Posts Tagged ‘Starman’

DAVID BOWIE – ” Starman ” Top of the Pops on 6th July 1972

Posted: July 9, 2018 in MUSIC
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The moment he pointed down the camera during his appearance on the BBC in July 1972 was also the precise moment that David Bowie became a major star

48 years ago today, David Bowie played Starman on Top Of The Pops. And for many British music fans, Something changed in those three minutes. It was probably also present in the performance of Starman that he recorded for the ITV show Lift Off With Ayshea three weeks before that historic Top of the Pops appearance. But ITV lost the tape, which seems typical somehow.

Like everybody else on 6th July 1972, I genuinely remember seeing David Bowie perform Starman on Top of the Pops. It’s one of the few historic pieces of pop television. I knew who David Bowie was, had already bought his record and had even seen him wearing a dress on the cover of Melody Maker. That short appearance with the Spiders From Mars, doing a song that only got on the record because somebody at RCA thought it was a hit, felt like an arrival. It wasn’t just the clothes. Lots of acts raided the dressing-up box. The way Bowie pointed that finger, smilingly draped an arm around Mick Ronson, the way he worked out which camera he was on and looked beyond the camera to engage the audience sitting at home.

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When Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops singing Starman. That was the moment Bowie went above ground and nationwide. The hype may have led us to expect something edgy and challenging. The record was as simple and hummable a radio hit as you could possibly desire. For the post-Beatles generation coming into their albums-buying majority, the record wasn’t really the point. The point was the way he looked at them.

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.

DAVID BOWIE – ” Starman ” Top Of the Pops July 1972

Posted: January 16, 2016 in MUSIC
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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.

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