DAVID BOWIE – "Ashes To Ashes"

Oh dear, David Bowie. “The Man Who Fooled The World”. What with his multiple faces, images and personas, each one we are supposed to obediently gasp at and applaud as he moves through the ages like a pantomime quick-change artiste, we must lap up everything like a hungry kitten addressing a saucer of milk. But for me, the milk has always been sour and I’m lapping up none of it. For the unswerving truth is that Bowie has always been a plastic Bolan, someone of true worth and zero irritation value. Further to the general fraud, which is Jones himself, “Ashes to Ashes” pushes Bowie’s luck to the very edge of our patience and only has good old Major Tom (wasn’t he supposed to be lost forever?) to thank for rescuing this train wreck. Is this too sceptical? We don’t think so. Tom was an image of the sixties, a charcter Bowie brought back with the self same track to serve up as a lukewarm dish in the middle of the seventies. He shoots. He scores. (“Can you hear mr, Major Tom?”). Now here’s 1980 and whaddyouknow? the man sitting in a tin can is reconstituted again, if only in the feeblist of references and we all wince painfully as Jones serves up a gruel even Oliver Twist would have sent back to the kitchen. So how did Bowie get away with this? Because this fraud, this charlatan, remains “The Man Who Fooled The World”. And those of us who have long since rumbled him can only stand on the sidelines, pointlessly muttering our objections.

Just when you thought that ‘your’ pop was disintegrating and you were getting old and careworn and exhausted with a baby about the place and there never being enough hours in the day to get everything done that had to be done, this comes along to stir the loins and make you feel young again. And yet again it’s a new departure for the mercurial Bowie, who could, it seems, change his shape and , well, not so much blend in with the landscape as rearrange it to fit.

This, following on from the previous number one, is surely the Goodbye Seventies, hello Eighties moment. After the first part of the year which was one of those when pop didn’t seem to have made up its mind where it was going and was throwing out all sorts of things just to see what happened, this felt to me like the new beginning. And so it proved.

Yes, Tom, magnificent. Not to diminish Space Oddity, which was also magnificent in its late-sixties way, but this is very different. Smoother, silkier, a bit sinister, like the times to come. I might be inclined to swap the marks for this and the previous one, but there’s not much more than a Rizla’s width between them. The difference for me is that this, and not WTIA, is the one that most perfectly evokes the time for me.

Loved it. Still do.

EDIT: Oh, and I remember the video because it was perhaps the first video that made an impact on me. But then I’ve never got into the pop video, which may seem odd from one who is fanatical about film. Even today I get oddly irritated by the ubiquity of video clips on teh interweb. I suspect it is the coming of the video as inseparable from the audio as much as anything that would complete my alienation from contemporary pop. Much of what is to come is probably incomplete without its visual aspect, which is why I never managed to ‘get it’.

“Boys keep swinging” was the first video I saw where I thought “Actually, he’s damn good at this sort of thing”

And now, he seems to be “missing in action” himself! (ages since his last album now)

Boy George tells quite a funny anecdote about the time Bowie pitched up at the Blitz to recruit the video extras. Steve Strange held court and everyone failed miserably to keep their cool, following him around the club.

The video is brilliant. I rarely care for pop videos, but this one made a big impact on 13 year old me. It marked the moment the new romantic movement entered the mainstream, with Strange and pals’ involvement and Bowie appropriating the Pierrot look.

It helps that “Ashes To Ashes” is such a great tune, of course. I loved “Fashion” and “Up The Hill Backwards” too. Those singles are among my very favourite Bowie moments. In fact, for me the Berlin period which preceded this and the early 1980s are the most interesting phase of his career.

Sonically, these singles have such a powerful quality. The textures, the syncopation, with strident guitar criss-crossing funky, pulsing bass. Along with Roxy Music’s “Same Old Scene” (which to this day remains my favourite recording), they nail the template new romantic sound. I’m not sure to what extent Bowie in particular soaked up the sounds of the emerging electronic scene in creating the “Scary Monsters” album. But I imagine the records Rusty Egan was playing at the Blitz would have influenced him as much as he influenced the artists formed out of the Blitz.

This sounds like the first number one of the 1980s. And I like the idea of Abba having the final word on the Seventies.

‘One of those records that could have, maybe should have, brought the curtain down on a career.’ Tactfully put, Tom. After the first side of ‘Scary Monsters’ there’s not much essential Bowie, but a twelve year run of greatness is twice as long as most acts manage. More like three times as long. And he remained a good live act, doing a great version of this on what turned out to be his final tour, in 2003. This record and the video were around endlessly yet somehow you never got tired of them. And still don’t.

Much earlier this year I was listening to POTP and got all excited by a song – inspirational! funky! This song had to (sorry) be an influence on anyone who heard it. It turned out to be “Sound And Vision.”

This song sounds like a confession; maybe even a self-condemnation. I just watched the video, the multiple selves of Bowie still in their chairs, tethers…the pierrot walking off in the end with his mum…it is all as if the Berlin trilogy hadn’t happened, or as if these multiple selves have driven Bowie into despair. The previous song’s singer turns the lyrics around, making it into a personal victory; this is more abject.

That “sorry who were we talking about” started with Madness, if I recall correctly.

One of his albums had a song that was the result of a song competition. “What’s really happening” where the tune and chorus was given, and the participant got to write the verses. Then, the visitors to Bowienet could click a button, and vote on five entries, marks out of ten. Then click and get five more.

So, I enetered my stanzas, and went to the voting pages. My god, what painful verses they were. “In with a real chance” I think to myself…

The eventual winner, “Alex Grant” suspiciously close to my name in the alphabet, never mind, had the only other decent set of lyrics I saw. So, fair play, and wonder if I came second, etc.

(RobWilliams did a similar songcomp, but my entry for that was absolute bobbins, not for want of trying. Just showing I can be objective!)

(OK I don’t much listen to CD2 past the first five tracks either)

What chart were you listening too Lee? My own recollection (which I’ve checked on chartstats) was that it entered at #4 and then on to #1.

This was a surprise, as I think most people had presumed his big commercial days were behind him (singles-wise at least).

As with so many singles in this era, there was a gimmick to stimulate early sales – a sheet of “stamps” (or stickers) in each of the first x+1 copies. My own copy had about 20 sheets in it!

It was his highest new entry, as a solo artist, anyway. (Down, bunny, Down!!)

don’t think anyone’s mentioned ‘let’s dance’ the single (and certainly video), if not really the album, as essential late(r) bowie, so i will. fifteen year old me was also pretty keen on tin machine for a few months before i started reading nme and learned that this was not the done thing. (incidentally, was tin machine the first bowie record to be touted – at least by those who had secured an interview with the band (because tin machine was, let’s be very clear about this, a band) -as a return to form?)

ashes to ashes is super great too of course. i’m intrigued by #19 pete saying ‘it isn’t even vaguely an electronic piece’ as i can’t begin to imagine how you would make a record that sounded like this otherwise.

I think I like something off Heathen. Hope that helps.

This record has grown on me enormously; at the time, I suppose it was a little leftfield for a kid only just coming to terms with The Jam, but after my obligatory Bowie phase kicked in in the early ’90s (I’d bought ‘China Girl’, ‘Absolute Beginners’ and, erm, ‘Loving The Alien’ in the ’80s), I became an obsessive and ‘Ashes To Ashes’ does indeed sound like the last real hurrah of pop’s leading outsider.

So charming too, to see him bless the new generation in the video.

The precursor to this record was the stripped down, Plastic Ono Band-like version of ‘Space Oddity’ Bowie released the year before (which I love). The padded-cell performance of it on the Kenny Everett Show really pushed the notion that Major Tom had cracked up (or wasn’t in a utopian SF novel as Tom said up top).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2wWWUvROuI&feature=related

“Up The Hill Backwards” – a conscious nod to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in the intro, or just coincidence?

I fear I have mentioned this before, but 12 year old DV thought that David Bowie was a figure of such monstrous depravity that he wondered how they had made that seemingly nice old woman pretend to be his mother in the video.

re 39 pretension in pop is often a good thing – and bowie had it in spades. It could be argued that by abandoning pretension for ‘lets dance’ that he lost his mojo and never really got it back.
I loved this song at the time and still do – although with a little less awe and wonder than I had at the time.
Was it prompted by bowie’s fear that his career was at an end? Had he tired of the weight of expectation? I seem to remember an interview with him in the NME at the time where he appeared on the cover in what looked like a nappy – in role as the Elephant man in a Broadway production – where he confessed to fears of being irrelevant or mediocre.
Nowadays pop stars seem to have more carefully managed career paths and that there is an expectation that even if your career stalls you can make a living on the oldies circuit. To his credit bowie has rarely if ever taken that route, and even if his efforts to appear credible have been laughable at least he’s tried.
I’d like to put a vote in for ‘This is not America’ as a good, late Bowie single but apart from the Sound and Vision retrospective I’ve not bought an album since ‘Let’s Dance’

I’ve been trying to think what effect this record has on me and it’s difficult to say – it’s just sort of THERE, and doesn’t move me one way or the other. I certainly don’t dislike it, but it’s not particularly coherent, musically or lyrically – while the likes of Drive-in Saturday or Life on Mars might not have obvious meaning, you do feel that in the right frame of mind (or in Bowie’s mind!) or on the right substances, they’d make perfect sense, while this still feels like random phrases slung together. And it doesn’t provide the feast that a lot of his other stuff does.

In fact, I was going to mention these next time Mr B featured on Popular, but since pjb already has – Bowie had a sequence of smallish hits with outstanding material between this and his next massive album, including “Baal’s Theme” (from a fine TV adaptation of the play by Brecht, whose “Alabama Song” he’d also covered), “Cat People” (a better version than the one on the album) and the wonderful, epic “Wild is the Wind”, reissued from “Station to Station”. These came in between two big hit collaborations, one of which we’ll be discussing here, but were all greatly underrated.

Seven year old Billy reaction – Absoletly mindblown, more because of the video than the song. The situations and images so concrete and defined (due to the videographic treatment of the image in part), the disparate parts seeming to flow together in a stream of consciousness that worked as a narrative in its own right. I could tell that it was very abstract, and yet very personal and lonely, too.

I’m glad that I was made aware of the absolute further reaches of what could be achieved by pop music at such a formative age.

Something that no-one’s picked up on yet is the effect of the spoken “Never done good things” refrains is a liturgical one.

Incidentally, as its been mentioned, does anybody have any particular memories of, or reflections about the 1982 Alan Clarke production of Baal?

I ask because its a chapter of my PhD thesis that I’m writing at the moment…