Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Press

For all the ceremony and theatre of David Bowie‘s final performance as Ziggy Stardust a little over a year later, his famous stage persona’s first concert was strikingly inauspicious.

Still struggling to make a name for himself on the periphery of pop culture, David Bowie first took to the stage as Stardust at a small suburban London venue known as the Toby Jug Pub on February 10, 1972.

Despite his obscurity and with the release The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars still four months away, Bowie was confident he would make an impact.

“I’m going to be huge,” he informed British music paper Melody Maker three weeks earlier. “And it’s quite frightening in a way because I know that when I reach my peak and it’s time for me to be brought down it will be with a bump.”

Taking half of his name from Mercury labelmate The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and inspiration from the story if fellow musician Vince Taylor, who had lost his mind after achieving minor fame in the 1960s, Bowie was already showing signs of inhabiting a fictional creation whose boundaries alarmingly blurred with his own.

“Ziggy wouldn’t leave me alone,” he would later recount. “That was when it all started to go sour… My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity.”

If he was having any initial doubts, David Bowie wasn’t showing them this night.

Brimming with confidence, Bowie performed in glitter, makeup, a jumpsuit and shock red hair, all cues he had taken from New York’s Drag Queen Culture, The Velvet Underground‘s Lou Reed, Japanese fashion, and pulp science fiction.

Unlike the thousands who would flock to Bowie’s performances as his breakthrough album gained momentum in the coming months, there were only 60 young Londoners present.

Most were familiar with David Bowie as a result of novelty hit ‘Space Oddity‘ three years earlier and as such had little idea what to expect.

Bowie floored them.

There was something captivating to his reinvention.

“David Bowie had brought theatre to a humble pub gig,” venue owner Toby Jug once shared of the concert to History.com. “I couldn’t blink for fear of missing something—nothing would ever be the same again.”

“I think a taped introduction from ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was played,” another attendee, Stephen King, shared in 2012, “and Ziggy Stardust with his trademark red hair and The Spiders from Mars then took to the two-foot high stage. I had never seen or heard anything like it before.”

“I was completely blown away,” he enthused.  “I was just entranced by the entire performance. It was a heady combination of the best music I have ever heard, tremendous sound, very basic but so effective lighting. Nothing would ever be the same again.”

Bowie performed older songs ‘Andy Warhol’, ‘Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud’ and ‘Space Oddity’, alongside leaner and more compact Spiders rockers ‘Hang On to Yourself’ and ‘Suffragette City’.

The performance lasted two hours.

Even seeing another Ziggy performance the following week, Stephen King was adamant that those present at the Toby Jug Pub that night had witnessed something special.

“I was so impressed,” he reflected, “that I dragged some more friends to the Wallington Public Hall gig the following week. Sadly nothing could compete with the Toby Jug gig and for me still hasn’t to this day.”

The venue was torn down in the year 2000, though a commemorative plaque still remains to recognize the historic moment.

“The Rise of Ziggy Stardust Began Here,” it fittingly states.

This night was just the beginning.

As Bowie’s live shows began to grow in popularity bolstered by several television performances, a controversial admission of bi-sexuality and the conceptual masterstroke of his third album, David was quickly catapulted to the fame he had always desired.

Yet, as the story goes, this was not without a heavy price.

Ziggy Stardust would set David Bowie on a years-long descent into drugs, paranoia, partial madness and the birth of several more distinctive personas.