Ashes to Ashes

In 1969, a man in a tin can floated in a most peculiar way, and the world took him for a gentle symbol of wonder. Eleven years later, the same astronaut came back on the radio, and nobody could pretend the trip had been harmless. The cheerful, hypnotic tune that carries the news is part of the cruelty.

"Ashes to Ashes" is the song David Bowie used to bury the 1970s, and a good deal of himself along with them. It topped the UK chart, it arrived with one of the most imitated videos ever made, and it still sounds unlike anything else in his catalogue. Under the nursery-rhyme melody sits a confession.

A sequel nobody asked for

The song revives Major Tom, the astronaut from Bowie's 1969 breakthrough "Space Oddity." In that earlier song Tom drifts away from ground control, ambiguous and serene. Here, the people on the ground receive a message that changes how they remember him: the hero of the space age turns out to be an addict.^[1]

Bowie never hid that Tom was a stand-in. Commentators routinely read the astronaut as a semi-autobiographical figure, and the song arrives after a decade in which Bowie's own cocaine-fuelled excesses had nearly consumed him.^[1][5] The first person narrator speaks of a past self with a mix of embarrassment, relief and tenderness. Tom is both the character and the career that Bowie built around him.

Bowie described the song's subtext as the appeal of a nursery rhyme, and its story as one about corruption.^[2][3] In his account, Tom is sent up by a technological ambition with no real purpose behind it, and discovers that the whole enterprise that launched him was already decaying. Alone in space, he finds comfort only in a drug-like solace that the void itself supplies, and he longs to return to the safety of the womb.^[2][3]

Childhood as a trap

The nursery-rhyme quality is the song's central trick. Bowie said he had borrowed the feel of a children's song, and in a 2003 interview he traced part of the song's harmonic character to a children's tune whose chords he learned as a boy, calling the result childlike and melancholic.^[3] He also tied the idea to the darker tradition of old rhymes, many of which were violent, and which were passed to children without anyone asking what they meant.^[2]

That contrast does a lot of work. The verses move with a sing-song regularity, yet the content is of failure, shame and dependency. A playground chant and a confession of addiction share the same meter. The effect is of a mind trying to soothe itself with something simple while the facts refuse to stay simple.

It also tells us something about the way people talk about other people's ruin. Gossip has its own singsong. Bowie shows the world delivering its verdict on Tom in the voice of a schoolyard, cheerful and unembarrassed, while Tom himself is somewhere far overhead, unable to answer.

Putting the seventies away

Bowie said openly that the song was meant to close out the decade, a fitting epitaph for the 1970s.^[5] Those years had been his great transformation: Ziggy, the Thin White Duke, the Berlin period. Each persona was a way of avoiding being a single person. By 1980 he was ready to look at the wreckage.

He also described a recurring feeling of inadequacy running through the lyric.^[5] That admission matters. Many of his earlier songs treated alienation as glamorous, as an alien's superior view of Earth. This one treats it as an unpleasant, human, practical problem. The astronaut is not a visitor from the stars. He is a patient.

There is a defiant streak, too. Bowie said he wanted the bluntest word for a drug user played on BBC radio, which in the prim climate of the day he regarded as a small subversive act.^[2] A song that was both a sing-along and a taboo was exactly the sort of trap he enjoyed setting.

How it was built

The track began life under the working title "People Are Turning To Gold," and was recorded between February and April 1980.^[3] Bowie and Tony Visconti produced, with the early sessions held at the Power Station in New York and the vocals and overdubs completed at Visconti's studio in London.^[5]

The band was a mix of old collaborators and new faces. Carlos Alomar and Chuck Hammer played guitar, George Murray bass, Dennis Davis drums, and Roy Bittan of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band played piano.^[3] Hammer's layered guitar synthesiser textures gave the song its shimmering, slightly unreal orchestral wash, and Visconti processed a grand piano until it sounded like a different instrument altogether.^[5] Bowie demonstrated the drum pattern himself for Davis to learn.^[5]

The result is strange in the right way. The rhythm is stiff and a little mechanical, the bass is bouncy, the synthetic textures drift above like a signal from a faulty satellite. NPR placed the song within a pattern on the album of cutting-edge studio technique, harsh textures and deliberate minimalism, a sound that would shape the early 1980s.^[4]

The Pierrot in the video

If the song buried the old Bowie, the video gave the burial a costume. Directed by David Mallet, it shows Bowie as a Pierrot, an astronaut and an asylum patient, in a solarised palette of saturated colour.^[5] The sad clown, a figure from commedia dell'arte, suited the song perfectly: a performer in white, a face made up to hide the face, a person who has been laughed at for so long that the laughter has become his identity.

The coastal scenes were shot in May 1980 at Pett Level in East Sussex, and Bowie walks along the shore with four members of the London Blitz club scene, among them Steve Strange, as a bulldozer follows them.^[5][6] The cost has been mythologised over the years, with figures far in the hundreds of thousands of pounds repeated for decades. Mallet himself later put it at about 32,000 pounds in 1980 money, with a shoot of three days.^[6]

Bowie summed up the feeling of the video as a nostalgia for a future.^[5] That phrase captures the song's whole attitude to time. The future that was promised in 1969 has already come and gone, and what is left is an obituary for something that never quite arrived.

The video also had an enormous influence on the New Romantic movement, with its Blitz Kids and dressing-up aesthetic arriving on mainstream television at precisely the moment the style was ready for it.^[5]

A hit that was too strange to be a hit

Released as the lead single from Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), the song debuted at number four on the UK chart and then reached number one, becoming Bowie's second British chart topper.^[3][5] Reviews were mixed at first, with one publication calling it a curious choice for a single, yet later critics have placed it among his finest work, praising an unusual structure that refuses to behave like a standard pop song.^[5]

In the United States the single fared poorly.^[5] That was perhaps inevitable. The song's mournful, ironic Englishness, the sense of a national mood processing the end of a decade, did not export easily.

The album around it was a return to form after the experiments of the Berlin years, harder and more confrontational, with guitars that sounded like they were being strangled. Placed in the middle of those sharp edges, the single's smooth surface seems even more unsettling.

Other ways to listen

Some listeners hear the song primarily as a drug narrative and nothing more, a clear-eyed account of addiction, recovery and the guilt that follows. That reading is supported by Bowie's own comments, and it makes the song one of the more candid pieces of self-examination in popular music of the time.

Others hear a critique of the space age and the technological optimism that surrounded it. In that view Tom is not only Bowie but a whole generation promised a glittering future by institutions that did not know what to do with it. Bowie himself talked about the American technological dream and Tom's disillusionment with it.^[3]

A third reading is about fame. Some fans have argued that the song suggests an audience preferred its idol in a damaged state, and that the song is as much about the public's appetite for his decline as about the artist's habits.^[1] If that is right, the song is a refusal to keep performing his decline for the crowd.

None of these readings cancels the others. The song works as a story, a metaphor and a farewell all at once, and its refusal to settle on one meaning is part of why it lasts.

Why it still resonates

The song's real subject might be what it feels like to look back at a former self who was both thrilling and ruinous. Most of us have a version of Major Tom: the person we were during a period of excess or ambition or denial, who looked glamorous from outside and was in trouble within. We cannot disown him, and we cannot go back to being him.

The tune keeps insisting it is a children's song, and the grown-up listener hears what the children cannot. That tension, between the comfort of the melody and the pain of the material, is what lets the song pass for pop and linger as confession. Decades on, it has been covered by Tears for Fears, the Shins and Warpaint, and lent its name to a British television series.^[5]

Bowie closed the 1970s with a funeral, and made it something you could hum. The astronaut does not get a heroic return. He gets a kind of honesty, and for an artist who spent a decade hiding behind masks, that was the bravest thing he could offer.