David Bowie: Space Oddity

Space Oddity

Best song: Come on, really? Do I even need to say it? …Space Oddity.

Worst song: Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed

Overall grade: 3

After spending a few weeks powering through Floyd, dealing with a bunch of requests and random side projects, and generally having to put off writing reviews in favour of completing university applications, I’m finally doing what I promised I’d do a month ago, and starting on a couple of new artists. First of these is David Bowie, and I’m planning to tackle his entire 70s discography as well as selected later works.

Bowie did have an album before this one, officially, but to all intents and purposes his career started when he released the single ‘Space Oddity’. In June 1969 it managed to capture the heart of a generation of people who were fascinated by space and had it constantly on their minds in the wake of the first moon landings. Its rise up the charts is one of those pivotal moments in music history, one that always makes you wonder what would have been without it.

Almost forty-five years later, space is still a source of interest to a lot of people, and the song hasn’t lost any of its power. It’s a crushingly sad tale, but we should have seen it coming all along – the opening is creepy and ominous, which both represents Major Tom’s fear of the unknown and foreshadows the climax. Slowly, torturously, it ripples and builds, until we hear the first call of ‘Ground control to Major Tom…’. I forget just how cool the lyrics are sometimes; organised as a conversation between Major Tom up in his spacecraft and the people back on the Earth who are monitoring him. They carefully give him instructions: ‘Take your protein pills and put your helmet on’, and he’s just excited and overwhelmed by the whole experience: ‘I’m floating in a most peculiar way/And the stars look very different today!’ There’s the poignant moment of ‘Tell my wife I love her very much/She knows!’ coming right before the unexpected shock of ‘Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong/Can you hear me, Major Tom?’ They sound panicked, but Tom can’t hear them, so he interrupts with his ‘Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do…’ All communication between them is dead, and the implication is that he soon will be too, out there on his own. In around three minutes, Bowie’s managed to create a character that I care about so much and who seems so real that it breaks my heart when he’s left stranded in outer space.

This portion of the song is, of course, focused on the vocals (although there are the obligatory spacey whooshing noises) but there’s a two-minute jam session to finish, featuring the lovely Mellotron sounds of the wonderful Rick Wakeman, while Bowie himself plays a Stylophone (I heard that he only included that on a dare) and it feels like a much needed release of tension spiralling out.

I’ve heard a few different interpretations of the song – that it’s a metaphor for heroin use and that it’s criticising the British space program – but I prefer to take it at face value, as an excellently crafted story perfectly matched with its accompanying music. It may have mostly become famous due to the circumstances of its release, but I think it would have stood out at any time.    

Sadly, this album is not just ‘Space Oddity’, though it’d probably be better if it was. I don’t really see why anyone would choose to listen to this all the way through. A case in point is second track ‘Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed’, a ridiculous Dylan pastiche that completely makes a mockery of Bowie. In ‘Letter to Hermione’, Bowie himself sounds bored and like he’s not all that interested in the song. I’m not either, the melody’s pretty dull.

The one other good song on this album is ‘Cygnet Committee’, which uses prog influences (maybe from hanging out with Wakeman) and an outstanding and emotional vocal performance to completely justify its ambitious 10 minute length. Lyrically it doesn’t always make sense, although it has its moments of clarity, but the music is actually probably more dynamic than the title track, seamlessly transitioning through a few distinct phases that show Bowie’s innate songwriting talent even this early on in his career. I love the ending, where the vocals become more echoey, gradually getting further away, as the drums become more rhythmic and staccato – cool effect.

Sadly, the second side is basically filler. ‘Janine’ is a fairly forgettable finger of folk-pop, ‘An Occasional Dream’ is very pretty and nostalgic at the beginning and has some occasional nice flute playing but gets kind of stagnant, ‘Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud’ begins in a very similar way to the title track and so disappoints me when it’s not, ‘God Knows I’m Good’ has really annoying, almost unlistenable vocals and a melody that’s repetitive and nowhere near good enough to make up for it. And ‘Memory Of A Free Festival’… it’s in two parts, the first quiet and reflective and the second slightly louder and with more of a sense of community. Honestly, both parts should have been cut out of the song. But if I had to pick one to cut, I’d pick the second part. Bowie’s singing on autopilot and it all sounds very clunky, the different parts out of time with each other.

TL;DR version: Listen to ‘Space Oddity’. The song, that is. Listen to it every day for the rest of your life. Never get tired of it. Listen to ‘Cygnet Committee’ pretty often too if you like it, which I do. Everything else should be treated as more of a historical document than something that’s still supposed to be listened to. I know I can look back on it, shake my head in bewilderment and think ‘who would have predicted…?’