Like a leper messiah

David Bowie creates a man-god. What does he want with us?

David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, 1972 (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

“What is [the Messiah's] name?…The Rabbis said: His name is 'the leper scholar’”

Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 98a

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be superhuman.’”

David Bowie

MESSIAH

Noun
1.  Judaism: the awaited redeemer of the Jews, to be sent by God to free them

2.  Jesus Christ, when regarded in this role

3. an exceptional or hoped for liberator of a country or people

Collins English Dictionary

All it takes to encounter the Messiah is an inquisitive mind and a fascination with popular culture. David Bowie had both.

There was Little Richard, bearer of a divine message. Listening to Tutti Frutti was such a transcendent experience for the young David that he later proclaimed: “I had heard God.”

There was Elvis Presley, the great liberator. Bowie recounted the moment he first felt the transformative power of music: “I saw a cousin of mine dance when I was very young. She was dancing to Elvis’s Hound Dog and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything.”¹ Bowie would call him a “major hero of mine. And I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something”.

There was Mick Jagger, another icon. David was enthralled from the first time he saw the Stones; Jagger would go on to play a quasi mythical role in Bowie’s imagination.

These were men whose hold over their audiences was absolute, who proclaimed other worlds, who embodied other ways of being; who were idols.

There was also Vince Taylor, whom Bowie had befriended in the mid-1960s. He recalled in 1996:

"He had a firm conviction that there was a very strong connection between himself, aliens and Jesus Christ. Those were the three elements that went into his make-up and drove him. Eventually he went to France and became a huge rock star over there. And one night he decided he’d had enough. So he came out on stage in white robes and said the whole thing about rock had been a lie and in fact he was Jesus Christ. It was the end of Vince, his career and everything else.”

And so we have the raw materials of Ziggy Stardust, alien rock god, leper messiah. Bowie first took to the stage as Ziggy Stardust in February 1972; Ziggy would go on to change David’s life and the lives of countless others.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was released in June 1972. It was his first proper hit album, reaching number five in the charts at the time. Its name suggests a coherent narrative but the record provides none. What we have instead are images, snapshots, memories. It is a bit like a scrapbook that has been compiled haphazardly, with the odd vivid photograph pasted among apparently irrelevant cuttings.

As we have come to expect, the lyrics are infused with religion in various guises. But first we have the cover, which shows an otherworldly figure helping illuminate a scene of mundanity in a manner not entirely dissimilar from classical depictions of the Nativity.

The album begins with a prophesy:

Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying

(The location here may carry further significance: a market place is also the setting for Nietzsche’s most famous parable, in which the death of God is declared.)

A cop kneels and kisses the feet of a priest, and the song ends with Bowie’s abandoned, desolate howl of “Five years”, repeated as if its import is somehow yet to register. The New Testament foretells Christ returning at the end of the world.

Five Years bleeds into Soul Love. Sacred imagery abounds:

Soul love, the priest that tastes the word and
Told of love, and how my God on high is
All love, though reaching up my loneliness evolves
By the blindness that surrounds him

The song ascends to its chorus:

Inspirations have I none
Just to touch the flaming dove
All I have is my love of love
And love is not loving

The flaming dove is commonly used to symbolise Pentecost, a festival celebrating the apparent coming of the Holy Spirit. Doves carry great significance in Judaism and Christianity, and among Bowie’s childhood memories was his mother singing O for the Wings of a Dove, which is derived from Psalm 55.

The song does not quite finish before the next begins. Among the evocative sci-fi schlock and intergalactic passion, we hear:

The church of man, love
Is such a holy place to be

At last there is a pause for breath. Then a driving acoustic guitar opens Starman. The song tells of a heavenly figure with a message of liberation for humankind:

Let the children lose it
Let the children use it
Let all the children boogie

Granted, it hardly sounds profound, but it appears to echo the story of Elvis, Bowie and his cousin.

Side one of the album finishes with its first unremarkable song, called It Ain’t Easy. It is a somewhat hoary number written by an American named Ron Davies, and its inclusion on the album has long been a cause of bafflement among Bowie fans, not least as it was originally recorded for his previous album, Hunky Dory.

But perhaps the lyrics have something to do with it. The chorus goes:

It ain't easy, it ain't easy
It ain't easy to get to Heaven
When you're going down

The lyrics also attempt to reassure:

Well, all the people
Have got their problems
That ain't nothing new

With the help of the good Lord
We can all pull on through

There is a bluesy religiosity here, and a sensibility just as nostalgically American as the comic-book stylings of Moonage Daydream. But there is something else going on in this song.

It begins like this:

When you climb to the top
Of the mountain
Look out over the sea

One of the less remarked-upon themes of Bowie’s songs is the idea of being physically exalted. The main character in Wide Eyed Boy from Freecloud, published in 1969, hails “from the mountain called Freecloud where the eagle dare not fly”.

His 1970 song Black Country Rock says little other than:

Pack a pack horse and rest up here on
Black country rock
You never know, you might find it here on
Black country rock

Some say the view is crazy
But you may adopt another point of view
So if it's much too hazy
You can leave my friend and me with fond adieu

We will at some point discuss at length the song Station to Station from 1976, but for now we can mention these lines:

Here am I, flashing no colour
Tall in this room overlooking the ocean

And these:

Once there were mountains on mountains
And once there were sunbirds to soar with
And once I could never be down

There may of course be no significance to any of this; the repetition of the imagery could well be coincidental. And even if it is deliberate, its meaning is not necessarily spiritual. But there is an obvious Biblical parallel if we are minded to find one; it is in a story of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness.

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple,  saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,

“He will command his angels concerning you”,
    and “On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”’

Jesus said to him, ‘Again it is written, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

“Worship the Lord your God,
    and serve only him.”’

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

Bowie was asked in 1975 to find an analogy for the “forces, apart from satellites, that are moving around this globe or this planet - around you, David Bowie”. He agreed that such forces existed, and said:

A mountain - or a tree - is the manifestation of forces that we are not capable of dealing with.

The least we can say therefore is that a spiritual or religious interpretation may be misguided, but it can be made.

The second side of the album deals more with the mythology of rock’n’roll itself: performances, audiences, pretences; sex, death, salvation. It is here we find the song Ziggy Stardust. The narrator is a bandmate, recalling his extraordinary frontman.

We are told that “he was the nazz”. The Nazz is the name of a poem by “Lord” Richard Buckley, who was a major influence on the Beat generation so admired by the adolescent David Jones. In the poem, whose style is aped in the song, The Nazz is Jesus of Nazareth.

The story of Ziggy Stardust concludes:

Making love with his ego
Ziggy sucked up into his mind, ah
Like a leper messiah
When the kids had killed the man
I had to break up the band

The leper, the Biblical outcast.

Ziggy Stardust, slain by those he came to save.

---

Except, of course, he lived on.

Ziggy as a character was never clearly defined. The image of him on the cover of the album looks little like the figure he would become, and Bowie would continue performing as him on stage until July 1973, months after the release of his next album. This record was called Aladdin Sane and appeared to herald a new character, albeit one that looked really rather like how Ziggy had by then become. Bowie would later say that Ziggy had taken over his life, and retiring him on stage was the only means of escape. Even then, Ziggy returns on the cover of his following album, Pin Ups.

And that was it. Until the late 1990s, when Bowie began talking up a new project. “I’m trying to undertake something incredibly complex, which is to recreate a Ziggy, in terms of theatre, film and the internet,” he told a Danish radio station in 1999. “The idea is to have a theatrical version, which is virtually the interior life of Ziggy; a film, which would be the audience’s perception of Ziggy; and the internet, which would be more to do with ‘who’s his mum?’.” It would also involve revisiting some unfinished songs from the time, with the whole enterprise designed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the album in 2002.

Apart from some rather unappealing artwork, nothing came of it. Ziggy would stay resolutely in the 20th century. But maybe that is not quite true. For many, Bowie has come to be defined by Ziggy; and the character, nebulous and sketchy as he was, somehow lives on. The telephone box in Heddon Street, in which Ziggy is pictured on the back of the album, has become something of a shrine.

Of course, employing Biblical imagery and messianic themes does not in itself suggest any kind of spiritual questing. If we understand Ziggy Stardust as a unique episode in Bowie’s career, we may want to think of it merely as him drawing comparisons between rock stars and the religion of old.

But as we have already seen, there is far more continuity in his work than is initially apparent; rather than being independent and discrete, each creation flows from somewhere and into somewhere.

As we will discover, Ziggy was not the first of Bowie’s messiahs, and would not be his last.

---

If you enjoyed reading this, do feel free to share it by clicking below. Thank you.

---

Next on Bowie/God:

David Bowie and the messiah of terror

1. Alias David Bowie, p57