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Mon 20 October 2025 2:00, UK
Ziggy Stardust – one of the most memorable and recognisable names in musical history. It perhaps only comes second to the name of his creator, David Bowie.
The impact of Ziggy Stardust is hard to even quantify. Before the moment Bowie first appeared on stage in a sparkly unitard with spiked red hair and futuristic makeup, he was doing okay riding the coat tales of ‘Space Oddity’. After that moment, he was a phenomenon. From that moment, he stayed that way.
The launch of Ziggy came in January 1972. “David Bowie had brought theatre to a humble pub gig,” the owner of the venue it all went down in said, “I couldn’t blink for fear of missing something—nothing would ever be the same again.” It happened with a flourish as Bowie clearly knew that this would be a historic moment. ‘Ode To Joy’, the Beethoven song revived by the Clockwork Orange soundtrack played, and Ziggy emerged. “Ziggy Stardust with his trademark red hair and The Spiders from Mars then took to the two-foot high stage. I had never seen or heard anything like it before,” the owner and onlooker said.
It was clear from the start that Bowie had a distinct vision for this chapter. He also seemed to know it would be something special as he warned, “I’m going to be huge,” telling Melody Maker three weeks before the first performance, “It’s quite frightening in a way because I know that when I reach my peak and it’s time for me to be brought down it will be with a bump.”
Even that is setting the scene for this character of an alien crashing to earth, playing the role of a rockstar crashing from the dizzying heights of fame. The aesthetic was locked in, the story was ready to be told, the album was prepped for launch and Bowie was raring to go.
But where did Ziggy Stardust the name come from? How do you even begin to find the right name for a project and a character so vivid and so fully formed in his mind?
It started with one of the character’s inspirations – “the Legendary Stardust Cowboy,” Bowie said to Paul Du Noyer. Legendary wasn’t a descriptor Bowie added, that was his name. The artists were signed to the same label, Mercury Records, during Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ days, so he was in his orbit.
Bowie was fascinated by him. “He was a kind of Wild Man Fischer character; he was on guitar and he had a one-legged trumpet player and in his biography he said, ‘Mah only regret is that mah father never lived to see me become a success,’” he said, utterly baffled by this eclectic figure. He simply stole Stardust from that, stating, “I just liked the Ziggy Stardust bit because it was so silly.”
It was the ‘Ziggy’ that was tricky. After having the story and the figure in his mind for so long, he was struggling to find a first name that felt right. Then it came to him where all good ideas seem to live – on the train.
“The Ziggy bit came from a tailor’s that I passed on the train one day,” he said, and it was as simple as just seeing it on a shop sign. It also seemed to make sense as it connected him back to Iggy Pop, who he’d just met and was just becoming fast friends with, stating, “It had that Iggy [as in Iggy Pop] connotation.” But mostly, it was just a name from a shop, explaining, “It was a tailor’s shop, and I thought, Well, this whole thing is gonna be about clothes, so it was my own little joke calling him Ziggy.”
Nothing too deep, but historical all the same. They say what’s in a name, but it’s all in the weight it can come to hold.
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