The Fat Angel Sings

David Bowie had been on the British pop scene for seven years by 1972, but it wasn’t until this performance of “Starman” on the BBC that he truly established himself as a giant cultural force. It was the first time a mass audience met Ziggy Stardust and the newly formed Spiders From Mars. The appearance made Bowie an idol to kids all across England, and that fervor would soon go global as the Ziggy Stardust tour went on. This was the first time that made me a huge Bowie fan and the moment David Bowie pointed down the camera during his appearance on the BBC in July 1972 was also the precise moment that he became a major star

In the glory days of Top of the Pops you couldn’t watch things again. You retained them in the archive of your memory. People watched hungrily, believing it would be their only chance. It’s only slowly, in the years since 1972, that I realised that I wasn’t the only one for whom this was a key moment. The way Bowie pointed that finger, smilingly draped an arm around Mick Ronson, and looked beyond the camera to engage the audience sitting at home, stickily hemmed in by disapproving members of their immediate family, seemed of a piece with the new Ziggy Stardust persona we’d been reading about. It felt like an arrival long delayed.

People had been tipping Bowie for much of the previous year. His album Hunky Dory had come out just before Christmas 1971, with glowing reviews and a big marketing push from his new record company, but it hadn’t really taken. The New York Times called him “the most intellectually brilliant man yet to choose the long-playing album as his medium of expression”. In truth, Bowie was like everybody else, just trying to get a hit. The last time he’d been on Top of the Pops was playing piano behind Peter Noone on the latter’s hit version of his own Oh! You Pretty Things. Bowie’s people were furiously working the machine. His first release of 1972, Changes, was not a hit, despite being single of the week on Tony Blackburn’s Radio 1 show.