The Intro

‘Liftoff’

2016: I saw tweets claiming David Bowie had died before I set off for work, and so I checked his official site and there was nothing. Relieved, I set off for Hull, but I had a nagging feeling this could turn out to be true, and so I turned off Morrissey on the stereo and switched to Radio 1, where I heard David Cameron of all people paying tribute as the final notes of Life on Mars? rang out. I couldn’t believe it. Perhaps the greatest solo pop star of all time was dead. In 2020, I’m still not over it. I immediately listened to my favourite Bowie tracks, and Space Oddity was the first.

2000: I was at uni sat on my bed. I was a mess at the time, but it was nearly the summer, and as usual I had a ticket for Glastonbury in a month or so. David Bowie was headlining, and although I knew how important he was, I’d never been that into him. I decided I needed to reacquaint myself, and so I put a cassette of Changesbowie on, and from the first few seconds that faded in slowly, I was gripped, hooked and obsessed. The song was, of course, Space Oddity, the song that rightly or wrongly is considered the start of his career. I missed his Glastonbury set due to a stay in hospital, and I never got the chance to see him perform.

1975: David Bowie has put behind the glam rock that made him so famous, and his last album was a fine collection of soul tunes called Young Americans. He is about to reach his most inspired, creative era, but he is not well. Emaciated and heavily into cocaine, he was just finishing his next album Station to Station, which he later claimed he had no recollection of making. It was one of his greatest pieces of work. His record label RCA reissued Space Oddity as a maxi-single, part of a series of occasional re-releases bringing attention to some of his best-known songs. Six years after its first release, it became Bowie’s first number 1 single and is his best-selling single of all time.

1969: David Bowie, after several false starts, including an album released the same day as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that sank, has finally made it to the singles chart thanks to Space Oddity. With a timely release to coincide with the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, Bowie appears on Top of the Pops for the first time. But can he prove he’s not just a novelty, a one-hit wonder?

It took a few years, but yes, I think I it’s safe to say he did. At the time of his death he had sold over 12 million singles in the UK alone. Two years later it was reported he had sold a further five million. If he had only had Space Oddity and the Ziggy Stardust years, he’d still be remembered fondly, but there is so much more. You could write a whole series of books on this chameleon, this genius, this effortlessly cool, witty… I don’t have enough superlatives.

Before

So it seems unreal to think he was originally just David Robert Jones, born 8 January 1947 in Brixton, London. His father Haywood was a promotions officer for Barnardo’s from Doncaster in Yorkshire and his mother Margaret was born at Shorncliffe Army Camp in Kent. He was known as a gifted child, and a bit of a brawler. Between 1953 and 1955 the Jones’s lived in several places before settling in Sundridge Park. Aged nine, his interpretations in music and movement classes were considered ‘vivdly artistic’. It was at this age that his father introduced him to rock’n’roll via songs by Elvis Presley, the Teenagers and Little Richard.

By the end of 1956, young Jones would enjoy skiffle sessions with friends, where he could be found playing the ukelele and tea-chest bass, and was also learning the piano. He would wow audiences by copying the gyrations of heroes like Elvis. After passing his eleven -plus he went to Bromley Technical High School, where he studied art, music and design, and thanks to his older half-brother Terry Burns he got into jazz, which led to his mother buying him a saxophone in 1961.

In 1962, aged 15, Jones formed his first band, The Konrads, who would play local events such as weddings. In the band was his friend George Underwood, who that year punched Jones in a fight over a girl and gave him the famous discoloration in his left eye that added to his alien appearance. Despite four months in hospital, they remained friends.

Jones left The Konrads in 1963 and released his first single, Liza Jane, credited to Davie Jones with the King Bees, in 1964. Making no impact, he jumped ship to The Manish Boys. I Pity the Fool did just as badly in 1965, and then came two singles with blues trio The Lower Third. He was credited as ‘Davy Jones’ on the first, You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving, but on Can’t Help Thinking About Me in 1966, he had become ‘David Bowie’, after James Bowie, the inventor of the knife he gave his surname to. And that ended any confusion with the much more famous Davy Jones of The Monkees.

But all this jumping around record labels with very typical mid-60s R’n’B groups (and there was one more, The Buzz) was getting Bowie nowhere. Later that year, he signed with Deram, and so began his psychedelic/Anthony Newley phase with the single Rubber Band. This period, which also included, of course, novelty single The Laughing Gnome and Love You Till Tuesday, was disowned by Bowie for decades, which is a shame as I like all three songs, and others from that eponymous debut. They’re a fascinating showcase of a nascent talent.

Bowie then moved into the dramatic arts, particularly mime, with the help of teacher Lindsay Kemp. It was here that he first became really interested with the idea of characters and assuming identities, which would be a large part of the rest of his career. Although music had taken a back seat, in 1968 he formed Feathers, a trio with girlfriend Hermione Farthingale and John Hutchinson, and they would perform a very late-60s mix of poetry, folk and mime. It was short-lived, as Bowie and Farthingale split-up in early 1969. And it was around that time that Space Oddity was penned.

Unsurprisingly, Space Oddity was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Released in the spring of 1968, Bowie watched it while stoned several times and was very interested in the idea of a space mission going wrong, particularly watching an astronaut floating off in silence among the stars, and with the Apollo 11 mission around the corner, he set to work.

The earliest unearthed recording of Space Oddity is a simple demo recorded by Bowie on his 12-string in his flat in late-1968 or early-1969. He and Hutchinson then recorded another primitive version soon afterwards, with Hutchinson in the ‘Ground Control’ role. Then, in February, the first studio take was made to be used in Love You Till Tuesday, a promo film thought up by his manager Kenneth Pitt to try and reignite record label interest. Hutchinson was Ground Control again, and among the line-up was Dave Clague, one-time bassist in The Bonzo Dog Band. All versions of this song are worth hearing, and this studio version in particular, to note its development. This version definitely sounds more like a novelty song than the finished product. It’s too camp and lacking the haunting quality that makes it so great.

In June 1969, Pitt negotiated a one-album deal with Mercury Records on the strength of Bowie and Hutchinson’s demos. Tony Visconti, who produced Bowie’s friend Marc Bolan, was assigned Bowie, and he liked what he heard… apart from Space Oddity, which he considered a cheap cash-in on the moon landing. He assigned production to Gus Dudgeon instead, and the majority was recorded at Trident Studios on 20 June 1969.

With Hutchinson gone, Bowie sang all the vocals, but he did sound rather like him in the Ground Control lines at the start. He also played 12-string acoustic guitar and that charming analog keyboard operated by a stylus, the Stylophone. In-house session player Rick Wakeman, later of Yes, was on the Mellotron, with Mick Wayne of Junior’s Eyes on guitar, Blue Mink’s Herbie Flowers on bass and Pentange’s drummer Terry Cox, plus assorted musicians on orchestral accompaniment. Bowie and Dudgeon encouraged improvisation from the musicians.

Review

Space Oddity long since transcended being remotely considered a novelty, and that’s thanks to Bowie, then 22, already showing an existential insight into the human condition, covering alienation and emptiness, all wrapped up in one of his other favourite recurring subjects – space. I don’t feel enough credit is given to Dudgeon here. Visconti is rightly considered Bowie’s top producer but he made a big mistake handing over the reins here. Dudgeon makes a brilliant job of giving Space Oddity it’s haunting atmosphere. The slow fade-in (shorter on the original UK mono single) really does capture the feel of tension as Major Tom prepares for his mission. The ‘This is Ground Control to Major Tom’ section sounds triumphant, all is well and Major Tom is in the news. And then my favourite verse:

‘For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do’

Here, Bowie sounds both serene and unsettled, resigned to his/mankind’s fate, that, far from being superhuman, he is just one man, in space, and his mission will actually achieve little. Is the Earth ‘blue’ because of humans? It’s a line as deep as the oceans Major Tom is staring at. The instrumental section is beautiful, with the Stylophone and Mellotron sounding charmingly primitive and futuristic at the same time. Banish all thoughts of Rolf Harris on the former instrument, and imagine it was just Bowie’s adverts for the Stylophone and this song that inspired 90s acts like Pulp and Orbital to use it too.

And then the mission goes awry. Major Tom is either resigned to his fate or has had a breakdown and sabotaged his craft himself when he says ‘I think my spaceship knows which way to go’. I love the way Ground Control’s repeated ‘hear’ to Major Tom merges into the doomed astronaut ‘here’ in his ‘tin can’. In the vastness of space, Major Tom doesn’t feel like a hero. He’s just a man in a tin can. And who knows where he’s going next? The stereo mix captures the uncertainty perfectly – you feel you are in that tin can, bumping from side to side as the effects are panning, hinting at the psychedelia of the Star Gate sequence of 2001: A Space Oddity.

And then on a different level, Space Oddity is just a nice little tune to get stoned to, with the space travel metaphor relating to getting out of your head, and, as Bowie fan Jarvis Cocker later asked, ‘What if you never come down?’. So, with Apollo 11 taking place in July upon its release, Bowie hoped to appeal to the counterculture as well as the wider public fascinated in man on the moon, plus your average pop fan (the strum followed by two simple handclaps is a hell of a hook).

After

But upon its release, it looked as though Space Oddity would be another failure. Apparently the BBC refused to play it until Apollo 11 was returning home safe and by then it was slipping down the chart. Until the new marketing director for Philips, part of Mercury, set his entire staff to work selling it in September, due to lack of anything else to market. It worked, and Space Oddity peaked at five in November, the same month his second album, David Bowie was released. When Bowie signed with RCA, they wisely renamed the LP Space Oddity to avoid confusion with his 1967 album. It’s an uneven collection, and the ‘title’ track is certainly the best bit, but Memory of a Free Festival is also a highlight. He ended the year singing a an Italian version of Space Oddity, with new lyrics by Mogol, called Ragazza Solo, Ragazza Sola (Lonely Boy, Lonely Girl).

Bowie made sure he couldn’t be pigeonholed, and as we all know, every album that followed was different from the last. But The Man Who Sold the World (1970) and Hunky Dory (1971) spawned no charting singles. It’s understandable with the former, it being a heavy, unusual collection, but the latter had Changes and Life on Mars? (which did at least reach number three when re-released in 1973). At best, Bowie at this point could hope to become some kind of cult figure.

All that changed when he and his band became Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and appeared on Top of the Pops in 1972 to promote Starman. Bowie had finally pulled it off. He rode the glam rock wave bolder and brighter than most of his contemporaries. The Jean Genie almost became Christmas number 1 that year, and then Space Oddity was reissued in the US and went to 15. To promote the reissue, Mick Rock made a film in which Bowie, in full Ziggy regalia, mimed along as if sat in his spaceship. Space Oddity fitted the Ziggy era perfectly, but Bowie later said he had moved on and couldn’t understand why he was still promoting it. In live shows over the next few years he would still perform it, but it would be reworked.

For several years most Bowie singles entered the upper reaches of the top 10, including Drive-In Saturday (three in 1972), Sorrow (three in 1973) and Rebel Rebel (five in 1974). Even an unofficial reissue of The Laughing Gnome went to six!

It’s interesting to note that Rebel Rebel was the last to reach the top five for nearly two years, as it was in effect his farewell to glam. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars were retired in the summer of 1973 and in 1974 he moved to the US. After Diamond Dogs, where elements of funk crept in, he paid tribute in full to the US soul and funk of the era, resulting in Young Americans. The UK would still buy Bowie in droves, whatever his current sound, but they did prefer the glam era. But Fame, his collaboration with John Lennon, became his first US chart-topper.

Which takes us to the maxi-single that brought Bowie his first UK number 1, six years after it was first released. Why 1975 and not 1969? It’s a strange one. Clearly Bowie was still a huge star in the mid-70s, but how many people needed to buy a song that missed out first time around? Perhaps the temptation of getting their hands on Velvet Goldmine for the first time interested his fans (something Bowie wasn’t happy about – he said it hadn’t even been mixed properly). Perhaps it was just right place, right time. The mid-70s were a strange and often bleak time for pop singles. Glam was over, disco hadn’t fully blossomed and albums were where the serious music buyer’s taste lay. Whatever the reason, it was fully deserving.

The Outro

1979: Bowie had a change of heart. He decided to revisit Major Tom, but on his own terms with a sparse, desolate remake of Space Oddity, a decade on. His next number 1, a proper sequel, was right around the corner.

The Info

Written by

David Bowie

Producer

Gus Dudgeon

Weeks at number 1

2 (8-21 November)

Trivia

Births

12 November: Rower Katherine Grainger
18 November: Presenter Anthony McPartlin

Meanwhile…

16 November: British and Icelandic ships clash once more, marking the beginning of the third Cod War.