With Weird and Gilly...

He played guitar didn’t he?

He did - jamming good with Weird and Gilly - two of Bowie's band mates in The Spiders From Mars: bassist Trevor Bolder (he of the magnificent sideburns) and drummer Woody Woodmansey.

Oh, what a day in 1972 when 15 year old me was first blown away by this album. My hair turned bright red almost overnight as Noddy Holder’s mirrored top hat was forgotten and Marc Bolan’s satin jacket was flung deep into my wardrobe never to be seen again.

Suddenly I was born anew, and all because of an album cover of a pretty thing in an electric blue jumpsuit and boxing boots. Discos at the youth centre would never be the same again. How well I remember gazing at that hand coloured over-exposed image. Where had he come from... Mars?

I knew every inch of that street on that cover. I could smell the slight rot of the rubbish, knew what was going on in every lighted room and what was going on in the darkness of the others. I'd sat in each car parked by the curbside, pushed in their cigarette lighters and lit a Gauloise from each of them, coughing on the dry, perfumed, French tobacco fumes. I'd walked through that tall green door a thousand times, up the grimy wooden stairs, visiting every business announced on those rain drenched signs outside - tailors and theatrical agents, publishers and poets, furriers and photographers and whores.

I poured over that sleeve for hours, so many hours that I became Ziggy sometimes - making love with my ego, becoming that special man, making them my band.

Heddon Street in central London is very trendy now but back then it was rubbish strewn and ratty and on that cold, wet, January night Bowie must have been freezing when photographer, Brian Ward, who was shooting pictures of the band in his crummy photographic studio above, persuaded Bowie to step outside for a frame or two. Of course Weird, Gilly and poor old Mick Ronson thought it was too cold and didn’t join him for the picture. The rest as they say is pop history and I was never the same again.

The reason for this post is that today, forty years on (yes, forty years!) Ziggy is to have a plaque dedicated to him on Heddon Street – and why not? After all, he was the Starman who took it all too far… but boy could he play guitar.

I wonder what the alternative sleeve would have been – spider from mars maybe?