A rather personal retro special marking the 45th anniversary of David Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes single and one incredibly striking video, issued to UK retailers on Friday 1 August 1980 but as was commonplace back then, not generally available to purchase in-store by the public until Monday the 4th. And I am unanimous in that.
This is the one that merits the obscenely overused cliché, ‘iconic’.
Not such an early song for some, but for this writer the endlessly evocative and atmospheric Ashes To Ashes is without doubt my earliest memory of the Thin White one and, ultimately, the first Bowie record I would buy. Though it would take me a while to process all the dizzying changes in styles and personae before I could settle on where to start with such an immense, illustrious back catalogue. Almost five years, in fact. That’s all I had.
By the time 1983 mutated into the Orwellian omen of 1984, I’d discovered a relatively unknown band called Dead Or Alive*, a firm favourite with my new group of “weird” merchant friends from other schools in the environs of North Bucks, though strangely, not my own classmates. Still, I always wanted to stand out, so I got my wish world granted. And how.
A fine example of a slightly older import from a different educational establishment, Alison McDermott had been the first person in the world to lend me a David Bowie record, which I picked out from her bedroom collection of vinyls.
Flicking through the small but perfectly formed 12” artworks — overriding thought: ‘is that really the same man on all of them?’ — image-wise, I liked the airbrushed Hollywood monochromatics of the ChangesOneBowie compilation the best, but opted to borrow the ChangesTwoBowie sequel instead, because I wanted “the one with Ashes To Ashes on.”) to see if I could get into his work.
There was skin in this game.
This fascinating if slightly historical Bowie character had been name checked by almost every artist I’d ever possessed a record by, as well as scores more. I knew nothing of his work before Ashes. By contrast, it was night-on impossible to ignore the Let’s Dance era but, alas, its prep school yuppie commerciality left me completely cold.
Apropos of everything and nothing, we could actually hear his Milton Keynes Bowl trio of concerts from the garden but that’s as close as I wanted to get), but I knew from all the numerous namechecks in music media that this was someone who was or had been a Pretty Big Deal and demanded investigation sooner or later.
On a grey midweek day sometime that April of ’84, Father asked me if I fancied a quick trip to Essex, as he had some business to attend to. I looked at the map and realised the destination was only a few miles from a well-known record shop called Adrian’s Records in Wickford, a comprehensive collectors’ emporium that specialised in rarities, imports, demos, promos… and Bowie. They were one — if not the — leading vinyl purveyors that dedicated a huge section of stock to all things Dame David.
I’d already obtained their doorstopper of a mail order catalogue and would regularly scan their huge Bowie section just to marvel at the dazzling display of past picture sleeves which illustrated a long and bewilderingly shapeshifting career that all bore the Bowie name yet looked like at least a dozen different faces.
I found it almost impossible to know where to begin, so I hadn’t. I had not a single Bowie record in my collection, but I knew that would change… at some point.
Realising I could wangle a day off school and hopefully peruse the hundreds of Bowie titles in the flesh I said yes to estuary Essex.
We stopped off at Adrian’s on the way back, in the shiny and new Sierra. Centred around Wickford High Street, Adrian’s had been in business for as long as I had been on the planet, but it was the 1980s that saw the independent retail trader explode, and they found themselves with four retail establishments within 50 metres of each other.
I entered the vinyl shop with a mixture of trepidation and unfettered excitement. Their Bowie racks were amply stuffed, though not everything in the catalogue was on display. I looked up and saw on the wall, to the right of the till, were a selection of twelve-inch singles and albums that were deemed special enough to warrant pulling out to stand pride of place high above the counter hatch.
One record in particular stood out, sporting a familiar looking get up that I immediately knew as the first visual image I can remember associating with this Bowie chap.
A padded costume, ghostly make up, a pierrot clown. It was Ashes To Ashes, and I was miraculously transported back four years, to a 1980 edition of our weekly programming pilgrimage, Top Of The Pops, where I’d put the words David Bowie to a visual image for the very first time.
The sleeve was emblazoned with a title strip that bore the past legend “Super-Sound-Single 45RPM” (it was) and, erroneously, “Disco-Remix” (it wasn’t, just the full length album version from an LP I had yet to hear called Scary Monsters). On closer inspection was an imported pressing from RCA Records in West Germany, and it had something called Alabama Song on the B-side. How exotic, how thoroughly international, I thought to myself.
Pafford senior, another London boy David from 1947 and then on the road to becoming a new name in local politics, transported me and my prized new addition to my record collection back to our sleepy village in leafy Buckingamshire It was a 90-minute journey that felt like ninety hours when you can’t wait to play your latest purchase.
It’s fair to say in 1984 — not exactly a nirvana year for music — the new-old song and its vivid pierrot imagery, with that exquisite hand-written artwork via Edward Bell, stuck out like a glittery diamond in a sea of otherwise adequate diadems.
Four and half decades on and Ashes To Ashes might be the most perfect piece of pop weirdness ever to reach 45rpm, let alone top the charts. If you forgive the geekspeak, Ashes is actually some kind of milestone — the first and indeed only solo Bowie single to enter the UK charts in the top 4, where the flowing week it leapfrogged over Diana Ross and Sheena Easton to push the super Swedes ABBA off their pop perch.
His immensely marvellous contribution to the BBC’s charidee re-do of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day excepted, the only Bowie single that crashed into the UK charts higher than Ashes would be Dancing In The Street. If you aren’t familiar with that comedy cover campathon, DITS was another fund-raising team-up with another of the Dame’s former showbiz shag, this time Mick Jagger in the summer of ’85, and a time when I was well on my way to becoming a fully fledged Bowiephile. Ooh, get her.
Zip forward to a midweek new millennium communication, and as co-author of a brand new book called BowieStyle I was invited to participate in an episode of Channel 4’s ‘rockumentary’ series. The Top Ten throwback had been one of the channel’s biggest Saturday night success stories for years.
With one of the programmes devoted to 1980’s most successful pop acts, our book publicist Gareth Harris of Orange PR nominated me over Mark Paytress to wax lyrical on the Scary Monsters era. Naturally, I asked if a fee was forthcoming, but being budget British telly Gareth apologised that the production house, Islington-based Chrysalis Television, were resolute in exploiting a loophole that if there is a chance your connected ‘product’ may receive exposure not otherwise available then no renumeration is offered. But he assured me that as compensation “we’re going to send over some posters of the book cover and insist they use them as your backdrop.” Oh, alright then.
Though I’d been interviewed on the radio and tellybox before, in various countries, this was the first time I was going to be a talking head ‘expert’ person. So, truth be told, I was rather apprehensive, but got a fanboy thrill in knowing Chrysalis had been behind the first video album I ever bought — Blondie’s genre-pioneering Eat To The Beat — and an appointment was made for 1pm on what turned out to be a particularly balmy Wednesday 7 June 2000 at their N1 HQ, just around the corner from the flat where Joe Orton met a sticky end at the hands of Kenneth Halliwell.
As someone I’d kept in reasonably regular contact with after interviewing him myself, I knew from email exchanges with Tony Visconti, producer of said Bowie work, that he would follow me as a rather more experienced and senior talking head at 2pm, having just flown in from New York.
Was I happy with my performance? Are we ever? Though I’m happy to report the balls dropped eventually, and that over-animated exuberance that gives the impression of early onset pseudo Parkinson’s seems to have dissipated.
While the crew reset, Visconti and I had a birrova chinwag on the roof terrace as he put himself through some mediative tai chi moves. That’s a convo relay for another time but it occurred to me as I was about to leave I’d forgotten one of my little nuggets of info, namely that Scary Monsters was the only Bowie album to place four Top 40 hits in the British charts. It’s a feat unlikely to ch-ch-change, either. I casually mentioned it to TV as he was positioning himself on the interrogation stool but I have no idea if that was something he used but didn’t make the edit.
When the programme finally aired I was working in-house at MOJO magazine, with access to that newfangled interweb thing on the fifth floor iMacs. I did get a kick in reading comments online from Bowie fans assuming I’d had my shirt specially made with the DB zipper. The truth was rather more mundanely prosaic — it was a tasty little Dirk Bikkembergs number from Harvey Nicks, via 30% discount from my Muswell Hillbilly bestie Judi. Fabulous, absolutely.
And no, I’m not wearing make-up, though I concede the summer tan under the studio lights certainly makes it look like I am. Oh, if only. I remember walking in and being somewhat surprised there was no hair and make-up assistant, and not even a nice cuppa tea or coffee.
I know right. What a diva.
Steve Pafford
My sincere thanks to Maarten Kwant for finding the C4 upload, which had seemingly vanished from my archive.
*It would have been Pete Burns’ 66th birthday tomorrow, another of my formative influences — and subsequent interviewee — taken from us, like the elder Dame, in the horrid holocaust of 2016
