The Barber of Suburbia:Suzi Ronson and Her Life with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

"Hey babe, your hair's alright" - Rebel Rebel, David Bowie.

It was standing room only at Wednesday night's Sohemian Society talk, Life with David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars, at the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place and quite rightly so. Suzi Ronson was an excellent speaker and Travis Elborough (who was written books about Routemaster buses and spectacles) proved a great interviewer, asking the right questions, making the odd interjection, but mostly allowing Suzi to chat as if conversing with old friends in a pub.

Which, in a way, she was. The event, named after Suzi's recent book, began (as did my David Bowie themed walk last year) began in Beckenham (though Penge and Catford both get an early shout out too) with the then Suzi Fossey living in suburban ennui, watching television, and going to bed early. A few miles away, in Brixton, David Bowie's life had been much the same. Neither of them wanted to be like their parents and both of them wanted much much more from life.

When the sixties became the swinging sixties (the pill! Twiggy! The Beatles!) they sensed a chance. David, it has to be said, in a far more clear eyed way than Suzi. Suzi failed the eleven-plus and, after school, started a poorly paid job as a hairdresser at Evelyn Paget in Beckenham (which, until quite recently, was still a salon - though renamed Gigante). One day, Peggy Jones walked in for a haircut and, little known to Suzi at the time, this event would seriously alter the course of her life.

 

Peggy's son, David, was better known under his stage name David Bowie than he was Jones and he'd already had a huge number one single, a couple of years previously, with Space Oddity. When Suzi saw Bowie walking down Beckenham High Street wearing a gold dress and a big floppy hat with wife Angie in tow and son Zowie (later Duncan) in a push chair she was blown away. This was 1971 and this "couple of kooks hung up on romancing" looked like nothing she'd ever seen before.

They were both impossibly skinny and Angie had the added bonus of being American. Working glass girls from suburban London didn't meet Americans much in those days. It was all so glamorous and when Angie came into the salon for a 'do' it was even more exciting. She'd initially planned to have a perm but she'd changed her mind because she was worried she'd end up looking like Kevin Keegan. The world may have been a different place if David Bowie's wife had looked like Kevin Keegan.

Suzi visited their home in Haddon Hall and she describes it, as well as Angie and David, as being like a portal into another world. The place had a midnight blue carpet, it had a minstrel's gallery. and there were French and Italian magazines on the coffee table. The only magazines in Suzi's family home were Woman's Own and the place smelt of chips and dog hair.

Although when Suzi mentioned Marc Bolan to David she got a somewhat frosty response. Bowie and Bolan may well have been friends but they were rivals too - and Bolan, at that time, was by far the more successful of the two. David let her cut his hair anyway. Short, spiky, a 'girl's' haircut, and dyed with Schwarzkopf 'red hot red'. It was, Suzi recalls now, the day that Ziggy Stardust was born. She charged him two pence for the haircut.

She was now in. He would struggle to find other hairdressers up and down the country that could copy it so he stuck with Suzi. On top of that, as she proudly remembers, he liked to 'mark his territory' and certainly did so with her. Angie was fine with it as she was having an affair with Mickey Finn, T.Rex's bongo player. Suzi, once she'd established she didn't want to be one of Dave's 'girls', started to bring back fans, and groupies, to the band's hotel after concerts.

Which, one assumes, she didn't tell her parents. When David had announced, in Melody Maker, that he was gay they were at first concerned but then took solace in the fact that he would at least not be interested in their daughter. Hmmm. For her part, Suzi would start to go out with a member of Stan Webb's Chicken Shack before marrying Bowie's guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson whose surname she still goes by. Mick Ronson died in 1993, aged just 46.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, of course, became huge and launched David Bowie's career (bizarrely, in retrospect, he'd been written off as a one hit wonder after being unable to follow up Space Oddity). So when David killed Ziggy off on stage at Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973 it came as a huge surprise. Not only to the fans and to the music press but also to at least two members of the band. Mick Ronson, very much David's sideman (and a man who was worried about the reaction of his own parents to David pretending to fellate his guitar on stage), knew the plan but even he was, he felt at the time, sold down the river by the decision.

Though he did go on to tour with Bob Dylan (whom he thought sounded like Yogi Bear) and Van Morrison, co-produce Lou Reed's Transformer, and get involved with Mott The Hoople. A band whose music Suzi liked but a band she clearly considered to be a bunch of boring breadheads who instead of partying like you're supposed to when you come off stage used to sit around arguing about money.

 

Mick Ronson did team up with Bowie again not long before his death (like Bowie, of liver cancer) for I Feel Free on the Black Tie White Noise album but, other than that, it seems Suzi Fossey/Ronson and David Bowie went their separate ways for the rest of their lives. Despite this she still seems to have overwhelmingly positive memories of her husband Mick and of David Bowie himself and they came through in an animated, informative, and funny talk that also managed to take in Elvis Presley, Roxy Music, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, The Band, The Byrds, The Damned, Adam and the Ants, Glen Matlock, Mick Jones, Siouxsie Sioux, The Slits, David Gest's appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, luncheon vouchers, and a Marilyn Monroe musical that was so bad it was scrapped after just one performance. Would Suzi be writing books and talking to us about her life if she'd not run into Peggy Jones all those years ago? Probably not. But would David Bowie have been who he was without that hair? Probably. But that takes nothing away from a fun evening in great company looking back on a life well lived. My only regret was that I didn't ask her to cut my hair. Let all the children boogie.