Space Oddity
by David Bowie
- 136
- BPM
- Eb minor
- Key
- 2A
- Camelot
- 30
- Danceability
- 8
- Acousticness
By the end of 1968, David Bowie felt cut off from his own career. His debut album had failed, he had left Deram, and his manager Kenneth Pitt wanted something new to show off his inventiveness for the unreleased promotional film Love You till Tuesday. Bowie wrote "Space Oddity", a story about an astronaut named Major Tom.
Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey gave him the title and subject. Bowie said he went to see it stoned and it really freaked him out. Other things fed in, including the Apollo 8 Earthrise photograph in January 1969 and his break-up with the dancer Hermione Farthingale the next month. Its sound was psychedelic folk, shaped by the Bee Gees, and he storyboarded each section so it flowed into the next.
Mercury's head of A&R in London, Calvin Mark Lee, thought the song was otherworldly. His boss Lou Reizner was not interested in signing Bowie. Lee paid for a demo session behind his back. Gus Dudgeon produced the record at Trident Studios, and Philips and Mercury rush-released it on July 11, 1969 to catch the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The BBC used it as background music for its coverage. It sold poorly at first. It reached number five in the UK.
Space Oddity runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in Eb minor, Camelot 2A, which shares its notes with F# major and mixes cleanly with Ab minor and Bb minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.