It reached a high point of no.5 in July 1972 but has sold millions over the subsequent years. By the end of the year, following his landmark hit single Starman,  the album took off – and his previous three albums all entered the charts too.

 

Five Years is the opening song on Ziggy. It still sends a chill down my spine just to hear that drum heartbeat slowly get louder… then the dramatic strum of that acoustic guitar. Then the opening line: “Pushing through the market square / So many mothers sighing / News had just come over / We had five years left to die in.”

 

The lyrics are so exotically strange: I remember being just thrilled by Bowie’s way with words as I tried to piece together the details of his apocalyptic premonition that we only had five more years to survive.  

 

“A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest and a queer threw up at the sight of that.” No one had ever written song lyrics like that.  “It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor.” The images flashed before our eyes.

 

“A girl my age went off her head / Hit some tiny children / If the black hadn’t-a pulled her off / I think she would have killed them.” Just incredible. It was as vivid as a disaster movie. With added music. Amazing music. 

 

Then that whole verse that gathers pace like a rollercoaster. Bowie’s voice rises to a panicked peak: “I hear telephones, opera house, favourite melodies / I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs / My brain hurt like a warehouse it had no room to spare / I had to cram so many things to store everything in there / And all the fat-skinny people and all the tall-short people…. I never thought I’d need so many people.”

 

Devastating. And the verse where he steps outside of the song and goes through the fourth wall to talk to the girl in the ice-cream parlour drinking milk shakes cold and long, smiling and waving and looking so fine… “Don’t think you knew you were in my song.”

 

Sheer bravado. And you could sing along to the chorus!

 

Anyway. That was just the first song. There are ten more, including the single Starman. They’re not all great (I can live without Soul Love and Lady Stardust isn’t one of his best; and It Ain’t Easy is awful) but they sound better in the context of the album as a whole, and that’s how we listened to albums back then.

 

And the good ones are great. More than great. They’re part of our lives.