The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.
Now that Oasis have been written into British rock history alongside The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and all those other elder statesmen they so publicly admired and absorbed, 1984's Definitely Maybe survives as a revered, although sometimes distant, memory. These days when Oasis play Glastonbury, there are waves of excitement but no huge hullabaloo about their perfunctory parade of greatest hits, and their albums have ceased to generate the expectation, the queues around the block in Oxford Street, that was once the norm.
Describing itself as "the evil twin to the ecstatically decadent Boogie Nights soundtrack", the merits of this collection dwarf even Val Kilmer's (it says here) 13-inch penis. Okay, so he was playing porn legend John Holmes. But we don't even want to think about the method acting. Instead, let's explain why this soundtrack is so excellent. It's very simple: most of the songs they've chosen are classics. As opposed to the tired drek clueless movie producers compiling soundtracks usually think are classics (Dido, The Troggs).
