David Bowie

Sound and vision. Music and image. Two inseparable components in the art of David Bowie. Among all the members of rock aristocracy, the Thin White Duke was the one most aware of the value of images and the most skilled at exploiting them, making them an integral part of his work. As early as the Seventies he had developed a pioneering approach to the video clip, which in the following decade, the era of MTV, would come to full maturity, putting him at the forefront (also) of the glittering season of video music. Starting with “D.J.”, one of the first songs to be given a genuinely elaborate visual commentary, thanks to director David Mallet, who captures Bowie in the role of the song’s neurotic protagonist as he smashes his equipment and then wanders through London, with people embracing him.
But the decisive turning point is the new single with which Bowie forcefully bursts into the Eighties. The concept of the music video as we understand it today, in fact, is born precisely with the four minutes of footage shot by David Mallet in 1980 for “Ashes To Ashes”. As Lorenzo Salzano points out on OndaRock, “the editing of surreal images, with a rather disturbing subtext, the considerable budget, the experimentation with optical effects such as chromakey, and the very fact that the footage is based on a storyboard meticulously designed by the singer together with the director, make Ashes To Ashes the first music video capable of going beyond the simple task of promoting a song; it effectively becomes a new medium in which it’s possible to develop a distinctive visual language, and to communicate something”. According to biographer David Buckley, it would also turn out to be the most expensive video shot at the time, costing around £250,000.

Inner monsters

But it’s not just vision. There’s also a new musical turn marking the Bowie of “Ashes To Ashes”, the lead single from the new album with which he forcefully inaugurates the 80's. The monsters of “Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)” are above all the inner demons that the English artist decides to confront, in a kind of controlled exorcism: “That record – he would later recall – was a kind of purge. It was me rooting out from inside myself the feelings I felt uncomfortable with. You have to come to terms with yourself, understand why certain things happened. You can’t just ignore them or push them out of your mind, or pretend they didn’t happen. It’s very important to face them and understand them. It helps you reflect on where you currently stand”. The result is an album fully immersed in that new wave era of which Bowie had been an undisputed pioneer.

Bowie arrives at this new chapter lightened of the heavy toxic residue of the Seventies, thanks to the “Berlin cure“, and fresh out of divorce. On February 8, 1980, his marriage to Angela Barnett was officially dissolved, leaving him with custody of their son Zowie, the future Duncan Jones. At Power Station Studios in New York, waiting for him were his trusted Tony Visconti and the Alomar/Davis/Murray rhythm section, while Andy Clark and Roy Bittan took turns on keyboards. Special guest, once again, was crimson king Robert Fripp, who played most of the guitar solos (with some overdubs courtesy of newcomer Chuck Hammer), along with Pete Townshend of The Who, who picked up rhythm guitar on one track (“Because You’re Young”). Some embryonic versions of the songs had already been recorded in Jamaica, at Keith Richards’ Ocho Rios studio. At Power Station, in fact, only the final track, “It’s No Game (N°2)”, was completed, while the other pieces were left as instrumentals, awaiting Bowie’s lyrics and melodies. The work was finished in April at Good Earth Studios in London.
A perfect link between Bowie’s avant-garde phase and his subsequent pop evolution, “Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)” was hailed by Melody Maker as “a frighteningly exciting entrance into the Eighties” and for a long time remembered as “Bowie’s last great album” (at least until “Outside“).

A perfect balance

And the song itself? Built on the catchy refrain of Chuck Hammer’s guitar synth, amid off-beat rhythms and synthetic strings, counterpointed by a powerful funky bass and Bowie’s layered vocals, “Ashes To Ashes” is one of Bowie’s greatest musical feats, built on an extremely refined balance between melodic writing, arrangement, and tonal exploration. From the very introduction, the piano theme stands out, deeply transformed by effects, moving deliberately asymmetrically in relation to the harmonic progression, creating a constant sense of rhythmic suspension. It’s no coincidence that Bowie himself, in live performances, occasionally showed some hesitation in finding the exact entry point of the verse.
The rhythmic backbone is dominated by slap bass, the song’s true engine, whose interplay with the anticipated snare and the rhythm guitar generates a groove of clear funk lineage, perfectly in line with the famous line “funk to funky”. Beneath the verses, a rock’n’roll-flavored Fender Rhodes adds depth to the arrangement without taking anything away from the centrality of Bowie’s vocal performance.
The pre-chorus suddenly widens the sonic spectrum with the entrance of the strings, which open up the harmonic space and increase the tension before the melodic resolution. The ending, meanwhile, is entrusted to a monophonic synthesizer, whose theme is gradually stretched out through an extremely calibrated use of delay all the way to the slow closing fade-out. It’s an exemplary coda in terms of restraint and tonal sensitivity, one that distills the legacy of 1970s electronic experimentation and projects it into the language of new wave. In later live versions this balance has rarely been preserved: the closing solo has often been reworked in a more virtuosic vein, losing that expressive sobriety which is one of the most distinctive elements of the original recording.

Among the melodic sources of “Ashes To Ashes” is also “Inchworm”, a song performed by Danny Kaye, one of the first artists to influence Bowie’s musical upbringing. Written for the musical film “Hans Christian Andersen” (1952), the song contained some of the first chords the young David learned to play on guitar. In 2003 the artist called it “extraordinary” and “melancholic”, adding: “‘Ashes To Ashes’ is influenced by it. It has something childlike and melancholic about it, in the sense of children’s fairy tales”.
Like “Inchworm”, “Ashes To Ashes” also closes its verses with a harmonic progression moving from F to E flat. The song is written in the key of A flat major, while the introduction and ending are crossed by sudden incursions into B flat minor.

The lyrics, meanwhile, offer a kind of “narcotic”, hallucinated retelling of the (mis)adventures of Major Tom, the astronaut introduced in “Space Oddity”, now reduced to a drifting “junkie”: “We know Major Tom’s a junkie/ Strung out in heaven’s high, hitting an all-time low”.
If in 1969 Major Tom embodied the visionary drive of the space race and the optimism of the hippie era, by 1980 he had become the symbol of an existential disillusionment, through which Bowie reflects on the shadows of the decade that had just passed.
The incipit, with the funerary formula “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, takes on the value of a definitive farewell: Major Tom is dismissed as a character now consumed by his own frailties. The famous line “We know Major Tom’s a junkie” makes this metamorphosis explicit, turning the astronaut into a metaphor for alienation, addiction, and isolation.
The autobiographical reference is obvious, but the lyrics avoid a confessional tone in favor of a more universal dimension, in which the protagonist becomes the emblem of lost illusions and identity crisis. The closing lines also reinforce this reading. The distorted reprise of a children’s nursery rhyme (“My mother said/ To get things done/ You’d better not mess with Major Tom”) introduces an unsettling contrast between the innocence of childhood and the disillusionment of adulthood, sealing the definitive break from a past that can no longer be recovered.
“Ashes To Ashes”, then, doesn’t merely bring back the character of Major Tom, but seals his transformation into one of the most complex and ambiguous symbols in Bowie’s entire body of work.

Pierrot and the funeral procession: the video

For the occasion, David Bowie unveils a new character of striking visual impact: a hallucinated Pierrot, created by costume designer Natasha Korniloff, already part of Lindsay Kemp’s entourage for “Pierrot in Turquoise”. It’s this figure who dominates the refined cover artwork of the LP, designed by Edward Bell. And it’s also this figure who takes center stage in the famous procession of the “Ashes To Ashes” video, set on a beach near Hastings, England. Almost a funeral procession, led by the clown, with three bizarre ecclesiastical figures (a priest, two nuns) and a girl dressed up for a party, followed by a menacing bulldozer. In a dreamlike sequence, images alternate between an astronaut hanging from a monstrous piece of machinery in an environment reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s “Alien”, a prisoner in a kitchen that explodes, then in a padded-wall room, before cutting back again to the beach, where the Pierrot, already warned by an elderly woman who has appeared at the water’s edge (Bowie’s mother?), sinks into the sea as a funeral pyre burns away images and outlines. Dust to dust.

The memorable video for “Ashes To Ashes” is nothing less than the visionary expression of the lyrics’ complex intertextual and autobiographical references. Starting, as noted, with the return of the character of Major Tom from Space Oddity, onto whom Bowie pours all his demons, from drug addiction to the excesses of a rock star’s career (“Non ho mai fatto cose buone/ Non ho mai fatto cose cattive/ Non ho mai fatto nulla di punto in bianco”). Then there also resurface references to childhood fantasy (in the melody, which echoes certain nursery rhymes, but also in the beach scene, reminiscent of “The Wizard of Oz”) and psychoanalytic confessions (the oppressive figure of the mother, also mentioned in the lyrics, the umbilical cord tying the astronaut to his capsule). The disturbing nature of the images is further underscored by the cinematography and the acidic, antinaturalistic colors, as abrasive as in few other videos of the Eighties. “The editing of surreal images, with a rather disturbing subtext, the considerable budget, the experimentation with optical effects such as chromakey, and the very fact that the footage is based on a storyboard meticulously designed by the singer together with the director, make ‘Ashes To Ashes’ the first music video capable of going beyond the simple task of promoting a song; it effectively becomes a new medium in which it's possible to develop a distinctive visual language, and to communicate something”, notes Lorenzo Salzano in the special feature “Sound and vision“.

New romantic casting

Positioning himself at the forefront of the new era of video music, the Bowie of “Ashes To Ashes” also becomes a pioneer of a new subculture taking root in Britain at the time. A sort of new glamorous saga uniting punk’s degenerate offspring, irredeemably corrupted by a decadent, narcissistic taste. An aesthetic capable of marrying music and fashion in a voluptuous embrace. It was the new romantic season, which would channel the libertarian, anticonformist ideology of glam rock into a new intoxication of gaudy looks and cultural provocations, replacing punk’s bare desolation with a technicolor dream. Here, then, were pirates with stylized makeup, effeminate dandies, kids decked out in geometric outfits, and neo-aristocrats with backcombed hair. Leading them was the Welsh Steve Strange, cultural agitator of London nightlife and founder of Visage, one of the key bands of the new scene, alongside Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Adam & The Ants, Human League & co. For many of them, David Bowie’s appearance on Top of the Pops performing “Starman” in 1972 had represented a kind of initiation rite. And it was precisely the Thin White Duke’s Berlin-era songs – alongside the classics of Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Roxy Music, and the newly emerging English synth acts (Human League and The Normal above all) – that took center stage during the wild nights at Blitz, blasted at full volume from the console firmly in the hands of the vigorous DJ Rusty Egan.

Intrigued, Bowie decided to go down the basement steps in Covent Garden to recruit the extras for the “Ashes To Ashes” video from among the very devotees who were throwing wild parties in his honor. A messianic event, that of July 1, 1980, which the protagonists of those nights would recount with undiminished emotion in the definitive documentary of that era, “Blitzed!” by Bruce Ashley and Michael Donald (2020). The four lucky ones who would appear in eccentric outfits amid the solarized visuals of the famous short film were Steve Strange himself, designer Judith Frankland, and two friends of Strange’s, fashion designer Darla-Jane Gilroy, a talent of British fashion in the Eighties and Nineties, and future model Elise Brazier, playing the party-dressed dancer.
In one fell swoop, with the “Ashes To Ashes” video, Bowie had placed himself at the head of a new way of conceiving music and image, one that would find its natural outlet in the MTV era, and of a new inflection of new wave in a new romantic vein. Thanks precisely to that historic July night in 1980, the movement would cement its indissoluble bond with the Thin White Duke’s art and make “Ashes To Ashes” its totemic song, the manifesto of a new musical saga of the “young dudes”.

“Ashes To Ashes” was released in four different editions with three different covers, and the first 100,000 copies included four postcards with images of Bowie dressed as Pierrot as in the video. The single marked Bowie’s return to commercial success. After debuting at number four on the British singles chart, the song reached the top spot a week later, knocking “The Winner Takes It All” by ABBA off the top, helped in no small part by the famous video’s airing on “Top Of The Pops”. It thus became the fastest-selling single of Bowie’s career up to that point and his second number one in the UK, after the 1975 re-release of “Space Oddity”. Not all of the Eighties would go on to be quite so inspired for him, but the start was truly explosive.

Do you remember a guy that’s been
In such an early song
I’ve heard a rumour from Ground Control
Oh no, don’t say it’s true

They got a message from the Action Man
“I’m happy. Hope you’re happy, too.
I’ve loved. All I’ve needed: love.
Sordid details following.”

The shrieking of nothing is killing me
Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis
And I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair
But I’m hoping to kick but the planet is glowing

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom’s a junkie
Strung out in heaven’s high
Hitting an all-time low

Time and again I tell myself
I’ll stay clean tonight
But the little green wheels are following me
Oh, no, not again

I’m stuck with a valuable friend
“I’m happy. Hope you’re happy, too.”
One flash of light
But no smoking pistol

I never done good things
I never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue,
Want an axe to break the ice
Wanna come down right now

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom’s a junkie
Strung out in heaven’s high
Hitting an all-time low

My mama said, “To get things done
You’d better not mess with Major Tom”
My mama said, “To get things done
You’d better not mess with Major Tom”
My mama said, “To get things done
You’d better not mess with Major Tom”
My mama said, “To get things done
You’d better not mess with Major Tom”

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01/08/2026