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David Bowie · S1 E7
Space Oddity
July 1969. The BBC plays his song about a doomed astronaut five days before the Apollo 11 launch. Major Tom floats into the void and David Bowie becomes a name
July 20, 1969. As Neil Armstrong's boot touches the surface of the moon, the BBC plays a song about an astronaut who never comes home, and the singer's name is David Bowie.
David Bowie, Space Oddity. Official music video. Major Tom sits in his tin can, far above the world, and Ground Control loses contact. Three years of empty rooms, rejected demos, and laughing gnomes led to this. The song that made David Bowie a name.
The Film That Started It
The idea arrives in a cinema. In late 1968, Bowie watches Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and walks out buzzing. The film's slow, hallucinatory depiction of isolation in space gives him the image he needs: an astronaut alone in a capsule, drifting away from everything he knows. He writes the song on a twelve-string acoustic guitar.
Trident Studios, Soho
17 St Anne's Court, Soho, London. The cramped studio where "Space Oddity" was recorded in June 1969. Trident was one of the first studios in Britain with an eight-track recorder, which is why The Beatles came here to record "Hey Jude" the year before.
“I thought it was a gimmick, capitalising on the moon shot. I said, "I'm not producing that. It's cheap." I was completely wrong.”
— Tony Visconti, in Visconti, Tony. "Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy." HarperCollins, 2007
TAP TO REVEAL: What three-pound instrument created the most iconic sound on "Space Oddity"?
Space Oddity, David Bowie (1969)
Recorded at Trident Studios with producer Gus Dudgeon, who stepped in after Tony Visconti refused the job. The production is remarkably sparse for such a dramatic song: acoustic guitar, Stylophone, a Mellotron for the eerie string textures, and Bowie's vocal shifting between the detached calm of Ground Control and the growing isolation of Major Tom. Dudgeon layers the stereo mix so that Ground Control comes from one speaker and Major Tom from the other, physically separating the two voices as they lose contact.
The Moon Landing
The BBC uses it as the soundtrack to their Apollo 11 moon landing coverage, a profoundly strange editorial choice: a song about an astronaut who dies in space, played over footage of an astronaut walking on the moon alive. The single reaches number 5 on the UK chart. After three years of gnomes, mime shows, and rejected demos, David Bowie finally has a hit.
Why did Tony Visconti, Bowie's longtime producer, refuse to produce "Space Oddity"?
Letter to Hermione, David Bowie
From the Space Oddity album (1969). While "Space Oddity" made Bowie famous, this track reveals what was happening behind the scenes: Hermione Farthingale, his girlfriend and creative partner, had left him to pursue dance. Just a voice, an acoustic guitar, and a man who sounds genuinely heartbroken. Behind the astronaut costume and the hit single, this is who David Bowie was in 1969.
"Space Oddity" proves David Bowie can write a hit, but one hit does not make a career. Everything changes when a guitarist from Hull named Mick Ronson walks into a rehearsal room, plugs in a Les Paul, and the 1970s begin.
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To be continued
Season 2: The Rise of Ziggy
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