In early 1968, David Bowie was a contract writer for Essex Music on Denmark Street, and part of the job was putting English words to foreign hits. His publisher handed him Claude François’s “Comme d’habitude.” Bowie turned in a lyric called “Even a Fool Learns to Love.” The French publishers passed. Paul Anka bought the rights soon after, wrote “My Way,” and gave it to Frank Sinatra. Three years later, Bowie answered it with “Life on Mars?“, and the answer is stranger on the page than it is on the record.
Bowie heard the result on the radio and recognized the tune instantly. He told Michael Parkinson in 2002 that it made him angry for about a year, and that he eventually decided to write something as big that sounded a bit like it. Three years later, on the back cover of “Hunky Dory”, in Bowie’s own handwriting, are the words “Inspired by Frankie.”
The writing itself took an afternoon. In notes he wrote for the iSelect compilation that came free with the Mail on Sunday in June 2008, Bowie described sitting on the steps of a bandstand in a Beckenham park, then walking up the High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham for shoes and shirts. He got off two stops in and went back to Haddon Hall because he couldn’t shake the melody. The room he worked in had a chaise longue, an art nouveau screen, an overflowing ashtray, and a grand piano. Lyric and melody were finished by late afternoon.
Inside the “Life On Mars?” Session at Trident Studios
The band cut it at Trident Studios on 6 August 1971, the last day of the “Hunky Dory” sessions, with Ken Scott co-producing. Rick Wakeman played the studio’s 1898 C. Bechstein grand, the same instrument Paul McCartney used on “Hey Jude” and Elton John used on “Your Song.” MusicRadar’s history of that piano notes that Mick Ronson sat down at it and walked Wakeman through the part before the take.
Ronson wrote the strings too – Woody Woodmansey has said it was the first orchestral arrangement Ronson ever attempted, scored for a room of BBC session players who were not inclined to take a long-haired rock guitarist seriously. Scott remembers Ronson finishing the chart in the first-floor toilet ten minutes before the orchestra arrived.
Scott told the Irish Examiner that a telephone rang partway through a take, Ronson swore, and the take was binned. Nobody thought about it again until strings were being overdubbed onto the master, at which point the ring surfaced under the long sustained ending. They left it in. The unfaded version on 2022’s Divine Symmetry box lets you hear Ronson’s reaction without the tape ducking away from it.
What the “Life On Mars?” Score Actually Shows
The official piano and voice score is marked 4/4 at quarter note = 124, with a two-flat key signature across 62 bars. MuseScore lists the key as B-flat major. That’s true of the chorus. The verse is a different animal. Bowie opens on F and stays there for eight bars. Read strictly, F is the dominant of B-flat and those bars are a long dominant prolongation. Read by ear, they behave like a key, because nothing resolves them for another seventeen bars. Under the first line, bassist Trevor Bolder walks down by half step: F, then E beneath an Am/E, then E-flat under an Adim, then D. That descending bass is the family resemblance to “Comme d’habitude,” which runs a similar stepwise drop under its own verse. From the D, the progression turns for home through Gm, B♭/F, C7, back to F.
The second half of the verse tips flat. A♭/E♭, an E augmented chord, then Fm, G♭, D♭. Bowie is raiding F minor, and the song gets visibly darker on the page around “the film is a saddening bore.” The pre-chorus climbs through Aaug and B♭m to D♭, and only then, roughly twenty-five bars in, does the music settle onto a plain B-flat major for “Sailors fighting in the dance hall.” The tonic arrives very late. That’s a large part of why the chorus feels like a window opening.
The augmented triads deserve their own paragraph, because Bowie uses them the same way every time. In this song, an augmented chord is a half-step connector. Eaug (E, G♯, C) moves to Fm (F, A♭, C), and every voice either holds or slides up a semitone. Aaug (A, C♯, F) goes to B♭m by the same mechanism. In the chorus, G♭aug (G♭, B♭, D) drops into F, and this is the one place the pattern bends. G♭ falls to F and B♭ falls to A, both by semitone, but D has to drop a whole step to C. Two voices slide, one steps.
That G♭aug has three notes that are the same three notes as B-flat augmented, which is the tonic triad with the fifth pushed up. It sits under “Is there life on Mars?” and it will not resolve, which is more or less the point of the line.
The other recurring move is the F to Fm swap in the chorus. F is the dominant of B-flat. Turning it minor kills the leading tone and drops the floor out from under “it’s the freakiest show.” Bowie does it twice. The half-diminished chords do similar coloring work: E♭m7♭5 at the To Coda marker, Em7♭5 opening the coda, both chromatic approaches rather than structural pillars. The last three bars are E♭, then E♭m, then B♭. A plagal cadence with a borrowed minor subdominant, one of the oldest melancholy sounds in Western music, and the final thing you hear before Wakeman’s piano and that telephone.
Why RCA Waited Two Years to Release “Life On Mars?”
RCA sat on the song as a single until 22 June 1973, nearly two years after the album, timed to Bowie’s Ziggy-era profile. It reached number three and stayed on the UK chart for thirteen weeks, per the Official Charts Company. Mick Rock shot the promo film: white background, turquoise Freddie Burretti suit, eyeshadow doing the heavy lifting. Wakeman has said he left the studio that night and told friends in the pub he’d just played on the best song he would ever work on. He was doing two or three sessions a day at the time, so he had a reasonable sample size to judge against.
