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.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in London in May of 1968. At the time, Bowie lived in a modest flat in London’s South Kensington. It was a neighborhood full of nightclubs and upscale shops, not far from one of his favorite King’s Road boutiques, the aptly named Dandie. There the ambitious, struggling young musician would try on bright, paisley shirts and run the risk of bumping into some of the shop’s far more famous clientele, including a flamboyant American expatriate named Jimi Hendrix—a guitar wizard who was known to sing about, among other things, outer space. He wasn’t alone. Everyone from the Byrds to the Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd had suddenly started singing about aliens and spaceships. It was as if they were collectively anticipating the United States’ imminent Apollo 11 mission, scheduled to land humans on the Moon the following summer.

The magazine Smash Hits summed it up pointedly: “If Dame David Bowie is such a bleeding chameleon, why, pray, can’t he change into something more exciting than the skin of an aging rock plodder?”
That’s not what I saw that night. I saw David Bowie descend sixty feet from a giant spider while lounging in an office chair, casually reciting the ominous opening lines of his song “Glass Spider.” I saw a tornado of catsuits, astronaut costumes, and gold lamé. I saw him perform a song from his 1974 sci-fi masterpiece Diamond Dogs: “Big Brother,” which had originally been intended for a combination album-and-stage adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I saw, in short, a songwriter who loved the wonder and fear and fun and transformation of science fiction—and who, against all odds, had passed that love along to millions. In doing so, he compelled a decade’s worth of fellow travelers to explore the farthest reaches of music along with him.

Being like any other reasonable kid who had reached his teens, I rejected the music my mom listened to. Bowie, however, was the exception. Sure, his music belonged to the generation before me. But he’d also reinvented himself in the early ’80s as a creature of that decade, one who was both an honored forefather and a vital contemporary of all the new wave artists I loved. One of those bands, Duran Duran, was opening for Bowie that night at Mile High Stadium. They were at the height of their popularity, and I was excited beyond belief to see them. But the gravity belonged to Bowie.