David Bowie’s 1972-73 tour has been fictionalized on the silver screen in films like Velvet Goldmine and Hedwig and the Angry Inch — but it also became a movie in its own right. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture was filmed at a July 3, 1973, concert in Hammersmith, West London. It was Bowie’s last show using the Ziggy persona. Directed by veteran documentarian D.A. Pennebaker (who also did Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back in 1967), the film combines both the kookiness of early-’70s glam with Bowie’s near ageless hits, including “All the Young Dudes,” “Oh, You Pretty Things” and “Space Oddity.”
TIME’s take: “Bowie looks like an extra directly out of A Clockwork Orange — an effect heightened intentionally at the start of each concert by the use of jabbing white strobe lights and the electronic version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from the sound track of the Stanley Kubrick film.”
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