Bowie released Space Oddity, the song that would give him his initial commercial breakthrough. Timed to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing, it was a top five UK hit. In March 1970, Bowie married art student, Angela Barnett. Artistically, Bowie was powering ahead. The Man Who Sold the World was released in the US in late 1970 and in the UK the following year, and with its daring songwriting and broody, hard-rock sound, it was the first album to do full justice to his writing and performing gifts. The album’s themes included immortality, insanity, murder and mysticism, evidence that Bowie was a songwriter who was thinking way beyond pop’s usual boundaries. He followed it with 1972’s Hunky Dory, a mix of wordy, elaborate songwriting. It was an excellent collection that met with only moderate success but that all changed with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars later that year. This time, Bowie emerged as a fully fledged science-fiction character – an intergalactic glam-rock star visiting a doomed planet Earth – and the album effectively wrote the script for his own stardom. The hit single Starman brought instant success for the album, while Bowie’s ravishing stage costumes and provocative performances triggered fan enthusiasm unseen since Beatlemania. Everything Bowie touched turned to gold. He had his first UK number 1 album with