Originally compiled in 2015 with the artist’s blessing, Mick Rock’s The Rise of David Bowie 1972-1973 (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de) is a multlingual (English, German, French) photobook in a 2023-edition. This collection includes stage shots, backstage candids and other photographs, charting the musical, theatrical and sexual revolution of the 1972–1973 Ziggy Stardust world tour, made by David Bowie’s official photographer, Mick Rock.
The five-phase lenticular cover — according to the angle you look at the cover, you will discover five different Bowie photos — is a celebration of David Bowie’s fearless experimentation and reinvention. This large-scale book 23.8 x 33.3 cm, 2.30 kg, is a feast for the eyes.
In the book, Michael Bracewell notes that David Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (vinyl & CD: Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France) is routinely hailed as of one the masterpieces of the rock canon, an epoch-defining work of creative iconoclasm. David Bowie comingled visions of apocalypse, desire and existential crisis. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was both a record and a cultural phenomen that seemed to be concerned with time, time travel and temporality.
In the eyes of Michael Bracewell, Britain, in the early years of the 1970s, was a place still partially immured in the drabness and formality that had lingered since the post-war years of the 1950s which, seen from now, appear as shabby and simplistic. Ziggy offered a lightning strike precisely at the moment when the apparent exhaustion of an old order rendered all the more incisive his presentiment of the future. Ziggy conjured the notion of rock ‘n’ roll for and at the end of time with images of darkness, disgrace, doomsday, orgiastic incitement which, in turn, became a metaphor for the end of youth, love, innocence and utopian fantasies.
According to Michael Bracewell, the song “Five Years”, announcing Earth’s demise in five years, intends more than a science fiction fantasy. The song invokes images of romantic, religious and maternal love as though also addressing the frailties of emotion; that people are kinder, more real, than the times they live through.
Alhtough the Rolling Stones (history in German), Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Doors and others had looked at the end of time before, Michael Bracewell underlines that Ziggy Stardust was exploring it in a very different way — not as a lament, or sentiment, or melodrama, or politics, but as an open-ended charade through which to explore the myth of oneself and the mythology of pop. Ultimately, David Bowie seemed to be playing with the notion of modernity itself and this album about endings, death and suicide.
The early 1970s mark the end of the hippie dream. Starman, Ziggy Stardust opened a new page, both a reclamation and reinvention of the classic forms of pop writing. The radicalism, queerness, otherness of the new sound were enhanced by the clothes, the makeup, the hair.
Michael Bracewell states that Ziggy became the ultimate pop star, the embodiment, executioner, untertaker and sacrificial victim of pop as an erotic and cultural archetype: the suicidal demigod of all the Jung dudes (in 1972, David Bowie wrote the song “All the Jung Dudes” for the English glam rock band Mott the Hoople).
Michael Bracewell does not mention that David Bowie’s alien, messiah rock star stage persona was partly inspired by the singer Vince Taylor. Taylor had had a breakdown and believed himself to be a cross between a god and an alien when the two artists met. Another inspiration was Iggy Pop.
Michael Bracewell’s text in The Rise of David Bowie 1972-1973 is just a short introduction to great, large-scale photographs which will blow your mind. In addition, the book offers an interview of the photographer Mick Rock by Barney Hoskyns.
Mick Rock: The Rise of David Bowie 1972-1973. With contributions by Mick Rock, Barney Hoskyns and Michael Bracewell. Taschen, July 2023, 300 pages full of large scale photographs. Order this multlingual (English, German, French) photobook from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
Barney Hoskyns was born in London in 1959. He is the editorial director of Rock’s Backpages, the online library of pop writing and journalism, and a former staff writer at the New Musical Express, contributing editor to Vogue, and U.S. correspondent for MOJO. He is the author of the Tom Waits biography Lowside of the Road (2009) and Trampled Under Foot, the oral history of Led Zeppelin (2012).
Michael Bracewell was born in London in 1958 and has written widely on modern and contemporary art and culture. His more recent publications include Richard Hamilton: Late Works, and Damien Hirst: The Complete Psalm Paintings. He has contributed to The Faber Book of Pop and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Fashion Writing.
Mick Rock (1948–2021), was born in London and is known as “The Man who shot the seventies.” As well as David Bowie, he has photographed Lou Reed, Queen, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music and Blondie. He also produced and directed music videos for the classic Bowie songs: “John, I’m Only Dancing”, “The Jean Genie”, “Space Oddity” and “Life On Mars?”. Mick Rock has had major exhibitions in London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, San Francisco and Las Vegas.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review have not been put between quotation marks.
Book review added on October 5, 2023 at 11:38 Swiss time. Detail added at 11:47.
