IT is November 2023 and Uncut is sitting in the plush confines of London’s AIR studios listening to David Bowie’s demo for “Starman”. A late addition to The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, “Starman” was released as the album’s lead single on April 28, 1972, where it played a critical role in helping Bowie reshape the cultural landscape. But it’s unlikely that the song would have proved so vital to Bowie’s – and Ziggy’s – success if it had stayed close to its original form. Originally recorded at his home in Haddon Hall, Beckenham in January 1972, this nascent “Starman” finds Bowie exploring other directions. As well as his acoustic 12 string guitar, there is an overdubbed slide guitar, which gives the song a surprisingly bluesy quality. Bowie alters his vocal delivery, too, adopting an almost Dylan-like phrasing on lines like “Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low”. Meanwhile, in the chorus, instead of “Let the children lose it/Let the children use it” Bowie sings, “Feel the cosmic people/Let the astral in”, a residual echo, perhaps, of the mystical fantasies of Marc Bolan – Bowie’s greatest creative rival and, for a time, inspiration.
Joining Uncut at AIR – a converted church hall in Hampstead – is Ken Scott, who worked as co-producer alongside Bowie throughout 1971 and 1972, a fertile period that yielded both the Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust albums. Scott has been working at AIR on remastering Ziggy, along with various outtakes and alternate versions, for Rock N Roll Star!, an expansive new boxset charting the evolution of Bowie’s doomed extra-terrestrial rocker. But Scott has not previously heard Bowie’s home demos. As “Starman” finishes, Scott laughs to himself.
“I was chuckling at how strange it sounds,” he explains while remastering engineer John Webber cues up another home demo – this time of “Soul Love”. Bowie plays the song with a beautiful, aching tenderness, only breaking out of his reverie to extemporise an instrumental break at the 1:43 mark. After the song finishes, he delivers careful instructions to Mick Ronson, his musical co-conspirator, for whom this tape was originally intended more than 50 years ago. Although Ronson is a master arranger, Bowie clearly and carefully explains what he wants – “Instead of having the usual violin lineup, I would like to have saxophones. Two tenors, two altos and a baritone doing very soft and sweet background work all the way through. And I think probably I’ll play an alto solo at the beginning and at the middle there.”
“It says something of the relationship between Mick and David,” says Scott. “It was so worked out, right down to the ‘la la’s at the end. To hear him talking like that – it’s amazing, this idea for another version that we never recorded.”
These home demos are not the only evidence on of an alternative path for . While songs like “So Long 60s”, “Stars” and “Hang On To Yourself” evolved into essential parts of the Ziggy story, “It’s Gonna Rain Again” – heard here for the first time – never made it past a jam, while “Shadow Man”, “Velvet Goldmine” and “Sweet Head” were recorded, considered and finally discarded. Listened to now, they make you wonder how differently things might have turned out for Bowie in 1972 – how reliant the success of his sexually ambiguous, sartorially outrageous creation was on the final selection of songs Bowie chose for the album. As if to underscore the potential fragility of the Ziggy project, the first version of the album was drawn up before three key songs – “Starman”, “Suffragette City” and “Rock ’N’
