The release
‘Space Oddity’ was first released as a 7-inch single in the UK and USA on 11 July 1969.
The single was issued just days before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July. Bowie’s record labels rush-released it in the hope of receiving a sales boost from its topicality.
I’m sure they really weren’t listening to the lyric at all. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to juxtapose against a moon landing. Of course, I was overjoyed that they did. Obviously some BBC official said, ‘Oh, right then, that space song, Major Tom, blah blah blah, that’ll be great.’ ‘Um, but he gets stranded in space, sir.’ Nobody had the heart to tell the producer that!
The song was also the opening track of David Bowie’s self-titled second studio album, which was released in the UK on 14 November 1969.
This [album version] is slightly longer than the single. The sad thing about the record was that not all copies were in stereo. This is definitely a stereo sound and you lost a lot of impact on the single. This is how it’s supposed to sound.
Disc and Music Echo, 25 October 1969
Bowie’s manager Kenneth Pitt had paid £140 to a man, Tony Martin, who promised to make the song a feature of the various music weekly charts. Instead, Martin disappeared with the money.
‘Space Oddity’ was not an immediate hit in the UK, its success hampered by the BBC’s decision not to play it until the Apollo 11 crew had safely returned to Earth. It first charted in September 1969, and in November peaked at number five.
In America, the single was a commercial flop, despite Mercury’s Ron Oberman calling it “one of the greatest recordings I’ve ever heard. If this already controversial single gets the airplay, it’s going to be a huge hit.” The song received limited radio airplay, perhaps due to its bleak subject matter, and the single stalled at number 124.
The song was released in most countries in mono, in keeping with the convention of the times, although stereo copies were available in a handful of countries including Holland, Italy and Belgium. Bowie’s Italian version, ‘Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola’, was also issued in stereo in Italy.
In July 2009 the ‘Space Oddity 40th Anniversary EP’ was released by EMI. This included the rare mono and US single edits, the 1979 re-recording, and eight stem files which isolated the lead vocals, backing vocals, acoustic guitar, strings, bass guitar and drums, flute and cellos, Mellotron, and Stylophone, from the 1969 recording.
An iPhone app was also released to allow purchasers to remix the song. The stem files were later available as individual streams on Spotify, along with the other EP tracks.
A new remix of ‘Space Oddity’ was included on the soundtrack of Brett Morgen’s 2022 film Moonage Daydream.
Hi Joe, did you left Peter Schilling’s song out on purpose?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Tom_(Coming_Home)
Not exactly on purpose, but tribute songs, covers and other non-directly-related recordings aren’t within my scope.
“Not exactly on purpose, but tribute songs, covers and other non-directly-related recordings aren’t within my scope.”
Fair enough, good job and good day sir.
Signed: Mayor Tom, deceased.
Interesting enough I had a similar conversation with David en route from Chicago to L.A. he came back to where I was, obviously not first class, sat down, nails painted, makeup on, it was the Ziggy days, he asked the first question, I was petrified, I was en route to Camp Pendleton, then Okinawa then Nam. He said” Did you ever hear of Space Oddity?” My response” Sure, the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001 Space Odyssey” he laughed kind of that Bowie chuckle, and he began to ask about where I was heading. In the end he gave me his card, scrawled a number on the back, which ended up being his mother’s home number. Later that trip I ended up actually the next day, he was playing at the Santa Monica Auditorium, as I recall on the beachfront. Later that trip I spent the day with Ned Lagin, David Crosby, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. I did the album cover for Lagin’s very experimental album Seastones. Truth is, I got to do the cover because I had a flat top Marine Corps cut and Lagin didn’t know what to think, so they sent me out with a camera with one order “Take pictures of seastones on the beach, no babes, butts, breasts and or anything that isn’t a stone” That trip was worth the ride and it was the best welcome I ever have seen in My California History. David Bowie, a genus of culture.
I appreciate how you wrote that Major Tom reappeared in at least two other Bowie songs! I feel like Tom is sideway reincarnated in the Tin Machine song “Baby Universal” for a couple of cryptic but significant reasons embedded in the lyrics to this song:
– In the Kubrick film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the hero is named David Bowman (and as David had only recently changed his name to Bowie, and within another year or so, he would start a group called “The Hype” and go be “Rainbowman” in it, you can be sure he tripped out to that implication), and the sequence of the movie where Bowman goes is like being transported through a prismatic warp speed space rush (lyrics in “Baby Universal” include: “no sense of destination” “running for the love of speed” “a speck of dust just settled in my eye” and it not mattering as he has “seen everything anyway”….)
– Bowman (who is clearly the template for Major Tom) met his fate at the end of the movie by being subsumed on his death bed by a baby growing as large as the universe, presumably asking the human if he could feel him thinking, and assuming that a human could see everything the baby is thinking.