ST RDUST MEMORIES
FOR me and several of my friends, the Seventies were the start of the twenty-first century. It was Kubrick’s doing on the whole. With the release of two magnificent films, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, within a short period, he pulled together all the unarticulated loose ends of the past five years into a desire of unstoppable momentum. Both of these films provoked one major theme: there was no linear line in the lives that we lead. We were not evolving, merely surviving. Moreover, the clothes were fab: 2001 with its Courrèges-like leisure suits and Clockwork’s Droogs, dressed to kill.
Writers like George Steiner had nailed the sexy term post-culture and it seemed a jolly good idea to join up the dots for rock. Overall, there was a distinct feeling that ‘nothing was true’ anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it had seemed. Nor, for that matter, was the past. Therefore, everything was up for grabs. If we needed any truths we could construct them ourselves.
The main platform would be, other than shoes, ‘We are the future, now.’ And the one way of celebrating that was to create it by the only means at our disposal. With, of course, a rock’n’roll band.
On a promotional trip to the US in January 1971, I was very kindly offered a room to crash in by the record producer Tom Ayers. At the time, Tom was producing one of the all time rock heroes, Gene Vincent. One night, at the recording studio, Tom asked whether I would like to jam or sing something with Gene. At that point, I had already written “Moonage Daydream”, “Ziggy Stardust” and “Hang On To Yourself”. We settled on “Hang On To Yourself” and made a ghastly version of it which is floating around somewhere on eBay, I expect. I went on to explain that Ziggy wasn’t going to be a real rock star and that I would play him. I think they all thought I was talking in
