Mick Ronson: so much more than just a great guitar player.
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Mick Ronson had what it took to be huge: striking good looks, on-stage charisma, stupendous musicianship. Yet he was the reluctant rock star, his personality more inclined to the role of sideman rather than being the main event. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ronson changed the course of David Bowie’s career, sparking his transition from acoustic folkie to androgynous electric spaceman. “Mick was the perfect foil for the Ziggy character,” Bowie said in 1994. “He was very much a salt-of-the-earth type, the blunt northerner with a defiantly masculine personality, so that what you got was the old-fashioned yin and yang thing As a rock duo I thought we were every bit as good as Mick and Keith or Axl and Slash. Ziggy and Mick were the personification of that rock’n’roll dualism.”