"England was already set to change trains from Marc Bolan to David Bowie, whose Starman single had shaken everyone with its somewhere-over-the-rainbow chorus and Blue Mink's Melting pot bridge. Full-page advertising for David Bowie's new Top Rank tour causes me to laugh excitedly as I see the now famous shot of spike-thin Bowie half-propped on a high stool, wearing tight white satin pants tucked into plastic boxer-boots, one hand on hip, the other hand on pointing the way to somewhere, quite fanatically homosexual. The face is damned-soul-as-savior-of-society, preacher and reformer, now free of his own unhappy childhood and willing to help you through yours should Black Sabbath and Deep Purple prove insufficient. I crawl from the cultureless world to Stretford Hardrock in September 1972, where David Bowie is showcasing the venue. At midday he emerges from a black Mercedes, every inch the eighth dimension, teetering on high heels, with all the wisdom of our ancestors. Smiling keenly, he accepts the note of a dull schoolboy whose overblown soul is more ablaze than the school blazer he wears, and thus I touch the hand of this inexplicably liberating reformer; he, a Wildean visionary about to re-mold England, and I, a spectacle of suffering in a blue school uniform.
(...) The womanly David Bowie was attacked by the Daily Mirror as being 'a disgrace' - although how he is a disgrace, or why, is not explained. Bowie's extraordinary effect of menace upon British culture is largely forgotten now, but I watched it break like a thundercloud in 1972, and its presence was as volcanic as that which later would be termed Punk."
