Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud (B-side).
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud (LP).
Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud (live, 1973).

“Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud” is another of Bowie’s Tibetan songs, completing a cycle that began in fact (“Silly Boy Blue”), evolved into half-myth (“Karma Man”) and now ends as a fable, fit for a bedtime story or a puppet show. The ancestor of “Freecloud” is Bowie’s mime piece Yet San and the Eagle, the story of a Tibetan boy living under Chinese Communist oppression, and “Freecloud” seems as if it was meant to accompany the movements of actors, with the lyric sometimes doubling as stage directions (the hangman “folds the rope into its bag” or “so the village dreadful yawns”).

But the wild boy of Freecloud isn’t just a Tibetan monk under an assumed name—he’s also uncorrupted youth in nature, whose very existence offends the worldlings who live meanly in the village below him. Bowie described his storyline in an October 1969 interview with Disc & Music Echo: the boy “lives on a mountain and has developed a beautiful way of life…I suppose in a way he’s rather a prophet figure. The villagers disapprove of the things he has to say and they decide to hang him.” The boy resigns himself to death, only to watch in horror as the mountain takes revenge for him. “So in fact everything the boy says is taken the wrong way—both by those who fear him and those who love him.”

Feral children and noble savages cropped up everywhere in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, from Kaspar Hauser in Herzog’s Jeder Für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle, to Truffaut’s L’enfant Sauvage, to the reclamation of Henry David Thoreau as ur-hippie and draft-dodger (e.g., The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail). The wild boys, hippie Christ figures and other “naturals” served as court jesters for the modern age, or as walking rebukes to a conformist, plastic culture. Society usually converts or kills these types, though as the Wild Boy in Bowie’s song eventually leaves the town in rubble, you can’t really blame society.

“Freecloud” marries Bowie’s theatrical sensibilities with his recent folk leanings—Anthony Newley and Jacques Brel sit alongside Fairport Convention in the gallery. The result is an odd combination of staginess (“as the night…begins for ONE!” the narrator intones, hangman exits stage left) and naturalism, the lyric ranging from the carefully-observed details of the opening verses to the Streisand-esque self-acclamation in the bridge (the “REALLLY YOU and REALLY MEEEE” bit). The whole piece is a catalog of influences: the stage setting of a night before a hanging is out of the Child Ballads, the sense of divine retribution levied on a damned town hails from Brecht/Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” and the loftiness of the lyric describing the mountain (“where the eagle dare not fly” and so on) has a bit of Tolkien in it. (“Freecloud” was Tolkien-head Marc Bolan’s favorite Bowie song).

The Battle of Freecloud

“Freecloud” opens with Bowie playing variations on the D chord—D to Dmaj7 to D7 to D6—basically just supplementing a D chord on his 12-string acoustic guitar with additional notes. The pattern repeats throughout the song: it opens the verses and circles three times through them, the relative similarity of the chords creating a feeling of stasis (they occur even while the boy is singing that he’s really free, suggesting he’s just as trapped as the rest of us). The guitar intro also has the song’s other major motif: a sudden push to C, which Bowie later uses to dramatically end the verses and begin the refrain.

The song’s built like an inverted pyramid, opening with two long descriptive verses, each 11 lines long with no rhymes and no real meter; the pattern is finally broken when Bowie goes into the bridge, which, rhyme-strewn and full of long-held notes, comes as a relief to the ear. The song spirals downward faster and faster, first with something of a refrain (handclaps, the title finally sung), then a turbulent pair of verses that contain the destruction of the village within them. It ends with a quiet 10-bar coda, the boy picking his way free from the rubble while the guitar pattern of the intro reappears, suggesting the cycle will begin again, here or elsewhere.

“Freecloud” was first recorded on 20 June 1969 as the b-side of the “Space Oddity” single and a revised version for the LP was cut roughly a month later. Consider the two versions a struggle between Bowie’s two main producers of the ’60s—Gus Dudgeon, who helmed the spare guitar-and-bass initial recording, and Tony Visconti, who seemed hell-bent on trumping Dudgeon for the LP remake.

Visconti called the Dudgeon recording a “throwaway” (it had been recorded in about twenty minutes) while hearing “a Wagnerian orchestra in my head” for his remake, and the LP version of “Freecloud” is an elaborate one-upmanship to Dudgeon’s “Space Oddity” production: Dudgeon has eight tracks on “Space Oddity”? Visconti has 16 for the new “Freecloud”! Dudgeon uses a dozen or so string and wind players? Visconti gets Philips to fund a 50-piece orchestra, including harp and tympani!

But the orchestral arrangement has an overbearing presence—it begins at top volume and goes upward, so that the chaos of the later verses lacks the dramatic force it should have. It’s a crowded party in which each guest tries to dominate the conversation: nearly every line Bowie sings is accompanied by some swoop of strings, brass blast, harp plucks, or tympani crashes. It may be the old punk purist in me, but I find the original B-side recording—a duet between Bowie’s 12-string acoustic guitar and Paul Buckmaster on Arco bass (not cello, as many references have it)—has a cold severity and power that eludes the Visconti production. Because a fable only really needs a voice.

Milestone: one of the guys doing the handclaps on the Visconti recording is a Hull-born guitarist named Mick Ronson, who was introduced to Bowie during the mixing session. The Ronson-led 1973 live performance linked above, in which “Freecloud” segues into “All the Young Dudes” as if it was always meant to do, is a marvel.

Top: “Vietnamese civilians, countryside,” taken by Lt. Commander Charles H. Roszel, 1969.

Conversation Piece (1969 demo).
Conversation Piece (1970 b-side).
Conversation Piece (2000 remake).

[The poor man] feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind take no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market, at a play, at an execution, or coronation: he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or cellar. He is not disapproved, censured or reproached; he is only not seen.

John Adams, Discourses on Davila.

I get lonesome right in the middle of a crowd.

Elvis Presley.

There have been few songs written about academics, whether tenured or failed. All that comes to mind are REM’s “Sad Professor” and this one, and “Conversation Piece” may not be about an academic at all. An independent scholar, let’s say—a shabby young man with an old man’s habits, who lives above an Austrian grocer: his rug is scattered with the pages of unpublished essays, and he spends his time wandering the streets begrudging life. He may throw himself off a bridge at song’s end.

“Conversation Piece” was Bowie’s most recent composition when he made a demo tape in April 1969 (John Hutchinson calls it “a new one” and Bowie has to prompt him with the opening guitar chords (“G-D-G”).) It’s unlike most of the songs written in this period, which are either love ballads or self-mythical explorations, as it hearkens back to the oddball character sketches of the first Bowie LP, like “Little Bombardier” or “She’s Got Medals.” (That said, some, like Bowie’s manager Ken Pitt, have said the song is fairly autobiographical, a sketch of the frustrated composer and failed pop singer Bowie of 1968.)

Most of all, it captures well the curse of urban anonymity—its title is a cruel joke, the “conversation” only going on in the singer’s head. Once during a hard spell while living in NYC I spent a weekend almost entirely out of doors, going from shop to cafe to library, and realized at some point during it that I had talked to absolutely no one, except maybe to mutter thanks to a ticket-taker or cashier. The sense of moving among a great mass of people and feeling utterly invisible and isolated from them is almost addicting at first, and then it can just sink your soul.

It’s a fairly simple song—three meandering verses, three tight eight-bar choruses (half lyric, half wordless). For the final verse, Bowie uses a standard trick and changes key, bumping all the chords up one step (so while the third line of the verse—for example, “he often calls me down to eat“—has been C/G, it’s now D/A (“and they walk in twos and threes or more“), and so forth). To further the sense that the singer is breaking down, the last verse extends into a faster-paced section with shorter sung phrases until collapsing into the final chorus.

The studio take, recorded during the Space Oddity sessions ca. July-September 1969, was eventually released as the B-side to “The Prettiest Star” in March 1970. It’s unclear why “Conversation Piece” was left off the Space Oddity LP, as it’s stronger than most of the other cuts, and if LP time was an issue, they could’ve shaved at least three minutes off “Memory of a Free Festival” and no one would’ve wept. Over the years, it’s become many people’s favorite Bowie obscurity (Stuart Murdoch seems to have lived in this song at some point).

Bowie revived “Conversation Piece” in 2000 for his scotched LP Toy, and eventually released it on a bonus disc for his 2002 Heathen album. He sings it in a lower register and without much emotion. The flailing scholar of the original recording at least had energy in his desperation; here, all is resigned, empty despair.

Top: Pascal Grob, “Paris, 1969.”

That’s it until after the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving. For non-U.S. readers, happy Thursday.

Janine (demo).
Janine (studio).

George Tremlett, a freelance British music journalist, interviewed Bowie in late 1969 and wrote that while Bowie was effusive about most of the tracks on his recently-released LP, he avoided mentioning one song entirely—”Janine”—leading Tremlett to speculate that Bowie considered the song a dud and had regretted putting it on the album.

That doesn’t seem to be the case, as Bowie actually mooted “Janine” as a follow-up single to “Space Oddity” and played it during some 1970 BBC sessions, but true enough, “Janine” has been mainly forgotten in the forty years since. Which is a shame, as it’s one of the few fun songs on a rather serious, dour album. Tony Visconti liked it best of all the Space Oddity tracks, and you can hear why—it’s much like the type of hippie glam that Marc Bolan had begun writing (the first key Bolan single, “King of the Rumbling Spires,” had come out in the summer of ‘69).

As opposed to the winsome, unattainable “Hermione” figure of Bowie’s recent songs, “Janine” sounds like a much better time. “You’re fey, Janine, a trooper to the last,” Bowie sings, with some admiration. “Take your glasses off and don’t act so sincere.” Of course, this being Bowie, the center of the love song winds up being its singer, who’s more concerned with protecting his true self than sharing it.

“Janine” is a rocker hidden within a folk song (the acoustic demo has some energy, and even goes into the “Hey Jude” chorus at one point, but it’s hobbled by its staid rhythm) and the studio cut, which attempts to liberate it, winds up being a bit of a hash. (A successful transition? Dylan’s “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”: folk, 1961; rock, 1966.) The band Visconti used for the Space Oddity sessions—Junior’s Eyes—isn’t up to snuff, as the beat’s weak and diffuse and the track is crying out for a simple, solid riff to keep it together, rather than the noodling electric guitar bits that crop up in the verses, played by either Tim Renwick (later of Pink Floyd) or Keith Christmas. It’s a shame that Bowie didn’t turn Mick Ronson loose on this song a couple years later, as it finally could’ve become the swaggering beast it had potential to be.

Inspirational verse: “If you took an axe to me/you’d kill another man not me at all.” Or even better, “Like a Polish wanderer I travel ever onwards to your land.”

Demo recorded ca. mid-April 1969 with John Hutchinson (Bowie’s introduction claims that the song’s about the girlfriend of George Underwood “who does very nice album covers”); studio version cut ca. July-September 1969 for Space Oddity.

Top: Diana Rigg, doomed newlywed, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Since David Bowie is my unequivocal favorite recording artist, I was excited to have received a promo copy of the 40^th Anniversary pressing of Bowie’s Space Oddity record (It was officially released in the U.S. yesterday). But I’d be remiss not to note my disappointment. The sound quality was nothing new to me, as the only other vinyl version I have of this record is the long out of print Rykodisc reissue from about 20 years back. Both are digitally sourced. It doesn’t matter much the remasters might differ, as digital recordings lack the warmth of the original analog tapes, the ideal source for vinyl.

Some of the apparent faults of digitally sourced vinyl can easily be heard on the first side of this record. The jam at the end of “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed,” especially where the horn comes in, pierces the ears. Following that track is “Letter to Hermione,” which has some unfortunate, distracting amplified sibilance throughout (which actually sounds less annoying on the Ryko release). Then, during “Cygnet Committee,” I thought I was hearing things, but after checking back three times, when Bowie first sings, “Because of you I need to rest/Because it’s you that sets the test,” I could hear distant voices and/or music. It reminds me of what a re-used cassette might sound like when you copy over music that was already there, and you can hear the ghost of that music below the new music you recorded on top. I wonder if this audio “ghost” may have been chit-chat in the studio that the microphones might have picked up…*

The reissue packaging is OK. EMI has done better with their “From the Capitol Vaults” series: The jackets are sturdy and painstakingly reproduce the quality of the original release (Space Oddity was not first issued in a flimsy high-gloss sleeve, though this vinyl reissue for the first time returns it to its original self-titled glory on LP). The package also includes a giant poster that reproduces a poster promoting a concert featuring Bowie during the record’s original release, which reeks of its digital source, an unfortunate visual reflection of the quality of the audio (you can see some of that psoter in the image of the record above). Personally, the Ziggy Stardust era image on the back cover of the original RCA reissue (seen left) would have made a way cooler poster, when the album was first re-titled Space Oddity (thanks to Epiclectic’s cool Flickr photostream featuring original album art for the image!).**

But the joy of this record is having another close listen to the songs. I first heard it when I was a young teenager in the 80s, having only been familiar with “Space Oddity” as a single collected on one of Bowie’s greatest hits (a cassette of either Fame and Fashion or Changesonebowie). What stood out to me then was how different some of the songs sounded in comparison to the trippy quality of the title track.*** This was Bowie in his short-lived hippie persona, which would later suffer a violent end with his 1970 follow-up, the pre-heavy metal tinge of The Man Who Sold the World.

What still strikes me is how sad some of these songs sound: the passionate delivery of the social critique that is “Cygnet Committee,” the lovelorn longing in “Letter to Hermione,” the pathos of “God Knows I’m Good,” the over-the-top melodrama of “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud.” Even “Memory of a Free Festival” has this mournful nostalgic quality, a beautiful moment that has died, similar to another cut on this same album, “An Occasional Dream,” except that the former recreates a shared experience with like-minded bohemian souls, while the other portrays a more private experience with a soul mate.

This album truly was Bowie with soul bared naked at the time (I believe he was 22 or 23 at the time). He wasn’t hiding behind some over-the-top persona, nor was he the self-conscious fame-seeking pop artist of prior failed attempts for notoriety as a soulful mod rocker and pop crooner. He also was yet to begin the more abstract cut-up lyric writing technique he took from famed beat writer William S. Burroughs–that would first occur on 1974’s Diamond Dogs.

For me, the strongest bits of the album include the otherworldly finale “Memory of a Free Festival” with its refrain of “Sun Machine is coming down, and we’re going to have a party” (noise poppers Mercury Rev would later record an appropriately strong version of this song). The jam that ends “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” was a revelation for Bowie at the time, since all his earlier songs were mostly compact pop numbers. Which leads me to the epic grandeur of “Cygnet Committee,” a song that grows from delicate sing-song to its soaring, pounding finale over the course of nine and a half minutes, his longest song to that date.

Though probably his strongest work at the time, Space Oddity was never the strongest album of his career. It really shows a newfound sophistication for him both lyrically and musically since his prior work, where his biggest inspiration was the cheesy pop of Anthony Newley, which sometimes resulted in some embarrassingly zany moments that shall remain unmentioned out of respect. He would later temper these naïve self-conscious themes with deeper existential musings in much stronger songs like “Quicksand” and “Life on Mars” or the more surreal “Bewlay Brothers,” all from 1971’s Hunky Dory.

Finally, a 2-CD version has also been reissued at the same time as this vinyl version, which collects some songs never officially available to the public. I hope to review that soon, once I get it from EMI…

*After checking, yes, this audio “ghost” is also on the Ryko LP version, and, yes again, I checked the Ryko CD, 1999 Virgin CD reissue and the Japanese mini LP CD—it’s on them all. I guess I never heard it before because I never had the system I now have (more on that in another post). I’m only left to wonder if it’s on the original RCA CD or LP (it probably would not have come out on the cassette due to the inherent hiss of the tape).

 **Before the album had been simply titled David Bowie, just like his first full-length in 1967 on Deram Records, adding to some confusion. To top it off, when it was first issued by Mercury in the U.S. the artwork was changed somewhat and the shameless (unapproved by Bowie) title Man of Words/Man of Music was added on. It became Space Oddity in 1972, when RCA bought the rights to Bowie’s back catalog and reissued it during the Ziggy Stardust craze that again saw the cover art altered to feature Bowie’s Ziggy persona on the covers). Ahhh, the marketing strategies of early music labels, how fun.

***It’s important to note that, per the liner notes on the inner sleeve by Kevin Cann, that “Space Oddity” was produced by Gus Dudgeon, and not Tony Visconti, who recorded the rest of the album (and continued to work with Bowie here and there on some of Bowie’s greatest records, down to his last release, Reality). Cann notes how Visconti had an aversion for the song and refused to record it for Bowie, so Bowie, asking Visconti’s permission, went to an outside producer to record it anyway. It would famously become his hit single thanks to the timing of its release with the first Apollo moon landing, though it was actually inspired by the grim future vision of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. It would turn out that none of the other songs, as strong as some still are, ever had single quality, to the frustration of the label and Bowie. Fame would elude him until his other interstellar ride as Ziggy Stardust, three long years later.

I was surprised when I heard this, but this month marks the forty year anniversary of Space Oddity. David Bowie is one of my favorite artists and without a doubt one of the most groundbreaking and savvy artists in music history. Here’s to you Mr. Bowie, cheers.

*I already own Space Oddity, but if you don’t, I highly suggest you purchase a copy of it now.

An Occasional Dream (demo).
An Occasional Dream (LP).
An Occasional Dream (BBC, 1970).

As young love often does, it sort of went wrong after about a year.

David Bowie, Golden Years documentary, 2000.

The other “Hermione” song Bowie composed in early 1969, “An Occasional Dream” replaces the studied heartbreak and intimacy of “Letter to Hermione” with a more stoic approach. Bowie was taken with Jacques Brel (his folk duo Feathers often performed Brel’s “Amsterdam,” which Bowie would later record), and “An Occasional Dream” has an attempted Gallic sensibility—a dead love affair is examined, pinned to a card and cased up. The singer seems to mourn more the passing of his beautiful youth than he does his departed lover.

“An Occasional Dream” is pretty enough, if it doesn’t have as memorable a melody or a vocal as “Hermione,” and it seems far more affected: the way Bowie swoons out the title phrase, or lines like “we’d speak of a Swedish room/of hessian and wood.”

The demo was recorded with John Hutchinson ca. mid-April 1969 (Hutchinson sings lines a bar after Bowie, or gives backing vocals, and gets the occasional lead vocal); it’s the best recording of the song, as the studio version, featuring dippy flute accompaniment, hissed interjections (“TIME!”) and a Bowie vocal that sounds like a Barry Gibb impersonation, is overcooked. It was cut ca. July-August 1969 for the LP Space Oddity. Bowie played “Occasional Dream” once on a BBC session on 5 February 1970 and then retired it.

Top: Mary Ellen Mark, “Heroin addict behind a door in London, 1969.”

Letter To Hermione (“I’m Not Quite” demo).
Letter To Hermione (LP).

Elvis Costello, irritated by biographical interpretations of his songs, once said in frustration to an interviewer something like “if Bob Dylan or I meant for you to take us literally, we’d have included a verse that said: So-and-so, my ex-wife, is a real bitch, this is where she lives, go burn down her house.”

Bowie’s “Letter to Hermione” appears to fit that bill: it’s a diary entry of a song, addressed to his actual ex-girlfriend by name, detailing what his biographers have described as a devastating break-up. Hermione Farthingale wasn’t her real name (no one knows, or will disclose, the true one). Bowie met her through Lindsay Kemp, danced with her for the film The Pistol Shot and the two were a couple by the summer of 1968, living together in South Kensington, forming a folk trio. By the time the two filmed Love You Till Tuesday in early 1969, it was over (Farthingale apparently had dumped Bowie for another dancer), and Bowie and Farthingale’s last day together was on a soundstage, miming “Sell Me a Coat” and “Ching-a-Ling” for the cameras.

So we have these facts, which impress the songs that Bowie wrote about the break-up (this and “An Occasional Dream“) with the engraved stamp of truth. “Letter to Hermione” isn’t just a sad break-up song, it’s a real sad break-up song. Marc Spitz, Bowie’s latest biographer, calls the song “plaintive and literal,” Nicholas Pegg calls it “painfully intimate.” Here, at last, we believe Bowie took off the mask—here is the true Bowie, dripping out his heart accompanied by guitar, so much that the song should have been credited to David Jones.

It’s understandable, because Bowie remains such an unknowable creature that any visible crack in the wall is worth a sortie. But do we consider something like “Letter to Hermione” an essential, “painfully intimate” Bowie song mainly because we believe it to be true? Is its formal beauty—the tender melody of the verses, the sweep of Bowie’s guitar—not enough?

Because the song isn’t a raw diary spewing at all, but has as much artifice and craft as “Space Oddity”: it’s structured neatly with a mirrored guitar intro and outro which enclose three verses (the first details how desolate “Bowie” is feeling, the second notes the rumors he’s getting about how “Hermione” is faring, and the third speculates about her new lover and her happiness). In the middle of each verse, Bowie, in desperate confidence, suggests that “Hermione” misses him (“You cry a little in the dark”) answered by a short four-syllable line (“well so do I”). And as James Perone notes, as the song is a “letter” it discards typical “love song” standards, shunning, for the most part,  short melodic hooks in favor of long, meandering phrases, while its rhymes are often assonant or half-rhymes (“well/girl,” “pain/same”).

The demo (called “I’m Not Quite”) furthers the sense of “reality,” with its poor, scratchy sonic quality, muffled guitar and Bowie’s tender- and awkward-sounding vocal. (The demo literally is a bedside confessional.) But as John M. Cunningham wrote, the demo’s rawness was refined away by the time Bowie recorded “Hermione” for his LP four months later. There he sings in a more mannered style, choosing a carefully forlorn and wistful tone to deliver his lines. He seems comfortable with it being a work of art, even if we aren’t.

The demo was recorded ca. mid-April 1969, likely in Bowie’s shared flat in Foxgrove Road, Beckenham; the studio cut was recorded ca. August 1969 and is on Bowie’s second LP, called David Bowie in the UK, given the woeful name Man of Words, Man of Music in the US and eventually rechristened Space Oddity by RCA.

Top: Bowie and Farthingale already heading in opposite directions, 1968.

I’m a cynical sort when it comes to re-releases, re-packages, deluxe editions, etc – they’re obvious marketing tactics from record labels seeking to gain the maximum mileage out of the same material, especially as they try to bolster the inevitable decline in physical sales. Having said that, I’m going to remain completely transparent here and say I received advances of both the Duran Duran re-releases and the 40th Anniversary Special Edition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity from EMI; because both David Bowie and Duran Duran contributed generously to my early music education, I felt it would be worth exploring these specific reissues (of course David Bowie also remains my favourite solo artist in the world, which will make me naturally curious in anything released under his name). Tomorrow, on November 17, this 2-disc Special Edition of Space Oddity is due for release, including a digipak with a booklet of extended notes and photographs (I can’t make a comment on that bit because my copy is just the promo copy of the music).

Space Oddity is of course the crucial breakthrough for David Bowie, allowing him to leave gravediggers and laughing gnomes behind. The title track remains a classic song that will forever be included on Bowie compilations, and it hinted at the space-tastic, alienated voyages to come. The story of Major Tom proved to be so popular that it became the album’s title in 1972 after the record had been released in 1969 under the titles David Bowie and Man of Words/Man of Music. I’m not sure about other Bowie fans, but I don’t include it in my top five Bowie records; I adore the title track and Letter to Hermione, a soul-baring, moody ballad to a former girlfriend, but rarely listen to the other songs. It’s an album that clearly shows where Bowie was coming from in terms of influences – it was a little bit folk and a little bit proggy, likely inspired by both Bob Dylan and Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. While Bowie has always been a sharp-eyed magpie of myriad genres and creative ideas, he seemed to find his true footing on my favourite Bowie album, Hunky Dory. Again, I really love the title track of The Man Who Sold the World, but many of the tracks from that record just don’t live up to it, whereas its successor was confident and memorable from start to finish, the first hints of glam rock stirring in its undercurrents. I think the rambling folk side of Space Oddity simply didn’t appeal to me as much as his campy glam and icy experimentalism and therefore remained less memorable for me.

Having gone back to listen to this re-mastered version of Bowie’s debut, I’ve revised my opinions a bit. If you don’t pay closer attention to lyrics, you could dismiss many of the tracks as hangovers from the Summer of Love; delving deeper, I began to realize, that like Bowie’s work and identity in general, it is not to be taken at face value. Several tracks are critical of hippie counterculture and fearful of madness, the latter being a rather constant thread throughout Bowie’s career. Album conclusion Memory of a Free Festival is now reminding me of Jarvis Cocker’s observations twenty-five years later in Pulp’s Sorted for E’s & Wizz; it seems like the disillusion and comedown of a participant in a loved-up scene is a perennial theme. One of many brilliant verses in this song:

Touch, we touched the very soul
Of holding each and every life.
We claimed the very source of joy ran through.
It didn’t, but it seemed that way.
I kissed a lot of people that day.

Unfortunately, the end of song and its repetition of “The Sun Machine is coming down/and we’re gonna have a party” still gets a little too Hey Jude-like for me; both endless finales end up lodging in my brain and irritating me. I have also come to embrace the quite epic Cygnet Committee, which tells the story of a sorrowful messianic leader who ends up violently destroyed along with all he represents; this song also very obviously points to future leitmotifs for Bowie. One of my favourite lines is: “My friends talk/Of glory untold dream, where all is God and God is just a word.” It’s a shame that, in my mind, poetry like this remained overshadowed by the musical style for so long.

The deeply rooted sense of never knowing the self and treating the self as a performance, which David Bowie took to great lengths through multiple musical genres, are some of my favourite aspects of his art, and they’re written all over this debut. Another one of the folky jaunty tunes that I generally didn’t take much interest in was Janine, but through repeated listens, several lyrics stood out:

Janine, Janine, you’d like to know me well,
But I’ve got things inside my head
That even I can’t face.

Janine, Janine, you’d like to crash my walls,
But if you take an axe to me
You’ll kill another man
Not me at all.

Several years later, he was still not up to facing himself and was much too fast to do so.

The second disc of this edition features the bonus material, which is mostly comprised of previously unreleased tracks, including early demos, BBC radio sessions, and even the full-length stereo version of the Italian version of Space Oddity re-titled Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola. Despite the fact I’m a big Bowie fan, I don’t actually own any previous special editions or collectors’ sets, so I haven’t heard any of this bonus material before, including the song London Bye Ta Ta, which reminds me of The Kinks’ David Watts and by extension, Blur’s Tracy Jacks. I think I’ve stayed away from buying the special Bowie recordings all these years because his back catalogue of demos, rarities, live sessions and bootlegs seem like a staggering monster that I can never hope to master. It’s ludicrously autistic of me to think of it that way, but it’s no coincidence that I identify with Bowie’s paranoia of going mad as well.

As with the special edition of Duran Duran’s Rio, I would say this reissue of Space Oddity is something for consummate collectors (though many hard-core Bowie fans may have already ferreted out a fair portion of this material). Despite the infinite flogging of Bowie’s back catalogue, I appreciate this re-release if only because it forced me to take a closer listen to a part of Bowie’s output that I inexplicably hadn’t done so much in the past. And in the absence of new releases from my favourite solo artist for the last six years, it assuages an iota of my thirst for new Bowie material. Space Oddity was Bowie’s understated countdown to a blast-off to happen a few years later, an orbit he hasn’t come down from since.

Cygnet Committee – David Bowie

Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola (Full-Length Stereo Version) – David Bowie

Space Oddity (first version).
Space Oddity (Feathers demo).
Space Oddity (single).
Space Oddity (first live TV performance, 1970).
Space Oddity (BBC, 1972).
Space Oddity (“1980 Floor Show” rehearsal, 1973).
Space Oddity (1979 remake).

“Space Oddity” is an officially sanctioned beginning: Bowie’s first single for Philips/Mercury; his first Top 10 hit (and, years later, his first UK #1); lead-off and title track of the subsequent LP; lead-off track of every greatest hits compilation from ChangesOneBowie on; lead-off track on his Sound and Vision career retrospective. When Bowie dies, the TV tributes will lead off with it.

So it’s “classic” Bowie, its now-iconic status won slowly and circuitously, but then “Space Oddity” has always seemed slightly out of time (its biggest chart placings, both in the US and the UK, came years after its first release). It began as a novelty song with a sell-by date (the first moon landing in July 1969), something like a grandiose, more dignified “Laughing Gnome,” and Tony Visconti, for one, refused to have anything to do with it, considering the song a cynical sell-out. Which it was. “Space Oddity” is close company to early Bee Gees hits like “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and Zager and Evans’ dire “In the Year 2525″: it’s a gimmicky folk song dressed up in extravagant clothes.

“Space Oddity” has come to define Bowie, perhaps because it’s as protean as its creator has tried to be. It’s a breakup song, an existential lullaby, consumer tie-in, product test, an alternate space program history, calculated career move, and a symbolic end to the counterculture dream—the “psychedelic astronaut” drifting off impotently into space (Camille Paglia suggested the last); it’s a kid’s song, drug song, death song, and it marks the birth of the first successful Bowie mythic character, one whose motives and fate are still unknown to us.

The major

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in London in May 1968 and played for months. As in many cities, its most frequent repeat viewers were the young and the altered. Visconti, in his autobiography, recounts a typical 2001 viewing—while high from drinking cannabis tea, Visconti had to talk down the tripping couple behind him who were terrified by the film’s “Star Gate” sequence. Bowie saw the film (stoned “off my gourd” he recalled) several times that summer and was especially struck by the final images of a “child” floating in space over the Earth.

So when at the end of 1968 Bowie’s manager asked him to write a new song for his Love You Till Tuesday promo film, Bowie had a scenario in mind. While 2001 was a primary influence, Bowie, an SF fan (e.g., “We Are Hungry Men“), may have raided other sources. One candidate is Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man story collection, which includes “The Rocket Man” (later used by Bernie Taupin), where an astronaut’s life is as dull and isolating as a traveling salesman’s; “Kaleidoscope,” where astronauts burn up in space, their dying embers seen as a shooting star on Earth; and, most of all, “No Particular Night or Morning,” where an astronaut in deep space doubts whether the Earth or even the stars are real and kills himself by going out the airlock:

Clemens blinked through the immense glass port, where there was a blur of stars and distant blackness. “He’s out there now?”

“Yes. A million miles behind us. We’d never find him. First time I knew he was outside the ship was when his helmet-radio came on on our control-room beam. I heard him talking to himself…Something like “no more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No planets. No stars…Only space. Only space. Only the gap.”

And of course there was the ongoing Apollo moonshot program, which many hippies and New Left types detested for embodying the absurdities of “plastic America”: a made-for-TV waste of resources undertaken at a time of war, repression and political chaos. Bowie wrote “Space Oddity” around the time of Apollo 8 near Christmas 1968, the first manned rocket to the moon, which made two TV broadcasts during the flight (on Christmas Eve, the three astronauts read from the Book of Genesis, a performance immediately followed by a rocket-eye view of the Earth hanging cold and alone in space).

The disaster that befalls Major Tom (is it a disaster at all?) also reflects the general, if unspoken, fear at the time that the Apollo missions could go terribly wrong, with gruesome death or exile shown on live global television. Richard Nixon had on his desk a memorial speech in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon (its author, William Safire, had suggested that a clergyman should “adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea”).

The musician

When Bowie began writing the song, working with his then-partner John Hutchinson (who likely came up with a few of the chord sequences), he was at low ebb. His prospects as a pop singer had faded and his intense relationship with Hermione Farthingale was ending. (During 1968 Bowie also had “a flirtation with smack,” he admitted years later, and some have argued the icy majesty of “Space Oddity” suggests it’s really a heroin song, the “liftoff” section marking when the needle hits the vein.)

So it’s not surprising that Bowie created a character who’s been sent into orbit by Establishment figures, who monitor him, give him orders and want him to do his share of media promotion. The line “Now it’s time to leave the capsule—if you dare” suggests Major Tom could even be a contestant on a television show. Bowie made the first recording of the song the day after his final break with Farthingale, which has led biographers to speculate that Bowie’s state of mind at the time reflected Major Tom’s blissful sense of isolation, a desire to free himself entirely from human entanglements and just drift off into the void.

Yet while alienation is key to the song, it’s not a bleak or despairing track at all, as it has childlike qualities: the lyric at the start sounds like a game played by two boys on walkie-talkies; it has simple wordplay based on common sounds (the way “Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear” segues directly into “here am I floating round my tin can“) and as David Buckley notes, Bowie often uses a child’s word to replace an “official” one: so “spaceship” instead of “rocket,” “countdown” instead of “ignition sequence,” and even the name “Major Tom” seems that of a ’50s action hero rather than of a legitimate astronaut.

The composition

I’m always trying to find that special thing in pop music. For me, it started with Space Oddity by David Bowie—it has that semi-tone shift which fascinated me. I played it endlessly to my mum and it made me feel this yearning. It’s a kind of sweetness, and it can turn up in the strangest places.

Roddy Frame, 2002.

“Space Oddity” was the most intricate song Bowie had yet written, and you could consider it a neatly controlled collision of two forces—the often-simple lyric, with its memorable, childlike lines (“the stars look very different today“); and the density and complexity of the song’s structure.

In the span of five minutes, there’s an intro, two verses, two bridges, two four-bar acoustic guitar breaks, a “liftoff” sequence with guitar and strings, a 12-bar electric guitar solo, a third extended verse that’s partially a refrain (the “Can you hear me Major Tom?” bit) and a long outro which also contains a second guitar solo. There are something like 15 different chords used and the lyric at times seems synchronized to the changes (in the bridge, when Major Tom is floating alone in space “far above the world,” the first chords are Fmaj7 and Em7, the two chords that the ominous intro had moved between). Despite this complexity, the song has atmosphere and space; constantly in motion, it has a stillness at its center.

It was intended to be a duet: the opening verse was originally sung by Hutchinson (as you can hear in the demo), who had a lower range, while Bowie harmonized an octave higher. Hutchinson as “ground control” again opened the second verse until the big reveal: Major Tom speaks at last, with Bowie finally appearing in his most resonant tone. Hutchinson recalled that he and Bowie loved Bookends, and here Hutchinson keeps to the ground as “Simon” while Bowie wafts in as “Garfunkel.” Bowie’s skill as a singer had developed enough, however, that he could play all the roles when he recorded the song as a solo vocal a few months later.

The song is a series of neatly-designed stages, as though it was a rocket itself—the way the “countdown” verse (a descending number marking the start of each bar) is met by the eight-bar liftoff (something of a neatly-tailored version of the orchestral upward sweep in the Beatles “A Day in the Life”); the bridge that begins weightlessly and then slowly falls to earth in its last four bars; or the way Bowie’s sharp acoustic break (C-F-G-A-A, strumming hard on the last two chords) serves as stage-clearing, first to set up the dreamy electric guitar solo, then to prepare for the long outro.

The recordings

“Space Oddity”’s first recording, cut for the Love You Till Tuesday promo on 2 February 1969, sounds like a tentative full-band rehearsal. While it shows that most of the song structure was in place at an early stage, the rhythm’s not right, much of it sounds thin and reedy, and a few sections are just lousy (the flute squawk solo was thankfully replaced by electric guitar). By the time Bowie and Hutchinson re-recorded the song as a demo (as part of Bowie’s successful audition for Philips/Mercury) in March-April 1969, Bowie had introduced the Stylophone, which would become one of the track’s defining sounds.

The Stylophone, whose manufacturer had sent a promotional copy to Bowie’s manager, was a primitive portable synthesizer that had two settings, “normal” and “vibrato.” You played it by touching a stylus to a tiny keyboard, which closed a circuit and emitted a tone. Bowie toyed with it for a bit and figured out how to create a basic droning progression that would become the backbone of the song’s early verses. (It naturally gave the song some SF cred to have an “alien” computer noise in much of the mix.)

The Stylophone was just one facet of Gus Dudgeon’s production for the Philips/Mercury single (Visconti had turned Bowie down, saying he’d produce the LP but not the cheesy single), a session that Dudgeon plotted like a military operation, mapping the song’s progress out on paper—Dudgeon couldn’t write music, so he used colors (cellos were brown, for instance) and squiggly lines to indicate where various instruments came in. Paul Buckmaster had to translate it into charts for the players.

This past summer Bowie re-released “Space Oddity” as a digital EP, including, wonderfully, the original eight-track Dudgeon recording now broken into its separate tracks, revealing some of the production’s tricks—for example:

The signal: Bowie’s Stylophone and Mick Wayne’s electric guitar share the same track. In the opening, the two instruments seem an extension of each other, the drone of the Stylophone pricked, every two bars, by a plucked note on the guitar. It sounds like an interstellar radio transmission. The Stylophone is the defining instrument of the song: it plays only three tones in the opening verse, the highest setting held and “waggled” as the verse gives way to the liftoff sequence; it plays a repeated two-note pattern that sounds like a police siren whenever Bowie extends a line (for example, on “made the GRADE” or “most peculiar WAY”); it underpins the guitar solo with a single held note. And in the outro sequence, while the guitar spirals out a string of notes the Stylophone frantically taps away as if making an SOS call.

Strings, old and new: Much as the song is a balancing act between its lyric and its knotty chord structure, the recording contrasts traditional orchestral instrumentation (eight violins, two violas, two celli, two double basses and two flutes) and the synthesizer future. The synths serve as the primary colors (while the Stylophone appears in the first verse and extends through most of the song, the richer-sounding mellotron (played by Rick Wakeman) is held back until the bridge, then replaces the Stylophone for much of the third verse). The orchestral instruments are used more as sound effects (the note-by-note string buildup during the liftoff sequence, the darting flute and moaning celli and basses in the bridges) and backdrops.

The bottom: One revelation is the isolated track of Herbie Flowers’ bass and Terry Cox’s drums. This was Flowers’ first-ever session (he’d go on to craft the trademark bassline of “Walk on the Wild Side” and played on Bowie’s Diamond Dogs), and he’s a marvel—buried under the layers of “Space Oddity” is a bassline that goes from a stark single-note repetition to a jazzy fluid movement in the later verses to a full-on bass solo during the song’s outro. Cox’s drumming isn’t very funky—he was the drummer for Pentangle, after all—but it serves the material well, from the parade-ground snare warmups at the beginning, to the bolero pattern Cox develops in the first verse, to coming down hard on the third beat in the later verses.

The single

The Philips “Space Oddity,” recorded on 20 June 1969, debuted over the PA system at the Rolling Stones’ free Hyde Park concert on 5 July, which had become an impromptu funeral service for Brian Jones. The BBC did play “Space Oddity” during the moon launch (though they mainly used “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” which had become the official soundtrack of outer space thanks to 2001). It’s impossible to verify when or how often “Space Oddity” was played during the coverage, however, as the BBC later erased its recordings of the moon landing (along with scads of Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell Doctor Whos, performances by every British band of the ’60s, early appearances by pre-Python Michael Palin and John Cleese, etc., etc.).

“Space Oddity” didn’t chart upon release, however, and initially seemed yet another Bowie flop. Then (possibly due to Bowie’s manager Ken Pitt, who offered some payola) the single rebounded in the fall and finally hit the UK Top 10, reaching #5 in November 1969. Mercury had released the single in the U.S. to utter indifference, but when Bowie finally broke in America in 1972, his then-label RCA (which had purchased most of Bowie’s Mercury material) re-released “Space Oddity,” forcing an exhausted Bowie to make a Mick Rock promo film while in full Ziggy garb. This reissue hit #15 in the US in 1973.

And in 1975, a slack year for pop music, RCA boosted its back catalog in the UK with its “Maximillion” series, repackaging singles by Elvis and reissuing “Space Oddity” backed with “Changes” and “Velvet Goldmine.” Whether it was due to a lack of chart competition, or whether the record had gone from being the voice of an ominous future to the sad, reassuring sound of a lost past, “Space Oddity” at last hit #1 in the UK.

Epilogue

Space Oddity (Langley Schools Music Project version, 1976).

The record’s one real insight: “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”—the idea that near-space exploration is not a frontier but instead the limit of human endeavour, revealing nothing so much as impotence.

Tom Ewing, Popular entry on “Space Oddity”.

Once during the mission I was asked by ground control what I could see. “What do I see?” I replied. “Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.”

Vitali Sevastyanov, USSR cosmonaut, Soyuz 9, Soyuz 18.

When I originally wrote about Major Tom, I was a very pragmatic and self-opinionated lad that thought he knew all about the great American dream and where it started and where it should stop. Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space, but once he gets there he’s not quite sure why he’s there. And that’s where I left him.

David Bowie, interview with NME, 1980.

Bowie cut a new version of “Space Oddity” in late 1979, which he debuted on Kenny Everett’s New Years Eve Show; in it, he sheared the song down to its skin—just Bowie’s harrowed voice, acoustic guitar, basic accompaniment and, in place of the liftoff sequence, 12 seconds of silence. He performed the song with an intensity it had never had before, and soon afterward, he decided to exhume Major Tom and see what had become of him (but that’s a tale for later).

“Space Oddity” is forty years old, and listening to it now it seems prematurely but accurately mournful. Few at the time of its birth, not even its creator, could have imagined that after the moonshots, the American space program would decline into irrelevance, waste and pointlessness; that the year 2001 would not be marked by lunar bases and a Jupiter mission, but the barbaric destruction of NYC skyscrapers and fresh, endless war; that in 2009 mankind would have gone no further into space than it had when “Space Oddity” first charted.

Major Tom’s fate is a resignation of sorts to the cosmos—Bowie had intended it to be the technocratic American mind coming face to face with the unknown and blanking out—but the song wound up being a harbinger of our cultural resignation, predicting that we would eventually lose our nerve, give up on the dream, and sink back into the depths of the old world. Perhaps we aren’t built for transcendence, and the sky sadly is the limit. Or as the song goes, “planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”

Photos (top to bottom): Neil Armstrong, en route to the moon, July 1969; Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) meets fate, and the last spacewalk of Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968; the original Philips single, BF 1801; Bowie’s 1969 self-titled LP, later renamed after its hit single; a spacesuit-clad Bowie demonstrates the Stylophone to the world; Dutch single, 1969.

I was listening to the Dave Matthews Band’s new album “Big Whiskey and the Groo Grux King” recently and noticed that one of the songs is called “Spaceman.” Hey, that’s the title of a song on The Killers’ “Day & Age,” I thought.

As these sorts of things are wont to do, pretty soon this observation led to the idea of imagining a space-themed album. I started jotting down the space-themed songs I was aware of, coming up with seven.

I talked to my brother a few minutes ago. He hosts a radio show on a college radio station and tends to like to theme his shows. I asked him if he knew any space-themed songs and got him hooked on finding songs for me. He rattled off a bunch, including many I hadn’t heard of, and one that should have been totally obvious to me.

He suggested I do some research on allmusic.com, which I did, plus I googled “songs about space.” Turns out there’s been quite a bit of work done on listing space-themed songs. An especially good list is at HobbySpace.com.

Here’s my list for an album I’d call “Out of This World”:

1. “Space Oddity” by David Bowie

2. “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling

3. “Spaceman” by The Killers

4. “Spaceman” by Dave Matthews Band (the Spaceman only gets a mention)

5. “Satellite” by Dave Matthews Band

6. “Astronaut Dreams” by Peter Mayer

7. “Camping by the Sun” by Peter Mayer

8. “One More Circle” by Peter Mayer

9. “Planet Earth” by Duran Duran (This is the song that should have been obvious to me ’cause I was a Duranie in my youth.)

10. “Rocket Man” by Elton John

11. “Interplanet Janet” by Lynn Ahrens (Schoolhouse Rock rocks!)

12. “Rapture” by Blondie

Got any favorite space-themed songs you’d add to this album? (It could be a multiple disc set, you know.)

I’m pretty fond of this video:

It definitely plays to the strengths of the iPhone. Mainly, the device allows for some wicked shaking and swaying.

You might find it odd that I am writing about Shane West and David Bowie in the same post. Their fame levels and target audience might seem different but they fit the criteria of the post and I guess there can be people who know and like them both, since I’m one of them.

DAVID BOWIE

David Bowie during his Space Oddity days

David Bowie is a cult musician. His songs are featured in over 200 films. His first album was released in 1967 so it is safe to say he has been around for over 4 decades now. His music is influential and his songs have been sung by other artists, such as Nirvana. Given Nirvana is probably the most popular grunge band and Bowie’s unique rock/pop sound has influenced them also, it becomes quite clear he is a universal idol. Do I like all his songs? No. They are all so different from each other. But there is a Bowie song to be found to suit all your moods and a Bowie picture to fit any kind of fashion statement; from contemporary to glam and flamboyant. But Bowie’s artistic talent is not limited to singing and song writing. He has also appeared in many films. I last saw him in the 2006 movie The Prestige, playing the role of Nikola Tesla. He has also appeared in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), The Hunger (1983), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Basquiat (1996); in addition to many other film and TV appearances. He has even played Andy Warhol, the leading man of the pop art movement. Sure, his acting might be critically praised but his name will probably never be mentioned as one of the most influential actors. But to this day, he remains as a musical icon. Below is The Hunger movie poster.

The Hunger

SHANE  WEST

Shane West as Landon in A Walk to Remember

Shane West is a young and promising actor. He is singing and playing the guitar for the band Jonny Was. Now, Shane isn’t insanely famous neither as a musician nor an actor, but he is building a strong movie resume bit by bit. He is only 31, and he has a bit of a baby face that gives him the advantage to play younger parts if he wants to. He totally passed for a high schooler in A Walk to Remember, at the age of 24. He has gotten to play Tom Sawyer alongside Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and he has scored one of the major roles in the long-running hospital drama ER. He has played in Echelon Conspiracy – an action movie that has quite a clever script, which is not so easy to find nowadays. This year he has starred in The Lodger, a high-paced thriller. So he has proved that he can undertake many different characters, and not just a romantic sweetheart, like he did in A Walk to Remember. Shane has a long way to go as an actor but things have been promising so far.

As for his band, I am not sure how many of his fans are just from the music scene only. I really enjoyed A Walk to Remember, an adaption of the best-selling Nicholas Sparks novel. The movie’s soundtrack was quite good, despite some of the songs were sung by Mandy Moore. Which reminds me she does act and sing, but her music is too standard pop for my taste. This soundtrack, however also contains a song by Shane’s band, known as Average Jo back then. It is modern rock with some punk energy in it and it is fun. Nothing you haven’t heard of before but it is the stuff I’d like to hear when I’m out with my friends and just want to dance and have a good time. And Shane’s movies are good for pure entertainment.

Shane is right in the middle, posing with his band Jonny Was

Il prossimo brano che vi consiglio risale al lontano 1969. Quello fu l’anno in cui l’uomo andò sulla luna (senza considerare varie tesi che escludono quest’evento), e l’anno in cui David Bowie pubblicò il suo singolo più venduto in tutto il  Regno Unito. E’ il periodo della creazione del fantastico personaggio Major Tom. Avete capito di quale canzone parlo? Proprio quella, Space Oddity, di David Bowie!

This is what happens when I start the weekend listening to Bowie.

 DOGFLIGHT – THE ARRIVAL

DOGFLIGHT - THE ARRIVAL, LitterART 2009 ©

“Here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.”

-

Space Oddity, David Bowie, 1969

<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o” rel=”nofollow”>www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o</a>

Actors: Barbara, our dog Fly, our Landy and our extraterrestrial guest “Spunky”, who invited us all together to a magnificant flight into the outer space

By LitterART, 03/10/2009 ©

I have an itchy jaw at the moment. Well, not so much the jaw as the skin covering the jaw. I wonder if it’s an allergic reaction to yesterday’s sunshine; I showed more pasty flesh yesterday than my bath tub has seen in a month. Perhaps itchy jaws are an evolutionary throwback, if you believe in evolution. And why are monkeys not called monkies but are sometimes called Monkees? I enjoyed yesterday’s weather despite it making me homesick for South Africa in a way I usually only get when I’ve run out of money. Autumn is here but we haven’t had a summer – again. I think at least the last four summers have been wet. The Government keeps promising us global warming but there’s no sign of it in Stockport. Do you know: I accidentally left the ‘w’ off ‘global warming’ – think it was a Freudian slip? I took advantage of the glorious weather and washed everything in the house. Unfortunately, this led to a little contretemps with a renegade spider group on the washing line, who, resisting the opportunity to claim asylum indoors (our house is a spider retirement home; not because I never dust, but because the Hub refuses to kill them), made a web on every peg and had enough lunch stored to keep them sated for three months. Not any more…one bowl of washing-up liquid and some disinfectant later, the line is clean, the pegs are clean and the spiders are dead. I confessed to the Hub straight away i.e. when I had plucked up the courage; he was asleep at the time so I think I got away with it.

Some of you might have found that paragraph a little odd. This is because I am a little odd. I know this for a fact because a good friend recently said to me, ‘You know you are a little odd, don’t you?’ Not wanting to appear odd, I replied, ‘Yes.’ This is not the first time my oddity has been remarked upon – sidebar: wouldn’t it be great if Springwatch was set in space and it was hosted by Bill Oddiety? I hear that some people wish that was where grumpy Bill was going. Hard to believe he was ever a Goodie.

Where was I? Oh, yes, being odd. A hippyish friend of mine once asked of me, ‘Am I eccentric?’ Wanting to reassure her, I said, ‘No.’ Feeling obliged to reciprocate, I asked, ‘Am I eccentric?’ Wanting to reassure me, she replied, ‘Yes.’ Both of us were disappointed that day. I think truly odd people don’t know they are odd. This complicates matters, because non-odd people also believe they are not odd. Everyone in the world therefore goes around thinking they are completely normal, and we all know that ain’t the case. I once met a really eccentric woman: I was chatting on a street corner with a friend when this woman accosted us, telling us that she was only joking but a chauvinist idiot said it to her and she thought it was quite amusing so she was saying it to us which was didn’t we have any housework to do not that she was doing hers right now because she was going to Marks and Spencer for a blouse that was costing her £25 which was a lot more than she spent in the charity shops but the husband said she should have it and she was a born-again Christian but she was going to a new church that was really nice because the minister at the last one had said she really oughtn’t to have anything to do with sinners like that evil witch walking further up the street who said the husband was interfering with underage boys and chance would be a fine thing because everyone knew he was impotent and she was a Christian and when people talk about getting down on the rug she wouldn’t mind some of that and it wasn’t like that in New Zealand where she went to a lovely church with her son and we mustn’t mind the Oil of Olay on her face because it was for her public and she didn’t mind lovely people like us knowing her business not like that one on the end of the street but she had a new job with Avon and it was such a comfort because her parents both died in Stepping Hill Hospital and the father was black when he sat up and she had to close his eyes because no-one was around but we mustn’t keep her any longer because she was going to get that blouse…
…and so much more that I wish I could remember, because it was hilarious.

I didn’t take in everything she was saying at first because I was mesmerised by the cream plastering her face and low cut chest; her coarse beard; and the broken red veins covering her cheeks, delightfully complemented by the mascara that was on every part of her eyes except her eyelashes. I had to bite my lip, my tongue and the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing, and I have to admit that when she finally moved on, my friend and I fell around the corner so she couldn’t hear us, laughing so hard I was forced to change my clean jeans when I got home. My friend knew – and avoided – her but she knew it was my first encounter by the wondering bafflement and suppressed hysteria that was flitting across my face as she was talking.

I discovered some information about my Creamed Lady: her name is Hazel and she is well-known and well-avoided around these here parts. It’s a shame that the British seem to have lost their sense of humour about odd people; we used to embrace eccentricity. Perhaps she could start a support group? The Eccentric Community, or EC. Motto: We’re Always in a State. She could be the first to stand up and say, ‘My name is Hazel. I am a nut.’

They say we shouldn’t mock the afflicted, but sometimes the afflicted are begging for it, aren’t they? She obviously didn’t know that she was not what most of us would call ‘normal.’ But who is? If you think I am being cruel, you have to remember that I have no claim on normality myself. At school I was known as Holy Moses because of my church-going propensities; I thought Prince Charles was onto a good thing when he admitted talking to plants; I am married to a man who believes spiders are not the enemy; my eldest child is a geek; my youngest child once lived in a cardboard box. I always tell my children that if we have to affirm that we are something (odd/weird/clever/brilliant) then we are definitely not that something. Therefore, I affirm it: I am odd.

Now let’s have a look at the lyrics – from Joey Tempest’s point of view.

While I was listening to the interview on TV after the gig in “Spodek” Joey said, more or less ” I have written the lyrics in my parents’ kitchen when I visited them one day”. From Wikipedia we can also learn that the leader of Europe was inspired by David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity“.

Yet this blog is aimed to find other inspirations and interpretations. I myself have and had in the past at least 3, they were changing as my life was changing.

The Final Countdown is about movement to something better and progress, just get into the ship as the final countdown has started. That is the example of one outlined interpretation.

Space Oddity

Para celebrar os 40 anos de seu lançamento original, ‘Space Oddity’ , álbum de David Bowie que foi lançado em 1969, mas só ficou famoso em 1972, ganhará uma nova versão.

A nova versão do clássico álbum foi remasterizada das fitas originais e ainda ganhará material extra. Além do disco, o lançamento também terá um CD bônus com raridades, lados B e algum material inédito. A previsão é de que esta nova prensagem de Space Oddity seja lançada em outubro em CD, vinil e em formato digital.

Notícia do Gigwise.

Emo é coisa velha não é? Na década de 70 David Bowie já fazia isso

- Hulde aan de grootste gitaarbouwer of all times! Les Paul is gisteren overleden op 94-jarige leeftijd door een longontsteking. Ik heb dan wel geen LP, maar toch zal ik vandaag ter ere van hem gitaar spelen! Slash, Joe Satrini en waarschijnlijk élke gitarist, is ook in de rouw.

- Heel erg Willie Wonka-achtig: de Arctic Monkeys (ja, die weer) hebben in twee hoesjes van hun 7″ single Crying lightning tickets verstopt voor Reading & Leeds Festivals. Ook maken veertig Britse kopers kans om een gesigneerde versie te hebben. De opbrengst van de singles is ten voordele van Oxfam.

- Gang of Four gaan in Engeland enkele optredens geven om het 30-jarig bestaan van hun debuut ‘Entertainment!’ te vieren.

- Ook David Bowie geeft een feestje! ‘Space Oddity’ is veertig jaar geleden gereleased. Een verjaardagseditie komt uit in oktober en zal demo’s, onbekende tracks, e.d. bevatten.

- Eind oktober komt de nieuwe plaat van Weezer uit, de rest is nog geheim.

- Gelukkig doen The Raveonettes minder mysterieus: hun volgende album gaat ‘In and out of control’ heten, komt begin oktober uit (boeiende maand blijkbaar!) en zal veel poppier klinken dan Lust Lust Lust uit 2007.

- Er zou een nieuwe song van Radiohead gelekt zijn, ‘These are my twisted words’ genaamd.  Je kan hem hier vinden.

- In Londen kwam Ronnie Wood van The Rolling Stones gezellig meedoen met de mannen van Pearl Jam. De nieuwe single van Pearl Jam ’The fixer’ uit hun komende album ‘Backspacer’ vind ik trouwens een goed schijfje.

- In september zou het solowerk ‘The phrazes for the young’ van Julian Casablancas (The Strokes’ zanger) moeten uitkomen. Hij is van plan van zijn optredens shows te maken in alle betekenissen van het woord.

- Het is er! Muziek van Them Crooked Vultures! 14 seconden heerlijke muziek! En beeldbewijs!

(foto afkomstig van www.themcrookedvultures.com)