“I keep a photograph/it burns my wall with time”
An Occasional Dream, David Bowie, Space Oddity, 1969
Space Oddity wasn’t Bowie’s first album, but it was his first ‘real’ album. After years of fooling around, aping popular styles trying to break a hit, performing in a mime troupe and trying to be Anthony Newley, in 1969 Bowie was starting to develop an original identity and also enjoyed his first hit single. Weirdly, many accounts do not count Space Oddity as a proper album and many discographies begin with Hunky Dory instead. Inexplicable, because Space Oddity is a certainly a proper album, and a very good one, which is also a stylistic missing link between the twee showtunes of Images and the more rocking sound that would develop later. This song is dedicated to Bowie’s first love, Hermione Farthingale, also the muse behind Letter To Hermione and other love songs.
I recall how we lived
On the corner of a bed
And we’d speak of a Swedish room
Of hessian and wood
And we’d talk with our eyes
Of the sweetness in our lives
And tomorrows of rich surprise…
Some things we could do.
In our madness
We burnt one hundred days,
Time takes time to pass
And I still hold some ashes to me,An Occasional Dream.
And we’d sleep,oh so close,
But not really close our eyes
‘Tween the sheets of summer bathed in blue…
Gently weeping nights
It was long,long ago
And I can’t touch your name.
For the days of fate were strong for you…
Danced you far from me.
In my madness
I see your face in mine.
I keep a photograph,
It burns my wall with time
Time,
An Occasional Dream
Of mine.
An Occasional Dream
Of mine.
An Occasional Dream
Of mine.
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