18. 1973 - Bowie's year

             By 1973 there was a recognisable Bowie cult in the UK, as 'Bowie Boys' and ' Bowie Girls' roamed suburbia.
             Although Bowie's records were being bought by everyone from teens to mums and dads, his hard-core following, those that actually took to the streets in make-up and glitter,seemed to consist of two types:

• first, Bowie had a huge following among teenage girls
• second, there were those arty suburbanites, the sexual experimenters, the bedsit gloomsters, who were drawn to Bowie's cleverness and his love for arty cross-referencing.

             Scientologist and writer, Simon Frith, wrote: " Bowie-ism was a way of life - style as meaning - and no other idol has had such an intense influence on his fans as David Bowie. His example of self- creation was serious and playful - image as art as image, and his tastes, the selves he created, were impeccably suburban: he read romantic literature ; he was obsessively, narcissistically, self-effacing....Bowie was youth culture not as collective hedonism but as individual grace that showed up everyone else as clods." In fact, Firth points out : "As a star, Bowie never pretended to "represent" his fans, but he did make available to those fans a way of being a "star"...Glam rock dissolved the star/fan division not by stars becoming one of the lads, but by the lads becoming their own stars. " 

             In May 1973 there was made a documentary by Bernard Falk - the programme recorded scenes of mass hysteria, screaming teenies and boys and girls dyed hair, glitter and the modish Aladdin Sane thunderbolt felt-tipped across their faces. This was the beginning of Bowie's immortality through style, and ,for his fans , it was this sense of sartorial danger which magnetised them.

             Bowie was freakish and other, and he presented the blueprint for all those bored suburbanites. Bowie, with his brand of self-absorption, his anti- countercultural poses and his revelry  in the surface trappings of glitz and artificiality, was the supreme expression of this new era of post- hippy, pre-punk questioning.

             By the end of 1973, Bowie had extricated himself from The Spiders and was about to bring his professional relationship with both Mick Ronson and Ken Scott to an end.

             'The 1980 Floor Show" was the last time Ronson and Bowie would share a stage for 10 years.

             The end of Bowie's working relationship with Ken Scott meant a shift of focus to more experimental techniques and arguably greater musical daring, and an end to the 'classic' pop period of David Bowie.

             Without question, 1973 will go down in history as Bowie's year. On New Year's Eve, RCA presented Bowie with a plaque to commemorate having 5 different albums in the chart simultaneously for a 19 - week period. RCA announced that his total UK sales were now 1.056.400 albums and 1.024.068 singles.

             Around this period, David would meet Ava Cherry - a striking black woman with short,platinum-blonde curls, perhaps several inches taller than Bowie himself. Bowie had met Ava in New York at the time of his Radio City Music Hall gigs in February 1973. Ava was a waitress at a party and Bowie soon had her earmarked as a future singing star. Cherry would now also be a regular backing singer for Bowie, and thee two would be romantically linked.

             Bowie's musical obsession were changing, and changing fast. What is certain is that, by the end of 1973, Bowie was already on the road to a more soul-inflected future.