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Ziggyology
Ziggyology
Oct 3, 2024 2:26 AM

Author:Simon Goddard

Ziggyology

He came from Outer Space...

It was the greatest invention in the history of pop music – the rock god who came from the stars – which struck a young David Bowie like a lightning bolt from the heavens.

When Ziggy the glam alien messiah fell to Earth, he transformed Bowie from a prodigy to a superstar who changed the face of music forever. But who was Ziggy Stardust? And where did he really come from?

In a work of supreme pop archaeology, Simon Goddard unearths every influence that brought Ziggy to life – from HG Wells to Holst, Kabuki to Kubrick, and Elvis to Iggy. Ziggyology documents the epic drama of the Starman’s short but eventful time on Planet Earth… and why Bowie eventually had to kill him.

Reviews

Dazzlingly pulls together all the vibrant strands that made up the star-spun cloth of Ziggy. Goddard is the aficionado.

—— Gary Kemp

Does for David Bowie what Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces did for the Sex Pistols... Big, bold and refreshingly original... It's Ziggy as experienced from the alien inside

—— MOJO Magazine ****

A tremendous account

—— Q Magazine ****

If you’ve been enjoying David Bowie’s comeback, you’ll relish Simon Goddard’s offbeat paean of man-love to his earlier incarnation. Goddard offers a thrillingly unusual slant on how Ziggy Stardust…came into being

—— The Observer

A great deal of research has gone into Ziggyology… Ziggy becomes a forcefield of fabulation, an imaginative cartography through and to whom all manner of ley lines pass…ingeniously and entertainingly (rendered)

—— Guardian

I heartily recommend Ziggyology, not just to those fans of Bowie and Ziggy, but to anyone with an interest in the popular culture of the last hundred years or so, to anyone with a passing interest in the world around us, and all beautifully written by a fine writer who displays a great gift of passing on his enthusiasm to the reader.

—— Steve Earles , Destructive Music

Something close to rock’s Joan Didion

—— New York Times

Self-aware, deferential and modest

—— Times Literary Supplement

Scholars of rock and roll still revere him for Awopbopaloobop, a passionate argument for the primacy of the three-minute pop song...A book ostensibly about popular music, but really about youth, innocence and rebellion

—— Observer

The Hollywood Brats are the greatest band I’ve ever seen

—— Keith Moon

Britain’s great lost punk band

—— Q-Magazine

So colourful, so comical, so damn bitchy... hilarious

—— Tony Fletcher , iJamming

Matheson writes with the jagged verve he once sought from his band.

—— Kevin Canfield , Washington Post

Biographical subject and author have found their perfect match.

—— Simon Shaw , Mail on Sunday

One Man Band rumbles along… Welles in his middle years is a more engaging prospect than most artists at a similar point. He has been lucky to have Callow as a biographer, balancing warmth with skepticism, fondness with reproof.

—— Anthony Quinn , Guardian

This richly detailed and revelatory biography presents the most frank and intimate portrait yet of Ray Davies

—— CGA Magazine

Rogan does an excellent job of trying to work out what makes The Kinks’ enigmatic frontman tick whilst charting the tumultuous career of a band whose idiosyncratic but brilliant hits are currently enjoying a renaissance

—— Mail on Sunday

This book is a good, solid, factually based read throughout… I imagine nearing six decades of recording history to be squeezed into one book is a task beyond the scope of a lot of authors, but this has been done rather well by Johnny Rogan… Excellent and complex.

—— Reg Seward , Nudge

An engaging and very accessible history book about our modern artistic achievements that, provocatively, also debunks some of the very icons it praises.

—— Simon Copeland , The Sun
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