This short story is a portion of a much longer tale I dreamed up in the latter part of the 80’s when I first became interested in Bowie.
At that time, I wrote the first chapter, which was set in the general vicinity of the #23 Heddon Street / K-West location depicted on the Ziggy Stardust album cover, describing the humble beginnings of the main character and his band mates.
Soon after, I abandoned the project, because I realized that I did not know enough about the inner workings of the music industry to complete it. I did have a fairly clear idea of how I wanted the final chapters to read, however.
Over the years, I have revised my initial vision in some ways, but in essence, it remains the same. This story is a portion of that ending.
It should be noted that my interpretation of the Ziggy Stardust story was made based upon these three key elements:
1. The album itself. 2. A book I read entitled 'David Bowie: Theatre of Music' by Robert Matthew Walker. 3. Bowie's own life at that time.
Using the music for inspiration was obviously a prerequisite. The book, which I found very enlightening, made a point to constantly reference what was going on in Bowie's own life at the time he wrote the various songs, as well as uncovering recurrent themes carried over from previous albums.
It was the opinion of that author that Bowie has always injected more of himself into the characters he creates than he admits.
This is why in my story David Jones is the main character's real name, with Ziggy Stardust being his manufactured stage name. While, in the central parts of the story, I might tend to refer to him as Ziggy both on and off stage (due to the confused nature of the events depicted in the narrative), here I refer to him by his stage name only during the concert sequence itself.
The ending is left intentionally vague, as it was Mr. Walker's opinion that while Ziggy did attempt to commit suicide, that this attempt ultimately failed, and that Aladdin Sane was, in fact, a thinly disguised, post-suicide version of the same character.
Also, I did add one main character of my own invention named 'Randy' (a name I chose because of the ambiguity of its gender) who serves as David's long-suffering girlfriend.
