I was fourteen when Starman was released as a single in the UK - 28 April 1972. I'd never heard of Bowie. I'd only even been listening to music seriously for about six months - since my dad had got me a stereo cassette deck. I'd borrowed LPs to tape from my oldest brother - three Led Zeppelin albums (II, III & IV), Pink Floyd's Relics, Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Fireball by Deep Purple. You may laugh - but these were all quite cool albums in their day. The only other person I knew who even had any LPs was my best school pal's older brother, Danny. He was 16 and therefore incredibly grown up and cool in my eyes. I knew he liked Deep Purple and Pink Floyd but I didn't know if his collection extended beyond those. Anyway, I was round my mate's house one afternoon after school and Danny was there; unsurprising since he lived there! The TV was on and the show was a kid's pop show called Lift Off With Ayshea (that being the presenter's name). Bowie & The Spiders came on to perform Starman. Before it really got started Danny said "You should watch this guy - he's really good!". Coming from Danny (my cool hero) this was akin to being ordered not to utter a word and not to take my eyes off the screen, so I didn't. I watched but was undecided.

Of course, really I was desperate to like him because obviously if Danny did, he must be cool. About a couple of weeks later - by which time I'd heard Starman a few times on the radio and had grown to quite like it - I was out shopping on a Saturday afternoon in Southend-on-Sea, with my mate and Danny, who appeared not to mind being seen out with his kid brother and his kid brother's mate. We stopped outside Guy Norris record shop and Danny pointed out the window display for The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust. I had never bought an LP before, nor did I that day, but I remember Danny making a big deal out of the fact that the words TO BE PLAYED AT MAXIMUM VOLUME appeared at the bottom of the rear of the cover. I thought that was pretty cool - after all, to be good AND appeal to teenagers music had to be loud didn't it? Within a week or so of that, Danny had bought himself a copy of Ziggy. Because of the interest I'd shown, he was kind enough to pass on to me his copy of the Starman single. Both the A and B sides, it turned out, were on the album, so he didn't need the single any more. So I got to hear Suffragette City.

Now I had two tracks to go on, but still wasn't totally sold. I liked the fact that Suffragette City was a bit heavier - and although I really liked that "Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am!" bit, I couldn't decide whether it was goofy or cool. (I didn't know what it meant.) A short while after that and I'd still never bought an LP. I was attracted to the idea of buying one, but it would take two weeks' money from my morning newspaper round to buy just one LP - a big commitment, as this would leave me no money for anything else. Then I was presented with a golden opportunity to obtain my first LP. The newsagent where I did my paper round installed one of those carousel-type racks about 6 feet tall and loaded it up with his latest line: LPs. I realised that it would be relatively simple to slip an album into my full newspaper bag if he turned his back long enough. Once inserted between the newspapers it would be completely concealed. So I spent time browsing through the LPs whilst he was making up the various paper rounds. Wow! He had Pink Floyd's Relics. And Paranoid. I'd grown fond of my tapes of both of those and thought it would be great to have the actual LPs. And look! He had Ziggy Stardust! I hadn't plucked up the courage at that stage to ask Danny if I could borrow any of his albums for taping purposes. I could nick Ziggy and get to hear that without having to either ask Danny or pay for it! Then it happened: my newsagent didn't just turn his back - he actually went round the back of the store while I was the only paperboy in there. The fool! In went Ziggy. There was even more room in the bag than I'd thought. No chance at all of him spotting it. I'd decided to steal Ziggy first purely on the grounds that there would be more of a buzz in rushing home with my ill-gotten gains if it was an album I didn't already know.

The first track impressed me. I thought some of the lines in Five Years were cool. I didn't realise people wrote songs with lyrics which included lines like "a queer threw up at the sight of that", and I really felt the despair of the soldier with the broken arm who simply "fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac". I thought the whole theme was cool, but in a totally Bart Simpson way. Earth gets a warning that it all ends in five years and people go crazy. Cool! I don't really recall too well now my first impressions of the remaining tracks. Obviously I enjoyed the two tracks I already knew. I played Ziggy a lot mainly, I think, because it was the only LP I owned. I played it and played it until I knew every word of every track. I now LOVED David Bowie. What a great new singer! The androgyny - the make up, the glitter - didn't really have that much of an impact initially. My mate teased me a few weeks later. I'd told him all about my thieving and about how much I liked Ziggy. "Do you remember" he asked me, "that single by Peter Noone called Oh! You Pretty Things?" Of course he knew I did know the song as I'd often laughed with him whilst we'd both mocked exactly that song - or rather not the song itself, but Peter Noone's performance of it on Top Of The Pops. I considered Peter Noone to be totally M.O.R. and had been totally scathing about his performance, which I considered just too namby-pamby to be even halfway to being cool. "Yes I do" I replied. "Did you like it" he asked, knowing damn well what my answer would be. Somehow though, I sensed this was leading somewhere so I gave a rather non-committal response. "Why are you asking?" I wanted to know. "Well that song was written by David Bowie". "What!" I couldn't believe it. Apparently, Bowie had made an LP before Ziggy called Hunky Dory. "Hunky Whatty?" (I didn't know what that meant either). Yes, and Danny had just bought it and on it was Bowie's own version of the song I'd not too long before been completely disparaging about. "Well, perhaps if I heard Bowie's version - it might be better than Peter Noone's" I said. "Do you think Danny would lend it to me?" "I doubt it, but you could ask". So I did and he did.

So I taped Hunky Dory and now I had two. And he wasn't having me on. Oh! You Pretty Things really was on it and Bowie really had written it. Oh well, since I liked the rest of the LP so much I found it easy to overlook the fact that not long before I'd hated that song. Changes was good. I loved that "Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes" bit. And the lyric of Andy Warhol appealed in an Edward Lear kind of way. Although my collection was building up - I'd stolen another three albums by then - it was still small enough to mean that every album in it was on "heavy rotation". So Hunky Dory got played and played until I loved that too. And that was it really. I found out there was another Bowie LP which only cost 99p so I bought that - The World of David Bowie. The songs on that weren't anything like the rest of the songs I'd heard but by now I thought Bowie was so brilliant that I persisted until I grew to love that too. I still do really, as it's music I grew up to and with, even though I know many Bowie fans who have no time at all for his pre-Space Oddity material. A few months after that RCA reissued Space Oddity and TMWSTW, which became my favourite album for a long long time. I waited outside my local record shop for it to open the day Aladdin Sane was released. And Pin Ups. And Diamond Dogs. And Earthling - but not necessarily everything in between.

Sent in by Tony Paknadel (10th May 2001)

(Brilliant story Tony - thanks!)