David Bowie (commonly known as Space Oddity) is the second studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released in the United Kingdom on 14November 1969 through Mercury affiliate Philips Records. Financed by Mercury on the strength of the success of the single, "Space Oddity", the album was recorded from June to October 1969 at Trident Studios in London. Gus Dudgeon produced "Space Oddity", while Tony Visconti produced the rest of the album. Session musicians included Herbie Flowers, Rick Wakeman, Terry Cox and the band Junior's Eyes.
Departing from the music hall style of Bowie's 1967 self-titled debut, David Bowie contains folk rock and psychedelic rock songs, with lyrical themes influenced by events happening in Bowie's life at the time, including former relationships and festivals he attended. "Space Oddity", a tale about a fictional astronaut, was released as a single in July 1969 and became Bowie's first commercial hit, reaching the UK top five.
The album was a commercial failure due to a lack of promotion, despite receiving some positive reviews from music critics. For its release in the United States, Mercury retitled the album Man of Words/Man of Music and used different artwork. RCA Records reissued the album under the title of Space Oddity following Bowie's commercial breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust in 1972, using a contemporary photo of Bowie as the artwork. The reissue charted in both the UK and the US.
David Bowie has received mixed reviews in later decades, with many finding a lack of cohesiveness. Bowie himself later stated that it lacked musical direction. Debate continues as to whether it should stand as Bowie's first "proper" album. David Bowie has been reissued numerous times, with bonus tracks and variance on the inclusion and listing of the hidden track "Don't Sit Down". Labels have used both David Bowie and Space Oddity as the title, with Space Oddity being used for a 2019 remix by Visconti.
Background David Bowie released his music hall-influenced self-titled debut studio album through Deram Records in 1967. It was a commercial failure and did little to gain him notice, becoming his last release for two years. After its failure, Bowie's manager Kenneth Pitt authorised a promotional film in an attempt to introduce Bowie to a larger audience. At the request of Pitt, Bowie wrote "Space Oddity", a tale about a fictional astronaut, as a song for the film. The film, Love You till Tuesday, went unreleased until 1984, and marked the end of Pitt's mentorship to Bowie.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) inspired the title and subject matter of "Space Oddity". Bowie demoed the song in January 1969, recording the final Love You till Tuesday version on 2February. In April, Bowie recorded demos of tracks with guitarist John Hutchinson, including "Janine", "An Occasional Dream", "I'm Not Quite" ("Letter to Hermione"), "Lover to the Dawn" ("Cygnet Committee") and another demo of "Space Oddity". In May, Bowie secured a record contract with Mercury Records on the strength of "Space Oddity". The contract granted him enough finances to make a new studio album, to be distributed through Mercury in the United States and its affiliate Philips Records in the UK.
Recording To produce the new album, Pitt hired Tony Visconti, the producer of Bowie's later Deram sessions. Visconti saw "Space Oddity", the chosen lead single, as a "novelty record" and passed the production responsibility for the song to Bowie's former engineer Gus Dudgeon. Dudgeon recalled: "I listened to the demo and thought it was incredible. I couldn't believe that Tony didn't want to do it". Comparing the two producers in a 1969 interview, Bowie stated:
Recording for the new version of "Space Oddity" and its B-side "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" took place on 20June 1969 at London's Trident Studios; Mercury wanted the single released ahead of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The lineup consisted of Bowie, Herbie Flowers (bass), Rick Wakeman (Mellotron), Terry Cox (drums), Junior's Eyes' guitarist Mick Wayne and an orchestra arranged by Paul Buckmaster. After the single's release on 11July, recording for the rest of the album continued five days later, with work commencing on "Janine", "An Occasional Dream" and "Letter to Hermione". Visconti recruited the rest of Junior's Eyes minus their vocalist– Wayne and Tim Renwick (guitars), John 'Honk' Lodge (bass) and John Cambridge (drums)– as the main backing band for the sessions; Bowie hired Keith Christmas as an additional guitarist. Beatles' engineer Ken Scott also joined the sessions. According to Renwick, Bowie was "kind of nervous and unsure of himself", and gave little direction during the sessions, which the author Paul Trynka attributed to numerous events in Bowie's personal life at the time. Visconti had little production experience at the time but remained enthusiastic during recording.
Recording continued on and off for the next few months. Bowie wrote "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" following his father's death on 5August. Eleven days later, he participated in the Beckenham Free Festival, commemorating "Memory of a Free Festival" after the event; recording for the song began on 8September. According to the biographer Nicholas Pegg, Bowie's "disillusion" with the "slack attitude" of hippie culture caused him to reshape the lyrics of "Cygnet Committee". "God Knows I'm Good" was attempted at Pye Studios in Marble Arch on 11September, but scrapped due to problems with the recording equipment. The song was re-recorded at Trident five days later. Recording completed on 6October.
Music and lyrics The music on David Bowie has been described as folk rock and psychedelic rock, with elements of country and progressive rock. According to the biographer David Buckley, Bowie based the music on the dominant styles of the times "rather than developing a distinct music of his own". Kevin Cann finds the music encompasses "a fusion of acoustic folk leanings with a growing interest in electric rock". Cann continues that David Bowie marked a turning point for the artist, in that lyrically he began "drawing on life" rather than writing "winsome stories". Marc Spitz considers the album one of Bowie's darkest, due to the death of his father. He writes that it reflects the artist's "darkening vision" and depicts "a man coming of age in a world that is increasingly depraved and barren". Susie Goldring of BBC Music calls David Bowie a "kaleidoscopic album [that] is an amalgamation of [Bowie's] obsessions – directors, musicians, poets and spirituality of a distinctly late-60s hue".
Songs "Space Oddity" is a largely acoustic number augmented by the eerie tones of the composer's stylophone, a pocket electronic organ. Some commentators have also seen the song as a metaphor for heroin use, citing the opening countdown as analogous to the drug's passage down the needle prior to the euphoric "hit", while noting Bowie's admission of a "silly flirtation with smack" in 1968. "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed" reflects a strong Bob Dylan influence, with its harmonica, edgy guitar sound and snarling vocal. Spitz describes the song as an "extensive hard rock jam", while Buckley calls it a "country-meets-prog-rock collision of ideas". A hidden track, subsequently titled "Don't Sit Down", featured at the end of the song on the original UK LP, but was excluded from the US Mercury release and RCA reissue of the album.
"Letter to Hermione" was a farewell ballad to Bowie's former girlfriend Hermione Farthingale, who is also the subject of "An Occasional Dream", a gentle folk tune reminiscent of the singer's 1967 debut album. "God Knows I'm Good", Bowie's observational tale of a shoplifter's plight, also recalls his earlier style. "Cygnet Committee" has been called Bowie's "first true masterpiece" by Pegg. Commonly regarded as the track on David Bowie most indicative of the composer's future direction, its lead character is a messianic figure "who breaks down barriers for his younger followers, but finds that he has only provided them with the means to reject and destroy him". Bowie himself described the song at the time as a put down of hippies who seemed ready to follow any charismatic leader. "Janine" was written about a girlfriend of Bowie's childhood friend George Underwood. It has been cited as another track that foreshadowed themes to which Bowie would return in the 1970s, in this case the fracturing of personality, featuring the words "But if you took an axe to me, you'd kill another man not me at all".
The Buddhism-influenced "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" is presented in a heavily expanded form compared to the original guitar-and-cello version on the B-side of the "Space Oddity" single; the album cut features a 50-piece orchestra. "Memory of a Free Festival" is Bowie's reminiscence of an arts festival he had organised in August 1969. Its drawn-out fade/chorus ("The Sun Machine is coming down / And we're gonna have a party") was compared to the Beatles' "Hey Jude"; the song has also been interpreted as a derisive comment on the counterculture it ostensibly celebrates. The background vocals for the crowd finale features Bob Harris, his wife Sue, Tony Woollcott and Marc Bolan. The outtake "Conversation Piece" has been described as featuring "a lovely melody and an emotive lyric addressing familiar Bowie topics of alienation and social exclusion".
Title and packaging The album was released in the UK under the same eponymous title as Bowie's 1967 debut, a move Trynka calls "bizarre". The original UK cover artwork featured a facial portrait of Bowie taken by British photographer Vernon Dewhurst, exposed on top of a work by Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely with blue and violet spots on a green background. The artwork, titled CTA 25 Neg, was designed by Bowie and Mercury executive Calvin Mark Lee, who enthusiastically collected Vasarely's works; Lee is credited as CML33. The back cover was an illustration by Underwood and depicted lyrical aspects from the album, stylistically similar to that of the Visconti-produced Tyrannosaurus Rex album My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows (1968). According to Underwood, the sketches included "a fish in water, two astronauts holding a rose [and] rats in bowler hats representing the Beckenham Arts Lab committee types [Bowie] was so pissed off with". Pegg says these items appear in the final picture, along with a Buddha, a lit joint, an "unmistakable" portrait of Farthingale and "a weeping woman (presumably the shoplifter in 'God Knows I'm Good') being comforted by a Pierrot", which he notes is "remarkably similar in appearance" to the "Ashes to Ashes" character Bowie later adopted. Underwood's illustration is referred to on the sleeve as Depth of a Circle, which according to Bowie was a typo by the record label; he intended it to read Width of a Circle, a title he used for a song on his next album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970). Apart from Bowie, none of the musicians who played on David Bowie were credited on the original pressings, due to the majority being under contract with other labels in the UK; song lyrics were presented on the inner gatefold sleeve.