JANUARY, 1971. THERE was trouble in outer space. Major Tom’s signal was growing fainter by the day. And Ziggy Stardust was still an undefined blip on the interstellar radar.
Meanwhile, back at ground control, David Bowie was staring at the grey sky outside his Beckenham flat and worrying about his career.
His last single, The Prettiest Star, had been a flop, failing to build on the momentum of Space Oddity. His third album, The Man Who Sold The World, was languishing in the vaults of Mercury Records without a firm release date. His guitarist, Mick Ronson, had moved from London back to Hull to work as a gardener. Meanwhile, Bowie had fired his manager of five years, Ken Pitt. Although Pitt’s replacement, the cigar-chomping Tony Defries, had offered the age-old promise of “I’ll make you a star”, nothing celestial had yet materialised. In fact Defries’s most significant gambit at that point had been a financial squeeze-play that ousted Tony Visconti, robbing Bowie of both a producer and close friend. Alienated and in serious limbo, Bowie was reduced to gigging at pubs around south London for a few pounds a night.
In an unguarded low moment, he admitted to journalist Steve Peacock that he felt “washed-up – a disillusioned old rocker”.
At 24, with seven years in the business, three albums under his belt and one too many thwarted dreams, Bowie brooded on the sidelines as his friendly rivals Marc Bolan and Elton John ascended the first rungs of the ladder to stardom. When would he get his turn?
But even in his winter of discontent, Bowie refused to quit. “I might have had moments of, ‘God, I don’t think anything is ever going to happen for me,’” he later said, “but I would bounce up pretty fast. I still liked the process. I liked writing and recording. It was a lot of fun for a kid.” After years of aping R&B and coffeehouse folk styles, the blond-tressed kid was finally discovering his own sound. Or, as he’d put it so poetically in a song he’d written that December, he was learning to ‘Turn and face the strange’.
“In the early 70s it really started to all come together for me as to what it was that I liked doing,” Bowie told in 2011, “and it was a collision of musical styles. I found that I couldn’t easily adopt brand loyalty, or genre loyalty. I wasn’t an R&B artist, I wasn’t a folk artist, and I didn’t see the point
