ABSTRACT
I want to tell you a story of love. It begins on a wintry day in New York City in 1998, and it ends sometime in the winter of 2015, but it really doesn’t end or begin when I say it does, because the kind of love I am talking about started much earlier. On 16 November 1973. On that day, this child accidentally stumbled upon ‘The 1980 Floor Show’ as part of the TV series The Midnight Special. That’s really when the love began, because that’s when I first saw David Bowie in performance. Filmed at London’s Marquee Club, ‘The 1980 Floor Show’ was a bit of an oddity to say the least on American television; it was also the first time The Midnight Special devoted an entire episode to a single artist in a longform performance. Ostensibly programmed to promote Bowie’s PIN UPS album, the show featured a duet between Bowie and Marianne Faithfull, dressed as a nun, a Spanish flamenco glam group named Carmen and Bowie’s last performance as Ziggy Stardust. Huddled underneath a blanket in the living room of my parents’ house, Bowie/Ziggy’s startlingly odd, glamorous presence cast an undeniable spell on me, one as potent as the kind described in Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ famous song from 1956.
