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Ziggy Stardust turns 50

Fifty years ago David Bowie changed the music scene forever with this extraordinary album

Por hola.com

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There's a starman waiting in the sky... and late British music idol David Bowie will always live on as that stylish alien, Ziggy Stardust. 

It's hard to believe that half a century has passed since Bowie's glam-rock alter ego burst onto the scene. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, released in 1972, still sounds as fresh as ever.

The record was written in just ten days, but Ziggy's sound, and his imaginative lyrics, were unlike anything that rock had produced up until then. If Ziggy was a starman, his creator was certainly an explorer too. He helped pop music expand to talk about pretty much whatever in the universe it wanted. This wasn't just an album, it was a concept.

As for Ziggy's look, he kicked the whole glam-rock vibe into orbit, giving rise to countless imitators. The spiky red hair, the vivid make-up and skintight sparkling outfits were deliberately androgynous, and on someone as handsome as Bowie, they drove the fans wild. 

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Although Ziggy was Bowie's fifth album, until then, the performer hadn't been a big name. The Ziggy phenomenon  was extraordinary. While Bowie and his group had been playing in pubs, Ziggy and his backing band the Spiders sold out stadiums in  Britain, the US and Japan.

For a while, David and Ziggy seemed like one and the same. The Spiders' drummer, Woody Woodmansey, tells how David really got into character.

"You know, you got in a taxi with Ziggy, you had to have money on you because Ziggy didn't carry money. It was a different thing," he recalls.

And then, barely a year after the starman had arrived, he disappeared. Bowie abruptly announced on stage in London that Ziggy Stardust was no more. 

“I moved out of Ziggy fast enough so as not to get caught up in it,” he later explained. “Most rock characters that one creates have a short life span. I don’t think they’re durable album after album. Don’t want them to get too cartoony.”

Of course, it was far from all over for Ziggy's creator, whose career spanned another four decades. David reinvented himself, and his music, constantly, with hits including Fame, Let's Dance and The Next Day. Long before his death in 2016, he'd been hailed as one of the greatest artistes of the 20th and early 21st century.

 
 

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