The reason we’ve never forgotten this.

Every pop fan of a certain age can remember Bowie doing Starman on Top of the Pops. His androgynous alien persona was like nothing we’d ever seen before and when he put his arm round Mick Ronson to sing the chorus, our parents went into meltdown. David Bowie wasn’t just talented, he was also shrewd, ambitious and determined. He’d been trying desperately to a be a star for years but apart from a one-off hit with Space Oddity in 1969, he hadn’t quite managed it. Now he’d engineered himself one last chance and he wasn’t going to waste it. Hence that carefully contrived performance. But what cracked it for him was the chorus. He’d deliberately written it so that Star-man had exactly the same octave leap as Some-where in “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”. And by combining the dangerous and outrageous with the sweet and familiar, David Bowie made himself a star.