When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World

by Dylan Jones

June 7, 1972. 7.30pm. David Bowie performs "Starman" on  Top of the Pops . This is the story of a moment in music history that changed a generation.  When David Bowie, the uber-freak with the mismatched pupils, the low-tech space face from the planet Sparkle, made his third appearance on Top of the Pops , that appearance was the one that properly resonated with its audience, the one that would go on to cause a seismic shift in the zeitgeist. This is the performance that turned Bowie into a star, embedding his Ziggy Stardust persona into the public's consciousness. With a tall, flame-orange cockade quiff (stolen from a Kansai Yamamoto model on the cover of Honey ), lavishly applied make-up, white nail polish, and wearing a multi-colored jumpsuit that looked as though it were made from fluorescent fish skin (chosen by Ziggy coshaper the designer Freddie Buretti), and carrying a brand spanking new, blue acoustic guitar, a bone-thin Bowie appeared not so much as a pop singer, but rather as some sort of benevolent alien, a concept helped along by the provocative appearance of his guitarist, the chicken-headed Mick Ronson, with both of them unapologetically sporting knee-length patent leather wrestler's boots (Bowie's were red). Suddenly Bowie had the world at his nail-polished fingertips, and in no time at all he would be the biggest star in the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music, Biography

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2012

About the author

Dylan Jones studied at Chelsea School Of Art and then St. Martin’s School of Art. He is the award-winning editor of GQ magazine, a position he has held since 1999, and has won the British Society of Magazine Editors “Editor of the Year” award a record ten times. In 2013 he was also the recipient of the prestigious Mark Boxer Award.
Under his editorship the magazine has won over 50 awards.
A former editor at i-D, The Face, Arena, the Observer and the Sunday Times, he is the author of the New York Times best seller Jim Morrison: Dark Star, the much-translated iPod, Therefore I Am and Mr. Jones’ Rules, as well as the editor of the classic collection of music writing, Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy. He edited a collection of journalism from Arena - Sex, Power & Travel - and collaborated with David Cameron on Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones (shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year).
He was the Chairman of the Prince’s Trust’s Fashion Rocks Monaco, is a board member of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and a Trustee of the Hay Festival. He is also the chairman of London Fashion Week: Men’s, London’s first men’s fashion week, launched in 2012 at the behest of the British Fashion Council.
In 2010 he spent a week in Afghanistan with the Armed Forces, collaborating on a book with the photographer David Bailey: British Heroes in Afghanistan.
In 2012 he had three books published: The Biographical Dictionary of Music; When Ziggy Played Guitar: David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World, and the official book of U2’s 360 Tour, published in October. Since then he has published
The Eighties: One Day One Decade, a book about the 1980s told through the prism of Live Aid, Elvis Has Left The Building: The Day The King Died, Mr. Mojo, London Rules, a polemic about the greatest city in the world, Manxiety and London Sartorial.
In June 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to publishing and the fashion industry. In 2014 he was made an Honorary Professor of Glasgow Caledonian University.

Reviews

[Solveig Oskarsdottir · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I would love this book but I couldn't even finish it. The first quarter was good but then it starts to feel a bit repetitious and longwinded. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood but I basically gave up on this book.

[Graham Power · Rating 3 out of 5]

Or how a twenty five year-old one-hit wonder reinvented himself as an extraterrestrial pop star and became the most influential pop star of the 1970s here on planet Earth. The Ziggy thing was certainly a high-stakes enterprise; Bowie coming on like a star and surrounding himself with the trappings of success, bodyguards and chauffeur-driven limos, at a time when he had no real fanbase and almost a decade of failure behind him. After that buildup, if the album had flopped, we would certainly never have heard of David Bowie again. Luckily, he had the talent to back up the ballyhoo.

The subtitle, ‘David Bowie and Four Minutes that Shook the World’, refers to Bowie’s appearance on the BBC TV programme Top of the Pops on 6 July 1972 to promote his new single ‘Starman’. Top of the Pops was watched by a family audience of up to fifteen million people each week. His androgynous and homoerotic performance had a profoundly liberating effect on many of the millions of young people who saw it, and it made Bowie a star. Jones rightly regards it as one of those era-defining and transformative pop moments, like Elvis on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show or the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show. Bowie was a startling flash of colour and strangeness in a monochrome and straight-laced Britain; even if many of us were watching in black and white. As Jones observes, it was one of those extraordinary shared national TV moments which no longer really happen with the decline of appointment television.

There are times when this feels like a magazine article that has been teased out, not entirely successfully, to book length. There is a lot of rather perfunctory historical context setting and perhaps rather too many autobiographical reminiscences of the author’s adolescence. Still, I don’t want to sound overly negative. Jones writes highly readable prose, and although he doesn’t say anything startlingly original, he makes all the important points about Bowie’s breakthrough moment.

[Jane Parsons · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very enjoyable tour through the early seventies landscape: the politics, the culture, the sights and sounds, and, importantly, the way music was packaged and delivered to the millions who watched Top of the Pops. David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars did something new and revolutionary which resonated with and inspired most of the 80s bands I used to slavishly follow on Top of the Pops.

Dylan Jones is an amiable, self-deprecating and well-informed tour guide who delighted me with tales of his dull childhood in Deal and his attempts at a Ziggy haircut. He is adept, as a cultural critic, of examining the impact of Bowie's performance of Starman on Top of the Pops, and brilliant at unpicking the way Bowie created his character. But sometimes I think he was so dazzled by the performance and persona, he forgets how darn good the songs were, how they have stood the test of time to be enjoyed by millions who weren't in front of their TV sets on that summer day in 1972. In fact, I'm just off to pop on Hunky Dory....

[Jolana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great insight into the time surrounding David Bowie as his career was just taking-off and the four minutes that define it. A great read for Bowie fans.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

for Bowie Fanboys! enjoyed.

[Max Tachis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am, first a foremost to many things in my life, a David Bowie fan. I want to get that out of the way right at the top so anyone reading this review knows that I am an unapologetically biased source and that will, without a doubt, color my opinion of this book.

It's not great. Dylan Jones' 2017 biography of Bowie is (so far; I'm not finished yet) a far superior book overall and (though I'm only halfway through it) I highly suggest it to anyone looking for an in-depth and near-complete look at his life and career. "The Complete David Bowie" by Nicholas Pegg is the best out there, by far, but is not for the faint of heart.

"When Ziggy Played Guitar", on the other hand, is personal; far more of a love letter than the biographical account of a historic moment in music history it's billed to be. However, Bowie's performance of that night on "Top of the Pops" is only a historic moment in music history because people like Dylan Jones took it so personally. There's a lot of validity in that. You can feel it, too, which is what I really appreciate about this piece. Those 3-plus minutes of television meant so much to so many and the explanation of what that means is where this book really shines.

In the end, it's just good. It tends to go in circles, with facts or stories repeated on occasion, but Jones' heart is easy to connect to if you're a Bowie fan and his retelling of the actual performance is riveting. It's like having a class taught by a professor who is ELATED with the subject matter; you can't help but get caught up in it, too.

[Esteban Galarza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dylan Jones nos propone un viaje emotivo a los años y días previos y posteriores a la presentación de Bowie y The Spiders From Mars en el Top Of The Pops del verano de 1972 que catapultó a Bowie e hizo estallar finalmente su figura como el único que tomó el testigo dejado por The Beatles en la música. Dylan Jones no es un advenedizo, claro. Es el editor de la revista GQ, una de las más importantes de su rubro en Inglaterra y tuvo la posibilidad de entrevistar múltiples veces a Bowie, coincidir en eventos, camerinos antes de recitales y hasta en el rodaje de The Hunger. Pero a Dylan Jones le interesa más dar una perspectiva de lo que significó esa presentación en la móda, la sexualidad, la música y hasta los colores cotidianos del English Way of Life. Tal vez señalaría como un punto flaco el quedarse mucho rato con esto, ya que los nos lectores que tenemos cierta aproximación a la cultura inglesa de esos años tenemos una idea del ambiente gris en el que se vivía. A esto sumamos (o restamos) que se detenga en muchas anécdotas de su vida personal y su familia que hace que se desdibuje la figura de Bowie (era por Bowie que leíamos el libro, ¿no?).
Pero luego, retoma la presentación en el TOTP de los Spiders y el estallido y el libro queda justificado con creces: muchas entrevistas de músicos que dieron el salto durante el estallido del post punk y new romantics, anécdotas de sus encuentros con Bowie que enriquecen muchísimo al superhombre y el despliegue sentimental de lo que significó que Bowie hubiese llegado a nuestras vidas para cambiarlas para siempre.

[Tony Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since this book's inspiration is Bowie's appearance on the UK music programme Top of the Pops in 1972 performing 'Starman' then there has to be quite a bit of padding to fill out the 200 or so pages in this book. I bought it because I saw Bowie on TV that day and it really was one of those life-changing moments. If you are a Bowie fan then you probably ought to read it, just expect a lot of personal reminiscing and some historical 'setting-the-scene' background information from Dylan Jones and you won't be disappointed.

[Dave Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must for Bowiephiles

Bowie spent over four decades trying to deconstruct his greatest construct the strange little Alien who came to save us, and ultimately gave us hope. Hope and glamour could it happen now in these instagram infected time that's debatable, and why this work should be widely devoured for an understanding and appreciation of the point that 70s caught fire.

[Joseph Williamson]

Enjoyed and learned from this book

I got this book by mistake thinking Dylan was David's son (Duncan). I'm glad I did get it as the book is a great read and I learnt a bit about David too.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but it does stretch its premise a bit far, and could probably have been done in half the pages as it repeats quite a lot.

[Dave Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learnt a lot about David Bowie from this book. I couldn't put it down

[Anthony Faber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lightweight but entertaining rendering of the zeitgeist at the time Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" album came out. The author is a Brit and he throws out a fair number of brand references that Americans like me don't know (I'm 2 years older than the author) as well as some idioms that we don't use in the U.S. but it was fun.

[James Gent]

Not a bad book, nothing hugely relevatory. Partly a subjective reflection on the impact Bowie & Ziggy made on a generation, partly a chronicle of how the Ziggy character shadowed Bowie's life, work and public personae, partly a fanboy memoir.

[Wilde Sky · Rating 3 out of 5]

A key time in a singer / songwriter’s life is described.

‎I found this book really interesting in places but large junks of it seemed to be the author writing about his own life (opinions) and / or what things were like in the 1970s. Overall it felt a bit rambling and repetitive.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I was looking for.