Ten years on from David Bowie’s death seems a good time for a reminder of the essential first step into the 1970s which the musician took while in Edinburgh.
It was on Leith Walk that David Bowie took one of his earliest creative moves into the 1970s, rehearsing, and soon after, filming, Pierrot in Turquoise, and assuming the role of Cloud in January 1970.
The Gateway Studios, the capital’s first colour television studio, had only begun production the previous July. Bowie collaborated with Lindsay Kemp on the short film, which Kemp described as a pantomime. Bowie performed songs including “When I Live My Dream” and “Sell Me A Coat,” both from his 1967 debut album on the Deram label.
Kevin Cann writes in his book, Any Day Now, that Bowie lived at 34 Drummond Street, “sleeping on the floor”, where he was joined by Kemp and Angie Bowie. The story of Bowie staying there has taken on near-mythical proportions. I spoke to Edinburgh-born comedian, Jack Doherty, who referred to Bowie living on nearby Infirmary Street, an easy mistake given the proximity. Infirmary Street evokes warm memories for a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s, when it housed a public swimming bath, now an art studio.
Within Edinburgh’s arts community, there is a persistent belief that Bowie stayed in the city for longer than a few days. “Months” are often suggested. At a stretch, it could only have been a cluster of days at most, but as with many Bowie-related stories, memory and myth blur easily. “David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust Born in Edinburgh” proclaimed an Edinburgh Evening News headline in May 2018.
Variations of the claim surface regularly. After Bowie’s death, former Edinburgh Hogmanay creative director, Pete Irvine, revealed he had once owned the Drummond Street property. He told the local paper in 2016: “Bowie stayed there all the time when he was in Edinburgh. I don’t know how long, but it was a few months. I knew some of the people he knew. It was the very early 70s and he lived there with Lindsay Kemp, his then wife Angie, and dancer Jack Birkett.”
Kemp later described Birkett in The Guardian as “Judy to my Mr Punch, Harlequin to my Pierrot, Titania to my Puck, Herodias to my Salomé, Queen of Hearts to my Lewis Carroll”. He added: “We shared flats, dressing rooms, boyfriends, bills, good times and bad times, a couple of extravagant young dreamers, a couple of aching elders, always entertainers”.
Bowie had been working with Kemp since the summer of 1967. The official Lindsay Kemp website helps place Bowie’s 1970 Edinburgh visit in context. From 1968 to 1973, Kemp had “one foot in London and one in Scotland (mostly Edinburgh)”, where the expanding Festival and Fringe were driving a theatrical and artistic renaissance. Opportunities there were often greater than anywhere else in Britain.
Each member of the Pierrot in Turquoise cast and crew had strong ties to Edinburgh’s arts community. Michael Garrett, who had married Edinburgh native Jane Brogan, accompanied Bowie on piano and organ during the performance, later retitled Pierrot In Turquoise or The Looking Glass Murders for the STV broadcast. Garrett lived in the city for extended periods, as did Kemp (Pierrot) and Birkett (Harlequin), all deeply embedded in its creative life.
Another key figure was Annie Stainer, a mime, dancer and clown who played Columbine in the film. Stainer, who died in the summer of 2025, later appeared alongside Kemp in the promotional film for Bowie’s “John, I’m Only Dancing”. Footage was taken from his performance as Ziggy Stardust at the Rainbow Theatre over two nights in August 1972. The scaffolding imagery in the show was inspired by The Living Theatre, the radical New York repertory group. Stainer was billed as part of the Astronettes, alongside Jack Birkett as The Incredible Orlando, making it something of a reunion for the cast of Pierrot. Stainer’s husband, Reg Bolton, was a clown, teacher, actor and writer and, at the time of Pierrot, manager and technical director of the Lindsay Kemp Mime Company. By 1971, he was directing the Theatre Workshop, producing plays for children.
Later in the decade, he worked with street children in Craigmillar, using circus skills to build confidence and character.
An internationalist, Bolton went on to develop adaptable educational programmes around the world, later moving to Australia with Stainer. His concept of the “new circus” proved quietly influential, using clowning as a positive and imaginative force in education. The late Lindsay Kemp later explained on the Mainman podcast that Angie Bowie travelled to Edinburgh carrying an early copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars ahead of the Rainbow concerts, offering Kemp a “free hand” in shaping the performances.
I wrote to Kevin Cann, who confirmed that Bowie stayed at the Drummond Street address for no more than a couple of days and that the 1970 visit coincided with Bowie’s transition from Ken Pitt to Tony Defries as his manager.
Records from the period, Cann noted, are sketchy. It seems more realistic that Bowie moved intermittently between Edinburgh and London over days or weekends. It was a remarkable circle of artists around Bowie, and a gift that their work was captured on film in Leith as 1970 got underway.
In that sense, Ziggy Stardust’s connections to Edinburgh are not fanciful, but rooted in collaboration, experimentation and artistic exchange. Bowie’s relationship with Edinburgh predated that visit to Leith. In November 1969, he played at Frisco’s in Chalmers Close and earlier that year supported Humble Pie at the Usher Hall.
His first visit to the city had come five years earlier with the Manish Boys. I spoke to one music fan who attended the Frisco’s show and produced an original membership card, yellowed with age, its jaunty typeface is dotted with a star above the “i”, and a drawing of the Forth Road Bridge beneath.
Not far from Drummond Street is the Museum of Childhood, where dolls were used for the production of Pierrot, which was broadcast in July 1970. Seen in that light, the final day of January and early February on Leith Walk matter less as a birthplace of Ziggy Stardust and more as a transitional moment.
Bowie was not yet who he would become, but he was moving towards it, surrounded by artists, ideas, and performance traditions that valued risk and reinvention.
Pierrot would reappear in Bowie’s work, most visibly in the “Ashes to Ashes” video and on the cover ofScary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980. In a strange way, the character began and ended Bowie’s decade of excellence, where he couldn’t put a foot wrong.
For a brief time Edinburgh was part of that journey.
