David Bowie

The solo adventure of David Bowie, at the end of the Sixties, was struggling to take off. Torn between the main road of British folk (and Bob Dylan), the psychedelic temptations of the Summer Of Love coming out of California and the British-style r'n'b revival, his Lp debut had laid bare these contradictions, revealing a talented but still immature singer-songwriter, far behind two London peers of similar age, Cat Stevens and Al Stewart, who were debuting around the same time. Bowie was "all over the place", in the words of sound engineer Gus Dudgeon: he was trying to draw from everywhere at once without managing to settle on a coherent, recognizable style.
But that frail folksinger kept soaking up musical experiences of every kind and style with omnivorous curiosity, like a sponge. What struck him most was a record released in 1967, bearing a banana on its cover signed by Andy Warhol, the master of pop art. It's called "The Velvet Underground & Nico" and is the debut album of the revolutionary outfit led by his future friend Lou Reed. "I thought they were the best band in the world", Bowie would later confide to Vanity Fair.

Lost in Space

There is, however, another spark of inspiration, this time of a cinematic nature, because for Bowie — as we know — there were never any boundaries between the arts, each one feeding into his overall vision. It's 1968, and in the dark of London's Casino Cinerama, the twenty-one-year-old David stares at the space capsule floating in the void on the big screen. It's the third time he's gone to see the film "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick, released in April of that same year. The film's sense of estrangement merges with the fascinations of science-fiction storytelling, at the peak of that neo-positivist climate fuelled by the US-USSR space race, which a year later would put man on the Moon. A virtuous short-circuit for the future Starman. "It was the sense of isolation I was feeling at that moment," he would recall to Classic Rock magazine in 2012. "I found the whole thing extraordinary. I was blown away when I went to see it — several times — and it was truly a revelation. It wrote the song in my mind." And what a song... "Space Oddity" is the single that, on 11 July 1969, catapulted the young London artist into the orbit of the charts. It marks the turning point of his career.

Bowie recorded a first demo at the end of 1968 for the promotional video of "Love You Till Tuesday". That version, in which he imitates the sounds of a spaceship, turns out to be a commercial flop, but it gives him the chance to sign a record deal with Mercury. It's the opportunity to cut a full, definitive version of the track. Bowie tries in vain to bring in his friend Tony Visconti, who would go on to assist him in the production booth for much of his career. But the producer is skeptical and decides to pass, leaving his young colleague Gus Dudgeon to get his hands on that odd experiment instead. "I listened to the demo and it was incredible. I couldn't believe Tony had turned it down," Dudgeon would later say.

Years later, Visconti would come to regret his stubbornness: "I thought the song was a cash-in to cash in on the first Moon landing, and it seemed out of step with the folk-rock style of the record. I've kicked myself many, many times since, because I was completely wrong." And indeed, the majestic "Space Oddity" would remain one of Bowie's biggest hits and an absolute rock classic, with its seven distinct sections, the symphonic-psychedelic arrangements by Paul Buckmaster, and a structure that mimics the sound of a rocket taking off. Recorded on 20 June 1969 at Trident Studios in London, the song is conceived with surgical precision: from its eerie opening, marked by Bowie's voice lost in space, to the sudden jolt of the stylophone, from the perfectly timed entrance of Herbie Flowers' bass and Rick Wakeman's Mellotron (the Yes keyboardist) to an epic, aching chorus, all the way to the dissonant instrumental coda. The airy chords, meanwhile, betray two unexpected influences: Simon & Garfunkel and the Bee Gees.

A space-age hit

Centered on the saga of the fictional astronaut Major Tom, "Space Oddity" is the first space ballad in rock history and the forerunner of that science-fiction strand that would become one of the cornerstones of Bowie's repertoire. The infinite Cosmos as a metaphor for an inner space: "Those themes and characters served a metaphysical function, expressing how alienated I felt," Bowie would explain in 1997, "communicating that I felt estranged from society and was searching for some form of connection." These are themes that also reflect his existential anxiety, his dread of mortality and oblivion, the ongoing conflict between rationality and esotericism, secularism and spirituality. With that memorable command from Ground Control ("Check ignition and may God's love be with you") acting almost as the ideal synthesis of these opposing sides of his personality.
The song was released on 11 July 1969, nine days before the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the BBC used it as the soundtrack for its television coverage of the event. Its success (No. 5 in the UK) was such that Bowie went on to record versions in other languages, including the unlikely "Ragazzo solo, ragazza sola", with lyrics by Mogol, for the Italian market.

The 2019 tribute

Tony Visconti, who at the time produced the entire "Space Oddity" album except for the title track itself, would make amends in 2019 with a posthumous tribute to his friend David, who had passed away three years earlier. A brand new mix of the whole "Space Oddity" album, which also includes the track "Conversation Piece", left off the original release.
Speaking about the 2019 mix of "Space Oddity", Visconti would recall: "It was really fun discovering little hidden treasures in the musicians' performances, since this time we had more time to spend on the mixing: a little guitar flourish here, a burst of trombone there, Marc Bolan's voice in a group chorus, and in general a lot more detail that had escaped us all those years ago, when the label gave us at most a week to mix the album. And it's in these very details that you'll rediscover the twenty-two-year-old David Bowie, who was about to conquer the world."

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07/10/2026