One metatextual break-up record succeeds another: but here David Bowie is breaking up with himself, and pop is breaking up around him, its structures fragmenting and sickening as the track lurches on. The music is a patchwork – snips and echoes of riffs or phrases jabbing across each other, somehow resolving into a song. Bowie himself starts to sing unsustainably high, his vocal line tumbling down and melting on re-entry – “Do you remember a guy that’s been” sounds like “Duhyuh remember agatherspear…”. Where you can decipher them the words are paranoid cut-ups or just nonsense playground rhymes like the chorus – “funk to funky”?
Though actually something does smell bad round here – this isn’t spectral pop, it’s zombie pop, shambling and corpse-cold. In the most horrible sequence, Bowie sounds like he’s broken out of the song, like he’s confessing something true, even if that’s only paralysis – “Never done good things, I never done bad things, I never did anything out of the blue”. But behind him the backing vocalists are zombies too, zombies of himself, and when he ends his phrase with a soulful “Whoa-oh”, the zombie Bowie echoes it hollowly: the most basic gesture of rock meaning reduced to a lifeless parodic twitch.
So Major Tom thought he was starring in an Arthur C Clarke story and found himself in a Philip K Dick one by mistake, and the result is oddly magnificent. Why is Bowie doing this? To kill off the 1970s, like everyone else was trying to. And by that he meant his 70s, because Bowie’s pop was always strongest when it was just him in his hall of mirrors. “Ashes To Ashes” is as self-conscious as records get, of course, but still hits hard outside its solipsistic context – its portrait of a crack-up is abstract enough to mean something, something indistinct but grim and real. Helps that it’s studded with great lines and moments: “WE GOT A MESSAGE FOR THE ACTION MEN!”; “Sordid details following…”; and the creepy nursery rhyme coda, as the song tucks itself into foetal position and tries to shut the inner enemy out. One of those records that could have, maybe should have, brought the curtain down on a career.
Score: 9
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i had loved –and still love – bowie’s previous LP, the lodger, which i think is odd and mysterious and full of strange shadows and urgency; from the sleeve and title inwards i never got on with “scary monsters and super creeps”, which i now see amplifies all of bowie’s signatures, including the one i was least comfy facing, which is his distinct streak of earnest mimsy clumsiness (i think that i thought he’d finally stepped beyond it, and instead he dived back into the heart of it) — tom’s review makes a really good case for bowie’s flaws as the element he needs to get working, to be interesting (in lodger they’re masked rather than removed; in this and the LP, the lodger skin feels it’s been turned inside out, and placed in a room full of naked metallic blades and bitterly sharp surfaces); in the event, he stepped away from the cracks towards smoothly confident performance shtick, and notoriously became really quite uninteresting for more than a decade…
my sister and i had a running joke about the little old lady in the video — is it actually his mum, or an actress? having no idea either way*, we enjoyed being
outraged yet unsurprised that bowie would hire an actress to play his mum!
*to this idea: actually finding out would have spoiled the joke
“to this idea” = “to this day”
The first ever number one to quote Kafka?
Much as I like Winner Takes It All, surely Ashes To Ashes is on another level entirely in terms of musical and thematic imaginativeness and inventiveness. The real mark of its excellence is how all this jaggedness, its ambiguities and complexities nonetheless gel into a pop unity.
I remember the video clip too being acclaimed as groundbreaking, although it looks pretty dated now.
“Scary Monsters” was the alb that got me into Bowie – borrowed off a friend at school and listened to repeatedly while reading SWAMP THING (the rub mockney voice on the title track always makes me think “John Constantine” – tough luck StingXoR!). Going back to it recently something I like is how Bowie is keen to pull the rug out from under his own shock-horror tactics, doing “It’s No Game” as a ridiculous manga-metal meltdown and then doing it again as simpery acoustica. I think the second half of the record – w/the Verlaine cover, “Teenage Wildlife” – is less interesting, and almost a pointer towards the slick schtick of later Bowie (which we’ll get the chance to discuss on its own terms a bit).
I found Scary Monsters a bit of a letdown at the time, and I still don’t get much out of the second half, but I think the first four songs a really trememdous, he’s absolutely nailed a sound and a time.
#3 – possibly, but Winner makes me feel a lot more. This wasn’t the case when I was 14 and wanted to be an identity-shifting existentialist, I grant you!
I think the video is still brilliant now, actually more effective than the song in creating a mood of extreme creepiness.
Very hard to talk about this single without blathering on about the video. I don’t think I’ll ever forget seeing it for the first time on TOTP the week before it reached Number One. As a 10 year old child, it scared me witless! I seem to remember I had nightmares based around those sinister images of the bulldozer following Bowie and his Blitz kid pals and the Bowie-sinking-into-a-lake. Even watching today it sends a shiver down my spine.
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.
Bowie has always been a plastic Bolan
You say that like it’s a bad thing!
Having just watched the video again, yeah, I have to say it’s still pretty great and pretty creepy. There’s just that bit when he’s in front of the bulldozer with his religious-looking mates – that’s where it kind of topples over into Not The Nine O’Clock News parody territory. Otherwise it’s excellent.
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’.
One of the admirable things abt this record is that it’s Bowie rising to the challenge of becoming an idol for a newer generation of musicians – which is a pretty rare thing for an artist to do, let alone do well.
“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)
The video looks like they have turned up the colour option on the television.
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.
H – what’s the kafka quote?
‘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.
re. essential late Bowie – in the pub last Friday, Wichita Lineman put “Absolute Beginners” on the juker which was a pleasant reminder that when he put his mind to it he really COULD do ‘smooth’ well. That really IS the last hurrah from my point of view, though I know there are FT people who will rep strongly for “Little Wonder”.
there was a standing joke at nme — i think invented and deployed by danny baker when he wrote the gossip column — of bowie arriving in a room to join the conversation and saying (for example) “the stockholm monsters! yes, i love their work! sorry, who are we talking about again?”
i think what’s most amazing is that DB *carries off* the pierrot look — he should have gone for the brass ring and dressed up as a sad circus clown with a painted tear!
Danny Baker looks terrible as Pierrot surely.
Another key point in my musical development this, when I really worked out the disjuncture between music and people actually playing. Partially because the creepy video, having no performance in it made me then wonder how the noises were made. Whilst it isn’t even a vaguely electronic piece, I think I started to think tape records (my sister was tape recording the top 40 at this point) and layering different sounds. No idea why Bowie was the catalyst for this, but it helped.
As for the song, its not a favourite Bowie piece, but it does mark the start for me of the easy Bowie impression (ie he had fucked his voice with the druqs* and now only had an old man Tony Newley act to work on). I also link the song to death of my grandfather (which actually looking at the dates was about six months after), with its somewhat morbid
coda.
I am one of the people who reps long and hard of Little Wonder.
*Yes, yes, we knew for quite a while now that Major Tom was a junkie.
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.
#16 – I would put in a vote for “Buddha of Suburbia” or “Outside” as good late Bowie tracks. I don’t think any of the post-Tin Machine albums are bad albums (although I’m not that keen on …hours), even though none of them matches up to the run of albums from Hunky Dory to Scary Monsters. If 1.Outside was pruned down to 45 minutes that would probably be closest to vintage Bowie.
it’s not his mum it’s just some actress! (repeat until helpless with laughter)
Yeah, but it’s supposed be his Mum surely.
Steve Strange on the Ashes To Ashes video:
http://us.geocities.com/rebel_blue_rocker/ssashes.html
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!)
I hardly ever play CD 1 of my vaguely chronological ‘Best Of Bowie’ (except ‘Golden Years’ of course which is STILL AMAZING fie upon the h8tas). This is the dividing line (for me, I hasten to add) where Bowie stopped being a whiny goth strumming a folk guitar and started making Actual Pop Music that was terrifying and amazing. I could never come up with something like this in a million years. I mean, ‘Heroes’ was OK but it didn’t half go on a bit – ‘Ashes’ sounds like the world is ending and it is Bowie’s fault! The jumpy-awkward squelch totally adds to the sense of AARGH FVCK SORRY.
(OK I don’t much listen to CD2 past the first five tracks either)
Agree with most of what’s been said above (apart from “plastic Bolan” – what rot), this was a last hurrah in a way and apart from the lovely ‘Absolute Beginners’ single and maybe ‘China Girl’ he hasn’t done much I’ve really loved (and I was a HUGE fan). Funny, like ‘Scary Monsters’ I don’t like the second side of ‘Low’ much either but it’s my favourite Bowie album.
When I first heard this I found it too bitty and patchwork-quilt like and thought it would be another minor-ish hit for him (RCA thought he was done for commercially too after the Berlin albums and he signed for EMI after this, bet they were kicking themselves when it hit the top), but it slowly worked it’s way into my earhole. Though I wonder how much of it’s success had to do with the video, it entered the charts at a lowly #22 and suddenly shot up to #2 the next week.
I think Bowie himself said it was his “goodbye Seventies” record.
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!
Lee, it entered at Number 4 – I’m pretty sure that he never charted higher.
It was his highest new entry, as a solo artist, anyway. (Down, bunny, Down!!)
That’s what it shows at EveryHit, but thinking about it now it doesn’t seem right. Those stamps did help early sales as I know from working a record shop at the time.
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.
#30 – it hasn’t been mentioned cos the bunny won’t allow it!! Hold yr horses till 1983!
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.
does anyone know the circumstances behind the making of the Scary Monsters album? i’ve always liked to imagine bowie wrote all the lyrics in a day, recorded them the next day, and then recuperated for a few years. the album carries a definite feeling that he’s pouring out the remaining dregs of his creativity (not to suggest the album is bad, in fact it’s my favorite of his), whether it all makes sense together or not. in this regard i’ve always thought of it as bowie’s “blonde on blonde”, ie an artist moving too fast for his own good, captured brilliantly on the edge of a breakdown, with the breakdown and subsequent disappearence following shortly thereafter.
anyway, great song (especially the part about the “little green wheels”).
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
I’ve never fully engaged with “Ashes To Ashes”, and I’m not sure that I can altogether pinpoint why. I think that in some ways, I saw Scary Monsters as something of a backslide into the mainstream middle ground, and an attempt (and a very successful one at that) by Bowie to reclaim his position at the centre of everything (cf. the 1978 ad slogan: “There’s the old wave, there’s the new wave, and there’s David Bowie”). “Ashes To Ashes” was clearly self-referential, but not in a way that pricked my curiosity. I’ve never really known what it was about, and I’ve never been minded much to investigate (until now, that is).
But hell, the strategy worked. Scary Monsters was a staple of everyone’s record collections when I arrived at University in the autumn – an all-round consensus choice – and “Fashion” was played so often at first term discos (along with “Baggy Trousers” and “Enola Gay”) that I grew thoroughly sick of it.
That said, “Up The Hill Backwards” is one of my absolute favourite Bowie songs. “Vacuum created by the arrival of freedom, and the possibilities it seems to offer. It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it.” God, but I related!
“Up The Hill Backwards” – a conscious nod to “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in the intro, or just coincidence?
1980 is a year I understand (from the UK charts pov) either quite well or not at all. So it took me a while to catch up with a lot of songs/albums, Scary Monsters included. Three other albums that came out in the summer/fall of note: The Affectionate Punch by Associates, Empires And Dance by Simple Minds and, most acutely, Remain In Light by Talking Heads. As good as “Ashes To Ashes” is, “Once In A Lifetime” does a lot more for me…
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.
Didn’t ever really, really learn to love Bowie. Although in retrospect, and that still means via a greatest hits collection (I believe there’s been a few..) this is rather good.
Even at the time I thought this was a tad bandwagon jumping (and this from one who was an admitted Abba fan) at a time whe other greater records were being released, as per 37 above.
I always felt you were either a Bowie or a Roxy person, and I was firmly in the latter camp, both in terms of legacy and in terms of the later, more poppy output. Dance Away still means much much more.
I did attempt to love Bowie around this time, not as a result of this or the subsequent hits (which again I like in a greatest hots sense) because of the Baal ep and the original Catpeople single. But I was just being pretentious. Hey ho
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’
Now you’te talking! Great track and great video and I remember it all so clearly as a 5 yr old. It didn’t scare me at all. Thought it was wonderful. Bowie is a firm favourite with me today and I feel he’s not a fraud or plasitc Bolan like someone said earlier. Hes great and this for me is one of the best number ones of 1980.
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.
..since I don’t think anyone has mentioned it – it’s a superior sleeve design – possibly the best since ‘Hit me with your rhythm stick’
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.
My adult response is like a deeper, and more informed version of my boyhood one: Awe and fear. Its so full of hooks and details – echoes, shadows and refractions. I don’t think that we’ve had a song as quotable as this on Popular since God Save The Queen, in that every line comes up in my mind unbidden at various times.
Perhaps what is most impressive about it is that it is a song about the inner self, an honest documenatation of a fracturing and dislocated mind, yet it can resonate so completly with the listener.
It also works especially well as a sequel. It sounds amazing if you have no knowledge of Space Oddity, but if you do it gives it an automatic depth and context that is very powerful. Major Tom might have been drifting out into helpless isolation (especially accentuated in the 1979 version with its heartstopping ten seconds of silence) but at least he knew who he was, and there’s a valient element to that song. By 1980 he’s lost his mind, and the only hope lies in the unrealisable wish to get back home again.
Something that no-one’s picked up on yet is the effect of the spoken “Never done good things” refrains is a liturgical one.
Those post-1983 great David Bowie singles in full;
Loving The Alien (bombastic arrangement notwithstanding)
Absolute Beginners
Underground
There are other things which are quite pleasant, but these are the only three that have much of an emotional effect on me.
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…