What Planet Am I On? (5 page)

Lennon also had another weird incident that he told Uri Geller about: ‘You ain’t fuckin’ gonna believe this’. Lennon said he was asleep with Yoko at home in the Dakota Building when he woke up because ‘there was this blazing light round the door. It was shining through the cracks and the keyhole, like someone was out there with searchlights, or the apartment was on fire.’

Lennon jumped out of bed and opened the door.
‘There were these four people out there. They were, like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths and they were scuttling at me like roaches.’

He insisted that he wasn’t on drugs when it happened. ‘I never saw anything on acid that was as weird as those fuckin’ bugs, man.’ He said he tried to throw the little people out of his apartment, but they pushed him back just using willpower and telepathy.

Lennon then woke up back in bed and he had a metal, egg-like object in his hand. He gave it to Uri Geller, saying he didn’t want to keep it because it was too weird for him: ‘If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.’

Lennon had an open mind on most things, not just UFOs, which is where I’m coming from too. I remember reading him summing up his attitude: ‘I believe in everything until it’s disproved. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? Reality leaves quite a lot to the imagination.’

I’m with him on that.

The Rolling Stones also have strong UFO connections. Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and a few others were camping at Glastonbury Tor in 1968 when they saw a huge spaceship above them. Marianne Faithfull said at the time that Mick ‘wants to know what everyone
else is thinking. The New Age grail questers . . . were searching for UFOs, ley lines and other totems of the Age of Aquarius’. Which is all a bit hippy for me. It’s pretty well documented that Jagger also thought he saw a UFO during their infamous gig at Altamont, but that’s hardly surprising considering all the other shit that was going down that night. Jagger must have been a little spooked at one stage because apparently he even had a UFO detector installed at his mansion!

Keith Richards also said he saw ‘several discs’ above his house in Sussex in 1968. ‘I’ve seen a few,’ Keith said, ‘but nothing that any of the ministries would believe. I believe they exist – plenty of people have seen them.’

Jimi Hendrix was also a believer. Hendrix was part American Indian, and so are a lot of people from near me in Salford, believe it or not. Or they could be. At the end of the nineteenth century, a gang of Native Americans came over as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus and they disappeared when they reached Salford. Turns out they were wanted by the US government on charges of war crimes after they beat General Custer. So when they reached Salford, they just vanished under the arches at Greengate and the locals hid them because they thought they were great warriors, not war criminals. The Native Americans ended up having loads of kids with the locals and a lot of them are buried at Pendleton Church. I’m not making this up. If you look in the graveyard there you’ll see gravestones for names like ‘Enid’, ‘Harry’ and ‘George’ and then one for ‘Running Water’ or something.
I often wonder if that’s why people from Salford are a slightly different breed, why we have no fear – because we have a bit of Native American blood in us.

Anyway, old Hendrix reckoned he had been a full-on, full-blooded American Indian in a past life. He also said he experienced astral travel in adulthood. Some of his best-known songs were about space and aliens and their impact on Earth. The oddest incident happened when he was filming his Rainbow Bridge gig in 1970 at the Haleakala Crater on the island of Maui, which even sounds like the right place for a UFO encounter. The crew were trekking through the crater with a load of donkeys carrying all the gear when they suddenly saw a silver disc hovering in the clear sky. Guitarist Merrell Fankhauser said, ‘Jimi walked out on the cinder field of an 800 year old lava flow with open arms saying, “Welcome, space brothers!”’

This next bit made me laugh. Fankhauser described how everyone was stunned at seeing the UFO except a film producer who’d been at the whisky and was waddling along on the back of a donkey. He couldn’t see a thing and told them all that they were crazy. ‘The producer became so upset when people kept pointing to the glowing orb that he fell off the donkey, injured his back, and had to be airlifted by helicopter.’

Another musician, Curtis Knight, said Jimi told him that ‘the craft had come down to put its spiritual stamp of approval on the show. He also said that he’d been emotionally and physically recharged by the experience.’

Reg Presley, the lead singer of the Troggs who sang ‘Wild Thing’, was another one who was bang into UFOs and space. In the mid-1990s, he even had his own TV show called
The Reg Presley UFO Show
and a few years later he published a book about UFOs and phenomena called
Things They Don’t Tell Us
.

Like I said earlier, David Bowie was the main pop star obsessed by space and UFOs when I was a kid. I didn’t know this at the time, but Bowie had been into UFOs ever since he was a kid, and when he was a teenager he even co-edited a flying-saucer newsletter. In an interview with the old magazine
Creem
in the sixties he told them, ‘I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year . . . We had regular cruises that came over. We knew the 6.15 was coming in and would meet up with another one. And they would be stationary for about half an hour, and then after verifying what they’d been doing that day, they’d shoot off.’

He also gave his thoughts on how the mainstream media handled UFOs, claiming that the way they angled the stories involved so much manipulation that readers would be forced to dismiss any possibility that there was any truth behind them: ‘You hit them with the various code words and they’re not going to believe anything if you don’t want them to’.

Like most people of his age, Bowie was bang into
Stanley Kubrick’s film
2001: A Space Odyssey
, which was released in 1968 between the disaster of
Apollo 1
and the success of
Apollo 7
. Everyone was into
2001
when it came out – it was a great film. Bowie even used a twist on the title of
Space Odyssey
for his 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’. I only found out during our research for this project that Bowie was partly inspired by the first colour photos of Earth from outer space when he was writing the lyrics to ‘Space Oddity’. Astronaut William Anders took a photo of Earth from
Apollo 8
, in December 1968, as it came back from the dark side of the moon. Most of the newspapers printed the picture and obviously it was a big fucking deal. I was a bit too young to appreciate it fully at the time, but I can imagine now how mind-blowing it must have been. My generation onwards have all grown up seeing amazing pictures of the Earth, but imagine if you were my nana and you’d lived most of your life without really knowing what Earth, the planet that you lived on, actually looked like until one day someone goes, ‘Here y’are, check this out, this is what Earth looks like in colour.’

It must have done people’s heads in a bit.

Anyway, that’s what Bowie’s on about in ‘Space Oddity’ when he sings about Planet Earth being blue. He was looking at those first colour photos of Earth and imagining what it would be like to be a lone spaceman up there on your Jack Jones, just looking back at Earth.

‘Space Oddity’ came out just before the moon landings, and the BBC played it over footage of the
moon landings. Which is a bit of an odd decision if you ask me, considering the opening lyrics are about it all going tits up in space for Major Tom. If Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin’s families lived in the UK at the time and were watching the BBC coverage, I bet they would have thought, ‘Leave it out, mate, we’re fucking worried enough about them getting back as it is!’

Bowie didn’t complain though. ‘Space Oddity’ went on to go top five, and then it went to Number One when it was rereleased in the mid-seventies. It’s still his biggest selling single in Britain. Apparently Tony Visconti refused to produce the single because he felt it was too much of a commercial gimmick. I bet he regrets that. As commercial gimmicks go, it wasn’t a bad one, you know what I mean? Any band today would give it’s fucking right arm for a commercial gimmick like that. I’ve never agreed with arguments about ‘keeping it real’. It’s pop music, mate. It’s called pop because it’s
pop
ular. The aim is to sell records. Or it used to be, before the internet.

Bowie has always been fascinated by space and space travel. One of my first clear memories of
Top of the Pops
was Bowie doing ‘Starman’ as Ziggy Stardust in 1972 with his electric blue guitar. Have you seen how skinny Bowie looks in that all-in-one leotard number? Fucking hell. He looks like if he turned sideways he’d disappear. But get on this, it turns out that the suit was padded. He looks like he’s wasting away, the skinniest man alive, and he’s wearing a fucking PADDED SUIT!

He also had another extraterrestrial single in 1973, ‘Life on Mars’ from
Hunky Dory
, and Major Tom cropped up again in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and even a couple of decades later in ‘Hello Spaceboy’.

Back in 1976 Bowie starred in
The Man Who Fell to Earth
which, even if you didn’t like Bowie, was a great film. It probably had more influence on me in fashion than music at the time. Bowie had this big duffel coat and a wedged centre parting, like a mushroom centre parting. It had a big effect on what became terrace fashion.

Bowie had a huge influence on Manchester in the late seventies. When I first started going out in Manchester, there was a nightclub called Pips, which was one of our favourite hangouts. It had eleven bars spread across nine different rooms, including a Roxy Music and David Bowie room. We used to spend all our time hanging out in there because that’s where all the coolest dudes hung out. A lot of the Roxy and Bowie fans would get all dressed up to go down to Pips, but we never did; we were more on the original Perry Boy vibe by then. The Perry Boys were heavily influenced by football terrace culture. In Manchester they later became known as Pure Boys and then just Boys. All that culture later led into what the press dubbed Madchester. The first time it was covered in the national press was when
i-D
magazine came up and did a piece in 1987 and called us ‘Baldricks’ because they reckoned we had haircuts like Baldrick from
Blackadder
. But no one in Manchester called themselves a Baldrick.

There was a story just recently about how David Bowie was offered big money to make a live comeback after his latest album,
The Next Day
, came out, but he was a bit reluctant because he was nervous about returning to the stage after so long. I remember that he once said that he originally created his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, to deal with nerves on stage. We found this quote when we were working on this book: ‘I’m not particularly a gregarious person. I had an unbearable shyness; it was much easier for me to keep on with the Ziggy thing off stage as well as on. Who was David Bowie and who was Ziggy Stardust? It was motivated by shyness.’

I’m totally with him on that. That’s one of the reasons I got Bez on stage, because I never wanted to be the centre of attention. Bez was my Ziggy Stardust, in a way.