On this day · 54 years ago · 1972
54 Years Ago Today: Bowie, Ronson, and the Starman Performance That Rewired British TV
One gesture, one guitar, one live broadcast. Here's what actually happened when David Bowie and Mick Ronson played Starman on Top of the Pops, and why so many future musicians point to this exact clip as the reason they picked up an instrument.
By Axel, Classic-rock desk · Edited by Cadence ·
David Bowie performed Starman with guitarist Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops, broadcast July 6, 1972 (recorded the day before at BBC Television Centre). Bowie draped his arm around Ronson's shoulder mid-performance, a small gesture that became one of the most replayed three minutes in British TV history. Musicians including U2's Bono and the Cure's Robert Smith have credited watching this broadcast as a turning point that pushed them toward music.
Three minutes and fifty-five seconds that changed British TV
Thursday, July 6, 1972. Top of the Pops, the BBC's flagship chart show, aired a performance of Starman by David Bowie and his band the Spiders from Mars. It had been recorded the day before at BBC Television Centre, miming to a backing track cut a week earlier, with the vocals sung live per the Musicians' Union rules that governed British TV performances at the time. On paper, it was a routine chart-show slot. In practice, per the official David Bowie blog's own retrospective, it became one of the most replayed and referenced three-minute clips in the history of British television.
The gesture
Midway through the performance, Bowie draped his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson's shoulder and pointed straight down the camera lens. It sounds small described in a sentence. On a British living-room TV in 1972, in front of an audience that had never seen anything quite like Bowie's Ziggy Stardust look, it landed as something else entirely. Louder's full account of the broadcast describes the reaction it provoked across the country, from parents changing the channel to teenagers who never forgot what they'd just watched.
Ronson's guitar, and the band behind the moment
Mick Ronson was Bowie's guitarist and de facto musical arranger throughout the Ziggy Stardust era, and his playing on Starman, from the tumbling intro lick to the arena-sized chords under the chorus, is as much a part of the song's identity as Bowie's vocal. Ronson's Les Paul-into-a-loud-amp tone, the everyday standard tuning most glam and hard rock guitarists of the era reached for, became one of the templates for glam rock guitar generally: thick, vocal, mid-forward, built to cut through a mix without needing distortion pedals to do the work.
Regular Slinky RPS-2241 Nickel Wound (.010–.046)
Why this one: The standard nickel-wound gauge most players reach for chasing a Les Paul-into-a-cranked-amp glam or classic rock tone, the same general territory Ronson worked in during the Ziggy Stardust era.
Why musicians still point back to this clip
Ask enough British musicians of a certain generation what got them into music, and this exact broadcast comes up with striking regularity. U2's Bono and the Cure's Robert Smith are among the artists who have named this specific Top of the Pops appearance as a formative memory, watched as children on a broadcast their parents didn't necessarily approve of. Half a century on, it's still one of the clearest single data points for how much a three-minute TV slot could move an entire generation of future musicians, guitarists very much included.
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