Ziggy played Guitar....

A short moment to jump back in time.

In late 1971, when I was 14, A school friend of mine, David Whitacker, loaned me the single "Space Oddity" with the B side "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" and shortly afterwards I saved my pocket money and bought "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" album.

Whitacker was part of a group of friends at the time, there was me of course, Andrew Swift, and Dave Burt and later an outsider, Joe Haynes. We all had a little music thing going and those first three guys introduced me to a few things, Bowie being one of them, and of course, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath.

And Gin.....

Joe Haynes was a different kind of friend, he tried many times to introduce me to girls and unfortunately for me at the time, I resisted. 

Joe didn't and he went off and found his own friend, Katrina Burns.

I think Ziggy Stardust was the first "real" music album I owned. The following year, by mail order, I bought Aladdin Sane and it was another of those albums that I played to death along with "No Secrets" by Carly Simon, an album whose cover made me realise that Joe Haynes was probably right.

One clever online person recently said that the death of David Bowie was merely the "tip of the iceberg" and perhaps he be right, methinks we'll be having a tsunami of dead rockers in the next few years and I sincerely hope I outlive them all.

I am however, sad that I outlived my good friend Joe Haynes.