DAVID BOWIE

IN THIS EXTRACT FROM HIS BOOK SILHOUETTES AND SHADOWS: THE SECRET HISTORY OF DAVID BOWIE’S SCARY MONSTERS (AND SUPER CREEPS), ADAM STEINER TAKES A DEEP DIVE INTO THE ICONIC SINGER-SONGWRITER’S SEMINAL 1980 SINGLE

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A series of watery notes, the breath of tides, and grinding guitar chords, like waking up within a dream, a high-fluted voice calls out to us across the waves, at once far away and very close, speaking into the ear: “Do you remember...”

On first listen, Ashes To Ashes is a song born of nonsense; deliberately obfuscating, it pushes the listener away, evoking a gloomy neon world out of place and time. The ethereal pingponging bounce of the wavy piano and seasick organ dance above the heavier instruments, cut through with jagged guitar chords scything down the fretboard like a slap in the face, punctuated by stabs of bass. The song soon reveals its confidence in Bowie’s great strides of yearning falsetto, which pitch backward and forward around a deadpan monotone, where Bowie remains uniquely English but manages to make himself sound alien within his native tongue.

The great strength of Ashes To Ashes lies in the depth of its emotional address masquerading as simplicity; the more we hear, the more layers are revealed before the song is fully wound up at just over four minutes. Except for the long instrumental outro, which was cut from the single edit, like all the greatest pop music the song seems to be over almost as quickly as it began. Bowie uses the track as a vehicle to reach far back into childhood concerns that still influence adult life, the present still tinged with ghostly nostalgia.

Ashes To Ashes offers us a reunion with Major Tom, at first not by name but as the guy “in such an early song.” The conscious nod to Space Oddity brings a host of Bowie’s demons home to roost. With Ashes To Ashes the earnest wondering of Bowie’s younger self would finally be resolved.

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David Bowie in Patmos Greece, August 1980

Major Tom was still an evocative figure in the collective memory of fans and casual listeners alike. Space Oddity marked Bowie’s first brush with fame, a bright and brief moment, burning with possibility; in an alternative reality, he might have disappeared as a one-hit wonder. Looking back from 1980, Bowie briefly resurrected Major Tom, Lazaruslike, only to cast him down again. In the intervening years, Tom had stayed more or less him – floating about with Earth still just out of reach – his failed quest now becomes the song of a drunken boat at odds with the sea. Tom’s separation from the human race and his native planet heightened Bowie’s position of being an alien accidentally born on the wrong planet, a native extraterrestrial.