"Ashes to Ashes" is a song by the English musician David Bowie from his 14th studio album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). Co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti, it was recorded from February to April 1980 in New York and London and features guitar synthesiser played by Chuck Hammer. "Ashes to Ashes" is an art rock, art pop and new wave song led by a flanged piano riff, and its lyrics act as a sequel to Bowie's 1969 hit "Space Oddity": the astronaut Major Tom has succumbed to drug addiction and floats isolated in space. Bowie partially based the lyrics on his own experiences with drug addiction throughout the 1970s.

Released as the album's lead single on 1 August 1980, "Ashes to Ashes" became Bowie's second No. 1 single on the UK singles chart and his fastest-selling single. The song's music video, co-directed by Bowie and David Mallet, was at the time the most expensive music video ever made. Featuring heavy use of solarised colour, the video presents Bowie as Pierrot, an astronaut and an asylum inmate, each representing variations on the song's theme, and includes appearances from four members of London's Blitz club, including the singer Steve Strange. Influential on the rising New Romantic movement, commentators have considered it one of Bowie's best videos and among the best music videos of all time.

Bowie performed the song only once during 1980 but frequently during his later concert tours. Initially viewed with mixed critical reactions, later reviewers and biographers have considered it one of Bowie's finest songs, particularly praising its unique musical structure. In subsequent decades, the song has appeared on various compilation albums and other artists have covered, sampled or used its musical elements for their own songs. A 2008 BBC television series was later named after it.

Writing and recording Backing tracks

The sessions for David Bowie's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) commenced at the Power Station in New York City in February 1980, with production handled by Bowie and his longtime collaborator Tony Visconti. The backing track for "Ashes to Ashes" was recorded under the working title "People Are Turning to Gold". The core backing band, as on Bowie's previous four albums, consisted of Carlos Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass and Dennis Davis on drums. Roy Bittan, a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band (who were recording The River in the adjacent studio), contributed piano while the session musician Chuck Hammer played guitar synthesiser. Hammer, who dubbed his work "guitarchitecture", had formerly toured with Lou Reed and was hired by Bowie after he sent tapes of his work to him. Visconti stated that Hammer "would pick a note and out of his amplifier would come a symphonic string section".

For their parts, Alomar played "opaque reggae" and Murray played a funk bassline using a mixture of fingerstyle and slapping. Davis initially struggled with the ska-influenced drumbeat. Bowie played the beat he envisioned for the drummer on a chair and cardboard box, which Davis studied and learned, recording the final take the next day. The beat was reportedly inspired by Madness' "My Girl", which had been released a few months prior. Although desiring a Wurlitzer electronic piano to tape Bittan's piano part, Visconti ran a grand piano through an Eventide Instant Flanger to imitate the sound of one upon learning the real Wurlitzer would take too long to deliver. For his parts, Hammer layered four multi-track guitar textures, each given different treatments through the Eventide Harmonizer, which were recorded in the studio's back stairwell to add reverberation. According to the biographer Chris O'Leary, he played "various chord inversions for each chorus section", although Visconti said that "it's the warm string choir you hear on the part that goes, 'I've never done good things, I've never done bad things...

Vocals and overdubs The backing tracks were recorded without lyrics or melodies pre-written. Unlike his recent Berlin Trilogy, wherein Bowie wrote lyrics almost immediately after the backing tracks were finished, he wanted to take time writing melodies and lyrics for the Scary Monsters songs. Feeling nostalgic, he had the idea of writing a sequel to his first hit "Space Oddity" (1969), a tale about a fictional astronaut named Major Tom, after re-recording the song in 1979 for The "Will Kenny Everett Make It to 1980?" Show. Bowie stated in 1980:

Reconvening in April 1980 at Visconti's own Good Earth Studios in London, Bowie and Visconti recorded the vocal tracks and additional overdubs for the now-titled "Ashes to Ashes". According to the author Peter Doggett, Bowie originally sang "ashes to ashes" as "ashes to ash" and "funk to funky" as "fun to funky" before settling on the final lines. For overdubs, Visconti added additional percussion and contributions from the session keyboardist Andy Clark, who had been introduced to Visconti by the Kenny Everett Show "Space Oddity" drummer Andy Duncan. According to the biographer Nicholas Pegg, Clark "provided the symphonic sounds" that end the song, while O'Leary says his parts are "a high pitch in the chorus". Upon finishing the track, Visconti recalled: "We love[d] it immensely and knew it was one of the major tracks."

Composition Music

Characterised by commentators as art rock, art pop and new wave; Pegg describes "Ashes to Ashes" a culmination of Bowie's late 1970s experimental period. With a funk rhythm, a guitar synth-led sound and complex vocal layering, the author James E. Perone considers it the most musically accessible song on Scary Monsters and on any Bowie album in several years. The author likens Murray's funky bass playing to the "plastic soul" of Bowie's Young Americans (1975) and Station to Station (1976).

The song's musical structure is unusual, which Perone argues made it stand out in pop music at the time. The main piano riff is a three-bar loop, rather than the more common four-bar loop:

The vocal melody also matches the piano riff through its use of contrasting beats, such as "funk" on the downbeat and "fun-ky" on the off-beat. Visconti called the beat "a mind-bender". Additionally, the vocal melody features contrasting phrasing, meaning the verses consist of unrelated sections, singing through bars ("Major To-om's"), key changes, large vocal register changes and contrasting singing styles. O'Leary comments: "It's as if the conductor of an orchestra is also the lead tenor."

"Ashes to Ashes" takes melodic inspiration from the song "Inchworm" by Danny Kaye, who was one of Bowie's earliest influences. Originating from the 1952 musical film Hans Christian Andersen, Bowie stated in 2003 that the song's chords were some of the first he learned on guitar, calling them "remarkable" and "melancholic": Ashes to Ashes' is influenced by that. It's childlike and melancholic in that children's story way." Like "Inchworm", "Ashes to Ashes" contains moves from F to E-flat to close out verses. The song itself is in the key of A-flat major, with the intro and outro featuring "intrusions" of B-flat minor. O'Leary refers to the two bridges as a "series of arcs", as Bowie starts low in his register, rising to high and descending back to low in the same breath. The second verse features dead-pan backing vocals "delay-echoing" the lead vocal.

Lyrics

Melancholic and introspective, the song's lyrics act as a sequel to "Space Oddity", which ends with Major Tom alone floating out in space. Eleven years after liftoff, Ground Control receives a message from Major Tom, who has succumbed to drug addiction and increased paranoia following his abandonment to space: "Strung out in heaven's high / hitting an all-time low." Ground Control are not keen on the astronaut's reappearance – "Oh no, don't say it's true" – and pretend that he is fine, in Doggett's words, mimicking "government agencies everywhere". The astronaut reflects on his life and hopes for the future and wishes he could break free from his "caged psyche". His pleas are disregarded by the public, leading him to proclaim that he has "never done good things", has "never done bad things" and "never did anything out of the blue". The song ends with the nursery rhyme lines: "My mother said / to get things done / you'd better not mess with Major Tom."

Described by the artist as "a story of corruption", Bowie wanted to see where Major Tom ended up in the 1970s:

Regarding the song's drug references, Bowie joked about getting the word "junkie" past the BBC's censors in an interview with NME in September 1980. Comparing "Space Oddity" with "Ashes to Ashes", NPR's Jason Heller evaluated the latter's technological undertones compared to the "psychedelically spacious" former. The writer Tom Ewing wrote that it was as if "Major Tom thought he was starring in an Arthur C. Clarke story and found himself in a Philip K. Dick one by mistake, and the result is oddly magnificent".

Analysis Reviewers have interpreted "Ashes to Ashes" as commentary on Bowie's own personal struggles with drug addiction throughout the 1970s. Several said that the song represents Bowie's reflection and acknowledgement of the past, at the same time offering hopes for the future. Bowie himself said that the Scary Monsters album was an attempt to "accommodate" his "pasts", as "you have to understand why you went through them". The lyrics describe Major Tom as a junkie who has hit "an all-time low". The NME editors Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray interpreted the line as a play on the title of Bowie's 1977 album Low, which charted his withdrawal inwards following his drug excesses in the United States a short time before, another reversal of Major Tom's original withdrawal "outwards" or towards space.

The biographer David Buckley argues that Bowie offered a comment on his entire career "using a rather sarcastic piece of self-deprecation" with the line: "I've never done good things / I've never done bad things / I never did anything out of the blue." Bowie said that these three lines "represent a continuing, returning feeling of inadequacy over what I've done". On the artist's future, Buckley interprets the axe line ("Want an axe to break the ice / Wanna come down right now") as his desire to move into less experimental territory and more "normalised" ground. Years later, Bowie said, "I was wrapping up the seventies really for myself, and that seemed a good enough epitaph for it – that we've lost him, he's out there somewhere, we'll leave him be." Heller agreed, arguing that it provided closure for the artist's "most momentous decade".

Release "Ashes to Ashes" was released in edited form as the lead single from Scary Monsters on 1 August 1980, with the Lodger track "Move On" (1979) as the B-side. RCA Records emphasised the relationship of "Space Oddity" and "Ashes to Ashes" by releasing a nine-minute promo on 12″ vinyl in the US titled "The Continuing Story of Major Tom", which segued the former into the latter. The British single came in three different picture sleeves, each packaged with four different sheets of adhesive stamps, all featuring Bowie in his Pierrot costume from the music video; Pegg says this was RCA adopting "the craze for limited-edition collectables" that pervaded the 7″ single market at the time. On Scary Monsters, released on 12 September, "Ashes to Ashes" was sequenced in its full-length form as the fourth track on side one of the original LP, between the title track and "Fashion".

Commercial performance After years of dwindling commercial fortunes, "Ashes to Ashes" was a return to commercial success for Bowie. Debuting at No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart, the single secured the top spot from ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All" a week later following the music video's broadcast on Top of the Pops. It became Bowie's fastest-selling single up to that point and his second number one single following the 1975 reissue of "Space Oddity".