I’ve Never Done Anything Out of The Blue...’
BY THE END OF THE 1970s, Major Tom had been ‘sitting in a tin can’ for 10 years, his circuits all but dead. Meanwhile, back at ground control, his alter-ego had turned into a succession of slightly more terrestrial sorts: Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke.
Then, just when it seemed that everyone’s favourite
rock’n’roll astronaut would remain marooned in space for ever, he re-entered orbit. First there was the stark ’79 remake of Space Oddity. Next, the following year, came Ashes To Ashes, the hypnotic and funky update and centrepiece of ‘Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)’. Not only did both song and album carry David Bowie back to the top of the charts, establishing his 80s artistic reputation, it also served as a powerful look back that mourned, mocked and sampled his own mythology.
“Scary Monsters always felt like some kind of purge,” Bowie told me in 2003. “You think: ‘How do you distance yourself from the thing that you’re within?’ I felt I was on the cusp of something absolutely new. There were no absolutes. Nothing was necessarily true, but everything was true. It was this sense of: ‘Wow, you can borrow the luggage of the past, you can amalgamate it with things that you’ve conceived that could be in the future and you can set it in the now.’ ”
If that seems like a heady vision for an album, there was some precedent.
“David and I had a running joke,” says producer Tony Visconti.
