Oliver James: Upping Your Ziggy

This book could be a life-saver.

I love Oliver James but he could just say David was fucked up about fucking his step-brother, Terry.

David Bowie: Top Of The Pops

"I was a gay 12 year-old just starting to take an interest in pop music and I was knocked out.
"I was watching with my mother who said, Oh he looks like Glenda Jackson playing Elizabeth I - which in retrospect was quite perceptive.
"And then came the famous moment on the show when David Bowie slung his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson - which was simultaneously blokey but also a bit gay. It may not sound like much now but in 1972 it was a revolution.
"A few months before the TOTP appearance, Bowie said on the record in the Melody Maker that he was gay - or at least bisexual. 
"Looking back now, the statement was ambiguous but at the time it was a brave thing to say - it was only five years since homosexual acts had been legalised in Britain.
"I didn't find David Bowie at all attractive in any physical way. But I loved what he stood for.
"He clearly knew his way around gay culture in terms of its writing and music and visual art. "More than anyone else, he blasted the closet-door off its hinges. So for that I'll always love him - but his position on the politics of sexuality is a conflicted one. If, like me, you're a big Bowie fan you just have to accept that.
"At the very least in the '70s he was a pioneer of sexual openness in Britain. It was a long time before anyone came along in music who was unambiguously gay. Arguably in Britain, that title goes to Jimmy Somerville but Bowie paved the way."

Rupert Smith quoted in a BBC News magazine feature David Bowie: Did He Change Attitudes To Sexuality?
I've compiled them together and left out all the other bits in the article using Bryon Gysin and William Burrough's cut-up technique - as a tribute to the enduring cultural legacy of David Bowie.
I don't care about you, but I'm a bit over-stuffed with reading everyone saying how wonderful Bowie is right now, but I liked this.

PS I also liked Tilda Swinton's tribute to the Dame at the opening of David Bowie Is.

Olympics: Is That It?

Well, if even a miserable old cynic like me enjoyed Danny Boyle's Olympics Opening Ceremony spectacular, it must have had something going for it.
One point though - which I hope doesn't sound too parochial (or like a knee-jerk gay journalist's Dave Spartism).
The ceremony was clearly trying to show what a wonderfully diverse and inclusive place modern Britain has become - particularly the second half.
And it picked as two of a handful of historic moments that made modern Britain, the Suffragettes and Windrush.
So where were we?
It seems incongruous as so much of the soundtrack (Kinks, Queen, Bowie, Frankie...)* hinted at what a queer old place this is.
I may have missed something, but all I saw was a snippet of the "Brookside lesbian kiss".
But this was so brief I doubt hardly anyone would realise what was going on if they didn't know of the fabled "Brookside lesbian kiss". **
[The kissing segment is 1.05 in here. I'd estimate the Brookside bit is two or three seconds long - out of an 80 minute show! If anyone's fast enough to actually time it, please let me know].
There was one other thing, that I'm not too sure about - again it was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it-moment.

As the Queen and James Bond flew over London there was a few fleeting seconds of the scene on the right.
It could just be some men in their best suits drinking Champagne - or is it meant to be a civil partnership?
As with the above was it deliberately brief, and vague - and thus really a quite pointless gesture.
Wouldn't this have been something to go big on, if you wanted to show the world how much this country's changed for the better?

Update: Unfeasibly right-wing Tory MP Aidan Burley calls the ceremony "leftie multicultural crap". Not a patch on Berlin 1936, eh Aidan?

* There was a distant clip of Bowie doing Starman on Top Of The Pops, which you could call a pretty seminal gay moment, but this had no context.

** Postscript: The Guardian online calls the kiss a "Little-noticed 'special statement'" - it's hardly much of a statement if hardly anyone noticed it. I think this was intentional.

Ziggy Stardust: Who She?

 
'On Thursday 6 July 1972, halfway through an edition of Top of the Pops, David Bowie performed his new single, Starman. Dressed in a multicoloured lycra jumpsuit, he put his arm languidly round his guitarist Mick Ronson and looked seductively into his eyes. Now, exactly 40 years later, Dylan Jones has written a 200-page book, When Ziggy Played Guitar, all about those three-and-a-half minutes of television. "It was thrilling, slightly dangerous, transformative," writes Jones, who was 12 at the time. "For me, and for those like me, it felt that the future had finally arrived."
'...But did this moment really "create havoc in millions of sitting rooms all over Britain", as Jones suggests? We do not know, because no fossil record of its contemporary effect on viewers remains. In 1972 there were no Twitter hashtags to collate an instant collective response, and it was only in the 1980s that newspapers, faced with declining readerships, really began to cling parasitically to the younger medium of television as a source of comment and gossip. So Bowie's performance inspired no press coverage or public reaction at the time, simply vanishing into the ether to make way for The Goodies at 8pm."

Joe Moran - one of Fagburn's most favourite writers by the Billy way - in The Guardian questions the hype, fetishism, overstatement and false memory syndrome about Ziggy Stardust.
A great piece as per.
I think it's safe to assume if this book he writes of is by Tory dickwad Dylan Jones it'll be as crap as a dog turd.
Joe, I've never figured if you're gay, but if you are, drop us an email and we can go for a date.
I have discount vouchers for Pizza Express.
Warning! I'm even more boring in real life.
Though that might be a come-on to you.

Ziggy Stardust: 40 Years On

On Thursday June 6th 1972, just after 7pm, David Bowie performed Starman on Top Of The Pops.
For many confused young viewers suddenly tomorrow looked wonderful.

Ziggy Changed My Life: Lipstick Traces

Okay, maybe this one doesn't look too good on paper.
A radio documentary about Ziggy Stardust written and presented by Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet fame - but it was pretty good.
Kemp can be a thoughtful writer (I remember Julie Burchill once saying how shocked she was at how good he was) and forty years ago, he was there.
A working-class lad from north London who had his world turned upside down by Ziggy Stardust, Kemp was also a witness to Ziggy's legendary farewell performance at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973.
At times this seemed a bit York Notes; racing through a litany of the influences David Bowie fed off for his greatest creation; Little Richard, Vince Taylor, Lindsay Kemp, Andy Warhol blah blah blah.
Its strength lay in the interviews with a number of Bowie's friends and collaborators, most hilariously Spiders Woody and Trevor, two very straight blokes from Hull wondering how far into poovery they were being taken.
There are also some great little jolts about how threatening many found this at the time, like the TV producer who didn't want "those perverts" on his show.
Kemp is particularly good on how thrilling he found it all, it was, he has written, his "teenage crush".
John Lennon once quipped about Bowie's early 70s model/s; "It's great - but it's just Rock n Roll with lipstick on."
This programme shows why Ziggy Stardust meant so much more than just that.

PS If you're reading this in the not-too-distant future and the above i-Player link has expired, it's being repeated on BBC Radio 2 on June 6th - your actual 40th anniversary of the album's release.

Ziggy Stardust: Still

The plaque to Ziggy Stardust on London's Heddon Street is being unveiled today.
Staring at this record sleeve as a kid always gave me a thrilling sense of otherness, like there was another world out there, maybe waiting just around the corner.
A sea of im/possibilities.
Still does.
Never a big fan of the heritage rock industry, me, but something about this still moves me. 
Still.

Update: The unveiling leads to John Walsh remember being a teenage Ziggy fan in The Independent.
Gets kudos for not mentioning his first sighting of Ziggy on Old Grey Whistle Test/Top Of The Pops and wibbling on about how life was instantly transformed...

David Bowie: "Oh man I need TV when I got T. Rex..."

This is a week old, but Fagburn makes no great apologies on this one.
I'd pulled it out of the paper to read later, but had put it off.
One, because it was Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet fame.
And two, because it was one of those "David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust changed my life" features, and although I'm quite the fan, I've read rather a lot of people saying that over the the years.
I have to concede Mr Kemp starts out rather well; "The first time I fell in love it was with a man. It happened one Thursday evening in the bedroom of a flat in King's Cross. I was a wide-eyed boy of 12 and the object of my passion had dyed orange hair and white nail varnish. Looking out from a tiny TV screen was a Mephistophelean messenger from the space age, a tinselled troubadour to give voice to my burgeoning sexuality. Pointing a manicured finger down the barrel of a BBC lens, he spoke to me: "I had to phone someone, so I picked on you." I had been chosen."
But Kemp also pointed out something simple but obvious about why Glam Rock turned the world of Pop day-glo in the early 70s, that I'd never seen anyone mention before.
"In 1971, [our family's] telly went colour."
And it's true. That was the time when colour TVs first became pretty standard in Britain's homes, hence the arrival of all those over-painted boys in their technicolour leotards and their shockingly dyed hair, just like David.
Another victory for Occam's Razor!