The Bowie Project #2 - David Bowie aka Space Oddity aka Man of Words/Man of Music (1969)
Many call this the first true David Bowie album. After the commercial failure of his first record two years earlier (also called David Bowie), the future Ziggy Stardust sought to reinvent himself and shed his jaunty music hall vaudeville past, and what better way to erase everyone’s memory of the first album than by giving the next one the exact same name?
The origins
of this album begin with the promotional movie Love You till Tuesday which Kenneth Pitt, Bowie’s new manager, hoped would showcase his talents and
introduce him to a larger audience. The film ended up being shelved and was not
released until 1984 when it finally appeared on VHS. The half-hour promo was
originally planned to include seven previously released Bowie songs and one
mime performance, but before shooting began Bowie wrote a new song for the film
– “Space Oddity”.
The track’s
title and subject matter were influenced by the Stanley Kubrick movie 2001:A Space Odyssey, and it would go on to become one of Bowie’s signature songs
and his first hit single. After a string of flops, it seemed like everything
came together at just the right time, released one week before the Apollo 11 mission
became the first manned Moon landing, people had space on their mind and the
song hit all the right notes. The psychedelic folk song features Bowie’s first
significant character, Major Tom, and tells the story of a man adrift in space,
losing contact with the ground control centre, destined to die. The pessimistic
tone of the track was inspired by Bowie’s recent break up with his girlfriend, Hermione
Farthingale, who also inspired other songs on this album and is allegedly “the
girl with the mousy hair” featured in Bowie’s later hit “Life on Mars”. The bleak sense of
hopelessness we experience for Major Tom may have also been reminiscent of how
Bowie was feeling at the time, after so many false starts and little success in
the music industry he too was a man adrift, incredibly creative with a whole
musical universe to explore but no one seems interested.
Luckily,
that all changes after the song is released and it goes to number five in the
UK singles charts. Bowie performs the song on Top of the Pops and gets
ready to release his second album. This record drops the music hall sound of his
debut and moves more firmly into psychedelic rock territory. The album opens
with “Space Oddity” and for a lot of people that’s all they listen to but there’s
more going on here, and even if Bowie still hasn’t quite come into his own yet,
it does have its moments. I think the issue with this album is the same problem
as his debut, Bowie is still unsure as to what kind of artist he wants to be,
or what direction he wants to take himself in, it feels unfocused and at times unfortunately
a little boring.
The album
then leads into “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” which clocks in at over
six minutes and really does overstay its welcome. It’s a perfectly acceptable
song but without anything too interesting going on. However, it does hold the
honour of being the first released Bowie song produced by Tony Visconti, a
working relationship that would continue right up until the release of Bowie’s
final album Blackstar.
Following
this is “Letter to Hermione” which for me is a major highlight of the album. A
simple folk song, it lays bare Bowie’s feeling of loss and sorrow at the end of
his relationship. It’s sad, it’s sentimental, and it feels so raw, just a young
man going through a major heartbreak who just needs to let it all out. Bowie
later said of the track:
That’s me in a maudlin or romantic mood. I’d written her a letter, and then decided not to post it. ‘Letter To Hermione’ is what I wished I’d said. I was in love with her, and it took me months to get over it. She walked out on me, and I suppose that was what hurt as much as anything else, that feeling of rejection.
Finishing side one is “Cygnet Committee” an almost ten minute dystopian narrative
that would feed into a lot of the themes that Bowie would more expertly explore in his later
works. The song concerns a post-revolutionary world that has failed to bring utopia.
Bowie was inspired by his dissatisfaction with the countercultural movement of
the late 1960s, people saying they want revolution but not working together,
because without communication all that revolution will get you is civil war. The
song is good, and lyrically Bowie’s just getting better and better, but it’s
missing something, and it just feels a little forgettable. This ambitious song
would be Bowie’s longest studio recording until the title track of 1976’s Station to Station.
Side two
opens with the upbeat “Janine” and it’s surely needed because things were
starting to feel a little bit too slow. Written about the girlfriend of Bowie’s
school friend and bandmate George Underwood. It’s catchy and gives the album a much-needed
boost in energy.
“An Occasional Dream” is another tune about Bowie’s former lover Hermione Farthingale.
It’s a song about reminiscing and that strange transitional phase before you can
fully move on from an old relationship. These love songs show Bowie as a
sentimental and self-reflective person, and being released in a time before he
began to adopt different personas and characters, they give us a real sense of
him before the walls of mystery have been built.
Next up is
the B-side to “Space Oddity”, it’s called “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud”, a beautiful
song about a boy who falls in love with a mountain, the villagers think he’s
mad and are determined to kill him, but the mountain protects the boy and kills
the villagers. The song deals with many of the themes he would return to again
and again: alienation, persecution, mortality and madness. Bowie himself said
of the track:
It was about the disassociated, the ones who feel as though they're left outside, which was how I felt about me. I always felt I was on the edge of events, the fringe of things, and left out. A lot of my characters in those early years seem to revolve around that feeling. It must have come from my own interior puzzlement at where I was.
“God Knows I’m Good” is about an elderly woman who gets caught shoplifting. The song
overall isn’t too interesting, but its lyrics do highlight Bowie’s emerging
interest in the negative effects of communication becoming dominated by
machines with lines like “a cash machine was spitting on my shoulder”. The powerful role of technology was
something he would continue to be fascinated with his entire life going so far
as to set up his own internet provider BowieNet in 1998, well before most
people had seen the massive potential of the internet.
The album closes with “Memory of a Free Festival” which was inspired by the Growth Summer Festival which took place on August 16th, 1969. The event was a huge success with about 3000 people attending at a time when the idea of a music festival of that scale was still quite new. The seven-minute track was split into two parts for the single release and its optimistic themes on the power of music, community, and free love stands in opposition to a lot of the other material on the LP. The track feels like it’s intended as an anthem for the possibilities of the hippie movement but sadly it’s nowhere near catchy or profound enough to have a lasting impact.
Overall, David
Bowie/Space Oddity is a solid enough album. Lyrically most of the tracks
are interesting and ambitious, but musically there’s nothing here that makes it stand
out from any other psychedelic folk album of the time. It’s mostly interesting because
of the artist Bowie would become, to read into the songs and see how their
themes and content relate to his later work adds layers to understanding his
progression as an artist. There’s nothing particularly bad about any of the
tracks but I just know that if I wanted to sit back and listen to a David Bowie
album I’ve got a wealth of incredible material to choose from, and it might be
a while before I get back around to this one.
David Bowie
(1969) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (6/10)
Bonus Track: "Conversation Piece"
While not on this album this track was recorded around the same time and I would say it's a good contended for one of Bowie's most underrated and little know songs. The soul searching lyrics line up with a lot of the more sentimental material on this record and I think it's a quietly beautiful song.
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