Bowie's Ashes To Ashes is a UK#1 nursery rhyme about spacemen junkies

David Bowie : Ashes To Ashes

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On August 8, 1980 David Bowie released his UK#1 single "Ashes To Ashes". Right from the start it sounds like nothing else, combining the funky bass playing of George Davis with a piano played through an Eventide Instant Flanger. Session guitarist Chuck Hamer came in with a newly invented guitar synthesizer.

"He gave us a quick demonstration of how he would pick a note, and out of his amplifier would come a symphonic string section.” co-producer Tony Visconti recalled.  “The sound was glorious. It’s the warm string choir you hear on the part that goes, ‘I’ve never done good things, I’ve never done bad things...’”  

The song revisits Major Tom from 1969's "Space Oddity" (“Do you remember a guy that’s been/ In such an early song.” ) and he is not doing well.

 Bowie has said that the song has elements of autobiography. The case is made by Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie:

The “Action Man” who has fallen so low might well parallel the former “Main Man” whose music went from “funk to funky” in 1975 as he became “a junkie” in the City of Angels (“strung out in heaven’s high”), before hit- ting the depths during The Man Who Fell To Earth (“I ain’t got no money and I ain’t got no hair”), and relocating to Europe for creative and spiritual rebirth (“hitting an all-time Low”), but still yearning to demolish the frozen emotions and paranoiac isolation to which he had fallen victim (“Want an axe to break the ice, I wanna come down right now”). If ‘Space Oddity’ was in part a metaphor of space travel as celebrity as drug-taking as sensory isolation, then ‘Ashes To Ashes’ represents the pay-off.

The song ends with a nursery rhyme:

My mother said
To get things done 
You better not mess with Major Tom

"It really is an ode to childhood," Bowie told NME in 1980. " If you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's about space men becoming junkies (laughs)."

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  In an interview with Performing Songwriter in 2003, Bowie explained the influence of Danny Kaye's performance in Hans Christian Anderson: 

“Something like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t have been for ‘Inchworm,’” he said. “There’s a child’s nursery rhyme element in it, and there’s something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they’re so identifiable even when you’re an adult.”

The music video was shot at Beachy Head and Hastings in May 1980 on a budget of £25,000, making it the most expensive pop video of its day. It uses the new-fangled Paint- box technique to turn skies black and seas pink, and premiered one of his best-remembered looks, the sad-faced clown . 

Bowie storyboarded the video for director David Mallet and recruited some of the nattily dressed new romantics from The Blitz.

 Future Visage frontman Steve Strange is one of the four following Bowie, pursued by a menacing bulldozer

“My robe kept catching in the bulldozer,” Strange later told biographer Marc Spitz. “That’s why I kept doing that move where I pull my arm down. So I wouldn’t be crushed. Bowie liked the move and used it later.”