In one album sleeve, Ancient Mesopotamia collides with A Clockwork Orange. Beethoven meets HG Wells meets disaffected Samurai youth. The International Space Station fuses into Elvis. The source of the synthesis, according to Simon Goddard, is Ziggy Stardust.
Goddard’s latest book, Ziggyology, charts David Bowie’s musical creation through the vast genealogy of his possible influences. The roots of the Starman are traced back as far as Pythagoras and the reader catapulted on from there into a tangled mass of interlinked ideas and inspirations. The connexions can verge on far-fetched – Aladdin Sane’s lightening bolt isn’t a reference to the SS just because his mother once dated a Blackshirt – but even at their most extreme his assumptions are enticingly readable. Most of his biography delivers like an extended Bowie-themed episode of QI, filled with snippets of information that provoke momentary murmurs of “Oh-I-never-knew-that”.
But what Goddard is attempting is more intriguing than a potted Bowie history. His biography is a generic miscegenation, poised between non-fiction and fiction, Sci Fi and music journalism. The line between imagination and reality is hazily drawn – Ziggy Stardust is presented not just as one of Bowie’s many Pop characters but his incarnate alien Other. History is conceptualised around the moment of Ziggy’s miraculous nativity, the distant past and cosmic future drawn together about the single point of the Starman’s ‘arrival’.
Disappointingly, the format becomes more orthodox as the novel progresses. The details of Ziggy/Bowie’s actual time touring never stray far from the sex, drugs and smashed hotel rooms of a conventional rock star biography. The arrival of Ziggy feels so anticipated that everything after his first appearance savours of anti-climax. We forget that Ziggy is merely Bowie’s creation, a clever piece of Glam Rock marketing. Goddard fails to balance the tale of Ziggy the psycadelic alien with that of Bowie the ordinary (well, ordinary-ish) earthling — we have learnt too much about Ziggy’s roots to maintain his Martian mystique, but too little about Bowie himself to gain real understanding of his character and career.
But do we really want insight into Bowie the human? To make him more ‘knowable’ would be to make him uninteresting. We want our pop geniuses to be aliens. As it is, there is a fascinating, almost magical-realist element to Goddard’s smooth movement between space spiders and stardust and the Chris Tarrant and chips banalities of 70s life. His surreal explosion of people and facts has an enjoyably hectic extravagance and if nothing else, the eclectic inundation of Bowie-trivia is a good incentive to return to his albums.
‘Starman’ is playing as I type.
