DAVID BOWIE – “Space Oddity”
First of all, I was a daydreamy type of boy, and this song should really get a mark or so docked in petty revenge for the several teachers who used “Ground control to Major Tom!” type gags to get my classroom attention. If this seems unfair, just be glad the Dallas theme tune didn’t get to #1.
At the time, I don’t think I’d ever even heard “Space Oddity”. My first memory of it was on a school trip to Wales, where I initially thought “Oh so THIS is what all that was about”, and then I thought, “How mean that Major Tom dies!”. I became a huge Bowie fan a couple of years later but still skipped “Space Oddity” more often than not. So my appreciation of it has always been tinted a little – well, yes, obviously this is an excellent record but…. but…. and the buts never resolve into anything you could defend, but they don’t help you love the song either.
It was his first hit, and his first number one, but of course with a six-year gap between them, filled half with culty failure, half with pop-changing success, which shifts the emphases in “Space Oddity”. Imagine if he’d given up pop in 1970 or 1971, gone back to acting or art: “Space Oddity” would be a novelty hit, crap pun and all; a darker, trippier counterpoint to Zager and Evans, a useful earner for an earthbound David Jones, whenever moonshot anniversaries came round.
Instead it’s the start of something - pointing at themes of identity disconnect, science fiction, insanity and ambiguity that Bowie would built a career aroumd. It owes more than a winking title to Kubrick – a space mission goes disasterously wrong, and you feel Major Tom’s experiencing some kind of cosmic revelation. (Bowie’s mid-70s records are more firmly aligned to the SF New Wave – persona shifts, cracked futures, the alien in the head).
And it’s also the end of something – the reissue’s video (recorded in 1973) sees a worn, drawn Bowie at the fag-end of his Ziggy period singing the song. In 1975 he’d taken the leap out of SF and into “plastic soul” – more identity play, but less attractive to singles buyers: from a marketing perspective, “Space Oddity” is a farewell to the space-glam superstar Bowie.
None of which explains why the song’s endured so well. For that you have to look at the idea-laden arrangement (stylophones, countdowns), the originality of the concept (is this pop’s only existentialist sci-fi death ballad?), the hooks of course, and the record’s one real insight: “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do” – the idea that near-space exploration is not a frontier but instead the limit of human endeavour, revealing nothing so much as impotence. Thought-provoking stuff: if only he’d been called Major Bob.
8
after ginger tom is spayed: ‘and i’m walking in a most peculiar way’ ISTR
I’ve heard that Pink Floyd supplied music for the Beeb’s Moon Landing coverage live in the studio-anyone recall this?
If you can remember it, you weren’t really there, man…
I’d heard Pink Floyd were actually on the moon playing when Neil Armstrong stepped out of his capsule.
In his book about Pink Floyd, Nick Mason says that a Floyd track was used to soundtrack the BBC’s moon landing footage but doesn’t say which one. At a semi-logical guess I would venture “Saucerful Of Secrets.”
re: #56
Dan Clowes=David Byrne
Last word on the Bowie/Who connection- Bowie being rumoured to be playing Davros in the new series! Not true apparently, sadly…
Wasn’t this single promoted with a film made in the sixties?
A proto video in a white studio that you’ll all have seen!
There was one he did round about ’68 with hornrims and possibly an orange on a table but that was an acoustic version (possibly a demo) of the tune.
True, and I’m sure playing that on TOTP sent this one to the top.
I don’t remember seeing it on TOTP and have the horrible feeling that Pan’s People did an interpretative routine.
I tried searching the TOTP archive but the page is off.
This sounds like a call for the man with the reference book!
9 October 1969: Performance recorded separately at Lime Grove with The Ladybirds (repeated 16th October, does not survive)
16 October 1975: Promo film (also 30th October, 6 November, 13 November).
23 December 1975: Interpreted by Pan’s People in the first of two Christmas specials that year, which was presented by Dave Lee Travis & Jimmy Saville. Also in the studio were Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel and the Bay City Rollers, plus a lot of repeated footage. No tape survives.
I bet the BBC have been very careful to preserve Barbara Woodhouse’s How To Train Your Dog To Pee On Your Neighbour series from start to finish.
What on Earth were the Ladybirds given to do apart from, I’d guess, the “Planet Earth is blue” harmonies and maybe the countdown?
I can remember John Peel speaking of his absolute fury at going to the archives to try to find the (missing) first Captain Beefheart session, but discovering that every edition of ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ had been preserved.
General rule of thumb with the BBC Television Archive: Systematic recording and keeping of television programmes started in late 1977.
It was the punk revolution wot dunnit!
But a fortnight too late to save Television’s Top Of The Pops appearance! I wish I’d seen that.
I must have seen it! But I don’t remember it! Sobs.
I first heard Bowie in 1973 with the Jean Genie, some of my neighbours worshipped him and the promo film for Space Oddity on TOTP when it was number one appeared to have been made in 1969 but did Bowie himself know it was number one?
If we’re talking 1975, it may be questionable whether Bowie himself knew what day it was.
The very excellent Pushing Ahead Of The Dame blog has reached this song:
http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/space-oddity/
“…No tape survives.”
It does on Youtube! Here’s that Pan’s People routine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQxMcJzjLNc
It’s…um…artistic? Proto-robot dancing, then they’re rockets, then some kind of slow motion thing where they embody the mysteries of space. I wasn’t around at the time, but I *love* that stuff like this existed. :D
Oh wow! Looks like it comes from the German ZDF archives. For a song that I cannot imagine dancing to – apart from perhaps smooching with a fellow Bowie fan – they do a grand job of interpreting it.
The interpretative dance completely falls apart at the end but the first two mins are not bad at all.
Pan’s People and Legs Inc (and Hot Gossip too I suppose) are so utterly utterly UK pop for me that I pretty much love ‘em. I believe that the current BBC plan is to start playing whole archived episodes of TOTP again, so they’ll be back possibly to wear out their welcome quite soon, who knows?
Bowie makes his Then Play Long debut.
(N.B.: I should point out that I have deliberately not been reading Pushing Ahead Of The Dame lest it influence my thoughts on Bowie too much. So any observations made in both blogs are entirely coincidental, though our conclusions may be completely different.)
Another blatant plug for my thoughts on a pre-fame Bowie b-side, just as dark if not as cosmic as SO:
http://besidethebside.blogspot.com
David Bowie says yes to futuristic musical based on his hits
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/27/david-bowie-musical-heroes
and here’s a sneak preview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ZtpYfNq74
Not so fast!
http://www.nme.com/news/david-bowie/60647
The musical as described in the Graun sounds right up there w/Glass Spider.