“And I looked and frowned and the monster was me”
The current edition of VIVE LE ROCK! magazine (issue 70), has a 12-page cover feature on how David Bowie paved the way for punk rock.
It’s another superb Bowie piece by Kris Needs, who is more than qualified to comment, having rubbed shoulders with the midwife at both the birth of Ziggy Stardust and punk rock. Here’s a short excerpt from a much longer piece…
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“Bowie was something else, continuing to exert a strange fascination that towered above anyone else. Still reinventing rock in his own image, most recently he’d been flying as the ice-cold, coke-deranged Thin White Duke from ‘Station To Station’: last of his '70s masks and still unlike anything else at the time.
Those who’d grown up with Bowie considered him just about the only high-profile UK artist in the first half of the ‘70s treading a dangerously unpredictable path, making visionary new music, always different from the pack. It was life-affirming to have a cool superstar who opened so many doors and habitually trampled social taboos, fixated on what he was doing next with a method actor’s zeal, rather than recycling past glories; the past, present and, most importantly, future all rolled into one.
Punk came more like a natural progression than sudden impact for those who’d experienced Bowie’s rapid evolution in real time during those grey years between psychedelic ‘60s revolutions and ‘76’s burgeoning tsunami, bringing Mott The Hoople, Lou Reed and lggy Pop with him. By 1973, Bowie had already cleared the runway for glam with short, sharp songs, noisy guitars and outrageous wardrobes, providing the perfect antidote to progressive rock excess and earnest singer-songwriters while sky-sailing over the pub-rock barrelling in through the saloon doors as a rootsy alternative to stadium prog-on-ice.
Although presented as glam packages on the surface, ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars’, ‘Aladdin Sane’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’ corralled rock ‘n’ roll’s original primal wildness, French chanson, avant jazz and classic Tin Pan Alley songwriting into vehicles heralding an other-worldly future where encrusted social taboos had been chucked out of the window with the nearest TV set. Pop and rock had been remade and remodelled by Bowie when the next generation started making its own noise.”
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VIVE LE ROCK! is on shelves now.
#ViveLeRockBowie