‘It’s been a recurrent qualification of my work from the day I started writing,’ said David Bowie in 1994. ‘A very early example, I suppose, is “Space Oddity”. Bowie was talking here about spirituality. The song he cites may seem unlikely: it mentions no angels or demons; there are no references to ideas or practices from any religion; there is no clear pattern of redemption, no path towards enlightenment. Quite the opposite. The official line is that some-thing is wrong. There is a mention of God, but only in passing, in platitude, perhaps in vain.
Yet ‘Space Oddity’ is integral to Bowie’s spiritual quest. Perhaps it is the quest. Initially derided as a grubby exercise to make some easy money off the moon landing, it ended up framing his career. It would be its prologue and its epilogue, its overture and its finale. It would lie deep and rise high; it would lurk, it would loom, it would haunt, it would dazzle. For a while, it seemed ‘Space Oddity’ would be the one hit of a one-hit wonder, but if it had been, it would have sufficed: a song of science fiction for a young man, a song of reflection for a mature man, a song of desperation for a dying man, a song of acceptance for a man finding rest. And its immediate effect was to take him somewhere else: to a place of spiritual murk and confusion, of secrets and mysteries and shady paths. The atmosphere around some of his resulting music is so thick it can almost be smelled.
‘Space Oddity’ is unique. It seems to have come from nowhere, and there was nothing quite like it thereafter. But as with all things Bowie, there is a danger that its otherworldly subject can lead usto forget the more earthly circumstances that led to its creation. Indeed, the tension between the two – the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial, the known and the unknown – lies at its heart.
Bowie essentially wrote the song to order, and it came after a period of some struggle. He had accomplished barely anything of note since his first album came out in 1967, and from a commercial perspective, that record itself was hardly an accomplishment. He released no music at all in 1968, fluttering between cabaret, acting and mime. There was the occasional recording session, the occasional radio session. But he had split from his record label and was back living with his parents again. Feeling pressure from his father to make money, he got a job operating a photocopier at a firm specializing in printing legal documents, and also found work as a cleaner. It was a time of drift and muddle. Plans were forming vaguely for
a second album that soon faded from his dreams; judging from the demos that have emerged, it would have sounded beefier than his debut but remained hidebound by provincial preoccupations. More daringly, he wrote a musical about a man who throws a party for his own suicide, but it died before getting anywhere near a stage.
Bowie was looking less like a gently psychedelic Mod. He grew his hair, which made him appear more vulnerable and elfin, and dressed simply. He was romantically involved with the mime master Lindsay Kemp and with the costume designer Natasha Korniloff, and then, powerfully, life-changingly, with the dancer and singer Hermione Farthingale. He later said that 1968 was the year he had a ‘silly flirtation with smack’, which he ‘never really enjoyed’.
Bowie ended 1968 with a series of performances in small venues as part of his new musical trio, Feathers. He was joined by Farthingale and the guitarist and singer John Hutchinson, known as Hutch. Bowie had already been racking up the genres – rowdy R&B, bluesy rock, modish pop, music hall, comedy, novelty, cabaret and more, all since 1964 – and here was another one – namely, folk. Even by this point, his musical adventurism was evidence of an openness to experience that was becoming mirrored in his spiritual wanderings.
Feathers was hardly the big time. But there was the promise of something new: a short film, a kind of musical anthology in which Bowie would perform dramatized versions of his songs. The idea came from Ken Pitt, who was still convinced his man was a star, if only the rest of the world would pay attention.
Balancing optimism with realism, Pitt assessed the songs so far assembled for the project. He knew something was missing, so he asked Bowie to write ‘a very special piece of material’. One day, Bowie got stoned and watched the epic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey; what ensued not only met the brief, but zoomed far beyond it.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, and it is easy to see why it would have resonated so deeply with Bowie, stoned or not. It is an adventure, a quest, infused with mystery; its name tells us everything about its blend of the ancient and the futuristic, and its exploration of the place of the human, 300,000-year-old Homo sapiens, in a world that seems ever more alien to human life. The further it ventures into outer space, the deeper it ventures into inner space. ‘Space Oddity’ traces the same trajectory, but in five minutes. To strong tunes and catchy refrains, it relates the story of what could be merely a simple tragedy: an astronaut loses contact with earth and slips out into the cosmos. But there is much more.
We can start with its first two words. Ground: stability, firmness, the known. Control: power, authority, the denial of individual will. Of course Major Tom wants to escape. The melody in this opening section spans only three semitones; it is pretty much horizontal. After the cacophony of lift-off there is exhilaration, and the tune immediately leaps by nearly an octave; and then a more placid floating; then a further burst of adrenaline as Major Tom proclaims his freedom; then an ecstatic kind of stasis; then no words as the music swirls and spirals and spins in sublime disorientation.
Major Tom had gone a long way. So had David Bowie. In 1967, a critic in the Financial Times described him as ‘a young pop-singer whose songs tend to follow ambition beyond the boundaries of his talent’. No one could ever say that again.
Yet we may ask quite what Bowie meant when he said the song reflected in some way a kind of spirituality. We could say with some justification – or at least a dash of poetic speculation – that the song depicts a voyage of the soul and an affirmation of the spirit. That may be it; if so, fine. But there may be another aspect to all this, and an answer may lie in that word control.
We are never sure who is in charge. Ground Control issues the orders, but the spaceship follows its own course, and there is nothing Major Tom can do. The song is the first overt examination of what appears to be part of Bowie’s basic understanding of the universe: a sense that there are forces that control us.
This idea pops up again in some curious places. In 1975 he released a song called ‘Win’, in which he feels someone else is driving. In 2003 we get ‘She’ll Drive the Big Car’: a male passenger is in the back seat; the driver is thinking of steering the car into the river. That same year, he released a song called ‘Your Turn to Drive’. There is a song where Bowie does the driving himself. It does not go well: the song is called ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’. Perhaps it is better, then, to submit to the will of this faceless driver. Describing the sensation of success in 1974, Bowie likened it to ‘that feeling you get in the car when someone accelerates very, very fast and you’re not driving’. Reflecting on his younger self, Bowie said in 1996: ‘I was driven then. I have a drive now.’
Driven. There he is in 1974 on the BBC, in the back of a limousine. Early on in this documentary, he is smiley and affable; later, he is haunted and possibly hunted, panicked, paranoid. Those images of Bowie burned themselves into the cinematic imagination of the director Nic Roeg; he cast Bowie for a film he shot the following year, which again shows Bowie in the back of a limousine, driven.
‘I’ve always felt like a vehicle for something else, but then I’ve never really sorted out what that was,’ he said in 1973. ‘I think everybody, at one time or another, gets that kind of feeling; that they aren’t just here for themselves and more often than not they turn to the Bible and agree that it’s probably Jesus and God and all of that section of religion. There’s a feeling that we are here for another purpose. And in me it’s very strong.’
There is a force here, an unknown and unnamed force; obeying it may bring terror but denying it will bring annihilation. This force has its own momentum and its own ways, he seems to be saying. Lying beyond the reach and grasp of human power is a scheme of things. Major Tom’s story could be described as a leap of faith: the man defies reason on the way to an unknown destination in the belief that the trip will be worthwhile.
From David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God Used with permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2025 by Peter Ormerod.
