Posted on December 30, 2010 - by Mark Zonda

Dittos from Outer Space: A David Bowie First Contact

You never forget the first time you get to listen to Bowie. It’s a brand new world disclosing to your eyes in wide screen and it brings along some odd and scary scenarios as well, just in case you’ve been too radical on your easy pop radiophonic listening.

“This man is REALLY brave”, that was my first thought while listening to my first Bowie song: a Space Oddity, of course. It wasn’t even the album version, but  one of the many alt takes from the German ‘4-3-2-1 Musik Für Junge Leute‘ special “Love you till Tuesday”. The obscure creepy countdown sequence with a distorted mellotron and the flutes and the violin parts between the space dialogue between Tom and Ground Controll were  fair enough to force me to start considering Bowie as the next divinity in my personal bedroom Olympus.

Life in the early ‘70s. What they were thinking about? I had no knowledge about that when I was a kid, and judging from the graffitis in my town and some old buildings I started to have my own retro-soundtrack for desperate drug addicted boys living their personal lives between anarchy, bubble gums,  punk and detention houses in a very gloomy dark town.

There were no MP3 when I started to listening to “Space Oddity”, not even the web and any related file sharing. But cassettes were really cheap at the times, and EMI started to release all Bowie’s catalogue two album a month in chronological sequence. After the distorted baroque performance of “Love you till Tuesday” I was quite disappointed by the whole album.

The thin blind freak started his drift over the sea to get in touch with his personal American odyssey, flower de-powering songs back to basic just with a 12 strings guitar and nothing more than a stylophon and occasional helps by the old time friend Tony Visconti, who always thought that “Space Oddity” was nothing but smart shit taking advantage on the popular power race for the space more than a transfigurated reflection on David leaving Hermione.

While “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” was one of the first songs I tried to cover even before writing my own stuff trying to make a puzzling‘80s synth-pop version of it with a Viscount keyboard and “Janine” hit the charts on “the most shared tunes for  friends mixapes”, the only two songs able to compete with the opening spaced track were definitely “God knows I’m good” and “Memory of a Free Festival”, the only effort by David not to compete on the melodic sterile  ground or Mr. Zimmerman’s stuff.

Lyrics and interpretation are somewhat out of this planet and really warped 10 years ahead of Ziggy O’Clock time, with a glimpse on what David real persona was meant to become. Tony showed the way.

U2 – “Space Oddity”
Belle & Sebastian – “Space Oddity”

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