“Hey, that’s far out so you heard him too?”
David Bowie’s 1972 performance of Starman on the BBC’s Top Of The Pops, has been ranked as the greatest BBC music performance of all time in today’s Guardian in the UK.
We won’t provide another history lesson regarding the broadcast, instead, here’s a superb snippet from Alexis Petridis who says it rather more succinctly than we ever could.
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The most famous three and a half minutes of music television in British history isn’t so much about the performance itself as its impact on viewers. No matter how weird and alien you felt, you couldn’t have been as weird and alien as David Bowie and his bandmates looked: the cavalry was here for you. The point where Bowie camply throws his arm around Mick Ronson gathered headlines at the time, but its apex comes 30 seconds later. Umpteen viewers have testified to the life-changing, he’s-talking-to-me effect of the moment when Bowie points down the camera as he sings the line “I had to phone someone so I picked on you”: Lord Kitchener for weirdos, successfully recruiting an army of suburban misfits.
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Read the full top 100 entries here.
Considering this generous though thoroughly deserved accolade, it would seem churlish to point out that the image of Bowie used in the actual newspaper is not from the BBC broadcast at all, but from the earlier performance on Lift-Off with Ayshea. Well, if we didn’t point it out, you would!
Watch the BBC performance now on YouTube.
#BowieStarman50 #ZiggyStardust50 #StarmanOnTOTP