I Want to Come Down Right Now

Recently I had occasion to listen to David Bowie's Space Oddity for the first time in some while. Perhaps I was feeling pretty spaced out myself at the time, because I cannot remember the circumstances at all. I do remember, however, the thoughts and sensations provoked by the song on this occasion. First of all, Space Oddity is, by now, rather an old song. In fact, it's older than I am. I believe it was first released in 1969 (I'm not going to the trouble of great research for this blog). For those of you unfamiliar with the song, I should explain briefly that, on the surface, it is the story of an astronaut called 'Major Tom' who goes up into space and refuses to come down. In the 1990s Bowie embarked on a 'greatest hits' tour, after which, he said, he would never play such tired old songs as Space Oddity again. He might not have used those exact words. Anyway, the point is, by rights Space Oddity should be as hackneyed to our ears as, say, Dancing in the Streets. But it certainly was not to my ears. It still gave me the same icy tingle of excitement, it still seemed to have the same disturbing freshness. But why? I think there are many reasons for this. People have already spoken a great deal about the 'double meaning' of the song – that it is admirably consistent not just in its surface meaning as a song of space expoloration, but also as one of drug innuendo. 'I'm floating in the most peculiar way/And the stars look very different today.' It's already some years since a friend and I decided that this perfect innuendo extended not only to drugs but to the experience of fame. Once again, 'I'm floating in the most peculiar way/And the stars look very different today.'

However, on this occasion it came back to me what had disturbed and excited me most the first time I had heard the song as a child. It was simply the following lines: 'Ground Control to Major Tom/Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong/Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you heaaar…'

Surely this is the key to the whole song. I won't say that Bowie predicted modern alienation, the inability for people to feel anything authentic within themselves, and therefore to make any authentic links with other human beings. That had already been predicted long ago. It had already arrived by the time that Dostoyevsky wrote, in 'Notes from Underground', that "we have ceased to be the sons of living fathers".

However, Bowie does seem to anticipate this alienation seeping into popular culture generally. It seems as if this song, on the surface so Bee Gees and poppy, is the herald of something dark, something going very wrong indeed. Collectively, the circuit of the human race has indeed gone dead. Here we are, floating in space, together, and yet all of us very, very alone. What can we do when we look at the world dying around us but say, "Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do"? We have ceased all transmission.

Despite the icy glamour of this situation, Bowie himself must have recognised how unhealthy it was when, in his song Ashes to Ashes, presumably in the role of Major Tom, who is mentioned in the song, he sung the lines, "I want an axe to break the ice/I want to come down right now." The song fades out with the repeated and haunting couplet, "My momma said, to get things done/You'd better not mess with Major Tom." The very title of the song seems to suggest that Bowie wishes to put the past behind him and move on. He wants to 'come down' to Earth.

I know the feeling. There is such urgent longing in the lines in Ashes to Ashes, as if, for a moment, if only in the longing itself, we are once again put in touch with our lost authenticity. Being authentic should be easy. It should, in fact, be normal. I can almost imagine, thinking about it, a world in which we have all 'come down' and we are simply being ourselves, interacting in a natural and totally fulfilling way.

After the album Scary Monsters, on which Bowie had sung about coming down, he recorded Let's Dance. Well, this was certainly 'normal' and 'down to Earth'. A dance album apparently about such normal themes as heterosexual love. Then why, why was it that he seemed more remote than ever before? It is almost as if he had stopped trying to transmit. Is it only in recognising how remote, how desperately, tragically remote we are from each other, that we can hope to have genuine communication?

I do not know. One way or the other, I still feel, as Bowie once did, that I want to come down right now. I only wish I knew how.