DAVID BOWIE’s 1973 brought two smash albums, spiralling success, and the first signs of the madness that might lurk behind the singer’s beguiling new mask. As AladdinSane and Pin Ups celebrate their 50th birthdays, Bowie's colourful comrades - and Lulu - remember a year of musical questing, cocaine and... betrayal? “We were like... ‘What the hell just happened?’” they tell TOM DOYLE.

Portrait by RICHART IMRIE

THE DOCTOR WHO EXTRAS WERE A TAD CONFUSED. IT WAS JANUARY 3, 1973, and in a break from filming at BBC Television Centre in west London, they were mooching around in the bar and sizing up some fellow aliens whose sci-fi get-ups didn’t seem to quite fit with the episode they were shooting. A couple of them decided to enquire further and wandered up to what appeared to be the interlopers’ spiky redhaired leader.

“Bowie said, ‘Yeah, we’re on the next episode,’” remembers Spiders From Mars dr ummer Woody Woodmansey with a wr y laugh. “These guys were saying, ‘But we’ve seen all the scripts and there’s nothing like what you are…’ He went, ‘Well, you obviously haven’t read the script properly.’ We all just played along with it, and they went away baffled.”

So freakish-looking in their glittering gold and black outfits that they appeared ready to do battle with Jon Pertwee’s space-travelling Time Lord, Bowie and The Spiders From Mars were in fact at the Beeb to record a stomping, live-in-the-studio perfor mance of The Jean Genie, the first single to be released from their forthcoming album, Aladdin Sane.

THE JEAN GENIE HAD come to Bowie in a flash of inspiration on the band’s tour bus the previous September. Bowie’s childhood pal, King Bees bandmate and Hunky Dory sleeve artist George Under wood was along for the ride and sitting at the front of the coach when, somewhere between Cleveland and Memphis, he started messing around with an electric guitar plugged into a small Pignose amp.

Legend has it that Under wood began playing Bo Diddley ’s 1955 single, I’m A Man, as covered by The Yardbirds in souped-up live and studio versions in ’64/5. Not so, he tells MOJO today.

“One of the songs we used to do back in the day was I’m Going Upstairs… ‘bring down all my clothes’… a John Lee Hooker number,” he says. “Anyway, I started playing the riff from that song for a bit, then David called out from the back of the bus, ‘Hey George, can you pass the guitar over here?’ David proceeded to do a similar riff, which ended up as the one on The Jean Genie.”

Camera Press/Richard Imrie

At RCA Studios in New York on October 6, 1972, The Jean Genie was cut with such haste that Bowie chose to keep the take that included bassist Trevor Bolder fluffing the bass line when he moved too quickly from E to B into the first chor us. “Trevor said to Bowie, ‘What? Do I play it wrong on-stage ever y night?’” Woodmansey recalls. “And he did.”

Amid the whirlwind of activity that had ar rived with the success of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars in the summer of ’72, Bowie was forced to write the songs for its follow-up while on the road in the US. “He still had to get that next album together,” Woodmansey says. “Writing on the road was different for him, but probably in a good way. He was picking up the influence of being in America on tour.”

Shock of the new: David Bowie revelling in his 1973 splendour.

“WE WENT, ‘WHAT THE FUCK? DID HE JUST SAY WANKING, KEN?’” WOODY WOODMANSEY ON TIME

In his attempt to process the sensory overload of his first proper US jaunt, Bowie began to piece together the songs for Aladdin Sane, a travelogue characterised by thrills and fears and the feelings of dissociation reflected in the album’s punning title. The record was to examine what he viewed as both the alluring strangeness and dangerous enticements he had experienced in America.

“We’d been approached while we were out there: ‘Anything you want, man. Sex, drugs, whatever it is… we’ll get it for you,’” says Woodmansey. “Because of the nature of the band, we attracted all the beautiful people and all the fucking weirdos.”

But, having achieved fame by inhabiting the weirdo-magnet character of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie was having trouble coming to terms with him. As he admitted to MOJO’s Paul Du Noyer in 2002, “I guess what I was doing on Aladdin Sane, I was trying to move into the next area – but using a rather pale imitation of Ziggy as a secondary device.”