It’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars." ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve got,’ he sang on the album’s opening number. Nobody in 1972, least of all Bowie himself, could have predicted where he would be in five years’ time, let alone forty. Yet Bowie’s towering and contradictory status, as both the most derivative and the most influential British pop musician after the Beatles, seems unassailable: Lady Gaga, Hot Chip and C Spencer Yeh owe as much to him now as the Sex Pistols, Kate Bush and Joy Division did in the late 1970s.
