Nursery rhymes and corruption: How David Bowie wrote ‘Ashes to Ashes’
When ‘Ashes to Ashes’ dropped in 1980, listeners quickly realised that the song was something of a sequel to David Bowie‘s 1969 hit single ‘Space Oddity’. The Scary Monsters track saw Bowie revive his iconic Major Tom character; only 11 years later, he had turned into a junkie.
Discussing the origins of the track, Bowie noted that the melody of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is almost nursery rhyme-like in its simplicity. He said in 1980, “The sub-text of ‘Ashes To Ashes’ is quite obviously the nursery rhyme appeal of it.” He added elsewhere, “It’s very much a 1980s nursery rhyme, and I think 1980s nursery rhymes will have a lot to do with the 1980s, 1890s nursery rhymes, which were all rather horrid, and had little boys with their ears being cut off and stuff like that.”
However, there was also a deeper meaning to the track, and Bowie suggested at its heart, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is actually about “corruption” from the perspective of Major Tom. Bowie said, “Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space, and once he gets there, he’s not quite sure why he’s there. And that’s where I left him. Now we’ve found out that he’s under some kind of realisation that the whole process that got him up there had decayed, was born out of decay; it has decayed him, and he’s in the process of decay.”
He added, “It was an ego, a technological ego which got him up there, for no specific reason, and just added more disaster because it was a potpourri of technical ideas. So the most disastrous thing I could think of is that he finds solace only in some kind of heroin-type drug, actually being that the cosmic space itself was feeding him with an addiction. And he wants now to return to the womb from whence he came.”
Evidently, Bowie had been influenced by two important factors when writing the song. Firstly, it had, without doubt, been inspired by his own drug addiction issues, like many of his best songs. Secondly, there were those significant advancements in technology throughout the 1970s.
However, as Bowie expressed, that technology arguably came too soon and is perhaps a sentiment that we are still feeling today. For once technology advances our society into a supposed progression, we then left there, suspended in space like Major Tom, without any prior knowledge of what to do when we get there.
Bowie was also keen to merely get the word “junkie” on the airwaves, seeing as 1980s radio had become quite prissy about the words it would broadcast. “It’s also about as subversive as one can get in popular music terms inasmuch as I would love to get a record played by the BBC containing the word ‘junkie’,” Bowie added. “I thought that was quite successful. There’s not much you can do these days; we’re all such a blasé, world-weary lot.”
