Brief Notes on David Bowie's 'Life on Mars'

David Bowie looking perfect in the video for 

'Life on Mars' (dir. Mick Rock, 1973)

 

 

David Bowie's arty glam rock ballad 'Life on Mars' is three minutes and forty-eight seconds of pure pop perfection [1].

 

Originally included as a track on his 1971 album Hunky Dory, it was released as a single in the summer of 1973 and although it only got to number three in the UK charts - kept off the number one spot first by Slade, then Peters and Lee, and, finally, Gary Glitter - I agree with the many fans and critics who believe it to be Bowie's finest song; one that became, rather ironically, his 'My Way' - i.e., the signature song he would frequently return to in performance throughout his career and which turns up again and again on compilation albums [2].         

 

To promote the single, photographer Mick Rock filmed a video that shows a heavily made-up Bowie looking extraordinarily beautiful in an ice-blue satin suit designed by Freddie Buretti [3] and miming the song against a stark white backdrop. 

It is, in its own way, just as perfect as the song and Rock achieves what he set out to do; namely, create a musical painting that captures perfectly what Malcolm McLaren would term the look of music and the sound of fashion.

 

In 2016, the video was remastered and re-edited by Rock and uses a remixed version of the song by the original producer Ken Scott, which strips the track back to strings, piano and vocals: click here - and enjoy!

Notes

 

[1] What makes 'Life on Mars' so perfect, apart from Bowie's own vocal performance and talent as a songwriter, is the string arrangement composed by guitarist Mick Ronson and Rick Wakeman's excellent playing of the same studio piano that was used by the Beatles when recording 'Hey Jude' in 1968 (and, later, in 1975, by Queen for their own moment of pop perfection 'Bohemian Rhapsody').  

 

[2] This is ironic because Bowie wrote 'Life on Mars' as an intentional parody of 'My Way' - the original French version of which, by Claude François and Jacques Revaux (entitled Comme d'habitude), he had once supplied English lyrics for (rejected by the song's French publishers). 

      Shortly afterwards, much to Bowie's annoyance, Paul Anka purchased the rights to the song and rewrote it as 'My Way', which was then recorded and made famous by Sinatra in 1969. In order to show that he was just as capable of creating an equally epic song, Bowie effortlessly tossed off 'Life on Mars'.      

 

[3] For more on Freddie Buretti, see the post entitled 'On the Designers Who Dressed David Bowie' (19 Dec 2017): click here.