Why David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ soundtrack was rejected
David Bowie is a star well familiar with rejection. It comes with the territory of daring to be different. As his ethos decreed: “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Despite the experimentalism of Nic Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bowie’s bold soundtrack ended up being rejected. In 1975, he began working on making music for the movie after he was cast, telling CREEM, “That’ll be the next album, the soundtrack. I’m working on it now, doing some writing. But we won’t record until all the shooting’s finished. I expect the film should be released around March, and we want the album out ahead of that, so I should say maybe January or February.”
However, perhaps as a symptom of the success that he had seen in recent years, Bowie had failed to reach a formal agreement with Roeg that he would, indeed, soundtrack the film. In many ways, Bowie was a victim of his own prolific nature during this period. Those present during the sessions claimed that they always knew that they’d be up against it to finish them in time for the movie. When you throw in the fact that contracts for the matter hadn’t even been broached also threw a spanner into the works.
As Bowie reflected on the Critereon edition of the film: “I presumed – I don’t know why but probably because I was arrogant enough to think it so therefore I acted upon it – that I had been asked to write the music for this film. And I spent two or three months putting bits and pieces of material together. I had no idea that nobody had asked me to write the music for this film; that, in fact, it had been an idea that was bandied about.”
This comical reality is indicative of Bowie’s artistry. It is proof, if proof be need be, that Bowie created for the sake of creation. Nevertheless, he didn’t take the bad news from the producer’s lightly, commenting: “I was under the impression that I was going to be writing the music for the film but, when I’d finished five or six pieces. I was then told that if I would care to submit my music along with other people’s… and I just said ‘Shit, you’re not getting any of it.’ I was so furious, I’d put so much work into it.”
And very little of the work was reusable, while the work helped to inspire Low, ‘Subterraneans’ was the only piece that actually translated directly. Adding to the frustration was the fact that this was one of many canned projects for Bowie during the era, although he was certainly in a purple patch, a few ‘issues’ shall we say, hamstrung his output.
But he always sought the silver-lining too. As he concluded in a Mojo interview: “I got angry about it, with no real rational reason. I thought I should be contracted, a stupid, juvenile reason but I kind of walked away from it. But bits of it, things like ‘Subterraneans’ on the Low album, were actually started for the film. So, musically there was some kind of continuum going on there.”
