Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded

Bowie offered no such illusion. “The publicity image of a spaceman at work is of an automaton rather than a human being,” he said, “and my Major Tom is nothing if not a human being. [‘Space Oddity’] came from a feeling of sadness about this aspect of the space thing. It has been dehumanized, so I wrote a song-farce about it, to try and relate science and human emotion. I suppose it’s an antidote to space fever, really.” Eventually, though, the BBC caught on. After “Space Oddity” was broadcast on July 20, the song wasn’t played on BBC radio until after the safe return of the Apollo 11 crew. With astronauts risking their lives on the most dangerous new frontier imaginable, “Space Oddity” was temporarily considered too controversial for airplay.

The BBC’s popular Quatermass serials in the ’50s helped instill in him a sense of dread about the future. Each installment depicted the stoic rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass beating back the threat of alien invasion, an ever-present specter. Bowie admitted that as a boy he would watch the harrowing adventures “from behind the sofa when my parents thought I had gone to bed. After each episode I would tiptoe back to my bedroom, rigid with fear.”
As a teenager, Jones was captivated by the cryptic, spacetime-traversing mythology of a show strongly influenced by Quatermass called Doctor Who. The program debuted in 1963. In it, the main character—known only as the Doctor—periodically died and was reborn in a new incarnation that barely resembled the one that came before—an act of metamorphosis that Bowie would employ, again and again, to equally mythic effect throughout his career.