Cinema for the ears: Steven Wilson’s The Harmony Codex

Let me toot my own horn a little: in his memoir Limited Edition Of One, polymath musician, songwriter and producer Steven Wilson mentions me in a section about David Bowie (he traces his love of The Dame to the purchase, by my parents, of a copy each of The Laughing Gnome for our respective birthdays in 1973, which are only eight days apart, having known each other since infancy thanks to our mums meeting at post-natal clinic).

The only reason I mention this, apart from showing off, is that the same book contains a short story written by Wilson called The Harmony Codex. “Dystopian sci-fi,” he described it recently to the NME. “Like a lot of my music, it had a very dreamlike quality”. 

As the story was coming together Wilson was also working – in his customary restless manner – on his seventh full solo album under his own name. “As I was writing the story I was beginning to develop the initial ideas for this record [which has just been released and takes its name from the short story]. It felt logical to have a narrative feel to the songs, to match the cinematic quality of the music,” he continued in his NME interview. “It made sense to write an imaginary soundtrack for that short story, writing music based on its characters and ideas.”

The result is a multidimensional experience that is Wilson’s best solo record to date. But before I get into that, a little context: he has been at this game a very long time, producing his first music while still at school in Hemel Hempstead, and very quickly started building a music career via various projects and outfits like No-Man (with Tim Bowness) and Bass Communion. In the process he has explored myriad genres from trip-hop to jazz, ambient to prog rock (most notably with Porcupine Tree). His last solo album The Future Bites featured a spoken vocal appearance from no less than Sir Elton John, and its predecessor To The Bone included the ABBA-esque Permanating. None of this is pastiche, but a reverence and love for the panoply of popular music including, yes, pure pop (don’t get him going about The Rubettes…).

Despite all this, the standard line is to describe Wilson as one of those artists who people who know, know (implying that those who don’t, won’t). His reputation has been augmented further by becoming the go-to producer of multi-channel remixes of classic albums from everyone from King Crimson and Jethro Tull to Chic and ABC. And yet, if you sat opposite him on the Tube many probably wouldn’t recognise him as someone who has and does sell out arenas.

Die-hard fans, who packed out Wembley Arena last November (notably on my birthday) for a temporarily reformed Porcupine Tree concert indicated the level of fanaticism that follows Wilson around the world. “I’m in the enviable position of having a fanbase who almost expect me to do the unexpected,” he told the NME. “If they feel like I’m making concessions to the music industry, they spot it a mile off and rightly pick me up on it.”

A cute sentiment, but Wilson is also in the enviable position of being able to do exactly whatever he wants. With each solo album since 2008’s Insurgentes he has continually changed the complexion of his music, confounding those still of the stubborn view that he is a prog rocker in the tradition of bands like King Crimson and Genesis. In truth, Bowie has probably been his touchstone, just simply for never conforming to any one genre, and never standing still, either. And that’s quite a feat in itself.

“I always talk about people like Bowie and Zappa and Neil Young and Kate Bush as being role models, in the sense of how they conducted their careers - that constant sense of reinvention and confronting audience expectations,” he told that august organ The Spectator a couple of years ago (the interview’s standfirst contained the line “The most successful musician you’ve never heard of”). 

“At the same time, I’m also conscious that it was easier for them, because I live in the age of social media. The problem with social media is that you get a response within five minutes of doing anything. You release a new song into the world, which might be different to anything you’ve done before, and literally within minutes you have an incredible wave of feedback, much of which will be negative. And I’ve come to like that. Maybe I’m a masochist. I prefer that to the indifference that most bands who just recycle everything over and over again get. Like the fans will go, ‘We love this. More of the same’. I feel that’s too easy and too lazy.”

Lazy he has never been. Peter Gabriel has been working on i/o, his first album of brand new songs for 21 years and it still hasn’t seen the light of day as a complete work. I actually can’t count how much material Wilson has released in that time.

A limited edition of one - Steven Wilson
Picture: Hajo Mueller

You certainly wouldn’t call The Harmony Codex “more of the same”. Whereas The Future Bites took a knowing lurch into pop, it’s successor is still accessible but with more musical tangents, and arguably more interesting for it. Inclination opens the record with a pulsing drum beat reminiscent of the aforementioned Gabriel’s stunning work on The Last Temptation Of Christ soundtrack, and builds over four minutes into something similarly rooted in the desert heat of The Holy Land. It is more electronica than anything, with Slovak guitarist David Kollar performing a guitar solo that defies the laws of ‘soaring’ axe work in traditional rock music.

It is notable that for a musician who, in Porcupine Tree and the first part of his solo career drove an at-times heavy, metal-like thrash, electric guitars are used sparingly and texturally throughout The Harmony Codex. In their application, guitars are just some of the brushes in the artist’s jar, not driving songs but contributing to their palette.

Into this, Wilson has put together an extraordinary collection of guest musicians, contributing something distinctive to the different directions each song takes. Pink Floyd/David Gilmour alum Guy Pratt adds bass to the single What Life Brings (which also features longtime Wilson cohort Craig Blundell on drums). Another regular collaborator, keyboard player Adam Holzman (son of legendary Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman) pops up throughout the album, most prominently on Impossible Tightrope, a frenetic jazz-rock workout which harks back to Wilson’s third solo release, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories). Another member of that album’s cohort, Theo Travis, provides a bonkers sax solo.

A calmer moment is provided by Rock Bottom, a duet with another of Wilson’s closest musical friends, the Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb (who also co-wrote it), and it is a beautiful, if slightly dark, love song which is also emblematic of the entire album’s exquisite production. It is in this regard that you recognise Wilson’s professed desire to create “cinema for the ears”. It’s no wonder, either, that he has invested a great deal of effort in the use of spatial audio technologies, and publicised the album’s release with a series of listening sessions around the world in which lucky punters were exposed to its full multidimensional effect.

I can’t begin to imagine what The Harmony Codex’s title song – for me an absolute highlight – must have sounded like in those listening environments. At almost ten minutes in length, it is a dreamlike experience, invoking the short story that inspired it. It reminds me greatly of Vangelis’s music for – yes, another film  - Blade Runner, and includes ethereal electric piano from Holzman as well as the first of two spoken word contributions on the album from Wilson’s delightful wife Rotem. It is as enigmatic as it is transporting. It is also unconventional, an ambient moment in the middle of an album, rather than the ‘slow one’ that traditionally ends it. “Part of this record is confidence from having done this for a long time now,” Wilson explained to the NME, “which means I can think ‘No, fuck it! I can put a 10-minute ambient piece on the same record as an acoustic song and an electronic pop song.’ It’s good to embrace that.”

The song that does end the ten-track album is Staircase, an epic, reflective track that warrants the involvement of Holzman and Blundell again, as well as Nick Beggs, another member of Wilson’s touring bands (and currently on the road with Howard Jones), who combine to create a song that both typifies past approaches (i.e. prog-ish) as well as Wilson’s drive to expand. 

It, too, is cinematic in its expanse, drawing reference to the Dutch conceptual artist MC Escher’s never-ending staircase (suggested in the album artwork). Written from a perspective that, I suspect, all of us in our mid-50s ponder on – the journey that has taken us to now – it also provides commentary on modernity: “Plagued by poor health/But you stockpile more wealth/Congratulate yourself/A sense of proportion/An act of extortion/There's too much distortion/You sink in stages/As you're approaching middle ages (You're up to here in debt)” trills its third verse. It ends with another appearance from Rotem Wilson, again speaking as the album oozes into another dreamscape facilitated by vintage synths (including the ARP 2600 that was a staple of the 70s).

For those who want more of The Harmony Codex there is more: an expanded edition includes remixes by, among others, Manic Street Preachers and Tears For Fears’ Roland Orzabal, underlining the point that for all of Wilson’s apparent anonymity, he can command the attention and involvement of some very heavy hitters indeed. 

It’s only what is deserved. He’s hardly flown under the radar these last thirty-odd years, and while some of that has probably suited him, to be at this stage of a career and still producing albums of this ingenuity, ambition and immersion, and not resorting to a lazy covers project, deserves commercial success as much as the acclaim that continues to come Wilson’s way.

The Harmony Codex is out now on Virgin Records

Caught in a trap: the male obsession with music

In my last post I mused about the (almost exclusively) male obsession with music, and how those of us of a certain age and disposition spent their formative years preoccupied with the artwork that enveloped album covers back in the day when vinyl was the actual predominant format, as opposed to its more recent revivalist hipster accessory.

Earlier this year, when I interviewed Mark Blake about his excellent Us & Them book about the Hipgnosis design studio, we concluded that another sub-branch of this obsession was the habit of Biro doodling on school bags (and the undersides of many a school desk lid…) the artistically designed logos of bands like Genesis or AC/DC. To the adolescent us, it was A Thing. 

It’s why our middle aged contemporaries still queue outside record shops at five in the morning on Record Store Day to buy the “limited edition” coloured reissue of an album we already own, probably on several formats. Simply because we have to have it.

One of the greatest portrayals of this umbilical relationship with buying, owning and curating music is High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s readily identifiable 1995 novel about the emotionally stunted 35-year-old owner of an Islington record shop, who processes the trauma of yet another break-up through the weed-depth compilation of a mix tape. 

Hornby’s chief protagonist, Rob Fleming, engages in a seemingly never-ending series of pedantic arguments with his employees, Dick and Barry, on topics such as whether to store albums alphabetically, generically or chronologically.. “The thing that interested me about people like the characters in the book,” Hornby has explained, “is that what they listen to all the time is incredibly emotive and yet they’re very anal about stuff.”

In Stephen Frears’ masterful screen adaptation of the book, Rob is transported to Chicago (and renamed Rob Gordon) with John Cusack in the lead role. In one of many fourth wall-breaking narratives, he establishes the premise of why he owns the record shop, and who it sells to: “I own this store called Championship Vinyl. It’s located in a neighbourhood that attracts the bare minimum of window shoppers. I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not re-released - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I’d feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn’t...well…kinda one of them.” 

Conversations between Gordon and the awkwardly shy Dick and the acerbic counterweight Barry (memorably played by Jack Black in his first major screen role), faithfully appropriate the level of fanaticism chaps will sink into (sample argument: after Rob has included Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit in one of his top five lists, Barry sarcastically counters: “Oh, that's not obvious enough Rob. How about The Beatles? Or fucking Beethoven? Side One, Track One of the Fifth Symphony! How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?”.

The undisputed companion to High Fidelity’s exploration of masculine musical neuroses is Giles Smith’s 1987 memoir Lost In Music, which is being republished today. It’s an autobiographical account of Smith’s own journey through music, from growing up in Colchester (the same London satellite town that begat Blur), to having somewhat unrequited musical ambitions of his own. It is riotously funny in recalling that journey, and the mania Smith - and I suspect plenty of others - become consumed by.

“This book is the story of that voyage - one man’s journey into the world of rock and then back to his mum’s,” Smith explained in the book. “And at the same time it’s a book about what gets into people when pop gets hold of them. And boy, can pop get a hold. It’s pushy like that. You’ve really got to watch it. You invite pop into your house on a fairly casual basis and the next thing you know it’s telling you what to wear and picking your friends.”

A case in point: I was 17 on 13 July 1985, the date of one of the greatest events in musical history: Live Aid. It was an impressionable time. I had no ambition (well, relatively little…) of becoming a pop star myself, but I was easily influenced. I obsessively bought a pair of white dance shoes from the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden because Bryan Ferry wore the exact same pair at Live Aid. Ditto, the 12-pleat blue-grey trousers Bowie wore during his set. Likewise the bright yellow shirt George Michael wore during the Wembley finale.

But for ridiculous fanboy obsession, it was Sting who left the most lasting memory on me of that day - wearing a baggy white grandad-collar shirt, untucked, with one arm of a pair of sunglasses casually adorning the outside of the breast pocket. Sting also played an all-black Stratocaster (with a 1970s headstock) that day. I wanted to be him, and hunted high and low for, at least, the shirt and accompanying loose-fit linen trousers. I even bought a bottle of Sun-in to get my hair like Sting’s. Of course, it turned orange.

I wasn’t alone. “I really fancied Sting’s job. Great pay: the best pay,” Smith wrote. “Superb hours too (because what does Sting actually do in the long months between albums and tours? He mucks about, I reckon). Homes in Hampstead and New York and Miami and Los Angeles (Barbra Streisand’s old place, in fact). Not that I wanted to make records that sounded like his, but I was certainly on for the lifestyle. Concerts, fans. Pop music. Pop stardom.“

Smith did eventually break out of his suburban Essex confines in the pursuit of pop stardom, as a keyboard player, the result of concluding that he couldn’t play guitar and would therefore be denied the preening glory that all axemen indulge. “Keyboard players seemed to be people like Tony Banks of Genesis, perhaps the least expressive man in rock, whose idea of a crowd pleasing freak-out is to nod gently to himself,” Smith concludes. He also acknowledges that playing one of those keyboards that you wear like a guitar - Herbie Hancock comes to mind - is no substitute, either. “…it made you look like a keyboard player with a bad case of career envy.”

Eventually he experienced some fame with Cleaners From Venus. “For every Simple Minds there are dozens, even hundreds, of Cleaners From Venuses,” wrote the late John Peel in his review for The Guardian of Lost In Music, “bands which, according to the accountants and promo hit squads, have failed. I know about these failures and I respect them. Some of the best music I have heard has been made by failures. This book could equally well have been, say, the Skip Bifferty Story, the Stackwaddy Story or the Bogshed Story, but these bands had no Giles Smith to record the handful of games with the reserves they played before their free transfer to oblivion.”

John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity
© Touchstone Pictures

Lost In Music describes in glorious detail the foundations of his relationship with music, from the High Fidelity-esque arguments over which ranked higher out of T.Rex or Slade, to standing in vain on a Colchester street corner hoping that Marc Bolan might happen to drive past en route to a music festival in Clacton. We’ve all probably done it. But it is precisely this lack of logical thinking that underpins the male obsession with music, and is the frankly hilarious - if worryingly resonant - thread coursing throughout Lost In Music. It is balanced perfectly between anecdotes of being that fan, to being that fan who wants to really be on stage. “You really want to be a rock star, but then you discover that you’re really just a fan,” Smith recently told David Hepworth and Mark Ellen on their Word In Your Ear podcast. 

In the years since Lost In Music first came out, much has changed. Smith, who has written for Q and Mojo, went on to become a brilliant sports columnist in The Times. The vinyl record has been, gone, and come back again. The album sleeve has lost its great significance as it has been reduced to a thumbnail on a streaming app. That said, Smith told Hepworth and Ellen:  “It’s a golden age to be a fan and a listener. When the book came out [in 1987] it was possible to get excited by the fact you could listen to music on a Walkman. And then not long after the book came out you had the iPod which could contain 40,000 songs. Suddenly you have streaming, which brings you everything all the time. In terms of the hardware you use to consume this stuff, that’s changed but we haven’t. People of our generation still cling to the physical format, but I look at my kids and they own nothing - it’s all on their phones. the fetishism has gone. I envy them, as they travel light!”

Yours truly, in front of his alphabetically ordered record collection

Me too. I still want records on the day they are first released. I will still buy albums I’ve owned several times before. I’ve transitioned from owning vinyl and cassettes to CDs, before buying them all again on vinyl, probably for the tactile excitement that still comes from unsheathing a record for the first time and placing a needle on the intro groove.

Years ago I went through a purge of my CD collection, mainly to accommodate a girlfriend’s request to make my then-home a little less of a man cave. Of the roughly 1200 discs I had at that moment in time (fuelled largely by visits to Tower Records branches in the US in the good times when a pound bought you two dollars or so), I had half professionally ripped onto a hard drive before selling them to a second hand dealer in Amsterdam. 

In his book Smith describes this as a form of purification, but also part and parcel of the awkward selectivity and margin calls that come with owning and listening to records. “When I went to the shelf and took down, say, [Stevie Wonder’s] Innervisions, I was just as importantly electing not to play Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy or Venus And Mars by Wings, or any of those albums that had seemed like a good idea at the time, but whose appeal had dwindled with age or the dawning of good sense. I was able to prize the wheat, because of its contrast with the enormous, patiently accrued pile of old chaff.”

All music fans, to varying degrees, apply this arch subjectivity. At its extreme, exhaustingly so. “Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Rob Gordon informs his estranged girlfriend Laura in High Fidelity. “No, it’s really not,“ she replies. “You know why? Because Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel make pop records.” “Made,” he retorts. “Made. Marvin Gaye is dead. His father shot him.” Mansplaining, as much as that comes across (Cusack has acknowledged the masculine toxicity that his character exudes), it does also faithfully capture the inanity that Smith also delves into in Lost In Music, the “emotional librarian” that lies in most men, to quote a Guardian review of the book.

“The book did want to be quite proudly wrong about things, which isn’t often really a strength about rock writing,” Smith said on Word In Your Ear. “I think people like to feel they’re championing a right cause and getting behind the stuff that matters.” Actually, he did. 

Lost In Music is an extraordinary, personal and resonant exploration of the transformative power of music, but also what drives the obsession. For some, that obsession shapes their lives. For others it provides context. Some simply can’t function without music, while others will go to extreme lengths to consume it. That’ll be me, then, someone who once drove for 12 hours on a 900-mile round trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album. You had to be there. You had to be me.

How Nick Heyward almost ruined my marriage, and other stories

My wedding, last year, might not have happened at all, thanks to Nick Heyward. Four days after my first date with the woman who is now, thankfully, my wife, she invited me out for a drink. Unfortunately I had other plans: a ticket to see pop’s perennially boyish, melodically gifted, all-round nice guy at The 229 in London. 

Even though I’d only seen Heyward three weeks before, at the Water Rats launch of his Woodlands Echoes album, I chose another evening with him over, potentially, eternal happiness. Thankfully the correct order of things was restored the following Saturday night when Nic - yes, I recognise the confluence of names here… - and I went out for a splendid dinner.

This might sound obsessive - about both - but Heyward has long been one of pop’s most under-recognised giants. Perhaps he prefers it that way. But I know I’m not alone in my regard for both Heyward’s songwriting gifts (if you’ve never heard his solo song Kite, what’s wrong with you?), not to mention his everlasting charm, honed no doubt by his upbringing in Bowie’s Beckenham. 

“I think so many of us have that thought, ‘Why isn’t he right up there?’,” says DJ Gary Crowley, a fan since before Heyward with Haircut 100 made their debut, 41 years ago, with that extraordinary explosion of effusive pop, Pelican West. That record earned a rave review from Danny Baker in the-then punk bible the NME. David Hepworth in his Smash Hits review wrote that the album possessed “winning vocals”, “a sturdy, flexible rhythm section, creamy saxophone” and “poignant, exhilarating and thoroughly British songs”. It would, however, remain the only album by the Haircuts that Heyward would appear on, but it was enough to propel him - and them - to stratospheric levels of adulation...before the singer himself was dumped, seemingly inexplicably, by the band.

Haircut 100 were the perfect combination of music and image, not least of which their preppy Fair Isle sweaters and upbeat, choppy funk (the jumpers, by the way, were a happy accident: rehearsing for an episode of Top Of The Pops in a freezing studio at BBC Television Centre, the band wore them round their necks as scarves. According to Heyward, “our publisher said: ‘You looked fucking great on the monitors. Keep the jumpers.’” And they did).

But, then, the band’s golden-haired, dimple-cheeked focal point was ousted. Sudden fame had not been kind to Heyward, leading to mental health struggles. To boot, resentment had grown within the band over royalties and other legal matters. So he was fired (“I wasn’t in a strong enough place mentally to fight for my band,” Heyward told The Times’ Dan Cairns earlier this year), just as Haircut 100 were on the cusp of something truly enormous. There was even talk at the time of a Monkees-style TV show. 

A follow-up to Pelican West, Paint And Paint, featuring Fox as lead singer, disappeared without a trace. As, largely, did Haircut 100. Heyward didn’t, however. His debut solo album, North Of A Miracle - released in 1983 and produced by Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, with singles Whistle Down The Wind, Take That Situation and Blue Hat For A Blue Day - commenced a career that has produced a series of gems, albeit on his own terms. 

“He works at his own pace,” says Gary Crowley. “He’s probably picked it up in the last 10 years or so, but personally I’d love it if he was releasing albums every year! You just have to wait really, but you know the quality is always good”. Back in 1985 Heyward himself told Smash Hits that his ambition is always “...to make the kind of LP you can wrap up and give to someone as a present. No duff tracks at all, just 12 shining wonderful singles”. It’s something he has never, since, strayed from.

Gary Crowley speaks to Nick Heyward at The Exchange in Twickenham, 1 May 2022
© Simon Poulter 

“I think he’s so happy with where he is [today], to be perfectly honest,” says Crowley, who interviewed Heyward just over a year ago in a very entertaining evening in Twickenham. “He gets the respect, he gets the adulation, from the ones who know - if you know what I mean.” He adds that while Heyward would get recognised walking down the street, it wouldn’t be to the same extent as a ’80s pop peer like, say George Michael did when he was alive. Plus, given Heyward’s state of mind when he left Haircut 100, you’d expect him to be just fine with that relative anonymity (and basing himself for part of the year in Key West probably helps, too).

4-CD 40th anniversary edition of Pelican West 

Haircut 100, and Pelican West, have never gone far, however. No Heyward gig can be allowed to conclude without at least Favourite Shirts and Fantastic Day, which he plays with crowd-pleasing relish. Perhaps, then, it was always inevitable that this Friday’s one-off show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, celebrating Pelican West’s 40 years-plus anniversary (marked earlier this year by a super-deluxe reissue box set), would happen. 

For a start it’s not their first gathering: the band first reunited in 2004 for a VH1 special, and Heyward, Jones, Nemes and Cunningham performed Pelican West in its entirety in 2011. But if Friday’s show goes well, could they be tempted out on the road for a longer tour? “There was a bit of a bunfight for tickets for [this] show,” Heyward told The Times, “which we weren’t expecting at all, and it sold out in just hours. The promoter is now saying: ‘Let’s see how it goes and then think about a tour.’ ”

While any so-called ‘heritage act’, reliving the glories of four decades ago, relies on those who adored them at the time for a fix of nostalgia, especially in these equally dismal times, Friday’s show and Heyward’s regular solo performances have afforded an opportunity to marvel at, for me, what their appeal was to begin with: songcraft. I would certainly put Heyward in the same category of melodic ease as arch pop tunesmiths like Paul McCartney, Elton John in his ’70s pomp, and Neil Finn, but there is so much more running through his musical veins.

Appearing earlier this year on Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt’s excellent Rockonteurs podcast, Heyward explained that like many of his contemporaries - including Kemp - he’d grown up listening to progressive rock and fellow Beckenham resident David Bowie. Punk, too, factored in their musical awareness (it’s a frequent theme - ’80s pop stars denouncing the notion that punk came along to do away with prog). In a 2017 interview with freelance journalist Malcolm Wyatt, Hayward revealed that Fantastic Day was inspired by a certain mod band from Woking: “I was pogoing to The Jam! I’d go home inspired by them and others around that time, ending up buying a practice amp and guitar. I locked myself in my bedroom and kept playing D major, C major and G. I had to sing something over those chords, which just happened to be, ‘It’s a fantastic day’. I then thought, ‘Actually, that sounds like a song.” He has also cited The Beatles as an obvious point of reference, and even A Trick Of The Tail, Phil Collins’ 1976 debut as Genesis frontman. 

Gary Crowley

“Nick had all these lovely influences going on with Haircut 100,” points out Gary Crowley, citing elements of Earth, Wind & Fire’s funk and The Monkees’ melodies (and, clearly, charm). You could probably throw in Chic, too. 

Heyward himself has also drawn on the emergence of suburban soulboy bands like Animal Nightlife, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Southern Freeze and even Spandau Ballet as part of what shaped Pelican West. Also, New Wave (Jones was a huge fan of The Clash) - an early single, released by Heyward and Nemes under the band name Moving England, could easily have come from a Talking Heads record. Little, though, is ever spoken about Haircut 100’s influences on others. 

“I’m not sure Wham! would have existed without them,” says Crowley, who knew George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley well, having DJ’d on their first UK tour. “Andrew talks about it in his book [2019’s Wham! George & Me]. They were big, big fans. I think Haircut 100 signposted for George and Andrew as to where they could go. Their influence on Wham! was immense.”

41 years on Pelican West, still sounds as fresh and as vibrant as it did when it was released in 1982. The 40th anniversary box set is worth every penny, even if you know the original album well, with that record given a delightful remastering, and additional discs containing B-sides, 12-inch mixes, a collection of previously unreleased tracks, as well as a stonking live recording of a 1982 Hammersmith Odeon gig. 

Remarkably, though, Pelican West didn’t make it to Number 1 on its original release, peaking at 2, but it remained in the upper reaches of the chart for 34 weeks. Listening to it today, it is still a stone-cold ’80s classic. In his 8½/10 Smash Hits review, David Hepworth also commented that “…you can dance to it. The fact is, you simply will dance to it.”. This Friday evening I’m looking forward to doing exactly the same. And you know what? My wife will be dancing right alongside me.

Conscious disguises - the life and times of David Bowie

David Bowie. The gift to this blog that keeps on giving. The occasion is Moonage Daydream, the much-anticipated feature-length documentary by director Brett Morgen, which opens today. As this channel has regularly recorded, the posthumous Bowie industry has never ceased to turn in the six and a half years since the icon’s death, with a bounty of re-releases, box sets, books, pop-up shops and exhibitions all pumping the legacy of a rock star like no other. While cynics might see it as exploitation, fan - and we are many - will see it as justified deification of one of the singularly most influential artists of the 20th century, one who crafted, controlled and curated his image so consciously while alive, and even as he knowingly approached death.

Moonage Daydream is, though, the first ‘official’ documentary to be sanctioned by the Bowie estate since his passing in January 2016. Appropriately, five years in the making, Morgen’s 135-minute epic does for The Dame what Peter Jackson’s even longer Get Back film did for The Beatles. Whereas Jackson’s production distilled 21 days’ worth of consecutive footage of the Fabs trying to make what would become their Let It Be album, Moonage Daydream painstakingly pieces together “thousands” of hours of film and video - some from Bowie’s personal archive - along with 48 newly remastered live music. It is a labour of love by Morgen, a Bowie fan all his life, which attempts to penetrate the creative ambition that made the singer who he was, single-handedly defining glam rock and, magpie-like, grabbing at any genre that took his fancy - from folk to progressive rock, Philly soul to drum and bass, trite pop to, in his final outing, the prescient album Blackstar, complex jazz.

Within this broiling sea of reinvention, Morgen reflects the theatrical guises Bowie adopted throughout his musical journey, as he evolved from suburban folkie David Jones to David Bowie, the vessel for the various phases he would pass through - the alien Ziggy Stardust, the glam prince, the soul boy, even the 1980s pop star (“my Phil Collins period”). “Becoming a pop act was no different than being Aladdin Sane or being Ziggy,” says Morgen. ”It was by design. He was going to enter the mainstream. It was just another challenge.” This point blew the director’s mind. The conventional wisdom is that Bowie made the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums out of weariness (or laziness). It wasn’t, argues Morgen. It was simply another conscious disguise to be that commercial.

“I think he would like this film,” keyboard player and frequent Bowie collaborator Mike Garson said of his late friend in The Times recently. “Three quarters of it he would really enjoy,” the remaining quarter being Morgen’s visually erratic style that will bombard the viewers with a dazzling kaleidoscope of imagery, zig-zagging its way through the Bowie timeline. The film was conceived while Bowie was alive, with Morgen pitching the idea to the star unsuccessfully, and before his apparent evaporation into what felt like partial retirement in 2004. Morgen turned his attention to the Rolling Stones (Crossfire Hurricane) and Kurt Cobain (Montage Of Heck) to satisfy his storytelling, but Bowie wouldn’t go away. At the same time, he had the desire to create music films for the IMAX format.

On hearing that Bowie had died, on 10 January 2016, two days after his 69th birthday, Morgen contacted Bill Zysblat, who’d looked after the star’s business affairs. Zysblat revealed that his client had archived a treasure trove of content. Over the next five years Morgen worked his way through boxes of footage and still images - some five million assets in all, setting himself up with the near-impossible task of turning it all into something compelling. “Not because I wanted to,” he explained recently to the NME, explaining that he was, at that stage, completely unfunded. Working 18-hour days on his own, his dedication almost cost Morgen his life. “I had a massive heart attack on January 5, 2017,” he told the NME, revealing that he flatlined for three minutes, just five days shy of the first anniversary of his subject’s own death.

From today we will see for ourselves whether this near-death experience was worth the trouble. Moonage Daydream will reward us with, Morgen promises, “the missing unicorns”: never before-seen clips of Bowie performing live at Earls Court on the 1978 tour for the Heroes and Low albums. “Two nights. 35 millimetre. 24-track audio. Possibly the greatest performance on film of David’s career,” Morgen says. The film won’t just present the visual spectacle of Bowie performing live, but the aural brilliance of it too, with Morgen employing the Academy Award-winning team that worked on Bohemian Rhapsody to turn less than great quality tape recordings into something befitting the cinematic soundstage. 

Five and a half years after his death, with a plethora of posthumous biographies and retrospectives filling up shelves (especially mine...), the cold hard truth is that we still don’t know all that much about Bowie. We know the musical milestones, some of his family story, his Brixton childhood and adolescence in Beckenham. Even now, there’s precious little of Bowie actually talking if you search for it on YouTube. There are the few chat show appearances, the uncanny prediction of the Internet in his Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, but apart from Top Of The Pops clips, Live Aid and the films he made as an actor, nothing that truly reveals the artist himself. Even Alan Yentob’s legendary 1975 Omnibus film for the BBC, Cracked Actor, leaves the viewer vague as to who it was about, thanks to Bowie appearing gaunt and clearly on drugs (“I was so blocked, so stoned,” he once admitted while talking about the documentary. “It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it. I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely”).

Morgen’s challenge with Moonage Daydream is, clearly, how much new it will reveal. So much of Bowie’s career was a guise combining distinct image and music that even his hair styles formed part of a character. After spending the 1990s trying to bury his past, attempting the thankfully short-lived grunge band Tin Machine and even trying to put his creative peak in the 1970s behind him with the Sound + Vision Tour, Bowie finally embraced his popularity. His headline appearance at Glastonbury in 2000 was a joyous jukebox of hits. But if you watch the performance film, you also see a star shorn of his lofty artistic pretences. He is Dave, the blokey, jokey feller from south London. Indeed, in the four years following that set, we saw something of the Bowie you’d be happy to hang out with in the pub - a warm, self-effacing humour exuding from the stage in the brilliant A Reality Tour DVD, or being wickedly droll with Ricky Gervais in Extras. 

Perhaps, though, we don’t want Bowie to be anything more than the slightly ethereal figure he became in the late 1960s and in his ’70s pomp. Even in his final music video, for the Blackstar single Lazarus (“Look up here, I’m in heaven/I’ve got scars that can't be seen”, embracing his impending death, but managing to remain abstract, distancing himself from the rest of us mere mortals. And that, quite frankly, is alright with me. 

Fading lights - Genesis at the O2 Arena

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

Clearly, I’m a devotee of unfashionable causes. When news broke that my football club’s owner was being sanctioned for his association with Vladimir Putin, and the club itself was to be put through the ringer as a consequence, there was little sympathy from across football’s tribal communities. Likewise, I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy all that much admiration (or is it empathy?) for going to see Genesis on Friday night, on what would turn out to be their penultimate live performance, 54 years after forming.

I’ve long accepted that Genesis are a Marmite band. A guilty pleasure, even. Amid the devotees from their origins as one of ’70s progressive rock’s pre-eminent acts, and those drawn to their catchy, mid-’80s MTV dominance, are those who just never got them (or saw them as just another outlet for Phil Collins’ ubiquity). Then there’s another group - those, like me, who’ve seen good in all their guises. Over the course of three nights at London’s O2 Arena, 60,000 fans of, mostly, a similar venerability, were of the same view. 

These were the final performances of a tour that had been truncated by the coronavirus (the first scheduled dates were delayed by lockdowns and then the London shows got postponed again by a band member testing positive for Covid), which started to feel like a stay of execution. The tour itself had been named ‘The Last Domino?’ - an intentionally ambiguous in-joke but not without its inevitability, given that an increasingly immobile Collins, robbed of his truly unique ability to drum by a congenital back problem and other health issues, had indicated that this would have to be it. Compared with other still-touring bands of a certain vintage (the Rolling Stones come immediately to mind, and Paul McCartney), the core surviving members of Genesis - Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist/bassist Mike Rutherford  - were all 71 as they took to the stage on Friday (the still youthful-looking Banks turned 72 yesterday), so there’s nothing materially requiring them to bring the band to a halt. But from the moment Collins walked on stage, slowly and assisted by a stick, to take the seat he would occupy for the next two hours, it was clear that this Genesis would be different. 

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

With his stage school training, Collins was always an impishly lively frontman, ever since he came forward from the drum stool in 1976 to replace the outgoing Peter Gabriel. Live reviews frequently referred to his end-of-pier schtick, a change of tone from Gabriel’s eccentric but hesitantly-delivered fantastical stories which he used to tell between songs as the band retuned their notoriously fussy 12-string guitars. For the live version of their minor 1973 hit I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), Collins developed a remarkable tambourine tarantella, colourfully extending the percussive agility that easily made him a peer of other thunderous drummers of his time, like Bonham, Moon and Rush’s Neil Peart. But no more. Knowing this, some expectation management would be required. 

This was to be a farewell performance, not just a wallow in nostalgia. Not that there was an obvious air of mourning in the air. Opening with Behind The Lines, the song I first saw them open with 41 years ago at Wembley Arena, the hair on the back of my neck raised a little. From that first moment of hearing and ‘seeing’ that song performed live, it has always struck me as the way to open any gig. “Brrrrang!” chimes the opening chord, followed by a fanfare-like keyboard riff. If I ever formed a band myself, I’d want to kick-off a gig like that. 

Long before the video hits, and throughout the years when they weren’t seen as ‘commercial’, Genesis were always a live band. Despite Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford (along with original guitarist Anthony Phillips) regarding themselves more as songwriters than rock stars when they started out, their shows never lacked impact, visually or musically. That has largely been down to the material, songs which - even in the band’s more pop-orientated era - have lent themselves to entertaining engagement live. I may not be a huge fan of the hits that came out of the ’80s, but the albums they were written for didn’t lack the more epic grandeur Genesis established as their stock in trade in the ’70s. 1986’s Invisible Touch album netted five hit singles, more from one album than the band had enjoyed in, then, 20 years of existance. It’s title track is still one of my least favourites, but others - performed on Friday like Throwing It All Away, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight and Land Of Confusion (whose Spitting Image-based video was tweaked to reflect the chaos of Covid), still stand up strongly live.

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

In 1977 Genesis released the live album Seconds Out, recorded on the tour for only Collins’ second album as lead singer. As a result, the double release comprised songs from the Gabriel era as well as the new stuff with Collins as singer. Tellingly, it contained only one song that had been released as a single - I Know What I Like, and yet it represents my favourite era of Genesis, with even complex, meandering, multi-part songs like Supper’s Ready found new life by Collins’ stagecraft. Their next release, ...And Then There Were Three, which followed guitarist Steve Hackett’s departure, included the single Follow You, Follow Me, which was the first Genesis track I ever heard on the radio. It’s a simple love song, set to a slowed down samba-like rhythm, and it reached No.4 in the charts. It’s popularity, especially in America, changed the band’s fortunes. The concert demographic started to change: whereas ’70s gigs were mostly attended by earnest young men with long hair, beards and army-surplus greatcoats, making notes on the songs they heard for discussion later over a half of mild, all of sudden there were women at Genesis concerts. 

The Duke album followed, and two more radio hits - Turn It On Again and Misunderstanding, competing with contemporary rock acts like Rainbow or Toto for FM radio airplay in the US. It marked a deliberate shift away from the fantasy stories to more immediacy in their songwriting. Collins inevitably took the blame, but Rutherford and Banks were still the main songwriters. Collins had always been the class clown to puncture the band’s public school loftiness, but he was gradually able to bring more of his own personality into the music. Good Lord, they even recorded a track featuring the Earth Wind & Fire horn section!

Which brings me back to the O2. Sadly, Collins has lost some of his vocal spectrum. It happens with age, but here, there were notable moments where his range was kept low, while - for the first time in Genesis history - two dedicated backing singers filled in some of the gaps in which Collins was struggling. But rather than feeling in any way let down, the band collectively played on. Collins himself, in the concert programme, admitted to his deficiencies. It wasn’t anything the crowd was going to complain about, either. This was an audience who had come to pay their respects to a band that had been a part of their lives for a very long time. They were rapturous when Genesis dipped into their deepest history, with the aforementioned I Know What I Like and the epic instrumental part of Firth Of Fifth from 1973 and even an excerpt from a 1970 track, Stagnation. 

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

Midway through the set, Rutherford, Banks, long-standing touring guitarist Daryl Stuermer and Collins’ uncannily talented 20-year-old son Nic on drums, repositioned around the seated singer to perform somewhat ‘unplugged’ versions of Follow You, Follow Me, That’s All and - to my delight - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. This was the title track of an album that, bizarrely, pre-dated punk, being a concept work built around the fantasy disappearance of a Puerto Rican street tough, Rael, into an imagined New York underworld (lyrically, it was Gabriel’s swansong). Here, though, stripped-down, it worked incredibly, suiting Collins Snr’s vocal limitations but sounding like it was always meant to be stripped back.

There were further treats from the past to close the show: after the almost obligatory performance of I Can’t Dance (which epitomised the band’s MTV dominance with its ZZ Top-aping video) - representing the band’s late-stage pre-eminence, there was an excerpt of Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, the opening track of 1973’s satirical Selling England By The Pound album, with its pastorality and references to “Green Shield Stamps”. In 41 years of seeing Genesis live, I’d never heard this track - an obscure entry in their canon at best - performed live. It was delightful. After the stomping pop, an example of the lyrical and musical individuality that, arguably, only this band could have ever produced, steeped in English tradition. 

For those who shunned the knowing commerciality that became Genesis’s hallmark, Moonlit Knight provided a reminder of how this band came into the world, around the time that The Beatles were inventing prog with the narrative concept of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, onto which David Bowie combined pop, rock and other artistic styles. Those early albums, Trespass, Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot may only have scratched the surface in places like Belgium and Italy, where the Gabriel-led Genesis enjoyed fanatical following, and now are politely “of their time”, but they contain many gems (even an early taste of Collins’ vocal beauty, the love song More Fool Me, along with Hackett’s truly innovative guitar virtuosity). There was, then, one more jewel from that first phase on Friday night: The Carpet Crawlers, one of the few real highlights from the sprawling Lamb Lies Down On Broadway record, its low-key vocal recreated perfectly by Collins, its musical subtleties providing a tender moment to end on.

With that, it was over. Literally (save for one final show the following night). As the full stage band dwindled to just Banks, Collins and Rutherford, who took a poignant final bow, it was time to reflect. All good things come to an end, and with rock bands you tend to want them to stop when they can and while they can. Banks and Rutherford could, probably continue (as they did in 1996 when Collins first decided to put his solo career first, and they brought in Stiltskin’s Ray Wilson in for one album and an ill-advised tour). But it seems unlikely. I would, sadly, even say it was unwise. Collins’ original departure was meant to give the other two an opportunity to prove that they are more than the sum of parts, but that denies the point that much of Genesis’s appeal for the greater part of their existence has been the knowledge that, since 1978, these three men were the band’s beating heart. Gabriel’s six albums defined the band in one way, while the eight with Collins brought with them hit singles. But it would be wrong to divide the band solely by their lead singers. The thread running through all 15 studio records is a style of songwriting that can be compared to no one else, not even the other stalwarts of the prog era, like King Crimson, Supertramp, 10cc, Yes or Pink Floyd. 

Of course, Genesis have never been to everyone’s taste, but for anyone prone to dismissing them for whatever prejudice or perceived prejudice they hold, they have always maintained a tradition of songwriting and song delivery established by A Day In The Life, Is There Life On Mars? or even Good Vibrations. Drama, narrative and, if you can excuse the record label pun, a unique charisma.If you had gone to see them on Friday night having never heard of The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, Squonk or Cinema Show, you would have heard a band of consummate musicians and songwriters, who for the better part of 54 years have made every note, every drumbeat, every chord, every riff and every vocal line count. 

At the start of this post I wrote about Genesis being a guilty pleasure. The trouble with that statement is that it places them in a similar category to, say, a Jason Donovan or a Rick Astley. But, then, to partition based on personal taste is to commit a facet of musical partition that I get very weary of. Taste might divide people, but talent shouldn’t. Genesis may have never been the most fashionable band, but the notion that fashion alone is the only diktat of popularity cuts no ice with me. Guilty pleasure, they may be, Marmite, even, but this band has been an unashamed part of my soundtrack since I was 11 or 12. My first forays with a guitar were to learn the solos and arpeggios of the early work, the infectious riffs of their later efforts. And in unsettling, troubling times like these, comfort is most welcome. On Friday night, in an O2 Arena still missing vast panels from its storm-wrecked roof, I found comfort, for the last time from a band that has been a part of my life for four-fifths of it. 

Marmite, they may be, but you know, I’m quite partial to it.

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

When Ziggy played...Tolworth

Picture: Tim Harrison

It is more than likely that you will never have heard of Tolworth. And why would you? It is, mostly, a roundabout on the Kingston Bypass as the A3 heads south-west out of London. It is not the adjacent Surbiton, best known for The Good Life and a million comfortable middle class memes. Nor is it Kingston-upon-Thames, anchor of the royal borough in which it is located. Down the road is Chessington, once best known for a zoo and now for its theme park. Further east is Epsom, north-east is Wimbledon.

Like much of this corner of London, where I was born, grew up and have returned to, Tolworth is part of a seamless conurbation, where towns once made distinct in the Domesday Book blur into each other, separated only by postcodes and school catchment areas. This is the suburbia of Betjeman, the aspirational outer boroughs where 1930s ribbon development brought rows of tree-lined avenues filled with semi-detached houses, bowler-hatted commuters and Austin Maxis getting washed on Sundays.

Tolworth’s primary landmark is a gargantuan concrete tower block built in 1963, with a glamorous-sounding ‘Broadway’ of shops attached to it. If you squint, the tower is visible from the air on the westerly approach as you come in to land at Heathrow. The tower’s exterior was once scaled by Terry Scott in an “amusing” Terry And June jape involving Scott and a window cleaning cradle. That was, pretty much, the extent of Tolworth’s glory, for me at least, coming from two miles up the A3 in New Malden. Until, a few years ago, when a caller to Danny Baker’s then-Saturday morning show on BBC Radio London revealed that he’d seen David Bowie perform in a Tolworth pub one Thursday night in 1972. 

The story, which blew everyone listening away (not least, Baker himself) was that the caller, then a teenager, had actually seen Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars make their live debut at The Toby Jug, a pub that, until the spring of 2002 , sat next to the A3 at the Tolworth roundabout. Pubs like the Toby Jug were staples of the suburbs, a neighbourhood boozer, with engraved pewter tankards hanging above the bar and regulars like my grandad (who frequented the Toby Jug’s closest rival, the Red Lion), nursing halves of Charrington's Toby Ale. 

But that Saturday morning, when I heard the story of Ziggy’s arrival on Earth in a pub almost walking distance from the house I was born in, my fascination with the area’s musical heritage took on a new and unexpected twist. As I’ve chronicled on these pages before, I’d long known about the Kingston area’s connections with rock’s formative years (see myriad posts-passim on the likes of John Martyn, Eric Clapton and my childhood friend Steven Wilson), but Bowie… 

He was, of course, an adopted son of suburbia himself. Brixton-born, at the age of 6 Bowie and his family migrated out to another leafy borough, Bromley. On 10 February, 1972 he was living in nearby Beckenham, at Haddon Hall, the glorified commune he’d come to occupy with then-wife Angie (a marketing graduate of what used to be Kingston Polytechnic) and their infant son Duncan. Guitarist Mick Ronson, bass player Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey were there too. That afternoon they piled into a Transit van and drove west, through the outskirts of Croydon, Banstead and Sutton, to the pub that, as Surbiton-based writer Tim Harrison describes would play an integral and unlikely part of musical history. 

Not that it was meant to be: having run through most of the songs at a rehearsal gig on 29 January at the legendary Friars of Aylesbury, a planned launch on 3 February at the Lanchester Arts Festival in Coventry had been cancelled by Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, making Tolworth the first port of call on a string of dates that the band would play throughout the spring and early summer of 1972. The tour would present material from the album that would be released that June - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. But it wouldn’t just be a showcase for new work - it was the commencement of a new guise for Bowie, one which combined conventional rock music with a somewhat avant garde costumed glam rock theatricality, within the notional concept of a sentient alien arriving on Earth. 

Tim Harrison

Tim Harrison chronicles that evening, 50 years ago, in his remarkable book, Hello Tolworth, I’m Ziggy. In many respects it is the tome I’ve always wanted to write myself, charting the phenomenal galaxy of musical talent that came from and through south-west London in the ’60s and ’70s. In particular, it focuses on the acts who played the function room of one suburban pub in its heyday, on their circuitous, industrial routes to greater glories. It’s the result of five years - yes, Five Years! - of extensive research by Harrison, revealing a rich list of bands who performed at the Toby Jug until its demolition - a catalogue of classic rock, with Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Howlin’ Wolf and even Muddy Waters during the ’60s blues boom, King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull and Genesis in the prog era, and the likes of Squeeze, The Damned, Ultravox and The Stranglers in the punk and New Wave years. It is, though, the copiously researched chapter at the book’s outset of the night when David Bowie reinvented himself again (and not for the last time), that provides Harrison’s premise. 

Without wishing to recount in full Bowie’s story up until that Thursday night in February 1972, his arrival on stage at the Toby Jug, wearing bright red wrestling boots and supported by three “unreconstructed white English blokes” from Hull dressed in “stretch silver satinette”, to quote one witness, lit the touch paper on the cultural phenomenon that Bowie would become throughout the 1970s. 

Fame - to use a word - had hitherto been fleeting: his pop debut with his self-titled, debut album led to the career reset of his second, self-titled solo album, known mostly as “the one with Space Oddity on it”. That may have been a hit single, but over the course of 1970 and 1971, and the albums The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory, Bowie was still searching for his place. It’s almost a cliche now to refer back to him as a shape-shifting magpie, collecting whatever styles and genres took his fancy, but over the course of these four records he’d embraced Anthony Newley-style vaudeville, pastoral folk and blues rock. Hunky Dory was barely in the can when Bowie and the three Yorkshiremen entered London’s Trident studios to record the Ziggy Stardust album.

Two nights before Tolworth became Ziggy Ground Zero, the band - with no mention of the moniker they would adopt for much of 1972 and 1973 - appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the BBC’s venerable music show which was, then, a late night refuge for the progressive and the eclectic. The set included Five Years, Queen Bitch and Oh! You Pretty Things and was, technically, the debut of Ziggy and the Spiders. But that wouldn’t happen, officially, until 9pm 48 hours later, when the quartet took to the stage at the Toby Jug.

Actually, Ziggy appeared about an hour before the band went on. Harrison tells the story of 19-year-old Alan Stevens, the landlord’s grandson, who brought a brown ale to Bowie in the makeshift dressing room before showtime. Offering it to “Mr. Bowie”, he was quickly corrected: it was for “Ziggy”. An hour later, in front of 60 punters scattered around the pub function room’s wooden flooring, Bowie made his introduction: “These are the Spiders From Mars”, he said, matter-of-factly, and then promptly introduced each Spider by name. Harrison’s extensive research tracked down the predominantly then-teenage punters there that night - 16 and 17-year-olds from surrounding areas like Worcester Park, Thames Ditton and Ewell, from the flats across the road and the housing estate around the corner. Their recollections are fascinating snapshots in time: “No one was really sure if it was brilliant, or if it was madness,” said one, adding: “They [the band] were all up there; tarted up in make-up. It wasn’t androgynous…it was just weird.”

This was the outset of glam, something you wouldn’t find much subscription - yet - to in the suburbs of the early 1970s. “I’m not sure 1972 was ready for it”, the punter told Harrison. Another admitted: “My first thought, when the band came on, was ‘What a bunch of weirdos!’”. He’d gone to the gig somewhat sight unseen of Bowie’s work. “I thought the band were weird and camp,” he said. “I’m not homophobic…but it was men in shiny gear - it was a homoerotic display, and I’d no experience of that, no terms of reference.” 

Like most of Bowie’s guises, Ziggy was part pantomime, part theatre, and even though such comments seem archaic now, it’s just possible, with the squinted eye of half a century’s elapse, to understand what a culture shock the quartet must have caused that night in Tolworth (later that year, in a now infamous appearance on Top Of The Pops, Bowie/Ziggy would drape his arm around Ronson’s shoulder while performing Starman, prompting much conservative frothing, coinciding as it did with Bowie claiming to Melody Maker that he was gay).

Over the course of two hours, and performances of most of the Ziggy Stardust album, along with tracks like Life On Mars?, Changes, Space Oddity, Rock’n’ Roll Suicide and Suffragette City, those 60 gig-goers at the Toby Jug witnessed yet another Bowie rebirth. It was a pattern that would repeat itself with almost every new album, every new persona, every new haircut, right up to and including the release of his final album, Blackstar and his subsequent death in January 2016. Even the death mask he carried at the end, with the visual nods to Major Tom, Ziggy and outer space in the video for the title song’s single release, appeared to be a very considered theatrical exit.

Picture: DavidBowie.com

The 50th anniversary of the live debut of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars may, in the grand scheme of things, be a relatively minor moment in pop’s greater panoply. Perhaps not as significant as, say, the young Elvis Presley calling in to a recording studio on Union Avenue in Memphis to cut a disc for his mother’s birthday, or John Lennon bumping into Paul McCartney at the St.Peter’s Church village fete in Woolton. But round these parts, it’s a moment for celebration still today, hence the string of events taking place to commemorate the events of 10 February, 1972 - including a Bowie-themed ‘silent disco’ at Waterloo Station and an open-air music festival 30 minutes down the branch line from the London terminus at Tolworth’s own station, a short walk from the site of the Toby Jug. It’s all the idea of local community figure Robin Hutchinson: “We’re celebrating Tolworth as a place of firsts and discovery,” he says, adding that Bowie's launch of the Ziggy tour was an important moment for the history of pop. “And it happened in Tolworth!”. Hutchinson makes the point that the suburbs have long been the font of musical history: “Yet, fifty years on from the Ziggy gig, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a venue in the town for live music. It’s something the local community has been after for a while. Where would an artist like Bowie play today?”.

That night, fifty years ago, sits prominently on a professional timeline that, itself, spans half a century’s worth of recording, half a century’s worth of music without much comparison for its variety, experimentation and, at times, daring. It’s a career that had been in play for several years when Ziggy and The Spiders rocked up in Tolworth. As a coda to this, the Toby Jug gig provided the opening night of what would be a run of 191 performances before Bowie artfully ‘retired’ Ziggy at the Hammersmith Odeon the following year. You used to be able to get to Hammersmith from Tolworth on the 72 bus - the “phantom 72”, as my late father used to call it when he had to take it to work.

Tim Harrison’s book, Hello Tolworth, I’m Ziggy - including copies signed by the author - can be ordered via this link.

Fascination: the enduring legacy of David Bowie

We’re barely eight days into 2022 and I’m already blogging about David Bowie. Sue me. But with today being what would have been The Dame’s 75th birthday, and Monday the sixth anniversary of his death, the propensity for Bowie to still surprise and provide compelling cultural fascination shows little signs of abating.

Just this week Variety revealed that the Bowie estate has sold his entire publishing catalogue - more than 400 songs (including 111 singles and 26 studio albums) - to Warner Chappell Music, the Warner entertainment conglomerate’s music publishing division - for figure estimated to be “upwards of $250 million” (it hasn’t been officially disclosed). The deal drives on the current boom in rock’s biggest names monetising their recordings, following Bruce Springsteen selling his catalogue to Sony for an eye-watering $550 million, and Bob Dylan’s similar agreement with Universal for an equally colossal $400 million.

With the Bowie deal WCM has got its hands on some of the most revered albums of the rock era, encompassing Bowie’s studio output from 1968 right up to Blackstar, released just two days before his death. It also includes both the less well received Tin Machine releases and the ‘lost’ album Toy, which was released in full yesterday as a three-disc package (a single-disc version appeared in November as part of the Brilliant Adventure box set). 

“All of us at Warner Chappell are immensely proud that the David Bowie estate has chosen us to be the caretakers of one of the most groundbreaking, influential, and enduring catalogues in music history,” WCM’s CEO Guy Moot said in a statement. “These are not only extraordinary songs, but milestones that have changed the course of modern music forever. Bowie’s vision and creative genius drove him to push the envelope, lyrically and musically - writing songs that challenged convention, changed the conversation, and have become part of the canon of global culture.”. 

For its part, a representative of the Bowie estate hailed Warner as “capable hands” adding: “We are sure they will cherish [the catalogue] and take care of it with the greatest level of dignity.” That, though, comes with some risk. The entertainment industry has a history of precious bodies of work transferring to corporate ownership with mixed critical results. Disney’s assumption of the Star Wars brand, expanding its universe with myriad spinoffs is still to win over the audience beyond the established fanbase of George Lucas’s 1977 creation. Likewise, there are concerns that Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, and with it the James Bond films, will see the imperious cinema property diluted into a similar sprawl as the Star Wars and Marvel franchises.

What might, to some, be surprising about the Bowie deal is that he was, in life, very particular about his work, maintaining tight control over it. Curiously, what isn’t included in the agreement with WCM is the ‘first’ album titled David Bowie, the record released in 1967 which appeared on Decca’s Deram imprint. That album firmly reflected his then-interest in theatrical, Anthony Newley-style whimsy, rather than either the prevailing beat pop of the early ’60s or the emerging progressive sound that manifested itself that year most profoundly with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

One of the songs recorded for Deram was The Laughing Gnome, a still-divisive song amongst fans, with purists refusing to accept it is a ‘true’ Bowie song. They prefer to regard it as a childish novelty beloved of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart’s Junior Choice, along with The Runaway Train, Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) and Tubby The Tuba. That, though, simply defines it by association. It is something of a novelty, for sure, but deserves its place in the total Bowie canon, something I know that rock star Steven Wilson wouldn’t disagree with. In his forthcoming autobiography Wilson claims that receiving the 1973 reissue of The Laughing Gnome for his sixth birthday inadvertently planted the seed of his own Bowie fandom. I would agree, especially as Wilson and I received a copy each for our respective birthdays, courtesy of my parents (we were born a week apart, were neighbours and childhood best friends). You can read more about this in March when Steven Wilson: Limited Edition Of One is published by Little Brown.

Part of what Wilson and I absorbed about Bowie, subliminally at first, was his breathless, relentless, restless search for something new, something different, something else. That’s what Warner Music has bought into. Not one of those 26 album is a replication. Not even the Tin Machine entries lack something adventurous. Amongst the many valid superlatives used to describe Bowie’s career, “visionary” crops up again and again, along with a profound sense of individualism. “He spent his whole life trying to empower people, and I think that’s what he would have continued to do,” the V&A’s Geoff Marsh told Dylan Jones for a posthumous gathering of Bowie’s friends, recounted in September in The Times. “He once said in an interview that ‘I’m doing this for me’, i.e. he was doing what he was doing because that’s precisely what he wanted to do. And he spent his entire life encouraging other people, especially the young, to do the same.”

Bowie was, of course, rightly lauded for “pushing the envelope”, to reuse that horrendous cliche. WCM’s Moot is correct in describing Bowie as inspiring those “not only in music, but across all the arts, fashion, and media”. To that add technology: in 1999 Jeremy Paxman interviewed Bowie for the BBC’s Newsnight, asking him about digital technology. “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society - both good and bad - is unimaginable,” Bowie told a visibly sceptical Paxo, who responded: “It’s just a tool though isn’t it?” “No,” Bowie replied, with wry disdain, “it’s an alien life form [laughs]. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here.” He then continued, presciently: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.  It’s happening in every form. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.”

Picture: BBC Newsnight

The year before, Bowie launched his own Internet service, BowieNet. It was, at the time, ground-breaking: for a monthly fee, members got their own davidbowie.com email address as well as  exclusive access to audio and video recordings. They could also participate in chat rooms, which Bowie himself often popped up in. At the time most other stars’ websites were pretty dry affairs, but not Bowie. It was, one user recalled, the first attempt to create an Internet community around an artist. He even used it to crowd-source ideas for new music, with the track What's Really Happening? later appearing on the Hours album. 1995’s Outside drew on a bespoke software application called Verbasizer, into which Bowie typed in different sentence which were then randomly selected and turned into the source of new songs. Four years later Bowie participated in Netaid, a streamed concert that drew an online audience of more than two million, then a record. His enthusiasm for his own online venture waned as the 21st century dawned, and Bowie’s much publicised health issues in 2004 saw him effectively withdraw from public life.

This week’s Warner deal is not, though, the first time that Bowie’s music has been monetised. In the mid-1990s a scheme was devised by his financial manager to sell asset-backed securities, nicknamed ‘Bowie bonds’, which paid out a share in future royalties for 10 years. Another deal, with EMI, saw Bowie sell bonds on the back of royalties from the albums he’d released between 1969 and 1990, but the venture suffered from the music industry downturn in the early 2000s. Even that was something Bowie had predicted in 2002, when he told the New York Times that music would become “like running water or electricity”. He’d foreseen the rise of streaming, with the meagre returns for artists we now know about, and its impact on physical media sales.

All of these exercises serve as a reminder that pop music is rarely as altruistic as either art or ‘just’ an entertainment medium. Business, as The Beatles found to their cost, often gets in the way. But while the Bowie estate’s deal with Warner Music is another chapter in the posthumous commercialisation of his career (which has generated a steady stream of box sets and special editions over the last few years), it shouldn’t do anything to fundamentally change either the Bowie legacy, or this fan’s fascination with it. 

There will also be plenty more to come from it, too, in the weeks and months ahead: later this month the 2022 Sundance Festival is expected to premiere a new Bowie film by Brett Morgan (whose credits include The Rolling Stones’ Crossfire Hurricane and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) which pulls together previously unseen live performance recordings, with Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti providing music direction. And then, next month, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars making their live debut, at a long-defunct pub which once sat less than three miles from the house I was born in. Kismet, again. 2022 promises to be another busy year in the enduring legacy of the late David Robert Jones from Brixton - and me and my wallet can’t wait.