This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut – “something outrageous”. Angie is so delighted with the result that Suzi is summoned to their home to meet David himself, a pale and epicene young man now going under the name of David Bowie. She styles his “mousy” hair into a spiky red feather cut, which he loves, and the look of Ziggy Stardust is born.
Her infatuation with the couple is instant and irrevocable. Their flat at Haddon Hall is for her a Xanadu of chic, of scented candles and foreign magazines and strange sleeping arrangements. It’s also an escape from an unhappy home. She shrinks from the glum suburban routines of her mum and dad and yet – in an almost parenthetical aside – we learn that they too once knew glamour and danger. It was the war: her dad drove tanks in occupied France (and won medals); mum drove pilots to their planes at Biggin Hill airport. Scratch the surface and lives poignantly begin to look less ordinary.
