Psychedelic Rock

380. David Bowie – Space Oddity (1975)

/ robbarker1979

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. 

293. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Voodoo Chile (1970)

/ robbarker1979

The Intro

30 years on, I can still remember the first time I saw Jimi Hendrix. I can pinpoint the date because it was a clip on Good Morning Britain in which the presenters were talking about the 20th anniversary of his death, so I was 11. I’d never seen anything like this otherworldly flamboyant peacock, tearing away at his guitar with supernatural abandon, on stage in darkness. It was mesmerising, exciting, and even scary.

Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitarist of his generation, perhaps ever, but he never had a number 1 in his lifetime. Voodoo Chile, from the final album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience Electric Ladyland in 1968, was released posthumously. Not a pop single, but what a riproaring way to call time on Hendrix and the 60s.

Before

He may have seemed like he’d arrived on Earth from outer space, but Johnny Allen Hendrix was born 27 November 1942 in Seattle, Washington, the eldest of five children. Four years later his parents changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix in honour of his father Al and his late brother Leon Marshall. Al was in the army, and absent for much of his eldest’s childhood. His mither Lucille struggled and James would often be sent to female family members and friends of Lucille.

When Al returned from service, he and Lucille would argue violently, and the shy James would hide in a closet. Many years later, he revealed to a girlfriend that he was once abused by a man in uniform. At the age of nine, his parents divorced and Al was granted custody.

In 1957, father and son were clearing an old woman’s home when the young Hendrix found a ukelele with one string left, which she said he could keep. He learnt to play by ear, and would particularly enjoy doing so to Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog.

By mid-1958, a few months after his mother’s early death, he bought his first acoustic guitar. He would play for hours, learning the blues licks of Robert Johnson, BB King and Muddy Waters, but the first tune he learned to play in full was the theme to Peter Gunn.

Soon after his purchase he formed his first group, called The Velvetones. but struggled to be heard above the din, and in 1959, Al bought him one. Hendrix joined The Rocking Kings, and began playing professionally.

Aged 18, Hendrix was caught riding in stolen cars more than once, and police offered him a choice between prison or the army, and he chose the latter and enlisted in 1961. Hendrix struggled and missed his beloved guitar, but when Al sent him it his peers would tease him and hide it from him. Fellow serviceman Billy Cox was impressed with his playing though and they soon joined other servicemen in a band called The Casuals.

After they had both been discharged in 1963 the duo formed new band The King Kasuals. Their second guitarist Alphonso ‘Baby Boo’ Young could play with his teeth, and before long Hendrix could too. As well as The King Kasuals, Hendrix began performing as a backing musician for soul stars including Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner and Jackie Wilson.

In 1964 Hendrix joined The Isley Brothers’ backing band The IB Specials and made his first recording on their two part single Testify. But he got bored of being restricted to the same set every night and left in October to join Little Richard’s touring group The Upsetters. He would make his TV debut appearing alongside the rock’n’roll legend in 1965

There would be further performances with artists including saxophonist King Curtis, but Hendrix couldn’t stand the restrictions of not getting the spotlight to himself, so in 1966 he moved to New York’s happening Greenwich Village and would begin a residency fronting his new band Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and it is here that he really developed his incredible style.

That May, while performing with Curtis Knight and the Squires he found an important fan in Linda Keith, the girlfriend of Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Their producer Andrew Loog Oldham was somehow blind to the potential of this virtuoso axeman, so Keith told Chas Chandler about him. Chandler was about to leave The Animals and was looking to move into managing and producing talent. He saw Hendrix performing Hey Joe in Greenwich Village, and was blown away. Hendrix signed with him and moved to London in September.

Hendrix and Chandler were on the lookout for members of a new band to showcase the former’s talent. They asked guitarist Noel Redding to play bass for him after seeing him at an audition for The New Animals, and drummer Mitch Mitchell had recently been fired from Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames. Chandler suggested Jimmy change the spelling of his name, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience had arrived.

The trio performed for the first time in France, supporting Johnny Holliday, that October. A month later they signed to Track Records, a new label set up by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, managers of The Who. A performance at the ultra-hip Bag O’Nails in front of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Pete Townshend set tongues wagging. Debut single Hey Joe shot to number six in December.

If ever there was a case of right time, right place, it was The Jimi Hendrix Experience, in Swinging London, in 1966 and 67. And 1967 was truly their year. Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary were top 10 hits in March and May respectively. These first three singles displayed the versatility of these firebrands. They could do soulful covers, write their own psychedelic rock and tender ballads. Debut album Are You Experienced, also released in May, went even further, with the blues of Red House and experimental rock like the title track. It’s rightly considered one of the greatest debut albums of all time, and climbed the charts in the Summer of Love alongside landmark LPs by The Beatles and Pink Floyd.

That summer saw Hendrix blow McCartney’s mind with a live performance of the title track to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and one of the most memorable rock performances of all time at the Monterey Pop Festival. As if Hendrix’s guitar-playing wasn’t impressive enough, he ended their show by setting his instrument on fire. After Monterey they briefly toured as support for The Monkees, quitting after a fortnight due to the audience’s general bafflement.

The trio ended an incredible year with the release of second album Axis: Bold as Love. While the least impressive of their three LPs, it was still sterling work. On 20 December they set to work on the opus that would be the group’s swansong – the double album Electric Ladyland.

Tensions rose during recording, with Hendrix taking more of an interest in the production, which annoyed Chandler, as did his increasing perfectionism. Not only that, the sessions were getting more and more chaotic thanks to fellow musicians dropping by, and also Redding was busy with his new group Fat Mattress, so Hendrix would record his own bass parts. Nonetheless, Electric Ladyland was a masterpiece thanks to songs like Crosstown Traffic and the definitive Bob Dylan cover, All Along the Watchtower. And then there was the album closer.

Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) was a rocked-up, alternative to Voodoo Chile, a 14-minute-plus blues jam featuring Steve Winwood, among others, earlier on the album. The day after that version had been recorded, The Jimi Hendrix Experience returned to the studio to film a documentary, and a session of jamming resulted in Hendrix’s sole number 1 single.

Review

What a track, what a way to pay tribute to one of the greatest musicians ever, and what a full stop on the 60s. Voodoo Chile, as it became confusingly titled upon its posthumous single release (the Slight Return being dropped by Track Records) is no pop single. It’s The Jimi Hendrix Experience at full throttle and saying goodbye. Opening with one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time, the track then explodes.

Hendrix pays tribute to the masters of blues from his youth with some lyrical imagery portraying Hendrix as some kind of superhuman, able to chop down mountains with the edge of his hand. Not that far removed from songs like Bo Diddley’s I’m a Man.

The music is in another dimension to such material, though, a heavy psychedelic onslaught of guitar noodling that, thanks in part to the stereo panning, swirls around your head and never gets boring, unlike perhaps some of Hendrix’s later work. The lyrics don’t last long, but may well be the reason this was picked as a tribute to Hendrix. The second and last verse ends with the guitarist apologising for taking up all the listener’s sweet time (like he has anything to apologise for) and then a promise:

‘If I don’t meet you no more in this world
I’ll meet you in the next one
And don’t be late
Don’t be late!’

Voodoo Chile has probably always been my favourite song by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and I love the fact that for one week, this was number 1. Storming, magnificent and unforgettable.

After

Electric Ladyland was released in October 1968. 1969 began with the trio caused controversy with their appearance on the BBC’s Happening for Lulu when they abruptly stopped performing Hey Joe to perform Sunshine of Your Love by way of tribute to the recently disbanded Cream. They prevented Lulu performing her closing number, and Hendrix was told they would never work for the BBC again. Around this time, Chandler quit.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s two February gigs at the Royal Albert Hall were their final UK shows, and in June after a performance at the Denver Pop Festival, matters between Hendrix and Redding came to a head, and Redding left.

Hendrix expanded the line-up, adding his old friend Cox on bass, and they headlined the Woodstock Festival as Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, famously blowing the minds of the remaining hippies on the Monday morning with an incendiary version of The Star-Spangled Banner.

To put an end to several years of legal disputes, Hendrix recorded a live album, Band of Gypsys, with Cox and new drummer Buddy Miles. The Band of Gypsys were not to last long as an entity though, and Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffrey announced in February 1970 that The Jimi Hendrix Experience were to return in their original line-up. This was news to the frontman though, who was reluctant for Redding to return, so he began touring with Mitchell and Cox instead on The Cry of Love Tour.

On 31 August 1970 Hendrix headlined the Isle of Wight Festival, but was beset with technical problems. On 2 September he angered fans in Denmark after three songs announcing ‘I’ve been dead a long time’. After a badly-received set in Germany, Cox was suffering from severe paranoia after a bad LSD trip, and he returned to the US.

Hendrix and Mitchell returned to the UK, and the former spoke to Chandler about being unhappy with Jeffrey’s management. He did an impromptu performance on 16 September with War at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, which was uncharacteristically low-key.

Two days later, his girlfriend Monika Dannemann found him unconscious in bed, and he was pronounced dead soon after. Hendrix had choked on his own vomit on a cocktail of barbiturates and sleeping tablets. He was only 27.

The Outro

Perhaps Jimi Hendrix was never meant to live a long life. His flame only burned for a few years, but it burned brighter and more colourfully than most can only dream about. Following Redding’s departure, Hendrix had struggled to live up to those first three albums, which suggests The Jimi Hendrix Experience had a very special alchemy. Mitchell was a fantastic drummer in particular, and if Hendrix hadn’t been in the spotlight so much, he may have been better remembered. Redding, sardonic and grounded, was perhaps good at stopping Hendrix from getting too carried away in the studio.

Redding was found dead at home in Ireland on 11 March 2003 after a shock haemorrhage, aged 57, and Mitchell died five years later on 12 November in a hotel in Portland, Oregon of natural causes, aged 62.

The Info

Written by

Jimi Hendrix

Producer

Chas Chandler

Weeks at number 1

1 (21-27 November)

Trivia

Births

22 November: Novelist Stel Pavlou
23 November: TV presenter Zoe Ball

Meanwhile…

27 November: The Gay Liberation Front organised its first march in London.