bowie felt was incredibly
important for a pop singer of that era.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in early April
1971, Bowie asserted, ‘I refuse to be
thought of as mediocre,’ adding, ‘If I am
mediocre, I’ll get out of the business.
There’s enough fog around. That’s why
the idea of performance as a spectacle is
so important to me.’
In spite of neither the album nor its
first single, Changes, making a huge
impression on the charts, they certainly
laid the foundations for Bowie’s ascent
to the top of the pop world – a world
that would give him four Top 10 albums
and eight Top 10 singles in the United
Kingdom in eighteen short months
spread over 1972 and 1973.In an interview with International
Musician magazine in December 1991,
Tony Horkins introduced one of his
questions in this way, ‘... it was definitely
a reaction to late sixties seriousness, and
the real murky quality that rock was
falling into. I think a bunch of us adopted
the opposite stance. I remember at the
time saying that rock must prostituteitself. And I’ll stand by that. If you’re
going to work in a whorehouse, you’d
better be the best whore in it.’ What he
was talking about, of course, was Bowie,
and in particular the character of Ziggy
Stardust, for it was the concept album of
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars that would come next
for the former David Jones.
Taking his androgyny a step
further, the character of Ziggy
Stardust was a boyish man-alien
with red hair and a pale face.
Returning to the rocking sound
of The Man Who Sold the World,
Bowie revelled in the glam rock
trappings of the era, essentially
making the sound his own, with
his lighter and faster versions of the
typical T. Rex fare.
In an interview with Charles
Wooley in 2002, Wooley described
the album as being the point at
which Bowie’s career really took
off, and inspired others, stating, ‘In
the course of events, it was one song that
changed David Bowie’s life. The release
of Space Oddity in 1967 saw his career
lift off. But it was the landmark Ziggy
Stardust album of the early seventies that
launched Bowie into the stellar orbit of
rock superstardom. So began a crazy,
drug-filled ride that was to redefine
modern music. Along the way, theA young David Bowie in 1966.
“I refuse to be thought of as
mediocre. If I am mediocre,I’ll get out of the business.
There’s enough fog around.
That’s why the idea of
performance-as-spectacle is
so important to me.”
DAVID BOWIE