by Peter Moore

Number Four: David Bowie – Five Years

Ziggy Stardust stands to this day a lasting testament to the strength of drugs during the early 1970s. Just imagine how ludicrous you would think it today if one of your musically talented mates decided to dye his hair orange, paint a pointed stripe across his face and shower himself in glitter?

Quite, I suppose. But in the early 1970s this was the kind of thing people did. Instead of crowding round a barroom table and moaning about their economic prospects or fantasising over the latest iPhone, it was deemed quite acceptable to suggest that you fancied dressing up as a sexually promiscuous alien whose raison d’être was rock n’ roll and the entertainment of humankind. God bless LSD.

This song, Five Years, is the first song from the gloriously titled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Here Ziggy learns that in just five years planet earth will suffer complete destruction, to which news a shocked population react with panic and despair (‘A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac’ – one particular lyric goes)

As with any music that has been influenced by the American acid rock scene of the late 1960s, the lyrical imagery is both vivid and confused. Because in the midst of this bleak, fatalistic landscape, Ziggy rests his focus upon a cheerful girl in an ice cream parlour ‘drinking milkshakes cold and long,’ who becomes the metaphor for the ideals of hope and frivolity that wash through the remainder of the album.