In January 2026, more than 50 years after its release, the David Bowie album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, was ranked the greatest glam rock album of all time by Uncut magazine. The album, Bowie’s fifth studio effort, beat out The Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard, Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure, the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut, and more than 90 others for the coveted title.
The concept album, released in June 1972, tells the story of androgenous, alien rocker Ziggy Stardust and his band (bassist Trevor Bolder, drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and guitarist Mick Ronson), acting as messengers for humanity five years before an impending apocalypse. The sci-fi themed album mixes hard rock, pop, and theatrical elements and has been compared to a rock opera as it explores themes of decadence and destruction.
Bowie, who was just 25 at the time, wrote all of the Ziggy Stardust songs except one ("It Ain't Easy’). The album features the classics "Starman,” "Suffragette City,” the unforgettable title track, and more.
Scott added that the Ziggy Stardust album was recorded quickly, before Hunky Dory was even released. “We did it all in two weeks plus, then we had to go back in for the single ‘Starman,’ so that was another couple of days,” he shared. “But the basic album was two weeks recording, and then probably 10 days mixing.”
The album’s inspiration
“I guess the simple one-liner is that myself and my mates and I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the '70s were fed up with denim and the hippies," he said. “And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else. And some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we'd better do something postmodernist—quickly, before somebody else did.”
Stepping away from Ziggy
While Ziggy Stardust has been named as the greatest glam rock album of all time, Bowie ultimately distanced himself from it and the character years before his 2016 death.
Bowie later claimed Ziggy “got much bigger” than he ever imagined. “He really grew, sort of out of proportion – got much bigger than I thought Ziggy was going to be," Bowie said. "Ziggy just overshadowed everything.”Years later, the rocker was critical of what would forever be known as one of his greatest works. In a 1990 interview with Q magazine, Bowie admitted, “I find the Ziggy Stardust record very thin. I don’t like the sound on that, it’s much thinner than I always thought it was. It sounded really powerful then; maybe systems have got better, it sounds kind of weedy.”
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