I have a piece in the latest edition of Uncut about the final Ziggy Stardust show at Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973. It’s an oral history, for which I spoke to fans who attended the show as well as the two surviving Spiders, engineer Ken Scott and singer Dana Gillespie. The fans include a largely unimpressed Vic Godard, later to form Subway Sect, an eight-year-old boy from Devon who was smuggled in by his wild-sounding babysitter, a West London tearaway who broke in with his pals through a fire escape, and a teenager from Surrey who is captured on film, open mouthed in shock, after Bowie makes his bombshell “retirement” speech before the final number. “I cried for the rest of the show,” she admitted. “I cried all the way home.”
It was an awful lot of fun chatting to fans about their memories of this momentous show. It was also interesting to speak to Woody Woodmansey and Mike Garson about their very different feelings about the show, Woody having effectively been sacked on stage without knowing anything about it, something Garson clearly has a form of survivors guilt about. Woody never played with Bowie again but he told me they did manage to clear the air later in the decade, and stayed on good terms thereafter.
I also spoke to Lee Grant, a Bowie fan trying to solve a photographic mystery from the evening of the show. That section of the article didn’t make the final cut, so I am including it here.
The after-show party at Café Royale became known as Bowie’s Last Supper and featured a panoply of celebrities, several of whom posed for a famous photograph. This group shot features Mick Ronson, Lulu, Jeff Beck and his girlfriend Celia Hammond, Ringo and Maureen Starr, Edgar Broughton, Bianca Jagger, David Bowie and Angie, plus another individual who has never been identified.
Bowie fan Lee Grant created his Bowie Mystery Guest blog to solve the mystery and has so far discounted Tim Buckley, Elliott Gould, Cat Stephens, Ossie Clark and Bowie’s friend Geoff MacCormack plus several others. He first heard about the mystery guest from a Bowie podcast. “I thought I could solve the problem in about ten minutes and here we are five years later,” he says. “What I tried to do was eliminate some of the main suspects and wait for somebody to come forward. It’s as simple and pointless that.”
Grant has contacted numerous members of the Bowie circle in his bid to solve the problem – many of whom suggest names he has already been able to eliminate such as MacCormack and Buckley. Having discounted most of the proposed names, Grant’s current theory is that the mystery man is a non-celebrity who happened to be at the Cafe Royale was invited to join the group shot because he was mistaken for MacCormack, who he certainly resembles. That makes identifying him all the harder but not impossible – perhaps with the help of other photographs from the evening which might show who the mystery figure was with.
“I’d love to find out who he was, why he was there and then get on with my life,” he says. “It’s in the back of my head all the time.” If you happen to know the answer, please put Lee out of his misery and let him know at https://bowiesmysteryguest.com.
The Great Wen 