The entire world should know who British singer-songwriter David Bowie is by now. Ever since he first became known to the public with "Space Oddity" in 1969, Bowie has since gone from Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s to working with Brian Eno in the late 1970s to finding his biggest commercial success in 1983 with Let's Dance to various musical experiments in the 1990s and 2000s.
On November 24, 1972, following his instant classic The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Bowie released the first single from his sixth album, Aladdin Sane, titled "The Jean Genie". A little over a month later, on January 4, 1973, the long-running British show Top of the Pops aired a performance of the song, in which the entire four-piece band performed live and then-guitarist Mick Ronson did an extended guitar solo. Unfortunately, tapes of this edition of the show (including "The Jean Genie" performance) was immediately wiped, like a lot of other BBC programmes.
Fortunately, cameraman John Henshall made a copy and, in December 2011, was contacted by music-television aficionado Ray Langstone to share this historic David Bowie relic. It has since been preserved in the BBC archives, screened at that year's Missing Believed Wiped event, and rebroadcast on December 21 that year, during the Top of the Pops 2 Christmas special.