“I Didn’t Like That Aspect of It”: Ziggy Stardust Allowed David Bowie a New Sense of Expressive Freedom, but Not Without Its Worries

In January 1972, David Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust to the U.K. public. He gave an interview in the British music magazine Melody Maker, as transcribed on the fansite Bowie Bible. The story kicked off the Ziggy persona, giving Bowie more expressive freedom in his clothes, music, attitude, and his sexuality.

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“I’m gay,” Bowie told reporter Michael Watts in 1972, “and always have been, even when I was David Jones.” While Watts surmised that Bowie was playing into the nature of the times, when it was “permissible to act like a male tart” in order to “shock and outrage” the public, Bowie later said that the interview—and the Ziggy Stardust persona—”enabled me to make things more comfortable for myself,” as he told Mojo in 2002.

Essentially, as David Bowie’s fame grew, he didn’t want people making assumptions about him. “I found I was able to get a lot of tension off my shoulders by almost ‘outing’ myself in the press in that way, in very early circumstances,” Bowie said in 2002. “So I wasn’t going to get people crawling out the woodwork saying, ‘I’ll tell you something about David Bowie that you don’t know…’ I wasn’t going to have any of that.”

[RELATED: ‘Scary Monsters’: The Album David Bowie Wrote with Optimism Following the Berlin Trilogy]

Ziggy Stardust Gave David Bowie the Confidence to Experiment with Many Aspects of His Life

When David Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust in 1972, it was an era of exploration. There was experimentation and avant-garde art, especially for Bowie. “There was an excitement that the age of exploration was really finally here,” he recalled. “Which is what I was going through. It perfectly mirrored my lifestyle at the time. It was exactly what was happening to me.”

At the time, Bowie was coming off of Hunky Dory, which was a departure from his guitar-driven previous works. He wrote Hunky Dory primarily on piano, and while it’s considered one of his seminal works retrospectively, at the time it wasn’t commercially successful. Then, Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust in January 1972. The album came out that June, finally a commercial breakthrough for Bowie, and his fame skyrocketed.

Hunky Dory didn’t receive much promotion from the record label. RCA was concerned that David Bowie would change his image yet again. According to a retrospective by Ultimate Classic Rock, change was inevitable—Bowie’s image on Hunky Dory was purposefully malleable. He was unconcerned with genre labels or gender binaries. This would translate into Ziggy Stardust as well, but Ziggy was overall not as malleable; Ziggy was a concrete and solid persona, the first of many for David Bowie.

Ziggy Stardust Opened Doors, But Bowie Still Had Worries

What Bowie didn’t want to happen by outing himself was that he would be made to “carry a banner for any group of people.” He was worried about becoming the face of a certain identity. This would have been hell for a character chameleon like Bowie. “I didn’t feel like part of a group,” he recalled. “I didn’t like that aspect of it, [that] this is going to start overshadowing my writing and everything else that I do.”

It’s safe to say that David Bowie is known first for his music, second for his personas, and everything else falls into place from there to shape him into the icon we remember fondly today.

Featured Image by Chris Walter/WireImage