MICK RONSON: From Rats To Riches

"I first started playing guitar by holding my violin like a guitar and plucking it," Mick Ronson, ex-bow wizard tells me, "then I thought, sod it, I'm more interested in what a guitar sounds like than playing a violin. Coz violin was always slow—I learnt it at school and I always had this problem of waiting for other people to catch up, and I used to get frustrated, bored by all that hanging around. And my hand would start sagging and then it would be-^slap! slap! slap!—"Up! Up!" After awhilb I began to get interested in the guitar, because there'd be no teacher to tell you you gotta hold your hand like that and this, and I guess I wanted to play what/wanted to play, rather than have somebody tell me exactly what to play."

Hp formed his first band at eighteen, culminating in the Rats, a rock-blues band which gains in legend as timeJi goes on, no doubt largely because of^ the name. After several years of trying to break through record company indifference, Mick left the Rats to seize a chance to play on a Michael Chapman LP, and then provided the majqr musical emphasis on David Bowie's Man Who Sold The World, drawing on his musical training in the arrangements, at the same time absorbing the considerably eclectic musical preferences of Bowie. From then on, there wasn't a music paper or magazine unwilling to chronicle at least one aspect of his every waking movement.