David Bowie

David Bowie

The video clip for Ashes to Ashes was one of the most iconic of the 1980’s. Costing £250,000, it was at the time the most expensive music video ever made. It incorporated scene both in solarized colour and in stark black and white, featuring Bowie in the gaudy Pierrot costume that became the dominant visual representation of his Scary Monster phase. Also appearing were Steve Strange and other members of the London Blitz scene, including Judith Franklin and Darla Jane Gilroy, forerunners of the New Romantic movement that was heavily influenced by Bowie’s music and image.  Bowie described the shot of himself and the Blitz Kids marching towards the camera in front of a bulldozer as symbolizing ‘oncoming violence’. Although it appears that two of the Blitz Kids bow at intervals, they were actually trying to pull their gowns away from the bulldozer in an effort to avoid them getting caught. Scenes of the singer in a space suit that suggested a hospital life-support system and others showing him locked in what appeared to be a padded room, made reference to both Major Tom and to Bowie’s new, rueful interpretation of him. Contrary to received opinion, the elderly woman lecturing Bowie at the end of the clip was not his real mother.