The David Bowie song Neil Finn calls the “absolute benchmark” for great pop music
Although David Bowie set the tone for modern pop music and for all the other genres he sang into existence, he also set the stage for Neil Finn.
As a teenager in Te Awamutu on New Zealand’s North Island, Finn would listen to Bowie’s Hunky Dory with excitement until it shaped the music the Kiwi would go on to make.
Finn’s new wave, melodic pop-rock is written into history with Bowie’s lyrical prowess as its muse. “He was doing something completely different from anybody else… It gave me an excuse to be obscure with my lyrics for the rest of my life,” Finn told ABC Australia, adding, “The words that are attached to melodies seem to have always existed and can’t be separated from those melodies. And sometimes they make no sense, and it doesn’t really matter. Lord, that was exciting as a 13-year-old.”
But there was one song in particular that struck Finn’s taste buds, and that’s the first and leading single from Bowie’s 14th album Scary Monsters (and Super Freaks), ‘Ashes to Ashes’. “What a record, what a video, what a song, what does it mean, who cares! The absolute benchmark for me in pop music,” Finn recounted, and that’s saying a lot, since many elements in the 1980 song sit quite far from pop and psychedelic nursery rhymes to sterile, mechanical melodies.
Revisiting Bowie’s iconic Major Tom from the track that rocketed him to fame, ’Space Oddity’, ‘Ashes to Ashes’ is seen as an unravelling sequel in which the character falls from grace. The UK number-one hit served as an autobiographical look at the Starman’s own struggles with fame and addiction, with Major Tom similarly struggling: “Strung out in heaven’s high, Hitting an all-time low”.
The song was broadly seen to mark a fresh start in Bowie’s music, indicating a turn away from ever-changing personae into a mature identity, and with the turn of the decade, his deeper voice indicated a growth in maturity that saw his music become more reflective and his persona more distant from fame’s glamour.
Enlisting his old friend and producer Tony Visconti, he recorded the album between London and New York, building on the elements of experimental innovation he’d established in his work with Brian Eno in their last three albums together. The song opens with a jagged, eerily high-pitched melody prior to descending into melancholic lyrics embodying its title, while the piano adds a hefty sci-fi depth to its already solemn character, before being joined by a full string section in its finale. The ghostly orchestral closing is paired with an old man pictured walking along Bowie in the song’s music video, before a white light engulfs the scene.
The metaphorical meanings in this song are endless, and it’s easy to see why this timeless monster of a song would have been such a strong inspiration for Finn and many more musicians after him. The video he made a reference to was the most expensive ever made at the time, containing Bowie’s many masks and disguises, from a clown to a patient in a mental asylum, and the dynamic clip accompanies a song that is much more digestible and textured than its predecessor, with lyrics that keep listeners guessing.
Bowie and Finn are drawn together by their melodic craftsmanship, with the Fleetwood Mac guitarist matching the Brixton icon’s intricate, indelible melodies and abstract, poetic lyrics, which makes it easy to see why the inspiration stuck with him.
