Pulling the plug

Picture: Reuters

I dabble in politics at my peril with this blog. Worse, dabbling in geo-politics. I’m just not intellectually equipped to process any sort of cogent argument, either to present as my own or replay that of others. But I do know, as if anyone else needed convincing, that the situation in Ukraine stinks. There: hardly the most sophisticated statement you'll read on the subject, but it does.

Amid the back-and-forth on the international reaction, with a consensus of world leaders condemning Russia’s menaces towards its independent democratic neighbour saying “this is a disgrace - we should definitely do something” (or “down with this sort of thing”, to quote from Father Ted), the response has so far been somewhat tentative, even if stern words and some actions have been proffered. As is the glacial progress of these things, Russia’s toes in south-east Ukraine have been met by initial sanctions by the US, the UK and the EU, but there is also a sense of things not too far too soon 

There is, though, an ominous sense that Vladimir Putin has only just got started. Ever since he annexed Crimea in 2014, and continued to invest in his military capabilities at a staggering rate, it is increasingly apparent that he has set his mind on reshaping Russia, petulantly repositioning himself on the world stage as a man who should not be ignored, or both. Some observers say that the events playing out now have been in his game plan for years. Of course, at time of writing, the official line is that Russian forces are merely “peace-keeping” in the so-called ‘breakaway republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, but with every public proclamation Putin makes, it is pointing towards the possibility that he has the entirety of Ukraine in his sights.And then what? Or, rather, and then who?

This afternoon Putin secured the permission of the Russian parliament to use force abroad, an ominous procedural development that merely seemed to confirm the inevitable. In a press conference, he once more referred to Ukraine’s potential NATO membership, pontificating on the country’s nuclear ambitions, not that I - or anyone in Ukraine - had any idea that it had any. Ah, the nuclear spectre. Believe it or not, there are actually people within Putin’s sphere of influence who believe that it would win a nuclear confrontation with the West. I’ll return to that shuddering thought later in this post.

It all ladders up to an increasingly isolated and even paranoid president. Which is a worrying flag to his state of mind. His rambling speech on Monday night to a rooted, rictus-grin collection of Kremlin apparatchiks provided sinister. apparent riffing on Ukraine’s cultural heritage. This had some equivalence to the Nazis dehumanising Jews and other minorities at the outset of the Holocaust, denying them an identity, later re-enacted throughout an occupied Europe. Effectively, Putin has now denied an entire nation its identity, effectively branding Ukraine a non-state and, effectively, an extension of Russia itself, rather than a separate, independent democracy which is the eighth most populous in Europe and the continent’s second largest after Russia itself. CIA reports that Putin's thugs have already drawn up a ‘kill list’ of Ukrainians incompatible with Russian state values, like homosexuals and political activists, is a frightening echo, not just of the Soviet past but of fascist Germany’s darkest days.

Whether Putin follows through with a full occupation of Ukraine or not, there was enough in his Kremlin unloading on Monday to suggest more of his inner psyche. Some have hinted at mental instability, of a paranoid loner increasingly isolated by COVID-19 (the ridiculous long table and cavernous meeting room for his security council was no posture - this was social distancing on an irrational scale). There is the suggestion, too, of the “ticking of time”, as the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK mentioned on the BBC’s Newsnight, hinting at Putin facing up to advancing age (he turns 70 in October) and, perhaps, a sense of impotent unfulfilment in the 22 years since he first became president. We know he’s a macho narcissist, with his preposterous bareback, shirt-free horse riding publicity pictures from holidays in the Russian wild, depicting a rugged huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ outdoors type (and, curiously, always pictured alone) rather than the more wholesome custom of world leaders being photographed with wives, children and pets, or pointing at fish in Cornish markets.

This raises the prospect of Ukraine being Putin’s last hurrah. After two decades quietly (or not so quietly) seething about Mother Russia being deprived of its empire, he has possibly been building to this. It’s hard not to meander off into trivialisation by comparing him to a fictional Bond villain: but while 007’s last onscreen adversary, Saffin, who hatches a maniacal plan to kill everyone with nanobots, was a somewhat underdeveloped character in No Time To Die, the parallels with a seemingly insecure figure like Putin can be easily drawn. At the end of the day, most despots resemble cartoons in some way, shape or form. Which makes our acceptance of them as entertainment ever-so-slightly worrying.

So what's the solution? Hawks are pushing for direct confrontation, but that can be interpreted in one of two ways: economic sanctions being one, pushing NATO to its extreme eastern edges being the other. For the first to work, analysts say, they need to be comprehensive and punitive. Here in the UK, that means Boris Johnson finally tackling the Russian money swilling around London. But will he act? Will he address the Russian donors to his own party, who supported his election in 2019, and who are rumoured to have been involved in the Vote Leave campaign before it? Will he clamp down on the City of London being used, quite blatantly, as a money laundering market for Putin's chums? 

I have to declare an interest here: my football club, Chelsea, has enjoyed unprecedented success since 2004 when Roman Abramovich bought it and invested millions of his fortune into the club. And while no one, least of whom me, has ever questioned his motives (and certainly not the outcome), should all of the oligarchs operating in the UK not be punished to send a signal back to the Kremlin? Boris Johnson mistakenly told the House of Commons that Abramovich was “already facing sanctions”, a point later clarified as incorrect. But more forensic examination of other Russian millionaires with business and political interests in London certainly provides a platform which politicians on all sides of the debate want to see cracked down on.

Then there’s the second scenario: NATO building up its forces in the Baltic states, in Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Hungary, all of which could soon sit on a border with the redrawn Greater Russia. Too provocative, say some, especially with Putin flexing his nuclear muscles with “missile exercises” in Belarus at the weekend and further rambling today about Ukraine which, of course, gave up it’s Soviet-era nuclear arsenal 30 years ago as it became independent. In exchange, Russia, the US and the UK guaranteed Ukraine’s security in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. That, like the Minsk Agreement, now appears to have been torn up or, at least, is hovering over the shredder. For now, the consensus that Putin is not prepared for a hot war with the West, either philosophically or strategically. But if a cold war returns, we go back to a state of being that I grew up in fear of - the Cold War becoming hot.

In the film The Hunt For Red October, the former submarine commander Skip Tyler tells Jack Ryan: “When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Well, this thing [the Red October] could park a couple of hundred warheads off Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it till it was all over.” It’s a line that has been brought abruptly back to me, along with the anxiety I had as a teenager. When my brother got married and moved out, I moved into the back bedroom of our house. Its window faced west, and in the distance I could see planes coming in to land at Heathrow. Although, 15 miles away from the airport and the planes still tiny specs, I knew that Heathrow’s proximity put me and my family in the direct path of any conflagration caused by a direct nuclear strike on it. It gave me recurring nightmares. A resurgent, belligerent Russia might just bring those nightmares back.

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.