The moment I’d been waiting for happened in Woolworths. It seemed incongruous that the artistry of a seemingly alien creative force could be for sale in a store that sold tea-towels and pick-and-mix sweets.
But there it was, in my hands at last. “Aladdin Sane”, the new LP record by David Bowie released 50 years ago this month.
It was the much anticipated follow-up to the Ziggy Stardust album, and there was a lot to take in, even before you slid the vinyl on to a turntable.
The picture on the sleeve became one of the most famous in rock history. It was taken by Brian Duffy in his Primrose Hill photographic studio where he, Bowie and make-up artist Pierre La Roche improvised a piece of music iconography.
The orange hair, the red and blue lightning flash across a meditative face, eyes closed, and a silver sheen to the skin, gave Bowie the look of an alien being.
The other-worldliness was enhanced by the drop of liquid just above his collarbone. A large teardrop? Alien blood? It looked to me as if it had been painted on by Salvador Dali.
The anniversary of the album and its famous cover is being celebrated at the Southbank Centre in its Aladdin Sane 50 Years Exhibition (April 6 - May 27), and will reflect the indelible nature of that image.
The music itself had been recorded at Trident Studios in Soho, London, and RCA Studios in New York, in the gaps between different legs of Bowie’s frenetic Ziggy Stardust tour.
For me, Aladdin Sane was more musically daring than Ziggy, but less coherent as a complete album. Ziggy was a pure rock and roll record with a beginning, a middle and an end - the prophetic “Rock and Roll Suicide”.
Aladdin Sane was a more sophisticated incarnation of the Bowie alter ego and musical ambition. It was Ziggy after absorbing America — more experimental, more edgy, but with a couple of tracks that arguably didn’t really fit in.
“Watch That Man” was a raunchy but unremarkable rock and roll opener, but was followed by the haunting title track “Aladdin Sane”, which is characterised by an extraordinary piano solo by Mike Garson.
Bowie had told him to play in an avant-garde jazz style that Garson knew, and the one-take recording on the Beckstein piano in Trident studios became the most telling couple of minutes of Garson’s musical life. He still dines out on it and talks about it in his bowiespianoman.com podcast.
The sumptuous “Drive in Saturday” - simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic — was a successful single. I remember listening to a record review programme on BBC Radio 1 in which panellists had to decide whether records would be a hit or not. One of them said: "Any song containing the line 'it's a crash course for the ravers' is bound to be a hit." And it was.
The next two tracks, “Panic in Detroit” and “Cracked Actor”, were also products of Bowie’s assimilation of America and his visions of urban decay and Hollywood decadence.
The song I used to play as a teenager more times than any other was “Time”, a theatrical, mini opera of a track in which Garson’s opening piano part sounds like it might be from an old-time Broadway musical. After all, nobody was into theatricality more than Bowie.
During the song there’s a verse which ends with the line: “…but all I have to give is guilt for dreaming”. Then, with flamethrower force, Mick Ronson’s guitar blasts out a searing wail of lament.
I tried to persuade my then girlfriend that this was one of the sublime moments of 20th century music. She was, however, much more taken by Carole King.
“The Prettiest Star” was reputedly a love song about Bowie's wife Angie. I think it doesn’t really fit thematically - but perhaps I’m influenced by knowing that it was originally written and released as a single in 1970 with Marc Bolan on guitar. If you listen to Mick Ronson playing the guitar part, you can easily imagine it as a Bolan cameo.
I never knew why Bowie did a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” for Aladdin Sane. Shamefully, I admit that I would sometimes pick up the needle and plonk it at the start of the next track, “The Jean Genie”, which will be familiar even to music fans who weren’t born at the time.
The final track was an uncharacteristically romantic, sexy song about loving a woman, with a sensuous combination of Mike Garson’s piano and Mick Ronson on acoustic guitar. It’s a brilliant piece of songwriting and a vehicle for a different kind of singing style by Bowie.
By now, the Aladdin Sane persona had worked its way into the stage act on the Ziggy Stardust tour. By the final concert at Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973, thousands of fans were turning up to gigs with the red and blue lightning flash across their faces.
Imagine how teenage fans like me felt when he announced on stage that night: “Not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.” He then launched into “Rock and Roll Suicide.” The plot was written in the lyrics.
I can’t remember how long it took me and everyone else to realise that this was simply the death of an alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, and not the end of Bowie as a creative force.
There would be another eight albums in the next seven years. Always changing, always innovating, always leading the way.
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