Half a century later, no one comes close to Ziggy Stardust | Michael Dwyer
There’s a starman waiting in the sky. The kids are down here hiding from their parents in a million darkened bedrooms, scanning their devices for some hot new pop saviour to set them free, to say “Give me your hands, you’re not alone”. You know, like always.
That’s because he’s from the future. And outer space. Or anyway some place where time and gravity and the affiliated demands and ravages of show business can kiss his swishy white Kansai Yamamoto kimono. On record, Ziggy was half-baked to perfection: a bundle of cyphers and suggestions and made-up words skirting plot holes that demanded unheard-of leaps in teenage intelligence. That was partly because even as he was making the album , he was a work-in-progress, an expression willing itself into a concept.On the album cover, for instance, he didn’t even have the iconic haircut together.
“We are the future, now,” was his rather bold assessment. “The one way of celebrating that was to create it with the only means at our disposal … a rock’n’roll band.”