![]() ![]() “You have someone who knows what it’s like to be estranged and untethered from the Earth, and singing it and broadcasting it gives it a poignancy you can’t imagine anyone else giving it. “How perfect could that possibility be?” says Heller. In 2013, astronaut Chris Hadfield covered the song in orbit above the Earth in the International Space Station, recording and broadcasting the first music video shot in space. “I think there was certainly a part of him showing off that he was not going to be a one-hit wonder, and at the time of Space Oddity he very definitely could have been,” says Heller.īowie would – figuratively at least – bury Major Tom in his 1980 song Ashes To Ashes, but the doomed astronaut, in many ways, refused to die. Space Oddity would become a number one in the UK on re-release in 1975, but by then Bowie had morphed from the relatively unknown songwriter into the shape-shifting performer who gave birth to – and killed – his most famous alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, as well as reinterpreting Philadelphia soul in his Young Americans phase. He says the song was banned “because it was kind of a killjoy”. “It was a song that tried to talk about the downsides, of the despair and loneliness that might come from being so far from home,” says Heller. Would it be in bad taste to imagine the long, lonely death of an astronaut when the Apollo 11 crew might have been contemplating the same? ![]() But the decision to ban Space Oddity was more nuanced. The BBC had a long history of banning songs it thought inappropriate – in the Sixties the Beeb had whisked songs as diverse as The Kinks’ Lola (product naming) and the Monster Mash (too morbid) from the airwaves. No-one gave the memo to the team handling the Apollo coverage for BBC TV, who played the song as background music. With Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins contemplating the enormity of the mission before them, Bowie’s psychedelic downer might have been in poor taste. But the BBC, instrumental in turning pop singles into hit singles, were uncomfortable. Sensing a hit in the making, Bowie’s record company, Philips, launched the song just days ahead of Apollo 11’s own blast-off. ![]() “And that’s what a lot of science fiction writers were also doing at the same time.”Īpollo 11 was impossible to ignore – some commentators regard it as the first rolling news story, audiences tuning in again and again for the latest update. “Bowie was trying to say… amid all this fantastic stuff there are dark sides,” says Jason Heller, the author of the book Strange Stars, a book which explores pop music’s fascination with science fiction. Ground Control can do nothing to save him as he spins into the inky darkness. The song is a bleak tale of an astronaut – Major Tom – getting into difficulties on his mysterious mission to the stars. But Space Oddity was not an ode to success. The consensus was that America’s technological might and will to succeed would prevail. Space Oddity was a dark and downbeat tale amid the industrial triumphalism of the Apollo programme. “I was out of my gourd anyway, I was very stoned when I went to see it, several times, and it was really a revelation to me,” said Bowie in a 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter. As the Apollo programme stepped up through the gears, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey, the thought-provoking science fiction epic based on Arthur C Clarke’s novel.īowie loved the film, and it was clearly a huge influence on the song he had written, and not just for its punning title. The race to the Moon had dominated news headlines since President John F Kennedy unveiled it in 1961. And a fledgling singer-songwriter –with only one mildly successful album behind him, and almost unknown outside the UK – releases a song that taps in to the space-race fever that has been bubbling away to boiling point.ĭavid Bowie’s Space Oddity took its inspiration from both fact and fiction. The Rolling Stones have, only days before, played to a quarter of a million people at Hyde Park. The Beatles are in a certain St John’s Wood studio, recording the album Abbey Road. In the US, Nasa is counting down the days until the launch of Apollo 11, the mission intended to land the first humans to set foot on the Moon.įive days before the planned launch date, Florida’s Kennedy Space Center is a hive of activity the rest of the world waits with anticipation.įar away from the launch pads and the looming shape of the Saturn V rocket, London is in the grip of the tail-end of the Swinging Sixties. ![]()
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