UK single release: Love You Till Tuesday

David Bowie’s final Deram single, ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, was released in the UK on 14 July 1967, with ‘Did You Ever Have A Dream’ on the b-side.

As with all his singles prior to ‘Space Oddity’, it was not a commercial success.

It did, however, receive warm reviews in the music press, with Disc’s Penny Valentine saying:

This is a very funny rather bitter little love song about how he’ll always love her – at least for four days. His incredible sense of timing and humour come over perfectly in this record. It would be nice if more people appreciated him.

Despite similarly positive reviews in Record Retailer, Record Mirror, and Melody Maker, the single failed to chart.

‘Love You Till Tuesday’ had previously appeared on Bowie’s debut album. Two days after the album’s 1 June 1967 release, the single version was recorded at Decca Studios. It featured a new vocal by Bowie, and an Ivor Raymonde string arrangement – including an instrumental coda taken from ‘Hearts And Flowers’ by 19th Century Austro-Hungarian composer Alphons Czibulka.

We re-recorded ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, which we all thought was a potential hit single. We got Ivor Raymonde to do a string arrangement for that, an orchestration which made the record more acceptable to radio. That was the last [Bowie] record that got released by Decca. It was a record we thought should really do some damage chart-wise and it got close, but it was at that point Ken Pitt made a decision to go somewhere else, even though nothing happened to Bowie for a couple of years after that. That was when he started to rethink things.

The single was released in the USA on 28 August 1967. Although it was again critically acclaimed, it once more failed to trouble the charts.