The character was inspired by English rock 'n' roll singer
Vince Taylor, whom Bowie met after Taylor had a breakdown and believed himself to be a cross between a god and an alien. Bowie's lyrical allusions to Taylor include identifying Ziggy as a "leper messiah". Taylor was only part of the character's blueprint. In the 1960s Bowie had seen
Gene Vincent performing live wearing a leg-brace after a car accident, and observed: "It meant that to crouch at the mike, as was his habit, [Vincent] had to shove his injured leg out behind him to, what I thought, great theatrical effect. This rock stance became position number one for the embryonic Ziggy." Bowie biographers also propose that Bowie developed the concept of Ziggy as a melding of the persona of
Iggy Pop with the music of
Lou Reed during a visit to the US in 1971. A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars". Bowie stated that with Ziggy Stardust, "I wanted to define the archetype
messiah rockstar. That's all I wanted to do. I used the trappings of
kabuki theatre,
mime technique, fringe New York music." One of his primary references was
the Velvet Underground. Bowie stated that Ziggy is meant to be an alien of some kind, possibly a
Martian, and was based "very much on a Japanese concept". The character's Japanese influences provided a human connection, Bowie explained, as in Britain during the early 1970s Japan "still seemed like an alien society, but it was a human alien society." and that at the time of creating the character he had viewed Ziggy as "a very positive artistic statement ... a grand
kitsch painting. The whole guy." Along these lines, some critics assert that Bowie's artificial concoction of a rock star persona was a symbolic critique of the artificiality seen in the rock world of the time. Bowie had previously created artificial stage personas in 1970 with his backing band
Hype. Over a small series of shows which, while poorly received at the time, are now credited as the origin of
glam rock, the band performed in flamboyant costumes, each with an accompanying persona of a
spoof superhero. Bowie, dressed in a blue cape, lurex tights, thigh boots and a leotard with colourful scarves sewn onto his shirt, was "Rainbowman". Describing his costume as "very spacey", he later explained that his idea for the outfits was to counter the popular image of rock acts at the time, which was "all jeans and long hair".
Name Bowie told
Rolling Stone that the name "Ziggy" was "one of the few Christian names [he] could find beginning with the letter 'Z. He later explained in a 1990 interview for
Q magazine that the Ziggy part came from a tailor's shop called Ziggy's that he passed on a train, and he liked it because it had "that Iggy [Pop] connotation but it was a tailor's shop, and I thought, Well, this whole thing is gonna be about clothes, so it was my own little joke calling him Ziggy. So Ziggy Stardust was a real compilation of things." "Stardust" came from the
Legendary Stardust Cowboy, the stage name of singer Norman Carl Odam, whose music intrigued Bowie. ==Appearance==