Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes: Major Tom soared from Space Oddity past

Eleven years separated Space Oddity from its ‘follow-up’ Ashes To Ashes. In that time, so much had changed.

David Bowie during the filming of the Ashes to Ashes video in 1980. Picture: Brian Duffy

Eleven years separated Space Oddity from its “follow-up” Ashes to Ashes. In that time, so much happened: the 1970s came and went, and with them disco, reggae, art rock, prog and punk — and Brixton’s David Robert Jones reinvented himself as David Bowie, became glam rocker Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and, after immersing himself in European minimalism, a New Romantic.

Then Major Tom reappeared. Bowie had been a low-level chameleon through the 1960s, darting around the London arts scene mostly as an eccentric singer-songwriter. His debut, self-titled album was issued on June 1, 1967 — a turning point in popular music. Bowie’s album rightly sank without trace, but The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band released that day ushered in rock’s album era.

Bowie’s first single came out in 1964 as Davie Jones with the King Bees, by the next he was the Manish Boys, then Davy Bowie and the Lower Third (to distinguish himself from the Monkees’ Davy Jones).

Early in 1969 he recorded a simple but curious song, one of a series of demos. It is said his manager approached Beatles’ producer George Martin to look at it, but Martin declined. American Tony Visconti, about to make Marc Bolan a star, and who would work with Bowie for the rest of his life, also passed.

So Elton John’s soon-to-be producer Gus Dudgeon recorded Space Oddity, bringing in bass player Herbie Flowers and a Rick Wakeman on Mellotron.

The single was released nine days before Neil Armstrong’s “one small step”. Bowie’s small step faltered, the record going to No 48 for a week and then slipping from the charts. But two weeks later it was back and eventually reached No 5 — but only the British heard it.

The following year Bolan, a friend of Bowie, stomped his glittery high-heeled boots to chart-topping glory as T. Rex. He was quickly overtaken, by his competitive mate. Bowie’s hits — singles and albums — flowed easily from late 1971 with Starman and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as the singer mutated in to his various guises, at which point the US and Australia belatedly caught up with Space Oddity. It made No 15 on Billboard and No 9 here (his only solo No 1 in Australia was 1973’s Sorrow, a song he did not write).

By January 1980, Bowie was among the most bankable acts on the planet, had filed for divorce from his first wife, and had recovered from a lengthy and nearly lethal flirtation with cocaine. He wrote a song to farewell the 1970s; an epitaph to the decade, as he put it. He sets the scene in the first few lines, contrasting the hapless astronaut of 1969 with the world-weary “junkie” he had become:

“I heard a rumour from Ground Control / Oh no, don’t say it’s true.”

Bowie said in interviews at the time that he saw Ashes to Ashes as a nursery rhyme of sorts and that, like others of his songs through the years, it had been partially inspired by the children’s song Inchworm, as sung by Danny Kaye in the film Hans Christian Andersen.

Inchworm, written by Broadway composer Frank Loesser, sounds simple but is deceptively complex with its “mathematical” chorus.

“There’s a child’s nursery rhyme element in it,” Bowie told Performing Songwriter magazine in 2003. “And there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it.”

Whereas in Space Oddity the singer was Major Tom, in Ashes to Ashes the singer — in the very final lines — treats him as a third party, and at the only point identifiably anything like a nursery rhyme: “My mother said to get things done / You’d better not mess with Major Tom.”

Elsewhere Bowie turns to lyrics of cut-and-paste, reassembled randomness, although one apparently nonsensical line may owe its presence to the dada movement Bowie and his band — by now Brian Eno was part of the gang — are said to have studied while in Berlin recording Low: “Time and again I tell myself / I’ll stay clean tonight / But the little green wheels are following me.”

The addicts’ regret is clear enough, but what of those little green wheels? Like Bowie, Kurt Schwitters went to art school and was drawn to painting, poetry, design and typography. Schwitters dabbled in dadaesque Jabberwocky-like writing and one such poem, An Anna Blume (To Anna Flower), bears the line: “Blue is the colour of your yellow hair; Red is the whirl of your green wheels.”

Ashes to Ashes went to No 1 on the British singles chart, falling a little short of that here in September 1980.

An astronaut, almost certainly Major Tom, makes an appearance as a skull in a spacesuit in the video of Bowie’s final single, Blackstar, released before his death two days after turning 69 in January.

Bowie’s spaceman turned up again in German singer Peter Schilling’s 1983 dance hit Major Tom (Completely Detached), and two decades later the Canadian artist known as KIA (Kirby Ian Anderson) released Mrs Major Tom. All of which were interpreted on an unlistenable space-themed album released in 2011 by Star Trek hero William Shatner called Seeking Major Tom that it so bad that it’s almost … no, it’s just ridiculous.