Do you remember a guy…
25 years ago, on August 1st 1980, David Bowie released the single that was to become his first legitimate UK number one hit with a new release…a mere sixteen years since his first release with Liza Jane and five years after the re-issued Space Oddity 45 which was his first actual UK number one.
The success of Ashes To Ashes, the first single from the forthcoming Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album, proved just what a good luck charm Major Tom was…despite the maternal warning at the song’s fade out.
Though Ashes To Ashes instantly became one of Bowie’s best-loved songs among long-term fans and recent converts alike, sales of the 45 certainly weren’t hampered by the issue of three different picture sleeves (above) each of which could have contained any one of four sheets of nine Bowie-designed stamps (below)…thereby creating a dozen permutations for the serious collector to seek out. (It wasn’t easy…believe me!)
The single was backed by Move On from the previous album, (the criminally underrated Lodger) in Europe, and America got an extra taste of things to come with It’s No Game as the flip.
The promotion of Ashes To Ashes will also be remembered for the ground-breaking and quite brilliant accompanying Bowie/Mallet-produced video, which featured DB in full Pierrot costume along with wonderfully dreamlike sequences featuring many of the major players of the fledgling New Romantic movement that was distressing parents all across the UK.
When informed of the single’s success via a Trans-Atlantic telephone conversation with BBC Radio 1’s Andrew Turner, David responded thus: “I see that as very exciting, what can I say? I?m very surprised. God bless the English public is what I say!”
25 years? I remember it like it was the day before yesterday. Where does the time go?