Mick Ronson and David Bowie

We stay in the 1970s for a look at the career of another Hull musician, Mick Ronson. He’s not widely remembered outside East Yorkshire or the crowd from Monsters of Rock, but in the summer of 2017, Hull’s year as City of Culture, a statue of Mick was installed in Hull’s East Park.

It was while he was painting white lines on the rugby pitches of that park, in 1970, that David Bowie caught up with him in the form of a man called John Cambridge.

John was putting together a new backing band for Bowie and he had Ronson in mind. Incredibly, he had to put great effort into persuading the disillusioned Ronson to put down his white line painting machine and come to London for an audition. Just two days later, Ronson the gardener appeared, on 5th February 1970, with David Bowie on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. Yes. John Peel again.

Remember our earlier warning: the success of any band is not preordained. If anything, the only pre-ordained outcome is abject failure.

This helps to explain Ronson’s reluctance to re-engage with the music business. Another explanation is that in 1970, the only person who had heard of David Bowie was David Bowie and his mum. This is partly because his 1960s stage name, Davy Jones, was eclipsed by a Monkee of the same name, and Davy Jones became David Bowie just in time for history to take note of his first album, the eponymous David Bowie.

And so we learn that Bowie was itself a construct, a stage name, a brand, and this makes it far less…