DAVID BOWIE – “Ashes To Ashes”
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.
9
(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…
re 50 I remember watching it on a crappy b&w set out of solidarity with db. I don’t recall being too overwhelmed by it – just thinking – there’s bowie in a false beard
..so, provoked by my lack of clear memories I dug this up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnyXoFlyB1Q&feature=related
It looks hamstrung by being shot on video in a studio.
I seem to remember a review saying that Bowies performance made every one else seem like an actor
i remember thinking baal was terrible — bowie has really never been much of an actor and it’s not exactly the kind of stuff brecht did best either (it’s his first full-length play, and iirc it’s very expressionist and angsty)
I remember my mum who worked at the BBC at the time asking a bloke she knew who worked on the production to get a signed photo of Mr. Bowie for me (“To Lee. Many, many thanks!” – thanks for what I’m not sure, but I was thrilled*).
A photo I’ve since lost, bah.
*But I must admit not as thrilled as the autograph she got from Clare Grogan for me: “To Lee, from your true love Clare. xxx” – I still have that.
Re #53: Its also the wrong version of Baal, not the revised one, which makes a bit more narrative sense.
Re #52: The great point in its favour is in its being shot on videotape in a studio, I’d argue. Alan Clarke does this really odd thing of reversing what were usually considered to be the specific qualities of ‘as live’ studio TV drama (its quality of close-up intimacy, the ability to mix between cameras while maintaining continuity of performance*), through shooting the thing in long-shots in extroadinarily large sets, which used the full extent of the Television Centre space. So we get to see Baal’s isolation and manipulation in the context of how he fits into, and works the occupants of, a full room. The videotape gives the image a definition and sharpness that wouldn’t be the same on film, in the same way that the video of Ashes to Ashes wouldn’t be the same on film.
The production had the misfortune to be scheduled against another high-profile stage adaptation on ITV, John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father (Thames, 1982), starring Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates. The aesthetic of that production is almost a parallel opposite of Baal, being shot on location on film, telling a linear story through the familiar convention of voice-over, and being reliant upon the star personas and charm of the leads to create a sense of empathy on the part of the viewer. Critics made unfavourable comparisons between the two productions, most emphatically Hilary Kingsley in the Daily Mirror;
“It seems daft to say we had a contest between Lord Olivier, our greatest living actor, and David Bowie, professional weirdo, rock idol and actor on TV last night. (…) Baal was a total flop. I cannot believe even the most besotted of David Bowie’s fans could have tolerated more than a few moments of it. The hero, a tramp-poet haunting German society in 1912, was rotten in every sense – a drunk, a slob, a know-all, a seducer, a murderer, who apparently decomposed before our eyes. That the BBC could spend a small fortune on this repulsive and rightly ignored tableau is a cause for top level concern (3rd of March 1982)
*Unlike film, which is usually pieced together, mosaic-like in the cutting room, or theatre, where you get continuity of performance without close-up scruitiny of gestures and expressions.
“9″ ??? To each his own, I guess. But I say this sucks, big big BIG time. The chorus is the stupidest EVER, the song is instantly forgettable, Bowie was way past mattering. I don’t care what he was going through at the time, save it for the book. I’ve always been of the opinion that he was innovative & had good taste & all that, but his post-glam & post-trilogy records are horrible. And don’t bother to bring up “Black Tie” or any of that other stuff. It ain’t “Queen Bitch”, and THAT’s what gets a 9.
I love the Kenny Everett Show performance of “Space Oddity” linked up above. But only because, in the first verse, his expression is identical to mine when I first came off antidepressants.
“I never did anything out of the blue” is the touchstone here, surely (the irony being that writing this line is the only thing he ever did out of the blue). It’s a wonderful record, and while it’s just as “contrived” as anything he ever did (not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, obv.), there’s a sense – more than in the Berlin albums – that personal issues have forced his hand. Rather than Let Out The Pain And Confusion, he’s used his last reserves of concentration to fashion something beautiful into which that pain and confusion can fit.
Also, I don’t think there’s a better example than Bowie of how, to be a ROCK’N'ROLL HERO, you need talent, you need intelligence, and you need to be a bit of an idiot. If he hadn’t had that holy stupidity, that lack of self-awareness when it mattered, his work would have been pure and sterile. That’s why I can embrace his ridiculous lyrics, his awkwardness, his occasional clottishness. It’s part of his game, take that away and he wouldn’t be the same player, etc etc.
Do I get a bonus point for noticing that the first line is a nick off “Peggy Sue got Married” ?
Ooh, good spot Mark. Bowie is full of these unexpected allusions. A while back I had to write a series of 100 word song intros for a magazine list-feature on The Dame and included the lovely fact that he wrote “Kooks” as a Neil Young pastiche – but it was edited out because, I presume, no one at the mag believed me!
NMEWatch. 2nd August 1980. Andy Gill. Enormously long review by Andy Gill. Abridged version;
“Have you ever noticed how the line of Bowie’s jaw on the cover of ‘Heroes’ is apparently retouched to accentuate the thinness of his face? [expounds upon idea of Bowie's attempts to present himself as being inherently faked, related to confessional mode of 'Ashes to Ashes']… “Musically, it’ll gladden the hearts of those radio producers and jocks who broke out in a cold sweat with ‘Alabama Song’. Innocuous and okay in its own way, but the point is this: All the indications are that this is another David Bowie song about David Bowie”… “To the often-asked question “Have we ever seen the real David Bowie/” the only sensible response can be “Who gives a toss?”. And the only sensible response to that ought to be “David Bowie”.”
Gill awarded single of the week to ‘Independence Day’ by The Comsat Angels. Also reviewed;
Tuxedomoon – Scream With A View
The The – Controversial Subject
Secret Affair – Sound of Confusion
The Shadows – Equinoxe Part V
re 42: Here’s a link to that Bowie interview from 1980 – it goes on a bit, mind.
http://mywebsite.bigpond.com/roger.griffin/goldenyears/8009NME.html
It probably says something about the quality of the show that it took me until now to remember that this song and the pierrot motif were rather arbitrarily referenced in the Life on Mars sequel.
how did you know he was wearing a nappy?
it’s a good interview — i never met angus sadly, he was a good writer and a great editor, but he’d moved on to more august things by then
re 62 There’s a version of the ‘nappy’ picture here:
http://www.corbijn.co.uk/images/photo_blackth_bowie.jpg
I’d flirted with Bowie (in a musical sense) and always held a grudge that he cancelled his Portsmouth Guildhall gig ( I had front row seats) some years earlier so he could ‘quit’ live performing at the more public Hammersmith Odeon. When of my friends was a manic depressive and was obsessed with Low which also put me off a bit but this was such a return to form, like he remembered that he could make really good pop records. I heard it for the first time the week before I moved to the Channel Islands and bought it my first Saturday there and it was two weeks before my stereo got shipped!
The Bowie blog gets around to this song here: http://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/ashes-to-ashes/