“Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie

"Ashes to Ashes" led the way for Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), David Bowie's 14th album, in 1980, and it drags an old friend out of the attic: Major Tom, the astronaut of 1969's "Space Oddity", now hooked on drugs and drifting alone in space. Bowie drew partly on his own struggles with addiction through the 1970s, which gives the whole thing a real chill.

He produced it with Tony Visconti across New York and London between February and April 1980, and the sound is as off-kilter as the story. A flanged piano riff (Roy Bittan's on the keys) wobbles at the center, Chuck Hammer's guitar synthesizer smears color over everything, Andy Clark adds Minimoog, and Carlos Alomar, George Murray and Dennis Davis keep a queasy funk moving underneath. It's art rock, new wave and pop at once, and it never quite resolves.

It gave Bowie his second number one in Britain and his fastest-selling single. The video, co-directed with David Mallet, was the most expensive ever made at the time: solarized color, Bowie as Pierrot, astronaut and asylum inmate, and cameos from four members of London's Blitz club crowd, among them Steve Strange. The New Romantics took notes.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.