I think probably what happened…is that it was a jam. When asked if Round and Round was dropped because it didn’t fit the Ziggy persona, Bowie replied that it was wasn’t, ‘Round & Round would have been the perfect kind of number that Ziggy would have done on stage. When asked about the concept of Ziggy, Bowie replied, ‘I’ll try very hard…its a little difficult but it originally started as a concept album, but it kind of got broken up because I found other songs I wanted to put in the album which wouldn’t have fitted into the story of Ziggy…so at the moment its a little fractured and a little fragmented (I’m just lighting a cigarette) so anyway what you have there on that album when it does finally come out is a story which doesn’t really take place…its just a few little scenes from the life of a band called Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars…who could feasibly be the last band on Earth – it could be within the last five years of Earth…I’m not at all sure.’ In fact at one point the album name was said to be Round and Round. These included the Chuck Berry cover Round and Round, and a cover of Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam – songs that Bowie would often included in the live show.
In a February 1972 telephone interview with Jon Scott, Bowie confirmed that a number of tracks that had been recorded never made the final cut. (Although the album was not slated for release until some months into the UK tour.) With rehearsals complete, the Ziggy album was mostly recorded across the period October 1971 to February 1972, and the intention was always that the tracks would form the core of the Ziggy tour scheduled to run from February 1972 through until the late summer of 1972, followed by a U.S. Basically it was a converted cellar and was the venue where Bowie and the Spiders from Mars rehearsed The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in mid-1971, prior to its recording at Trident Studios.īowie’s Spiders consisting of Mick Ronson (guitar), Trevor Bolder (bass) and Mick Woodmansey (drums), were in fact the yet unnamed the Spiders From Mars, but they had recorded Hunky Dory at Soho’s Trident Studios in London with the added verve of yet to be Yes keyboard magician, one Richard Wakeman. This was a rehearsal studio designed and built in 1971 by Will Palin, Les Copley and Lance Spencer. Ziggy’s story starts in south-east London not only in Beckenham where Bowie was living but at the Underhill Rehearsal Studios which could be found at 2, Blackheath Hill, Greenwich. The question of where Ziggy was launched is often asked but is open to some misinformation? For Bowie and music fans it has interest because this new alter-ego launched Bowie’s career into outer-space in terms of popularity. (And one day I’ll write a piece on the Bowie – Japan connection.) Of course Bowie was a Nipponphile and so there is at least some connection to my usual writings on Japan. This is a bit of an outlier when it comes to my usual pieces but I was asked to undertake some research on this by a friend writing a music book, and he was happy that I publish the bare bone facts of where and when Ziggy was launched. Photographs taken at the Ziggy gig, Empire Theatre, Edinburgh, almost a year after the launch.
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