Life on Mars?: A Timeless Oddity by David Bowie

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Life on Mars?: A Timeless Oddity by David Bowie
by Alexis Andrews - November 13, 2008

David Bowie

“I think this episode of Life on Mars is utterly boring,” I told my audiophile friend John at the risk of sounding sacrilegious. We were in his bohemian living room, watching an episode of the BBC One science fiction and police drama series. Life on Mars is a sequel to Ashes to Ashes – and Saturday nights usually meant a viewing with John of an episode of either of these two shows. Not that I could not miss it; but it was his house, his show.

“Do you know,” John began – and I knew it was another bit of trivia – “this show adopted its title from a David Bowie record? It’s called ‘Life on Mars?’, with the question mark. And if you listen closely to the song you’ll be amazed at how odd the lyrics are.” He began to sing the first lines: “It’s a God-awful small affair/ To the girl with the mousey hair...” I raised my eyebrows as though it was the most pleasantly ridiculous thing I ever heard.

That same night, I decided that I had to look the song up. “Life on Mars?”, I then found out, first appeared in 1971 on the album Hunky Dory, and then was released officially as a 7” single in 1973. It has been called by BBC Radio Two as “the best David Bowie song of all time” – even though, unlike Bowie’s more commercially successful singles (like “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fame”), it peaked only at #3 on the UK charts. (“Life on Mars?” did reenter the charts three decades later, owing to the popularity of the BBC TV programme.)

At the time Bowie wrote the song, which was in the year 1968, his androgynous alterego Ziggy Stardust hadn’t yet taken off. He was still a struggling musician. And he was writing English lyrics to a French song called “Comme d’habitude”, composed by Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux. Bowie’s version was never released. Instead, Paul Anka bought the rights to the original version and rewrote it as “My Way”, which as we all know was popularized by Frank Sinatra and has since then become the British funeral service anthem.

“Life on Mars?” is Bowie’s brilliant riposte to Frankie’s immortal 1969 record. It has similar chord progressions as “My Way”, but with infinitely stranger and more esoteric lyrics, which can be interpreted to suggest the futility of the existence of man (a common theme that Bowie toyed with early in his career). In the song, Rick Wakeman of the progressive rock group Yes plays keyboards while Mick Ronson rocks it out on the guitars. Bowie also delivers the words in an operatic way, rendering the towering chorus even more towering and the surreal imagery, more surreal.

Of course, having been born as member of the MTV Generation, I had to look up the music video at Youtube. In “Life on Mars?” – produced and directed by Mick Rock – Bowie was rocking a suit so radioactively turqoise I half-expected to my ears to pop. The mullet and glam blue eyeliner he was sporting frightened me a bit, and were dead giveaways to when the song and video had been made (read: not in The Age of Cornrows). But I don’t think anyone, let alone John, would disagree with me if I assert that the song is timeless.

Hmm – good choice of inspiration for a show that overlaps the past, present, and future.

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