Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was one of the first albums I ever purchased. A week before, an uncle had given me his old red Dansette record player; I used collected pocket money to christen it. After just one play, the 10-year-old me was blown away. But it wasn’t just elementary school kids who loved this album, causing it to break into the top 30 US and UK album charts. This was the album that launched Bowie to superstardom.
Glam had been throwing color into gray 1970s Britain, but Bowie, with influences as diverse as the Velvet Underground and A Clockwork Orange, took it further than the Sweets and Slades. His lyrics and his interviews were not aimed at a safe audience; songs about alienation and his announcements of bisexuality were not the usual stuff of the pop world of the time. Bowie was pop and rock, accessible and edgy. His arm around Mick Ronson on the BBC’s music flagship, Top of the Pops, might seem tame now, but in 1972, British living rooms shook when it came on the screen. Now that moment is hailed as important in UK LGBT+ cultural history.
Fifty years later, there is much hullabaloo about the album’s anniversary, which (among much else) shows that Ziggy’s place in rock history is secure (if anyone had any doubts). One piece of the half-century celebration is this new pressing, issued by Parlophone, cut by John Webber “on a fully customised late Neumann VMS80 lathe with fully recapped electronics from 192kHz restored masters of the original Trident Studios master tapes, with no additional processing on transfer,” according to the press release. (A picture disc is also available.) So that’s the tech stuff; the main question is, does it sound better? Is it a plus for the music or a marketing ploy? I’ve bought a few half-speed masters from other bands and not heard a great deal of difference.
The run-in to “Five Years” is completely silent; there’s not even an h of a hiss, then, to quote a song later on the album, The epic “Five Years” sounds even more epic. The echoing cry-in and dying away of Bowie’s vocal seem to reach farther back behind the speakers. There’s more power and more depth. From that point on, the sound quality never lets up. The only pops you hear on the record are the songs; the
