(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 9 November 2025 14:30, UK
Beginning the story of Ziggy Stardust’s crash-landing onto Earth, offering his message of the youth’s salvation by an alien referred to as ‘Starman’, David Bowie’s glam rock anthem incited a revolution.
Ziggy Stardust is one of the many beings conceived in Bowie’s mind, representations of his chameleon-like musicianship and his subsequent evolution. Ziggy, in his customary look of a fiery red mohawk, glittery patterned jumpsuits and lithe frame, saw a strangely beautiful alien come to life.
Like all of Bowie’s inventions, he lived many times over. Bowie is perhaps the most difficult musician to “describe”: coming of age in the heady world of glam rock, Bowie could easily shapeshift into classic rock, folk, and more, aided by his personas that acted as partial mirrors of his true self. Ziggy and the Starman, however, have become most synonymous with Bowie’s memory, best representing who Bowie wanted to be perceived as: someone near-impossible to define, unpredictable and always with a trick or two up his sleeve. In this was an excitement, found in the wonder of what Bowie would do next.
Since its release in 1972, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars has been adopted by generations of Bowie’s devotees as a rallying cry, a hopeful message of something bigger, better, more thrilling lurking beneath the mundane. The song ‘Starman’ has taken on a life of its own, reinterpreted and shared like folklore to dissect life’s larger questions.
Was it a retelling of Jesus Christ’s second coming? Was Bowie able to predict the future, prophesying an actual alien existence on Earth? While never so clearly defined, Bowie’s lyrics are regarded as an ancient text in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.
David Bowie performing live as Ziggy Stardust. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Upon Bowie’s death in 2016, the original lyrics to ‘Starman’ were leaked to the public. An original lyric sheet was sold at auction in Los Angeles, won by The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, for a staggering price of £203,500. Fans circulated photographs of the lyric sheet in a frenzied, mournful anticipation. Poring over its contents like a revelation, as though its original texts would hold some long-lost secret, fans noticed a slight change to the lyrics that caused intrigue.
In ‘Starman’s first verse, Bowie tells of “some cat” playing music. Debuting the song on Top Of The Pops in 1972, he sings, “Some cat was layin’ down some get it on rock ‘n’ roll, he said.”
However, as the lyric sheet confirms, the line goes, “Some cat was layin’ down some rock ‘n’ roll, ‘Lotta soul’, he said.”
Similarly, a couple of lines later, Bowie sings that the sound “came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase haze”. Originally, the line simply read, “Came back on a wave of phase”.
With these minutes, Bowie’s message resonates the same, though adding a texture to the song, describing the rock tune’s impact on his impressionable mind. Ever-so mysterious, Bowie’s backstory for the song remains ambiguous and open to interpretation. In conversation with Beat hero William S Burroughs, he told Rolling Stone in 1973: “The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers… Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the Earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping.”
Ziggy Stardust’s promise was an early one of many inventive tales Bowie concocted, a showing of true genius unlike any other visionary artist since. The late musician’s memory, preserved in his stories, still resonates today, with ‘Starman’ being one of the most profound.
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