“It was a mind-bender. Your brain tells you this isn’t supposed to work”: From unplayable rhythms to lost astronauts – the genius of David Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes

It’s a song that will always be synonymous with the video that accompanied it, featuring David Bowie, dressed as a Pierrot clown, standing in front of a bulldozer flanked by four bright young things from London’s New Romantic scene.

When Bowie dropped in unexpectedly at the Blitz club in Covent Garden a few weeks earlier to ask New Romantic kingpin Steve Strange and three others to appear in the video for his new single Ashes To Ashes, it must have felt like God descending, such was the esteem in which Bowie was held as a creative colossus.

But Ashes To Ashes would raise the bar even further for the man who had already written some of the greatest songs of the past decade.

Even set against the context of his entire back catalogue, Ashes To Ashes shines out as one of his best songs. It’s a stunning achievement, melding melodic inventiveness, sonic experimentation, self-reflective themes and peerless hooks.

David Bowie - Ashes To Ashes (Official Video) - YouTube

Watch On

By 1980, Bowie was preparing to record Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), his 14th studio album and the first following the Berlin trilogy of Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979).

This would be his attempt to create a more commercial record, and as on the last three albums he brought in co-producer Tony Visconti.

Scary Monsters was recorded between February and April 1980 at the Power Station in New York and then in June that year at Visconti’s Good Earth Studios in London.

Ashes To Ashes would be the lead single and would feature many of the same musicians from the Berlin-era albums.

By the time Bowie began work on the album, he was looking to draw a line under the 1970s. But he first sought to expunge some ghosts and wrap up his past.

11 years after the release of his 1969 hit Space Oddity, he resurrected the character of Major Tom for Ashes To Ashes.

In Bowie’s new vista, Major Tom had succumbed to drug addiction and was floating, isolated, in space.

In this dark scenario, Bowie presents Major Tom as a fragile, paranoid figure. "Strung out in heaven's high/Hitting an all-time low."

The lyrics are also a nod to Bowie’s own experiences of drug addiction in the ’70s.

Bowie would go on to explain that there was a deeper meaning to the song, and that it was actually about corruption.

“Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space and once he gets there he’s not quite sure why he’s there,” said Bowie in an interview with the NME on 13 November 1980. “And that’s where I left him.

“Now we’ve found out that he’s under some kind of realisation that the whole process that got him up there had decayed, was born out of decay… but he wishes to return to the nice, round womb, the Earth, from whence he started.”

According to Bowie, the vocal melody for Ashes To Ashes was inspired by a lullaby called Inchworm, written by Frank Loesser and sung by Danny Kaye in the 1952 musical Hans Christian Andersen.

“I was seven or eight when that came out,” recalled Bowie. “The chords were some of the first I learned on a guitar. They’re remarkable chords, very melancholic.

“Ashes To Ashes is influenced by that. It’s childlike and melancholic in that children’s story way.”

Poignant melodies abound in Ashes To Ashes but the line that is arguably the most moving is: “I never done good things/I never done bad things/I never did anything out of the blue", which occurs after the song’s indelible bridge.

"Those three particular lines represent a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I've done," said Bowie candidly in Peter Doggett's book The Man Who Sold The World. "I have a lot of reservations about what I've done, inasmuch as I don't feel much of it has any import at all."

This was an unexpected admission from Bowie, as Jason Heller of NPR Music observed in a piece about Ashes To Ashes published in October 2017. “It was a rare and mature show of vulnerability in someone who, for so long, had cloaked himself in concept and costume,” Heller wrote.

The backing track for Ashes To Ashes was recorded at New York’s Power Station studio in February 1980.

At that point, the song had the working title of People Are Turning To Gold, and the backing track was recorded without lyrics or any pre-written melodies.

The musicians working on the backing track in the studio included Carlos Alomar on guitar and Bowie’s long-time rhythm section, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis.

As sessions began in February 1980, Bowie and the band began to fashion a batch of songs that Tony Visconti felt could be “a kind of Sgt. Pepper”.

Among these was the track which would become Ashes To Ashes.

From the outset, the track had a staggered, off-kilter syncopated rhythm that drummer Dennis Davis allegedly found challenging.

“I’m sure Dennis Davis won’t mind me saying this, but when we did Ashes To Ashes, that beat was an old ska beat,” Bowie told the NME in September 1984. “But Dennis had an incredibly hard time with it, trying to play it and turn the beat backwards, and in fact we worked through the session and it wasn’t turning out at all well, so I did it on a chair and a cardboard box and he took it home with him and learnt it for the next day. He really found it a problem.”

Davis returned to nail the take the following day.

Meanwhile, Murray laid down an inspired high-end funk bassline, a real high point of the track, by using a mix of finger style and slapping.

From the first moments of the Ashes To Ashes sessions, it was clear they were creating something attention-grabbing yet complex.

“The intro and interlude chord changes… [are] based on three bars of three chords, cycled five times,” wrote Visconti about the Ashes To Ashes sessions for the A New Career In A New Town (1977-82) box set. “David’s idea was to play a repeating four-bar melody over it played on piano.

“It was a mind-bender. Your brain tells you this isn’t supposed to work.

“Music is mathematics and David was often using odd bar cycles in his songs. To him this was familiar ground.”

The alien feel of Ashes To Ashes was bolstered by some outstanding musicianship.

As luck would have it, the group recording in the adjacent studio to Bowie at the Power Station was the E Street Band.

Bowie and Visconti enlisted the help of E Street Band pianist Roy Bittan to play the distinctive melody heard in the song’s intro and chorus.

According to Visconti, Bowie wanted to use a Wurlitzer stereo electric piano but one couldn’t be found, so a compromise was made by hiring in a Fender Rhodes. When that arrived it had a broken channel so Visconti decided to improvise.

“We were relying on a rapid left and right panning for a cool sound,” wrote Visconti in A New Career In A New Town. “As we worked the part out on a grand piano, I had a far-fetched idea to make the grand sound like a Rhodes using the Eventide Instant Flanger.

“My tweaking did not emulate the Rhodes sound,” he said, “but it created an entirely new sound instead.”

Another musician brought into the sessions was guitarist and soundtrack composer Chuck Hammer, who had worked with Lou Reed and was known for his Guitarchitecture recordings.

It was Hammer who would provide the choir-like sound of the layered guitar synthesisers that bolster Ashes To Ashes.

“When David and I heard he had a guitar synthesiser, that alone opened the door for us to see and hear this new instrument,” wrote Visconti. “Hammer didn’t disappoint.

“He stunned us with an orchestral string patch for People Are Turning To Gold. In those times it was unreal to watch a man strum a guitar and hear a thick orchestral string chord.”

Visconti added: “It was a stunning sound but it needed something else. It was too in-your-face, strings with no reverb.

“We were told that the four-storey stairwell had a great reverb so we put Hammer’s amp in the stairwell plus a microphone one floor below and another two floors below. That natural reverb worked for us. We layered the guitar/synth/strings twice. Lush!”

Two months later, in June 1980, Bowie and Visconti reconvened at Visconti’s Good Earth Studios in London.

By then, Bowie had written all the lyrics for the album.

When Visconti first heard Bowie’s vocals for the song, he was blown away.

“When I heard him sing the lyrics to Ashes To Ashes I got goose bumps. It was the character of Major Tom from Space Oddity brought up to the present.”

Ashes To Ashes was released on 1 August 1980 and was an immediate hit, debuting at No.4 in the UK and eventually knocking Abba’s The Winner Takes It All off the top slot.

Ashes To Ashes became Bowie’s fastest-selling single and his second No.1 following the 1975 reissue of Space Oddity.

For Bowie it was the end of an era, a fact drummed home by his divorce from his wife Angie on 8 February, 1980 in Switzerland.

Bowie referred to Ashes To Ashes as "the end of something," adding, "I was wrapping up the '70s really for myself, and that seemed a good enough epitaph for it — that we've lost [Major Tom], he's out there somewhere. We'll leave him be.”