My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars
December 18, 2023
Ronson debuts with a disjointed and superficial account of her charmed life as David Bowie’s hairstylist and the wife of Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson. A hairdresser in her hometown of Bromley, England, Ronson styled hair for Bowie’s wife and mother. In 1971, she was invited to Bowie’s house to do his hair and dreamed up the red, spiky hairdo that hallmarked his Ziggy Stardust days. The following year, Bowie hired Ronson to join the Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars tour, where she cut hair, fetched coffee and cigarettes, and witnessed up close the excesses of a rock and roll show—the band spent a quarter of a million dollars on the tour’s American leg and was pursued by shrieking groupies Ronson was expected to wrangle (“My new job: tour madam”). Meanwhile, her attraction to Mick Ronson, “a god on guitar,” grew, and the couple’s courtship took off as he released a solo album and did stints with Mott the Hoople and Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. While the author’s behind-the-scenes observations hold some unvarnished appeal (“The interaction between the two of them is electrifying, so rare and sexy,” she writes of Bowie’s and Ronson’s onstage dynamic), more often her reflections drown in tiresome clichés (“inside I’m bubbling up like a champagne bottle about to burst its cork”). This misses the mark.