THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS

"Ziggy really sang, screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo like some cat in Japan."

The iconic persona of Bowie, that was transmogrified into a glam queen androgynous guitar god, was exemplified on "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." Everytime I think of this album it takes me back to the vinyl years and I remember sitting down and letting the music flow over me as a teen. Every song made me rethink music and I was listening to the likes of Kiss, The Sweet and Suzi Quatro in the 70s. David Bowie was one out of the box though. His red hair and lightning bolt makeup was irresistible and captured my imagination. His visage was pasted on every magazine looking weird and alien and it was the image of the 70s. This album cemented Bowie as a rock legend and he never looked back.

The songs are loud and abrasive and Bowie rocks out like no other album he produced before this. It was a real starting point to his rise to meteoric fame after the immortal 'Space Oddity'. It begins with the weird 'Five Years' that is too long but has plenty of rock to drive it on; "we've got five years, my brain hurts a lot..." The next stand out is the wonderful melodic 'Moonage Daydream' with an unforgettable hook; "Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe, Put your ray gun to my head, Press your space face close to mine, love, Freak out in a moonage daydream!"

'Starman' is fantastic space nonsense, harking back to the spacey thematic content of earlier Bowie. His film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" is certainly influenced from such whimsical concepts of the lonely alien "there's a starman waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds."

'Lady Stardust' is a nice acoustic space ballad, similar to T-Rex. The best song on the album is 'Ziggy Stardust' with the awesome riff and glam poetry, "making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind, like a leper Messiah, when the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band."

There are 2 more songs worth mentioning to end the album; the raucous 'Suffragette City' "don't lean on me man cos you can't afford the ticket", and 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' "all the knives seem to lacerate your brain". The album was edgy and crass and nasty and teens loved it. Parents hated it. And I loved it too.