Ziggy Played Guitar

The history made on Heddon Street

The Starman, Heddon Street - Photograph: Jackie Hopfinger

My set is amazing, it even smells like a street

There's a bar at the end where I can meet you and your friend

Candidate - David Bowie

The future fell to earth on Heddon Street - formally part of Mayfair, yet culturally an outlier of Soho, separated from the latter only by the width of Regent Street. Until recently it was a down-at-heel central London backwater shoehorned between the flagship stores of Regent Street and the elite tailors of Savile Row. Now it has found its niche in London’s experience economy: you can have a drink at The Starman pub, enjoy a meal at Ziggy Green’s and Instagram yourself into one of the most iconic album covers of all time.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars by David Bowie is - both in its creation and its impact - the ultimate Soho album. It was recorded in Soho’s Trident Studios and is in part inspired by one of Soho’s musical pioneers. Bowie himself learned much of his musical craft in the neighbourhood’s clubs. But it is how Heddon Street itself has exploited its chance location as the album cover backdrop that tells us much about how Soho is changing in the 21^st century: from Dog Field to Diamond Dogs.

I’m a space invader…

Dog Field was a five acres pasture, surrendered to the Crown in 1538  by the Abbot and Convent of Abingdon as part of Henry VIII’s Reformation. Its eastern boundary is followed today by Warwick Street, while the western boundary runs close to Savile Row. The field’s territory is topped and tailed by New Burlington Street and Vigo Street, and the area covered by Heddon Street itself lies in what was the field’s north west corner.

Along with large parts of what eventually became Soho, Dog Field was leased to Thomas Poultney, and his family continued to farm it until building work began in the 1670s. Rebuilding took place in the following century, and again from 1811 when Regent Street cut a swathe through this part of the city resulting in the demolition of all existing buildings and another phase of redevelopment. By this time Savile Row was attracting affluent residents, tailors and dealers in luxury goods while, just to the east, Soho’s rag trade inhabited the more densely packed streets and alleys. Businesses in Heddon Street catered to all these trades, with its relative seclusion providing from 1912 a home for a unique nightspot.

The historical writer Philip Hoare in his book ​Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand describes how “down a dark cul-de-sac lurked a new and devilish sort of place where Futurists cavorted: a 'night club' profanely named 'The Cave of the Golden Calf’”. A former draper’s basement at nine Heddon Street was where Frida Strindberg opened her club for Queer socialising offering jazz and dancing. In the view of London’s biographer Peter Ackroyd, its very name “seemed to promise almost biblical licentiousness”.

With interior decor by Wyndham Lewis, Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein it offered, at somewhat exclusive prices, tolerance of same-sex intimacy - seemingly unique for its time. In terms that would not be used in this context for many decades to come, the club advertised itself as “a place given up for gaiety”. It has been suggested that The Cave of the Golden Calf was London’s first gay bar and while it lasted for only two years it created a template that similar clubs - such as the Shim Sham Club on Wardour Street - would build on from the 1920s. Following the club’s closure, Heddon Street returned to being an unremarkable rag trade backwater.

A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me…

Casting a careful eye over the cover of Ziggy Stardust reveals much about Heddon Street’s economy in 1972. It also tells a story about the state of Britain at that time and what Bowie offered to young people (like us).

The cover glows with saturated unearthly colours, made all the more vivid by the muddy darkness that surrounds them. We’re in an alley with some rubbish and boxes dumped in the foreground. ‘London’ is scrawled on one of the boxes. So that’s where we are. The sky is dark. The pavement is wet. Welcome to Britain.

The photograph was taken on the evening of Thursday 13 January. Just four days before the country’s coal miners walked out at midnight in their first national strike for fifty years which was to last for seven weeks. A State of Emergency and power cuts followed. Some nights we did our homework by candlelight. Cinemas were showing a dystopian vision of brutalised and violent British youth culture in A Clockwork Orange. Unemployment exceeded one million for the first time since the thirties. Fourteen Catholics were shot dead by the British army on Bloody Sunday in Derry. The IRA responded with a car bomb at Aldershot Barracks, killing six people. 1972 was not starting well.

Meanwhile just weeks before the album was released, Apollo 16 returned from its lunar mission. To paraphrase Oscar, it may have felt in Britain that we were all in the gutter, but some of us at least were looking at the stars. The album cover certainly captured the bleak nature of that time, but also something else. As Christopher Breward says, the photograph “exudes mystery, menace and the anticipation of perverse sex and violence among the rain-soaked, litter-strewn backstreets of depressed early 1970s London.”

In a suggestion of Dickensian London, there’s a gaslight above all the rain sodden boxes and an illuminated sign that reads “K WEST”. Is it a quest? Well not strictly speaking: K. West was a firm of furriers. Below the light is a green doorway, to the right of which are signs that read Paquerette Dresses, Ramar Dresses Ltd 3rd Floor, International Wool Secretariat, Cravats Ltd, main entrance, T.H. Ferris 2nd Floor.

There in the centre he stands. Left leg raised, guitar slung over his shoulder, boots, turquoise jump suit. Turning the cover over, we see him in a phone box, staring out suggestively. Phone boxes have associations with call girls, Superman and Timelords - all of which capture the Ziggy persona fairly well. Down the side is the track listing and credits, which finish with the words “to be played at maximum volume”. Sound advice.

On the left of the album’s front cover is a three story building, with some of its windows illuminated. That building was number nine Heddon Street, formerly home of The Cave of the Golden Calf.

So where were the spiders…

As well as being home to dressmakers and cravat merchants, Heddon Street also provided affordable temporary workspaces, one of which Brian Ward rented as a makeshift photography studio. David Bowie had worked with Ward on the cover of his earlier Hunky Dory album, and at short notice the musician and his band arrived for a photo session. Bowie wanted him and his band to appear as alien beings who had just landed in a ‘Brooklyn alleyway’. It was raining heavily when Ward suggested “we may as well just go outside then”. Bowie was the only one prepared to pose in a downpour.

On a cold, wet January night, fifty four photographs were taken in black and white, two of which were later coloured by hand for the front and back cover. Many years later, the last surviving member of the Spiders from Mars band - drummer Woody Woodmansey - was asked by Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 6 why the band didn’t accompany Bowie for the photo session outside:

“So you could have been on the cover of one of the greatest albums of all time but you didn’t go outside because it was raining?”

“Exactly, yeah. We could have stood in the background with an umbrella, you know what I mean? The Spiders from Hull!”

Bright lights, Soho, Wardour Street, you hope you make friends with the guys that you meet…

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is very much a Soho album. For David Bowie, Soho was where he discovered music and created his persona(s). As a teenager, he would be taken by his older brother Terry to jazz clubs. From this he developed his own passion for jazz, soul and R&B. It was at Le Bataclan Club just off Regent Street where he first met Marc Feld (later Bolan).

“Marc took me dustbin shopping,” Bowie explains. “At that time, Carnaby Street, the fashion district, was going through a period of incredible wealth. And rather than replace buttons on their shirts or zippers on their trousers, they’d just throw it all away in the dustbins. So we used to go up and down Carnaby Street and go through all the dustbins, around nine, ten o’clock, and get our wardrobes together.”

One of Bowie’s first bands - The King Bees - performed at the Marquee Club in May 1964 when, even as a seventeen year old, he was developing his stagecraft as Dana Gillespie recalls: “David came onstage looking like Robin Hood, with thigh-length suede fringed boots, and flowing lemon-yellow hair.”

His next band - The Lower Third - he recruited at the Gioconda coffee bar on Denmark Street, which he frequented in the mid-sixties, outside of which he lived briefly in the band’s converted tour ambulance in the days before central London parking restrictions.

His 1967 debut album was a commercial failure, following which he was heard in The Ship pub on Wardour Street saying he would give up music and become a Buddhist monk. A short-lived time at the Samye Ling Monastery in Eskdalemuir, Scotland was followed by him returning to London and collaborating with the mime artist and dancer Lindsay Kemp, with whom he had a brief relationship and lived with him at his Bateman’s Buildings flat just off Soho Square.

Major Tom came into the world at Soho’s Trident Studios in 1969, along with his next four albums, including Ziggy Stardust. The album and the concept behind it drew on many influences, but one in particular is dominant - the Elvis of Isleworth: Vince Taylor. Born Brian Holden, he visited the 2i’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street right at the start of Britain’s rock and roll boom. A leather-clad persona and stage name kicked off his singing career. His recording of Brand New Cadillac failed to chart in the UK, but was a hit across Europe, and for a few years he toured Europe from his new base in Paris.

A taste for LSD marked the start of the end for Vince Taylor’s career, leading to him announcing from the stage that he was the son of Christ. As his drug taking continued and his grasp on reality slipped further, he returned to London where he ran into David Bowie:

“I met him a few times in the mid-Sixties and I went to a few parties with him. He was out of his gourd. Totally flipped. The guy was not playing with a full deck at all. He used to carry maps of Europe around with him, and I remember him opening a map outside Tottenham Court Road tube station, putting it on the pavement and kneeling down with a magnifying glass. He pointed out all the sites where UFOs were going to land. He was the inspiration for Ziggy.”

But there is so much more folded into Ziggy Stardust. The style is Clockwork Orange in Liberty fabrics (Soho’s iconic department store) expressing a sexual ambiguity that owes little if anything to Vince Taylor’s rock biker persona. This is reinforced by Bowie’s highly considered working of the media surrounding and in part defining the album. He was interviewed early in 1972 by Michael Watts in Melody Maker who wrote:

“David’s present image is to come on like a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy. He’s as camp as a row of tents, with his limp hand and trolling vocabulary. ‘I’m gay,’ he says, ‘and always have been, even when I was David Jones.’ But there’s a sly jolty about how he says it, a secret smile at the corners of his mouth.”

Then on 6 July 1972 David Bowie performed Starman on Top of the Pops. At the start, the camera is focused on him strumming the song’s opening chords on a blue 12-string acoustic guitar. It pans out as he starts singing to show him wearing a beautifully quilted colourful jumpsuit, red boxing boots with green laces and sporting a bright orange blowdried vertical puffball haircut, razored tight at the back. So far, so very colourful, although most of the audience were watching in black and white.

But it was what happened one minute and six seconds into the four minutes of Starman that changed our music culture forever. Wearing a gold lamé suit, guitarist Mick Ronson joins him at the microphone, where Bowie drapes his arm around him as they both sing the chorus. Then twenty seconds later he points straight at the camera as he sings “I had to phone someone so I picked on you-hoo-oo”. The rest is history.

Screaming above Central London, never bored, so I'll never get old…

The Starman pub is the latest addition to the street where you can enjoy a drink and a meal under the K WEST sign (we have it on good authority that the sign is a replica of the original). We take our walkers to The Starman at the end of our guided walking tours - great service, atmosphere and - for central London - good value. Watching that episode of Top of the Pops all those years ago, never did we imagine that the song would eventually become a pub, outside of which you could enjoy a meal. Built on land stolen by Henry VIII from the monasteries, Heddon Street remains part of The Crown Estate, with its website lauding “Heddon Street’s place as a vibrant al fresco food hub in the heart of the West End”.

Al fresco dining recently became a sore point with many of Soho’s 3,000 residents. In efforts to increase footfall lost by Covid, Westminster Council brought in temporary street closures to allow continental-style al fresco as a shot in the arm for Soho’s restaurants and bars. The consequent rise in noise, disturbance, crime and street fouling was not welcomed by those for whom Soho is their home.

This raises the question of how Soho should develop in future, and especially the balance of interests that should shape that development. The Soho captured on an album cover half a century ago no longer exists. Thankfully. Cities change, they evolve, they develop. Our whole project is about exploring how and why wonderful music cultures grow in the spaces and places of our changing cityscapes. Our interest is not in nostalgia - but in understanding and celebrating how this ever changing migrant city creates islands of liberty and liberation expressed through music.

But cities do not develop according to some iron law; their future is not predetermined. People make cities. And usually people have quite different ideas about how cities should develop. Those differences usually fall between the people who live in them and the people who own them. Then there are the retailers and hospitality providers - and those who work for them - who have yet another set of interests. Speaking for the Soho community, Labour Councillor Geoff Barraclough says “We want Soho to remain a vibrant centre for a diverse range of the capital’s creative and hospitality businesses for years to come but not at the expense of those that call it home.”

Without its community, Soho would have no musical legacy. David Bowie was, for a time at least, a part of that community - being inspired here, learning his craft here, sporadically living here, creating some of his finest work here. Apart from some scattered blue plaques, Denmark Street and Heddon Street (both located little more than the length of a London bus outside Soho itself) are the only places where that legacy is obvious. Both streets need to be celebrated and the history made in them appreciated. Those who visit Soho to enjoy its music, culture and vibrancy must also recognise that Soho’s current community are the custodians of that legacy.

Ziggy Stardust plaque, Heddon Street - Photograph: Jackie Hopfinger

On Sunday 13 August 2023 we will be doing our next Guided Walk of Soho’s musical history. Details here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/cc/walk-on-the-wild-side-1656209