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| Album Artwork | 2/2 |
Inner sleeve
ALBUM INNER-SLEEVE: Side Two
The inner-sleeve photos of Bowie and the Spiders were taken by Brian Ward upstairs in his Heddon Street studio and were designed to resemble Clockwork Orange look-a-likes.
"The idea was to hit a look somewhere between the Malcolm McDowell thing with the one mascaraed eyelash and insects. It was the era of "Wild Boys" by William S. Burroughs.
That was a really heavy book that had come out in about 1970, and it was a cross between that and Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become. They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burrough's Wild Boys with their Bowie knives.
I got straight on to that. I read everything into everything. Everything had to be infinitely symbolic." Bowie (1993)
Rear cover details
The rear cover was also photographed by Brian Ward. The rear cover shows Bowie posing as Ziggy Stardust in a red K2-series telephone box (also on Heddon Street, London).
For many British teenagers the phonebox pose immediately struck a chord in being strikingly similar to the Dr Who TV series where The Doctor - a Timelord - traveled in a time-machine disguised as a British Police-box. Alternately it could also be seen as decadent - i.e. reminiscent of a male prostitute plying his trade. Today, these London phoneboxes in London are usually full of advertising cards from call-girls and massage parlours.
The phonebox image and the song "Starman" would neatly predict the plot to the future films "Close Encounters of The Third Kind" and "ET". While the original telephone-box was replaced in the 1980's by a smaller modern blue phone booth, and then again by the red K6 model, the walls around it are still repeatedly covered in messages from Bowie fans who visit the street.
---This page last modified: 13 Jan 2019---
