This is the David Bowie television performance that no one has seen in 38 years, and which Americans have never seen at all – up to now! As the story goes, Bowie visited U.K.’s longest-running music programme Top of the Pops on January 3rd, 1973 to showcase his then-new single “The Jean Genie.” The performance was only ever broadcast once – the day after its filming, and the tapes from that TOTP episode were duly placed in the BBC vaults where they were eventually erased so that the TV company could reuse the tapes.
Because of this, it was believed this performance of the song had been lost forever. But just recently, a TOTP cameraman named John Henshall revealed that at the time of his involvement in the filming of the episode he had been given an additional copy of Bowie’s performance for himself. The British Film Institute was told of the discovery and an exclusive preview screening called ‘Missing Believed Wiped’ was held in London on Sunday 11th December 2011. As a result of this, the BBC were very keen to once again broadcast it and following talks, it was agreed that it could be included in the Christmas edition of TOTP2. The video will also be broadcast uninterrupted and in full on BBC4 in January 2012 as part of a documentary called ‘Tales Of Television Centre’.
This version here is slightly different and more complete to the one which appeared on the BBC’s TOTP2 Christmas show on 21st December 2011 because there are less captions, no voice-overs, and it includes the full beginning. This edit is also EXCLUSIVE to ZiggyStardustTV.
in January 1973, Bowie returned to Top of the Pops for a victory lap: a triumphant performance of “The Jean Genie.” Promoting a new album, Aladdin Sane, Bowie was still dolled up in his Ziggy Stardust persona, with a crepe-style plaid jacket over his bare chest, a chain around his neck, and a shock of bright red hair. The Spiders from Mars emphasized the single’s martial stomp and Bowie wailed on his harmonica like he was worried the BBC might take it away from him.
“I wanted to get the same sound as the Stones had on their first album on the harmonica,” Bowie once said. “I didn’t get that near to it but it had a feel that I wanted – that Sixties thing.”
The music to “The Jean Genie” was inspired by Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man”; Bowie wrote the song’s lyrics in the New York City apartment of model-actress Cyrinda Foxe, then a publicist for his management company and later married to David Johansen of the New York Dolls and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. But the actual subject of the song was Iggy Pop, or at least a fictionalized version of him, Bowie said. The lyrics were about somebody who “sits like a man but he smiles like a reptile.” The title of the song was an homage to French novelist/dramatist Jean Genet – Bowie has told different stories over the years whether the reference was unconscious or deliberate – while the line “He’s so simple-minded, he can’t drive his module” would, in turn, inspire the name of the band Simple Minds.
Bowie regarded “The Jean Genie” as a manifesto, not just a 45-rpm single. The following year, in a Rolling Stone interview with William S. Burroughs, Bowie said, “A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.”
Bowie’s Top of the Pops performance of the song gave viewers a wide range of lifestyle choices, from his shiny earring to the lyric “strung out on lasers and slash-back blazers” to the alarming haircut of bassist Trevor Bolder. But at some point after the broadcast on January 4th, 1973, the BBC wiped the tape to save money. The performance would never have been seen again – except that cameraman John Henshall had employed an unusual fisheye lens of his own invention. Wanting the “Jean Genie” footage for his professional reel, he had retained a videotape copy. It remained in his personal collection, unseen for 38 years, when he discovered that his copy was the only one in existence. “I just couldn’t believe that I was the only one with it,” Henshall said. “I just thought you wouldn’t be mad enough to wipe a tape like that.”
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