Hammersmith Odeon, 3 July 1973 – and the guitarist found out at the same moment as the audience
Ziggy Green holds a 4.4 from twelve hundred and thirty-three people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and it is the second of three Bowie venues in this file.
And Heddon Street, which is round the corner, is where the album cover was photographed.
The photograph
The cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was shot on a wet night in January 1972, in a doorway on Heddon Street, in about ten minutes.
It was cold. It was raining. Bowie was in a jumpsuit and he was not enjoying it, and the photographer took a handful of frames and everybody went to the pub.
The furrier’s sign above him – K. WEST – was read by an enormous number of people as a coded message, and theories circulated for years about what it meant.
It meant that a furrier called K. West had a shop there.
There is a plaque now. People go and stand in the doorway.
3 July 1973
Hammersmith Odeon, the last night of the tour, and the band had been on the road for eighteen months and were exhausted and expected to carry on.
And near the end of the set Bowie walked to the microphone and told the audience that of all the shows on the tour, this one would remain with them the longest – because it was not only the last show of the tour, but the last show that they would ever do.
The audience screamed. A great many of them cried.
And Mick Ronson – the guitarist, standing four feet away, who had been playing with him for three years – had not been told.
Neither had most of the band. They found out at the same moment as the crowd, on stage, in front of three thousand people.
What he was actually killing
Not the band. The character.
Bowie has said, in various forms, that Ziggy had begun to take him over – that he was no longer able to distinguish between the persona and himself, and that the thing had become genuinely dangerous.
So he killed it in public, without warning, in the most theatrical way available – and then went to Paris and made a covers album.
The Prat’s cultural desk regards this as the single most ruthless act of self-preservation in the history of popular music, and notes that the people who paid for it were standing next to him.
The three of them
Starman, Ziggy, and the Thin White Duke – three bars in one district, named after three phases of one man, who destroyed each of them in turn.
Nobody else in five postcodes has three. Not Shakespeare. Not Wellington, who has five pubs and would have hated all of them.
Verdict
Good restaurant. Go, and then walk to Heddon Street and stand in the doorway, which is what everybody does, and which takes four minutes.
What Ronson got
Not enough, and everybody who was there has said so.
Mick Ronson arranged a very substantial amount of that music. The strings on Life on Mars are his. The guitar that everybody remembers is his. He was, by common consent among musicians, the reason a great many of those records sound the way they sound.
He made two solo albums that did not sell. He went back to playing on other people’s records. He was, at various points, essentially broke.
He died of liver cancer in 1993, aged forty-six, and the tribute concert filled Wembley.
Bowie sent a message. He did not come.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My gran asked why I kept stopping to laugh. I tried to explain London councils. She just made tea and nodded knowingly.