The unlikely inspiration behind the classic David Bowie single producer Tony Visconti says is like “a Swiss watch”: “You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun out of that one song”

David Bowie performing onstage in the late 1970s — (Image credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

The decade-long run of game-changing albums that David Bowie made from 1970‘s The Man Who Changed The World onwards remains unmatched by any artist. This hot streak came to an end with 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) - his last truly great album until 2016’s grand farewell, Blackstar.

Scary Monsters features one of Bowie’s all-time classic singles in Ashes To Ashes, a song that saw the singer moving on from his fabled ‘Berlin’ period and into a brand new decade. At the same it was also a callback to his breakthrough single, 1969’s Space Oddity, and the character at the centre of it, the astronaut Major Tom.

Musically, the inspiration for Ashes To Ashes came from an unlikely source: Inchworm, a song from the 1952 musical Hans Christian Anderse.

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“I loved it as a kid and it’s stayed with me for ever,” Bowie told Classic Rock journalist Bill DeMain in 2003. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song.”

Bowie recorded the song in New York’s Power Station studio with guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, plus guesting pianist Roy Bittan (of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) and guitar-synth player Chuck Hammer. Overseeing the session was producer Tony Visconti, who likened Ashes To Ashes to “a Swiss watch.”

“If you open up a Swiss watch, you see all those tiny little wheels and hammers going,” says Visconti. “But no matter what’s going on, it has to tell the time in the end. There was so much Swiss-watch business going on in the tracks for Scary Monsters. That’s why we loved it.”

Ashes To Ashes was released in August 1980, giving him his second No.1 (after Space Oddity) and becoming his first great single of the new decade. For Bowie himself, it was a bridge between his glorious past and a bold future.

“It was this sense of: ‘Wow, you can borrow the luggage of the past, you can amalgamate it with things that you’ve conceived could be in the future, and set it in the now.’

Read the full story behind Ashes To Ashes in the new issue of Classic Rock. Buy it online here.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.