David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust, now a man of wealth and taste

It is no coincidence that June 2002 is turning out to be David Bowie month. This time 30 years ago, trading under the plastic-fantastic moniker Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was taking the UK's teenage nation by storm. A self-proclaimed "leper messiah", Ziggy was an epicene alien in skin-tight snake boots and shocking orange mullet, crooning of "moonage daydreams" and rock'n'roll suicide.

Not to mention coming out as a bisexual.

On 17 June 1972, during a gig at the town hall in Oxford, Bowie suddenly dropped to his knees and started to simulate fellatio on Mick Ronson's Gibson Les Paul guitar. For many in the audience it was the most outlandish thing they had ever seen.

"David had to become what Ziggy was – he had to believe in him," said Ronson. "Ziggy affected his personality, but he affected Ziggy's personality. They lived off each other."

Through Ziggy, Bowie took glam rock to places that the Sweet only had nightmares about. Bastard spawn of Iggy Pop and Lindsay Kemp, steeped in the visual and performance arts, Bowie made classic pop with an art-rock twist – pop that was also adult art.

Those of us who followed him through the rest of the Seventies were rewarded by a series of startling metamorphoses – from the mutated Ziggy of Aladdin Sane (1973) through the apocalyptic, Orwellian rocker of Diamond Dogs to the coked-out "thin white duke" of Station to Station (1976) – culminating in 1977's brilliant, Berlin-recorded Low and Heroes albums. No surprise that Bowie was one of the few elder pop statesmen accepted by the insurgents of punk.

Born humble David Jones in Brixton, the pre-Ziggy Bowie had been a suburban blues apprentice, the saxophonist and then the singer in a succession of R&B bands (the Kon-Rads, the King Bees, David Jones and the Buzz, the Manish Boys, Davey Jones and the Lower Third). In 1966, with the Monkees' Davy Jones in the ascendant, he became David Bowie.

In flower power London, Bowie was all whimsy and slight, fey singles such as "Rubber Band" and the notorious "Laughing Gnome". Anthony Newley was a big influence. The charts were unaffected.

But the skinny blond kept banging his head against the wall, simultaneously taking on board ideas and motifs from the world of performance art (he was a member of Lindsay Kemp's mime troupe). In 1969 he was rewarded with a top-five UK hit in the shape of "Space Oddity", the haunting, possibly metaphorical plaint of Major Tom, "floating in a tin can" over planet Earth. (The track's producer, Gus Dudgeon, has just sued Bowie for $1m in unpaid royalties.)

Bowie soaked up influences like a pop sponge, not least the input of his American-born wife, Angie. America itself obsessed him, particularly after a 1971 trip to promote the dystopian Man Who Sold The World. In New York he was embraced by Gotham's demi-monde – Warhol, Lou Reed et all – and paid homage to them on the assured, swishing chamber-pop of Hunky Dory (1971).

But it was when he lopped off his pre-Raphaelite locks – on Angie's urging – that Bowie truly found himself. Or at least found Ziggy. "Starman", in 1972, took up where "Space Oddity" had left off, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars followed it into the charts. Partly inspired by his friend and rival Marc Bolan, Bowie was now a leading light in the glam rock wave sweeping Britain, writing the anthemic "All the Young Dudes" as a favour to West Country journeymen Mott the Hoople.

Bowie's great gift to legions of disaffected teenagers was the implicit invitation to reinvent themselves – to strike a pose, to revolt into style. After the doldrum denim years of older brothers' rock, "the kids" suddenly became a tribe of freaks, sci-fi peacocks in DIY regalia. Bolan had started the ball rolling, but Bowie took the "everybody is a star" aesthetic one vital stage further. As a Bowie boy or girl, you were standing out from the grey morass of Edward Heath's council-block Britain.

Where Bolan burned out, Bowie began to boss pop, propelled to the top by his super-aggressive manager Tony De Fries. A born chameleon, Bowie killed off Ziggy, conjured up Aladdin Sane, revisited his mid-Sixties roots on 1973's Pin-Ups, went all William Burroughs on Diamond Dogs (1974), and then impulsively switched to plastic Philly soul for Young Americans. His every move was riveting, even when artistically dubious. He instinctively understood the flash funkiness of the Seventies, and the central importance of America at the dawn of disco. "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, was his first US No 1, in 1975.

Not even a Herculean cocaine habit acquired in his new hometown of Los Angeles stopped Bowie chalking up a fabulous 1976 – the year of "the Thin White Duke", as trumpeted on the title track of the swirling, surging Station to Station, the cover of which bore a still of the singer in Nic Roeg's Man Who Fell to Earth. On the flipside, cocaine almost certainly played its part in the megalomania that saw Bowie give the Nazi salute on arriving at London's Victoria Station – the low point in a phase of fascist flirtation in which he proclaimed Britain's need for "a new Hitler".

Then came the sublime music of recovery from Bowie's years in Hell Lay. Working with the former Roxy Music synthesist Brian Eno, DB lay low in the shadows of Berlin, working on the ambient art-muzak of Low and the Eurofunk of Heroes while breathing second wind into the Iggy Pop of The Idiot and Lust For Life (all 1977). Godfathers of punk, Bowie and Pop toured together in the year of clashing Pistols and X-Ray Spex.

Yet something happened when Bowie recoiled from the precipice of self-destruction. After Lodger (1979) and Scary Monsters (1980), he became a (gulp) nice bloke. And nice blokes, as we know, eat quiche – artistically speaking. It wasn't that he sold out, exactly: his mindset remained avant-garde, and he was the influence on New Romantics like Steve Strange and Boy George. But, like many Seventies icons negotiating uncertain paths through the slick soulless Eighties, the bloke stopped being dangerous. In a reverse of the famous Robert Johnson myth, Bowie bought back his soul.

"Let's Dance" (1983) was a catchy slice of cod-soul, but it was a record anyone could have made with the aid of Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughan. At least it was a hit – and there haven't been many of those in the past two decades, only endless duff, overproduced albums such as Tonight and Never Let Me Down... not to mention the terrible entity that was Tin Machine. The nadir for any true Bowie fan was the grotesque Live Aid duet with Mick Jagger on "Dancing in the Street". Nor did Dave's thespian abilities exactly improve with time.

More recently, Bowie has settled for a role as one of rock's arty ambassadors, joining that élite group of men of wealth and taste that includes Eno and Peter Gabriel. He's become – to use the label Keith Richards slapped on Mick Jagger – "so respectable". Think 21st-century Bowie and you think Iman and Italian suits, Bowienet and Bowiebanc, not "Queen Bitch", "Five Years", "TVC15", "Warszawa". Nor even 1980's "Ashes to Ashes", his last truly great song.

Don't get me wrong: nobody is saying rock veterans have a duty to stay permanently pie-eyed and wear bones in their ears (Yo, Keef!! Hey Lemmy!!), but there's a price to pay when you become an enlightened conceptual-art businessman. And Bowie has paid it; for all his efforts to stay in tune with pop youth (anyone out there still playing the Eno-produced Outside, or the drum and bass Ear th ling?), his music has become a minor embarrassment.

Nothing illustrates Bowie's well-intentioned but fundamentally misjudged attempt to stay au courant than the various activities that coincide this summer with the 30th anniversary of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. If the new album, Heathen, produced by his old glam-era compadre Tony Visconti, is the most tuneful record he's made since Scary Monsters, Bowie's mutton-dressed-as-lamb live appearances this summer – at Manchester's Move Festival (10 July) and at Moby's 12-date Area:2 extravaganza (28 July to 16 August) in the US – smack of mild desperation.

Then there's his curatorship of the Meltdown Festival, starting today on London's South Bank. Following in the footsteps of Meltdown mavericks such as Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt and Elvis Costello, Bowie has picked a bunch of ostensibly cutting-edge but actually rather tame bands to represent the crème of contemporary grooviness: Suede, Supergrass, the Waterboys, the Dandy Warhols, the Divine Comedy, Badly Drawn Boy and – worst of all – the irredeemably fey Coldplay.

Not even the presence of genuine oddballs such as Bobby Conn, Daniel Johnston and the Legendary Stardust Cowboy (part-inspiration for the Ziggy moniker), nor the last-minute additions of electroglam deviants Fischerspooner and galvanising New York trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, can disguise the fact that Meltdown '02 is David Bowie, once again, striving to be all things to all men.

"There's not much outrageousness left anymore, apart from me and Marc Bolan," quoth DB back in January 1972. "The Beatles were outrageous at one time, and so was Mick Jagger, but you can't remain at the top for five years and still be outrageous... you become accepted and the impact has gone."

Ziggy, you said it. Methinks it's time to rise again.

Life story

Born: January 8, 1947 in Brixton, south London.

Siblings: A brother, Terry, later committed to mental institutions.

Marriages: To American-born Angela Barnett in 1970; to Somalian supermodel Iman in 1992.

Children: Son Zowie (now Duncan), born June 1971; daughter Alexandria, born August 2000.

Education: Burnt Ash Primary School, Bromley; Bromley Technical High School.

Albums: Space Oddity (1969), The Man Who Sold the World (1971), Hunky Dory (1972), Ziggy Stardust (1972), Aladdin Sane (1973), Pin Ups (1973), Diamond Dogs (1974), Young Americans (1975), Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), Heroes (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980), Let's Dance (1983), Black Tie White Noise (1993), Outside (1995), Ear th ling (1996), Heathen (2002)

He says: "I don't have that thing about 'I'm old but I feel like an 18-year- old inside!' I don't. I feel like exactly what I am, which is 55 going on 56, and it seems a pretty cool age to be. I've experienced a lot and have a sense of who I am that maybe I didn't have a few years ago."

They say: "David did a wonderful job of broadcasting sexual freedom and personal liberation. He shone his light into a lot of dark places in people and helped them see themselves – and maybe love themselves – a little better" – Angie Bowie, former wife