[LeatherTrumpet]

'Holy Grail' of David Bowie footage is found: first Ziggy Stardust TV performance unearthed



David Bowie’s Top of the Pops appearance as Ziggy Stardust in July 1972
is regarded as a seminal moment in music history.

But few people remember that Bowie actually made his television debut
as Ziggy a month earlier, singing Starman on an ITV teatime show called
Lift Off with Ayshea. The performance was believed lost to history when
the tapes were accidentally wiped.

Almost half a century on, a recording of that first appearance has been
unearthed. A member of the public came forward to say they had captured
the show on computer tape, a forerunner of VHS.

It is now being restored with the aim of showing it in a forthcoming BBC
documentary, David Bowie: Finding Fame.

“For fans, it is something of a Holy Grail,” said Francis Whately,
the film-maker, in an interview with Radio Times. “It would fall apart
if we played it, so it’s had to be very carefully restored. It will be a real coup if it comes off.”

The tape has degraded and is being slowly “baked” - incubated at 130
degrees to extract moisture that has built up over the decades and
rendered the footage unplayable.



He appeared alongside The Spiders from Mars in an episode broadcast on June 15 1972
that also featured Tony Christie, and was preceded by a segment starring an owl
puppet called Ollie Beak.

The pop show ran from 1969-74 and was hosted by Ayshea Brough. It is said that
Granada Television had sent 144 tapes to be transferred to digital, a handful
of which were marked with an ‘x’ meaning they could be safely deleted because
they featured duplicate content.

Instead, a technician misunderstood the instructions and thought only the
marked tapes were to be transferred, deleting the rest. While the Top of the Pops
performance of Starman lives on in the archive, garnering millions of views online
and regularly featuring on television, the song’s television debut has been all but forgotten.

In an interview with Record Collector magazine, Brough said: “He wiped years of my
life and performances, and everybody else’s performances. It’s a terrible thing.”
Brough later moved to the US, where he set up an interior design business.




The BBC documentary, which will be broadcast next month,
is the final part of Whately’s trilogy of films about Bowie.
It explores the star’s early years and includes contributions
from one of his first girlfriends, actress and model Hermione Farthingale,
and a cousin, Kristina Amadeus, who has never spoken
publicly about him before.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...y-stardust-tv/