David Bowie at the Hammersmith Odeon, 1973
I read with some amusement recently that Steve Jones, the guitarist with the Sex Pistols, saw David Bowie at the Hammersmith Odeon, the night before he retired as Ziggy Stardust,on July 2nd, 1973.
I was there, tho’ I don’t recall seeing Steve.
But I do recall guitarist Mick Ronson (Ronno) playing a white Les Paul at the gig, one that looked remarkably similar to the one Steve Jones played in the Pistols. I wonder if this was one of Jonesy’s infamous heists? Perhaps if anyone knows they could leave a comment?
To give you some background about myself at the time, I was sixteen and had been gig-going since the previous year (see Emerson Lake and Palmer article).
I’d heard “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” in September ‘72. A friend, David Gowlett, had bought it pretty much when it came out. I don’t know who’d advised him that Bowie was cool, tho’ I suppose by late in ‘72 he was a chart star with ‘Starman’.
I recall David bringing Ziggy to my house, and all of my friends and I listening to the whole album from start to finish. On Ma and Pa’s trusty radiogram! I can remember it being an amazing listening experience.
The guitars were seriously hard, and rocked more than any Brit Glam Rock that was around at the time, perhaps with the exception of the Sweet’s b-sides. Not that I was listening to British Glam at the time. In fact I thought it was totally uncool. “Brickies in Baco foil”!
The Stooges entered my life round about then and I thought they rocked harder than anything I’d heard before. And the New York Dolls were about to enter my life too. By 1974, I was listening to the Dolls albums continuously, at least a couple of times a day.
I had an outrageous sound system at the time, a Linear valve amplifier – donated, I think, by Nick Fisher. The sort of amp us junior players would run our guitars or basses through, amateur-esque, but still damn loud! I ran a Wharfedale turntable through the amp. It was mono, obviously.
The amp drove a pair of two by twelve cabinets. One was a Marshall, which I probably bought from my Sister Helen’s club book! (Hands up how many of you bought your first amp or combo from Kay’s? I can see uncle Stom’s hand up at the back there, and maybe Jem’s too?) The other amp was a Fender – the 2×12 that came with my brother-in-law Jed Wilson’s amp, an infamous Bandmaster. It had originally been the classic cream colour, until someone had decided it would look cooler black, and had painted the whole thing with black shoe polish! Sacrilege!
That beautiful cabinet was stolen when the Accidents supported Lilliput at the Rock Garden, in Covent Garden, on the 8th of October, 1980.
I can’t imagine what hell my parents went through, having to listen to the Dolls day in and day out, through what I suppose was my first p.a.!!!
But back to the gig…
Ronno’s guitars definitely hit the spot for me. But the whole vibe, the lyrics – some of which were fairly outrageous for the time – and Bowie’s voice really took me somewhere else. It was part futuristic, and in retrospect, pre-defining certain aspects of Punk.
Surely Bowie’s ginger/red mullett hair do, often imitated but never equalled, spawned the spikey punk architype sported by Johnny Rotten?
I know there’s been a million different interpretations of the Ziggy story,
but I just thought it was about an alien rock’n'roll star, whose biggest misfortune was to hit the Top of the Poppermost, just as Earth went into it’s final decline. Oh no!
The cover of Ziggy looked as though Bowie had just popped down to planet Earth for a quick photo shoot and his rock’n'roll Flying Saucer was parked just around the corner and out of the shot.
This is the first part of a three part article about David Bowie’s Hammersmith Odeon gig in 1973. The second part will be published very soon. Watch this space…
If you’d like to find music by the groups mentioned in this article, you can buy it on CD and vinyl from netsoundmusic.com. They’ve got plenty of records and CDs by David Bowie
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