On This Day in 1980, David Bowie Fulfilled His Goal of Writing a More Commercially Successful Record After the Berlin Trilogy

In the late 1970s, David Bowie released perhaps the most influential work of his career, the Berlin Trilogy. Although history has since given these albums their respective flowers, they polarized critics at the time. Determined to land a mainstream hit this time around, Bowie recorded and released Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), an attempt to correct the record. He achieved this goal on this day in 1980, when the album became Bowie’s fourth #1 in the United Kingdom.

Videos by American Songwriter

David Bowie Called the Album “a Purge”

Led by the #1 single “Ashes to Ashes,” which saw David Bowie reunited with his Space Oddity character Major Tom, the meticulously crafted Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) could not have been more different from its minimalistic predecessors.

“Scary Monsters always felt like some kind of purge,” Bowie told Classic Rock in 2003. “You think: ‘How do you distance yourself from the thing that you’re within?’ I felt I was on the cusp of something absolutely new. There were no absolutes. Nothing was necessarily true, but everything was true. 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 you can set it in the now.’” 

So, in essence, the six-time Grammy winner was looking for his Sgt. Pepper. “The Berlin records – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger – were all done in five weeks each. You can’t exactly make a Sgt. Pepper in that time frame,” said producer Tony Visconti. “On Scary Monsters we decided to give ourselves the luxury to think of every possible thing we could do. That was the premise. And we took ourselves very seriously.” 

[RELATED: 3 Classic Rock Songs by David Bowie We Can’t Stop Singing]

The Most Expensive Music Video Yet

The success of “Ashes to Ashes” was buoyed by its 250,000-pound music video, the most expensive of its kind at the time and still one of the priciest to date, 40 years later. And the song saw David Bowie resurrect one of his earliest characters, the ill-fated Major Tom from Space Oddity.

“Ashes to Ashes” gave Bowie only his second chart-topping single in his native England, which admittedly shocked the singer. “I guess that a lot of people still have some empathy with [Major Tom,] because he became the little sort of… bouncy hero,” he said. “I just wanted to bring him up to date a little bit.”

Featured image by Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images