Mick Ronson, the former lead guitarist for David Bowie's band, and a rock music producer, has died in London. He was 46.
The cause was cancer of the liver, British newspapers reported.Ronson was a hard-rock guitarist who also understood melody, and his chunky chords and riffs put a firm rock foundation under the ironies of Bowie's androgynous glam-rock. Songs like "Suffragette City" helped to establish the proportions of a genre that survived the 1970s and thrived anew in the 1980s as so-called lite metal.
Ronson joined Bowie's band, Spiders From Mars, in the late 1960s, playing on the albums "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Hunky Dory.' He was credited as co-arranger and guitarist on the 1972 album "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," which established Bowie as a star. He also performed and arranged on Lou Reed's 1972 album "Transformer," including the hit "Walk on the Wild Side," and performed on Bowie's 1973 album "Aladdin Sane."
After the Spiders disbanded, Ronson released two solo albums, "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" and "Play, Don't Worry," in 1974 and 1975. He joined Mott the Hoople in 1974 and continued working with the band's singer, Ian Hunter, during Hunter's mid-1970s solo career. In the mid-1970s, he toured with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue.
He rejoined Hunter to collaborate on the album "Y.U.I. Orta" in 1990, and in 1992 he produced "Your Arsenal" by the English singer and songwriter Morrissey.