David Bowie & the Story of Ziggy Stardust Page #4

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Without Tony De Fries,

we would never have had David Bowie,

Pop Star, Rock Star at all.

MUSIC:
"Venus In Furs"

by the Velvet Underground

Tony's main objective

was to make Bowie a superstar.

And that meant cracking America.

So at the beginning of 1971,

the 24-year-old singer was sent

there on a short promotional tour.

Within a few months

he returned, signing a deal

with RCA Records in New York,

the company who would later

fund the Ziggy Stardust project.

It was during this period

that Bowie was introduced

to the subversive world of Andy

Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

He felt immediately at home

surrounded by New York's

counter-culture.

We were all working

in underground theatre,

which involved a whole

lot of outrageousness.

The rock 'n' roll world

at the same time in New York

was becoming very underground.

There were men dressed in

women's clothes but not in drag,

they were just wearing

women's blouses and things

and a lot of make-up and things.

And everything was

getting very bizarre.

Back in London, Bowie continued his

fascination with the avant-garde.

He hung out in gay nightclubs

with a fashion designer

called Freddie Burretti.

And when an Andy Warhol play

called Pork arrived in town,

Bowie and his new wife Angie

befriended the American cast.

We invited Angie and David

to come see the play,

and they came with Tony De Fries,

and we all started

to hang out together.

We met David's incredible, loud,

crazy wife Angie, and she was,

"Oh, we have to go do this,

"we have to go do that,

we have to outrage the populace."

And we were fine for that.

I was, you know, psychedelic,

acid-head, hippie chick.

In those days, we were still pretty

outrageous sexually, I have to say.

You know, we had sex in the

loos at the Hard Rock Cafe,

even with the owners.

This was, like, every night

and a lot of people doing it.

Inspired by the

outrageous characters

he'd met in London and New York,

the very beginnings

of Ziggy Stardust

began to materialise

in Bowie's mind.

Taking his lead from

the star-maker Andy Warhol,

he invented his own

rock 'n' roll star, Arnold Corns.

What he hasn't yet done is

manage to get together the balls

to be that rock star himself,

and so he chooses somebody who,

effectively in musical terms,

is a blank canvas.

The idea was to take

Freddie Burretti,

this beautiful boy that

he'd met in the Sombrero Club

and to hand him the songs

and dress him up

and get him to be Ziggy, even though

he would be miming to David's voice.

Bowie decides that he's going to

create a band called Arnold Corns.

Now unfortunately, the music

that he's selling is terrible.

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