“HAVE YOU GOT AN ACOUSTIC?”
Bowie’s sometime guitarist John “Hutch” Hutchinson remembers his part in Bowie’s 1969
“I’D been in Canada and traded my electric guitar for an acoustic. In Canada, I hooked up with people who played in a folky sort of style. People were playing Gordon Lightfoot songs; Ian & Sylvia were big. It was happening to me in Canada and by a different route it was happening to David. The softer approach – a less American approach. When I got in touch with him, he said, straightaway, ‘Come on down.’ His guitarist in Turquoise was going back to heavy metal and he said, ‘Have you got an acoustic? Come down, I’ll show you what I’m doing.’ And it was brilliant for me: picking and singing harmony. Hermione [Farthingale] was there and they’d been singing harmony, so I stuck another harmony on and that was it. It was a folky, soft thing.
“He was producing a lot of songs. Every time I would go up to the flat he would have more new ones, and ‘Space Oddity’ just arrived along with all the new ones. It stood out as being a little bit odd – because it tells a story. I never really thought it was tied to the space programme or Kubrick’s film, but it was a pun in the title, and just a story about a spaceman getting lost up there. I don’t think I thought of it very deeply. David might have been thinking about it but I don’t think he wrote it to coincide, though we were all watching the NASA stuff and wondering what was going to happen. I thought it was an unusual song, but I also thought he’d been listening to the Bee Gees. It was a bit like the ‘…Mining Disaster’ – a story song – and we were both trying to sound like the Bee Gees when we did it.
“I’d probably have stayed around a bit longer, but I decided to come back to Scarborough and get a job. [Bowie manager] Ken Pitt didn’t want me there, in a duo. The final solo version of ‘Space Oddity’ I first heard when someone was singing it outside the office I was working in. I was just chuffed that he’d got a deal and got the record out.”