It's some c**t in a clown suit

The filming [Of the Ashes to Ashes video] was interrupted by an old man walking his dog in a very leisurely way. When the director gestured to Bowie - sitting patiently to one side - and asked the old man, 'Do you know who this is?' the fellow replied, 'Of course I do. It's some c**t in a clown suit.'

S. Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam rock and its legacy (2016), 647

The ungodly godfathers of glam, pioneers of aggressive androgyny and elegantly wasted decadence

Bowie was obsessed with Mick Jagger. Just as Alice Cooper in his early days had decided that the Stones were the group to beat in terms of scaring parents, Bowie yearned to knock them off their pedestal. Yet he knew that the Stones were unassailable. They were, in fact, the ungodly godfathers of glam, pioneers of aggressive androgyny and elegantly wasted decadence. The Velvet Underground may have been the first group to write songs about hard drugs with studied dispassion, but hardly anyone noticed because hardly anyone bought their records. on Let it bleed and even more so with 1971's Sticky Fingers, the Stones referenced heroin and cocaine in songs that got onto the radio and into millions of households.

S. Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam rock and its legacy (2016), 308

Short on custard pies, high on Genet references

The Bowie/Roxy glam axis - short on custard pies, high on Genet references - fitted the seventies rock critic's post-Sgt Pepper world more comfortably than Sweet or Mud, whose It's better than working album title didn't suggest much familiarity with Lorca.

B. Stanley, Yeah yeah yeah: the story of modern pop (2013), 341

Rewrote them with an abundance of exclamation marks

The hippie counterculture was politically committed to the present tense and largely mistrusted theatrics. ... Glam - garish, ultra-commercial and colourful as a Dulux paint chart - was its worst nightmare ... the likes of Mud, Wizzard, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Slade and Sweet picked up on certain lines of Bowie and Bolan's glam manifesto - the Bo Diddley riffs, the glittering artifice, the outrageous make-up, the tremendous sense of fun - and rewrote them with an abundance of exclamation marks.

B. Stanley, Yeah yeah yeah: the story of modern pop (2013), 335

With one crushing stomp of its platform soles

As Electric Warrior and Ziggy Stardust, Bolan and Bowie were far more effective Pied Pipers than Donovan, transporting their young listeners from immersion in a speculative, mythological past, and repositioning pop music in a future of plastic, glitter and tin ... With one crushing stomp of its platform soles, glam wiped out the market value of British rock's Arcadian dreams.

R. Young, Electric Eden: unearthing Britain's visionary music (2010), 474