As a teenager in the 70’s it wasn’t unusual for us kids to have a copy of David Bowie’s record, ChangesOneBowie. It was a ‘best of’ collection up to that point in Bowie’s miraculous and varied career.

We all loved that record but for me I never really ventured into his history and deep dived into the albums. Although ChangesOneBowie absolutely rocked, my focus was on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Sadly, you couldn’t admit to liking Bowie at my high school without paying a brutal price.

Bowie was universally mourned at the announcement of his death in 2016 and I was quietly determined to find out a little more about the great man in the ensuing years.

For the record and thanks to Wikipedia, Bowie made twenty six studio albums alone and sold over 140 million albums. His capacity to innovate and change ‘states’ with his music, made him virtually unrivalled in modern music.

In July 1973, Bowie and his band at the time, The Spiders From Mars, played their last concert in that configuration after a gruelling tour of Europe and the US. It was played at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in front of a packed and highly emotional crowd of mostly teenagers.

The concert has been digitally remastered and it is truly an incredible concert experience. The film commemorates fifty years since it was performed when Bowie was amazingly only twenty six years of age.

To put 1973 in some sort of musical context, this was an extremely rich period of rock music history. There were bands such as Mott the Hoople, The Stooges, MC5, Lou Reed (post Velvet Underground), John Lennon (post Beatles), T Rex, and the Rolling Stones who had just released their magnum opuses, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St.

Bowie had his first hit single with Space Oddity in 1969 and with his confidence reaching new heights on Hunky Dory in 1971, he then had a big hit with 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

Bowie transforms into his Ziggy Stardust persona beautifully and I was blown away by the structure of the songs off the album that I didn’t recognise.  The rhythm section of Trevor Bolder on bass and Mick Woodmansey on drums is just extraordinary.

Mick Ronson on guitar was a star in those days and perfected the ‘sex face’ well before Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap! He could also play really well. His brilliant lead breaks facilitated the opportunities for Bowie to do a costume change and it was fantastic having the camera capturing Bowie changing from one androgynous outfit to the next in the tiny changeroom.

At the end of the day it comes down to the music and this is a magnificent collection of songs from the album plus a couple of surprises and a special guest for the second encore.

We saw the film on limited release at the cinema but I would expect it to be streaming soon.

We were blessed to see Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix last year which was outstanding. This concert film Ziggy Stardust is the perfect companion piece for those who remember this incredibly fertile period of music.

Pleasingly there were plenty of youngsters amongst the nests of grey hair in the audience and judging by the smiles and head rocking, a new generation will appreciate the genius of this legendary artist and icon.

This is a trailer followed by a trailer from the award winning documentary for Moonage Daydream which was released last year.