DAVID BOWIE – "Space Oddity"

If you’d given this 10 I wouldn’t have complained. But as a 1975 number one, then 8 seems about right. Bowie had moved a hell of a long way since this track exploded into our consciences in 1969. We’d had Ziggy Stardust since then, not to mention Aladdin Sane which, for what it’s worth, is my personal favourite amongst many fine, original and groundbreaking albums.

In 1969 it caught the zeitgeist of a time grown tired of the hippy dream but full of the drama of moon landings. A year later it seemed to express the full horror we felt as we all held our breath for the Apollo 13 crew. On either of those occasions, had it made number one, I would have thought something so totally unlike anything heard before would be a shoo-in for the top mark.

But it didn’t get to number one on either of those occasions. And yet it did in the autumn of 1975, when the whole moon bubble had burst and we were all facing a new period of belt-tightening austerity. I don’t understand why – was there a tie-in somewhere that I wasn’t aware of? Or maybe a song about hubris is just the point.

Anyway, a splendid track at any time and one I’m always happy to hear. It’s a little thriller in a five-minute song, so just the thing for a crime writer like me.

From yet another work in progress…

Earlier in 1975 Bowie stopped a song two thirds of the way through to ask what wasn’t quite a rhetorical question: “Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?” I wondered if he wasn’t looking desperately through his back catalogue. But then there’s so little evidence of a living, breathing David Jones in the work of David Bowie that any expression of explicit emotion is bound to stand out with unusual clarity.

I remain deeply sceptical about and suspicious of Bowie and I have to say that his work, by and large, leaves me cold and impatient. So many masks, so much jumping from one stepping stone to another, all the better to avoid any genuine or useful self-revelation; and the response would be that there is no response, since calling him a charlatan, a fake, an ambulance chaser, a pop star about pop stars rather than the thing itself would most likely draw from him the warmest and snakiest of slow smiles. And yet the most recent edition of Guinness (2006) says he is the tenth most successful of all UK chart acts over the last fifty-five years; could so many have really been taken in, or is there something very fundamental that I am missing?

Like many similar fly-by-nights of that period, his sixties work represents a rather frantic series of hops from one keyhole to another – Mod lite, sub-Ray Davies social commentary, sub-Newley childish novelty, sub-Donovan tremulous acoustic balladry, miming (the incipient self-as-artwork) – and nowhere do we discern a Bowie of marked individual character. Space Oddity, the album (1969), is typical end-of-dream where-are-we-all-going-now dreamy (or fuzzy) musing – though “Letter To Hermione” is an early example of the rare spectacle of Bowie singing with candour and honesty. The Man Who Sold The World (1970) was unremarkable, muddy art-metal. Hunky Dory (1971), his best early record, shows some welcome influx of imagination in arrangements and presentation although his lyrics were as bad as ever; “Life On Mars?” really should have stayed as the kind of earnest poem that every fifteen-year-old schoolboy writes after one read of The Waste Land and gets published on page 23 of the school magazine (do I speak from personal experience? What do you think?) and, as Mott’s “All The Young Dudes” proved, the sub-sub-Dylan lyrical morass needed someone with the benevolent force of an Ian Hunter to make it mean…something, or anything.

Then came Ziggy. I have no useful response to the thousands of impressionably-aged adolescents of future importance who saw that performance of “Starman” on TOTP, nor to the 176 weeks which The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust (1972) has thus far managed to rack up on the album chart over four different decades. I can only counter their perspectives with mine; that Ziggy Stardust seemed no more or less profound a “character change” than Gary Glitter, that the album was underproduced, underpowered, standard issue smelly 1972 rock resembling a well meaning school musical with artful (or artless) juxtapositions of pop stardom and imminent apocalypse – and that Bowie seemed to anticipate the latter with uncommon relish – and that as rock it barely matches the best of Bolan’s pop. And bisexuality or not (and inevitably it turned out to be “not”), I never responded to Bowie as a spectacle as I would undoubtedly had responded to Bolan had I been a few years older; Bowie is a calculating rationalist who thinks before he performs, whereas the Bolan of ’71-2 is a sprite, a force who performs before he thinks.

Nonetheless, Ziggy touched, turned and twisted everyone else, and Aladdin Sane (1973) was essentially a more decorous upgrading; again showing some invention, if no more profundity, and even if that invention were limited to Mike Garson pressing his Cecil Taylor button at key moments. Diamond Dogs (1974) is hammy but actually works far better in Bowie’s unfolding context; he is practically slavering over the end of everything as frantically as he protests against it and it’s a terrific comic book of a pop record. Similarly, David Live (1974), two albums of coked-out Philly numbness, is very effective since it sets the repertoire into the cold, neon blue tube which seemed to be Bowie’s natural home; his absence of emotion is actively affecting.

All of which makes Young Americans (1975) a vaguely unsettling halfway house. Blue and green eyed machine soul, and the Bowie record with the most delayed after-effects; its influence took a full decade to seep through into British pop, as the Paul Youngs, Marti Pellows and Matt Gosses of their world proceeded to bleat “soulfully” over mechanical (but uninterestingly so) backdrops in a simulacrum of emotion. But none of those pretenders’ work approached the genuine dread of something like “Fascination” where again Bowie seems to exult at the prospect of the machine swallowing him whole; and nor did Young Americans seem to resolve the increasingly pressing question of where the real Bowie was to be located. Like the Beatles he was skilled at isolating the key elements of passing trends and utilising them for his own ends, but where the Beatles remain clearly visible, no matter how far out they travelled, the Bowie pinpointing is more troublesome.

He still seemed to be driving into a dead end (and typically the dead end turned out to be the most interesting part) so the fortuitous reissue of “Space Oddity” may have served as a safety brake. When the single first appeared as 1969 turned into autumn many considered it merely another novelty hit, a moon landing cash-in, Bowie permed holistically over his acoustic while the imminent seventies bombs of Stylophone, Mellotron and guitar rush around him like impatient asteroids. Was this really heralded as the beginning of a long and planet-changing career at the time? To me it fits in snugly with the general sense of foggy apocalyptic dread which characterised most of 1969’s key hits, space travel as barely concealed metaphor for drug oblivion (as Bowie would himself admit – or does he? – on its sequel); where was the real way out?

With the revised video, the song unexpectedly became a US Top 20 hit in 1973; but by 1975, RCA were concerned about maximising the profitability of their back catalogue. In that year alone they leased the rights for three chart-topping 40 Greatest Hits double compilations to TV-advertised companies; Elvis and Jim Reeves to Arcade, and Perry Como to K-Tel – and all made number one in the album chart (though the Elvis package did not top the chart until September 1977, in the wake of his death). In addition they had a running “Maximillion” series of three-track maxi-singles which had provided unexpected big hits for the likes of Presley, Reeves and Neil Sedaka (and, imminently, for Glenn Miller). The “Space Oddity” reissue was part of this series and in some lists appeared as a triple A-side, the other two tracks being “Changes” and “Velvet Goldmine.” Still, it was “Space Oddity” which got the airplay and pushed the single to number one; at the time, the gap of just over six years was the longest between any single’s initial appearance in the chart and its eventual progress to number one.

It seemed as though even the future was now part of the past, and it’s little wonder that punk would have happened against this kind of backdrop. So the revived “Space Oddity” I think endures as one of two important delayed last stands against what the “sixties” represented in terms of hope and expansion and what the “seventies” were proving in terms of businesslike calculation and a certain aridity. The record remains admirable in that one can admire what Gus Dudgeon, Rick Wakeman et al.brought to it – but still I see it as little more than Grocer Jack in a different if equally suffocating kind of tin can.

And then Major Tom fell to earth, and the really interesting stuff began.

I’ve been watching Cracked Actor on the old Sky+ (BBC4 screened it the other week) and I’m finding Bowie’s translucent frame almost painful. Tremendous stuff, though.

“Space Oddity” is of course great, but I find it harder to love ‘concept’ singles. It’s one way of taking a qualitative approach to Dave’s masterful catalogue, I s’pose.

TOTP Context watch: The famous Starman performance was from the edition transmitted the 6th of July 1972 – The clip survives, but the whole show doesn’t. Also in the studio that week were The Sweet, Lulu and Gary Glitter. The host was Tony Blackburn.

Incidentally, of course, the song alludes to one of my absolute favourite films. (Visions of Gary Lockwood cannoning into space, desperately grappling with his breathing apparatus in deafening silence.) Some call it tedious, to which I reply “only those without eyes to see”.

As someone who was a late Bowie convert (I only really first listened to him in the late 1990s), I find the popularity of ‘Space Oddity’ somewhat surprising, in that I find it one of the weaker singles in his canon of work. But then simultaneously, it makes perfect sense that it would be so popular, in that it is so simple in its arrangement. And it tells a story… Joe Public always likes a song that tells a story.

That said, personally, I’d rather listen to ‘Rebel Rebel’, ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Drive in Saturday’, ‘Rock N Roll Suicide’ etc and I normally find myself skipping when the CD gets to ‘Space Oddity’.

What did Wakeman play on this? I assume it’s the mellotron part, but I’ve read conflicting accounts.

My favourite element is the brass arrangement, actually. (I wonder if that’s Herbie Flowers doing the garish tuba(?) “fart” just before the last verse?) It brings an old fashioned feel to the otherwise modernist, space-age sound of the track.

My worry with Bowie, conversely, is that he gets the moves too right. If only he could reveal a bit more of the endearing/not-quite-getting-it-right stuff he would be a rock Woody Allen (Sleeper anyone?) but then maybe not.

Bearing in mind that Bowie’s previous five singles had peaked at 22, 21, 10, 18 and 17, perhaps RCA were also keen to squeeze another big hit out of him, by any means necessary?

This was only the second Bowie single that I went out and bought (the first being, ha ha ha, hee hee hee, “The Laughing Gnome”, to which I plead being an 11 year old Spike Milligan fan). I’m entirely sure why I bought it in preference to his earlier hits, but I suspect that the “added value” of the 3-track single played its part (and “Velvet Goldmine” was previously unissued, I think). Then again, it was a new academic year at Big School, and we now had control of the record player in the junior common room, so there was also probably more of a practical point to the purchase.

I was too young to have heard “Space Oddity” the first time round (as I doubt it had picked up much airplay on the shows that my parents listened to), and I think that many younger people were getting their first exposure to it, maybe having read about its existence in biog features, and hence taking an interest in tracking down the point at which it all began (at least in terms of chart success). So there was a sort of “classic track” factor at work.

Yes, it told a story – and I liked stories, any possible drug allegories whizzing straight over my head, just as they did with my beloved Gong (I thought they were just singing about funny little pixies with china pots for heads, drinking cups of tea). There was a nicely filmic quality, and I liked the almost proggy episodic touches, and as a keen Stylophone player myself I appreciated the validation. (We’re only a month away from my self-recorded prog concept album, in which the Stylophone featured heavily, but the less said about that particular pubescent indulgence the better.)

As for my favourite line, it was a deliberately misconstrued one: “Plan-It Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.” Do you see? Do you see?

As to Bowie’s appeal in general: the cultish fervour which surrounded him put me right off, as if there was a club which you had to join – or at least an advanced Appreciation Society, with entrance examinations. The only albums that I bought on vinyl were Diamond Dogs and Low, and the former more out of curiosity than anything else. (Enjoyed it, though.)Low remains the only album of his that I love, with the latterly discovered Hunky Dory running second. Ziggy left me cold, save for the inevitable Starman-on-TOTP moment, which scared me more than anything else. (At the tender age of 10, I thought he looked like a menacing, f**ed-up druggie from another planet, and the arm-round-Ronson bit evoked not even the faintest stirrings of recognition.) So, yeah, I get the whole Toweringly Influential Figure bit, but mostly on an abstracted level. He showed people what was possible, I suppose.

I also thought the Band’s “Chest Fever” and Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” were Procul Harem! Quite excellent too. Procul Harem at its best. I doubt that I’d ever heard any actual Procul Harem song other than “Whiter Shade Of Pale.” In fact, I don’t know if I have to this day. But in retrospect it’s clear that Procul Harem were a plant-based intelligent life form that would infiltrate other performers à la The Thing and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

In any event, to ruin “Space Oddity” for you, I need to mention that, back when I was collecting misheard lyrics in Why Music Sucks, Karla Mallette informed us that at age fourteen she’d thought Ground Control was telling Major Tom that “It’s time to read the caption if you dare.”

old pedant writes: PROCOL HARUM

“procul harem” would mean “near the seraglio”
(in some as-yet ill-established ottoman-latin mash-up)

Well, if I don’t know what they sound like, why should I know what they’re spelled like? (Though in my proofing days I knew how to spell trichloroethene and trichloroethylene – which I believe are the same thing – and I don’t know how it/they sound either.)

oops yes procul means “far from” not “near to” (but it is procul not procol, i just looked it up to confirm in my v.battered copy of cassell’s compact lat-eng etc): so does it take the dative then?

*goes and hunts for kennedy’s latin primer*

nope “ablative of separation”

hence i wd go for: “quisdam procul” (with a long i); hic haec hoc is not specific enough, and the word order is more playful and sonorous (imo)

(actually i bet you can’t fvck w.word order w.an adverb)

Isn’t harum vocative, though?
“Horum harum horum, his his his.”

Oops, it’s genitive – my bad.

I love the Internet:
http://www.procolharum.com/young_cat-claude1.htm
http://www.procolharum.com/doglatin.htm

The first David Bowie tune I ever heard, circa 1999 when I began conducting my first earnest historical investigations into popular music with the help of profoundly ridiculous end-of-century “100 Best Rock Songs of the 20th Century” lists and (nostalgia alert) Napster. (Am I really that young? Let’s say I simply got a late start. Incidentally, this is probably why I resent the displacement of earlier pop by rock-oriented pop [q.v. last thread] — it’s all equally-dead history to me, not part of any shared experience until 1990 or so.)

At any rate, I loved “Space Oddity” from the moment I heard it; to this day, my primary memory of it is the burbling key-changing rushes that precede the instrumental breaks, a sound which is so unusual in pop that I can never think ill of the song, though I’ve since come to love much more about Bowie.

And finding things to love “about Bowie” feels right; like Marcello, I find it hard to locate an actual Bowie to love (though I don’t think I resent it so much); most of what I love is entirely sonic and textural, which would of course be down to his producers, up through the early 80s and then I lose interest fairly sharply in favor of those many who built their careers on imitating specific elements of Bowie (and Ferry) (and Bolan).

I agree that “quisdam procul” is both technically and aesthetically far more apt and specific.

TOP SIXTIES BANDS WHOSE NAMES DERIVE FROM LATIN
1. Status Quo
2. Quisdam Procul
3. Erm…

4: tyrannosaurus rex