You can tell how fascinating whatever Morrissey happens to be doing at a given time is when the thread turns into a discussion of David Bowie...
It's definitely true that Mick Ronson and the other Spiders could and should have shared a bit more in Bowie's good fortune once the serious money started to come in. But the idea that Mick was simply paid peanuts and then tossed away like a soiled Kleenex is wide of the mark.
Mick was on £45 per week, which equates to a salary of about £35K in today's money. Not much when you're talking about one of the defining rock musicians of his generation, but also not a starvation wage. And, for most of the time he was with Bowie, Bowie was a commercial flop. Mick's salary was much more than could be justified by the amount of money the band was bringing in. Bowie was subsidising him, at first using money he still had from "Space Oddity", then when that ran out, Bowie took less and less of the band's money for himself.
Bowie probably didn't up the money later on partly because he didn't really control the money and either chickened out of arguing the case with the manager, Tony Defries, or else got overruled. But also probably partly because it came to a head when the bassist, Trevor Bolder, got angry about it (understandably so) and confronted Bowie. That seems to have got Bowie's back up and made the issue more difficult to resolve. Bowie's logic: regardless of the rights and wrongs of this, how dare you shout the odds after I sacrificed myself for two years to pay your wages? I wouldn't call this totally fair, but it's also not evil.
After disbanding the Spiders, Bowie did not just abandon Mick, but continued to work with him and invested a lot of money (probably much more than he could have ever realistically given him as a pay rise) in his solo career. He also wrote/co-wrote three tracks on Mick's debut album. After Mick was diagnosed with cancer, Bowie part-paid for his treatment, along with a few other wealthy friends (one was the singer out of Def Leppard).
I'm not saying he was treated entirely fairly, but there are two sides to the story.
