Space Oddity

• 1. Five Days Before the Moon

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  "Space Oddity" reached British airwaves on the 11th of July, 1969, exactly five days before Apollo 11 lifted off for the Moon. The BBC broadcast it as background music during live coverage of the lunar landing. Nobody at the corporation appears to have listened closely to the words. The song describes a fictional astronaut named Major Tom who loses contact with Earth and drifts alone toward his death. When BBC staff realized what they had been playing, they pulled the record until the Apollo 11 crew returned safely home. Bowie later said: "Of course, I was overjoyed that they did."

  That dark comedy of misunderstanding was just the beginning. The song spent years as a footnote, dismissed as a novelty tied to the Moon landing. A producer turned it down before it was even made, calling it a gimmick. It would outlast almost everything from the summer it appeared and eventually be performed somewhere no pop song had been performed before. The character of Major Tom, sitting in his "tin can, far above the world," would not stay confined to a single song. He followed his creator from 1969 all the way to Bowie's final album.

• 2. The Lonely Astronaut

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  By the end of 1968, David Bowie was running out of options. His music-hall debut album for Deram Records, released in 1967, had been a commercial failure. He departed Deram in May 1968, leaving him without a label for two years. His manager, Kenneth Pitt, authorized a promotional film called Love You till Tuesday in an attempt to build an audience. The film went unreleased until 1984; it marked the effective end of Pitt's mentorship.

  Pitt asked Bowie to write something new for the film, something that would "demonstrate David's remarkable inventiveness." Bowie had recently seen Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had premiered in May 1968. He later said he had gone to see it "stoned out of my mind." The film, he recalled, "really freaked me out, especially the trip passage." Two additional events shaped the song that followed. Bowie saw the Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph in January 1969. He ended his relationship with dancer Hermione Farthingale the following month. He later said it was Hermione who taught him to write "for and on a specific person." Biographer Marc Spitz argued the loneliness of that break-up was the emotional core of what Bowie wrote next.

  The song tells the story of Major Tom, who has already made the headlines but finds himself drifting and detached. In 1969, Bowie described Major Tom at the song's end as a man in total dissolution. "At the end of the song his mind is completely blown," he said. "He's everything then." Bowie compared that fate directly to the ending of 2001.

  The first person outside Bowie's immediate circle to hear the song was Calvin Mark Lee, head of A&R at Mercury Records in London. Lee called it "otherworldly" and believed it was Bowie's ticket to a deal. His boss, Lou Reizner, was unimpressed and refused to sign. Lee paid for a demo session himself, without Reizner's knowledge. He later recalled: "We had to do it all behind Lou's back. But it was such a good record." That demo session eventually brought Bowie a deal with Mercury and set the album recording in motion.

• 3. Five Hundred Pounds

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  Work on the album version of "Space Oddity" began at Trident Studios in London on the 20th of June, 1969. The session came about through a chain of refusals. Beatles producer George Martin had turned down the project. Tony Visconti, who was producing the rest of Bowie's second album, dismissed the single as "a novelty record" and "a gimmick to cash in on the moonshot" and declined to work on it. He passed the responsibility to engineer Gus Dudgeon. Dudgeon's reaction on hearing Bowie's demo was simply "unbelievable." He and Bowie planned "every detail" of what followed.

  Mercury Records had insisted the single reach shelves before the Apollo 11 Moon landing. At Visconti's suggestion, guitarist Mick Wayne and keyboardist Rick Wakeman joined the session. Composer Paul Buckmaster arranged an orchestra of eight violins, two violas, two cellos, two arco basses, two flutes, and an organ. He advised Bowie to focus on the overall sound rather than the narrative. Bassist Herbie Flowers and drummer Terry Cox of the folk band Pentangle completed the rhythm section.

  For the Stylophone, a compact electronic keyboard marketed mainly to children and recently put on the market, Bowie later credited Marc Bolan with the idea. He recalled Bolan telling him: "You like this kind of stuff, do something with it." A small accident during the session produced one of the recording's most distinctive sounds. Guitarist Mick Wayne thought he had finished a take and began retuning a string while the tape was still rolling. Dudgeon liked the warped, detuned effect and asked Wayne to repeat it.

  Wakeman recorded his Mellotron part in two takes after hearing the demo only once. He later recalled that the session made "the hair stand up on your neck" and that he knew immediately he was "involved in something special." The entire session cost £500; Dudgeon was paid £100 for producing the two songs. In June 2002, he filed a lawsuit against Bowie claiming he had not received the agreed two per cent in royalties. He sought a settlement of £1 million. Dudgeon died in a car accident the following month, and the suit ended without resolution. He had previously told the biographer David Buckley that he considered "Space Oddity" among the finest work of Bowie's career.

• 4. From Novelty to Number One

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  Penny Valentine of Disc and Music Echo predicted that "Space Oddity" was "going to knock back everyone senseless" and named it the magazine's record of the year. Melody Maker's Chris Welch described it as "beautifully written, sung and performed." In the US, Mercury's publicist Ron Oberman wrote to American journalists that it was "one of the greatest recordings I've ever heard." That letter may have cost the song its American audience. Oberman used the word "controversial," which caused US radio stations to ban it. The single reached only number 124 on the Billboard Hot 100.

  In the UK, "Space Oddity" entered the chart at number 48 in September 1969. Bowie's appearance on the BBC's Top of the Pops, broadcast on the 9th of October, changed its fortunes. By early November, the song had climbed to number five. On the 10th of May, 1970, Bowie accepted the Ivor Novello Award for Most Original Song. Despite that recognition, the album containing "Space Oddity" sold just over 5,000 copies by March 1970. Bowie did not have another hit until "Starman" in 1972.

  His commercial breakthrough that year with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars prompted RCA Records to reissue "Space Oddity." The North American reissue, released on the 13th of December, 1972, reached number 15 on the US Billboard Hot 100, making it Bowie's first American chart hit. Record World called it "a winner from liftoff to fade." RCA then released the song again in the UK on the 26th of September, 1975, as a maxi single with "Changes" and the then-unreleased 1972 outtake "Velvet Goldmine" as B-sides. The UK version reached number one in November, giving Bowie his first British chart-topper. In September 1979, Bowie re-recorded the song for a British television special at the suggestion of the show's director, David Mallet. He stripped it to just acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and piano.

• 5. Major Tom Returns

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  Bowie returned to Major Tom in 1980 with "Ashes to Ashes," from the album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). In the song, Ground Control still believes the astronaut is doing as well as he was ten years prior. Major Tom himself is described as a "junkie" who is "strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all time low." Critics and biographers read the lyric as Bowie confronting his own years of drug addiction in the 1970s. The floating astronaut served as a metaphor for his former self. The song's music video directly reused visual elements from the 1979 television performance of "Space Oddity."

  Major Tom surfaced again in 1996, in the Pet Shop Boys remix of Bowie's single "Hallo Spaceboy" from the album Outside. Pet Shop Boys member Neil Tennant told Bowie he planned to weave "Space Oddity"-related lines into the remix. Bowie was hesitant at first but agreed. The added lines read: "Ground to Major, bye-bye Tom / Dead the circuit, countdown's wrong."

  The final chapter of Major Tom's story may have been told in 2015. The music video for Bowie's single "Blackstar," directed by Johan Renck, runs ten minutes. It depicts a tailed woman discovering a dead astronaut and carrying his jewel-encrusted skull to an ancient, otherworldly town. Renck initially refused to confirm whether the dead astronaut was Major Tom. He later said on a BBC documentary that to him it was "100% Major Tom." The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2018.

• 6. Recorded in Orbit

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  In May 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded "Space Oddity" while commanding Expedition 35 to the International Space Station. The video he made became the first music video filmed in space. In it, Hadfield sang and played guitar while floating around the station. On Earth, producer Joe Corcoran handled the backing track, with a piano arrangement by multi-instrumentalist Emm Gryner, who had toured with Bowie during his 1999-2000 concert tours. Gryner later said she was "so proud to be a part of it."

  Hadfield modified the lyrics to reflect his own situation. Rather than losing contact with Ground Control and drifting to his death, his Major Tom receives landing orders and returns safely. The song also mentions the Soyuz spacecraft that carried Hadfield. He announced the video on his Twitter account, writing: "With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here's Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World." Bowie's social media team responded with a tweet of "Hallo Spaceboy..." and later called the cover "possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created."

  "Space Oddity" is the only Bowie song for which he did not own the copyright. His publisher granted Hadfield a one-year licence to the song. When the licence expired on the 13th of May, 2014, the official video was removed from YouTube, despite Bowie's explicit wish that the publisher grant Hadfield a licence at no charge. Following negotiations, the video was restored on the 2nd of November, 2014, under a two-year agreement. The biographer Nicholas Pegg described Hadfield's video as "breathtakingly beautiful and extraordinarily moving" and wrote that it offered a rare opportunity to deploy the word "awesome" with, in his words, "complete justification."