Saturday 23 March 2019

Black Sky

"Can we make the sky black? Like Justin did."
God bless Twitter; yes, like any branch of social media, it's got its fair share of nut jobs and knuckle draggers. But no more than you'll find on your average high street or indeed Clapham omnibus. And although to the untrained eye it may appear to be full of nothing but Brexit, and kitten videos (and, to be fair, it's hard to remember a time when it wasn't), you'll come across nuggets like this:
Hands up if you knew that Justin Hayward's promo video for his 1978 single Forever Autumn was the prototype for Bowie's Ashes to Ashes. My hand would have remained firmly down at the back of the class. Whilst we're on the subject of Hayward, Pete Paphides played an extract from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds on his Soho Radio show this week. It was a particularly gloomy passage - that's H. G. Wells for you - and afterwards Paphides came out with a simple solution for making this particular concept album a little less miserable: instead of Richard Burton doing the narration, they should've given the gig to Ronnie Corbett. How wonderful would that have been?

David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes (1980)

9 comments:

  1. I'm still reeling from the fact that it's taken a full 39 years for this to come to my attention.

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    1. Just when Bowie fans think they know every facet of the David Jones story...

      Interestingly, when you Google anything to do with this, it's only Nicholas Pegg's recent Twitter post that comes up and gives the game away; very area 51!

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  2. Very interesting! We have Nicholas' excellent book 'The Complete David Bowie' here on our shelves, massive tome that it is. Just checked and seems he hadn't made this specific connection between the videos before writing the book. Weird that it hasn't been talked noticed or discussed anywhere else, as you say!

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    1. Superfluous 'talked' in that comment. Lunchtime wine!

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    2. C - I just love stories like this. Two artists with nothing, seemingly, in common and, hey, waddya know, they both made the 'same' video on the same stretch of beach.

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  3. That's crazy. How did this not come up before?

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    1. Shall we start a conspiracy theory Brian?

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  4. A nugget indeed. And, Ronnie Corbett doing the narration - That would have been real treat but sadly another one now gone.

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