Under Pressure Ashes To Ashes David Bowie

Under Pressure
Ashes To Ashes Album: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980)
by David Bowie

Under Pressure was a collaboration with David Bowie, this is credited to "Queen with David Bowie" because the B-side of the single is Queen's "Soul Brother." It was recorded at an impromptu session in Montreaux, Switzerland in the summer of 1981.

According to Queen bass player John Deacon, Freddie Mercury did most of the songwriting on this, although everyone contributed. The lyrics deal with how pressure can destroy lives, but love can be the answer. The lyrics are characteristic of Mercury's songwriting.

Deacon however did come up with the iconic two-note bass riff, although it came very close to vanishing: according to Roger Taylor in the Days of our Lives documentary, Deacon came up with the riff, then the band went for pizza before coming back to continue rehearsals. Upon returning, Deacon had completely forgotten his idea! Luckily, Taylor eventually remembered how the bassline went.

Brian May recalled to Mojo magazine October 2008. "It was hard, because you had four very precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us. David took over the song lyrically. Looking back, it's a great song but it should have been mixed differently. Freddie and David had a fierce battle over that."

May adds to this feeling of the sessions being fairly strained in a further interview for the Days of our Lives documentary, where he notes that "suddenly you've got this other person inputting, inputting, inputting... he (David) had a vision in his head, and it's quite a difficult process and someone has to back off... and eventually I did back off, which is unusual for me."

In the US, this was on Queen's Greatest Hits album and released as a single at the same time. It was not released on a UK album until six months later, when it was included on Hot Space.

This was only the second UK #1 hit for Queen. They hit #2 with "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," "We Are The Champions," "Somebody To Love," and "Killer Queen," but their only previous #1 in England was "Bohemian Rhapsody."

In the early '80s, it was popular for two superstars to get together to release a hit single. Other notable combinations include Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder on "Ebony And Ivory," Diana Ross and Lionel Richie on "Endless Love," and Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton on "Islands in the Stream." "Under Pressure" marked the first time Queen collaborated with another artist.

David Bowie performed this with Annie Lennox at the 1992 "Concert For Life" in Wembley Stadium, London. The show was a tribute to Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to AIDS causes.

Vanilla Ice sampled this on "Ice Ice Baby," which was a huge hit in 1990. Details are fudgy, but it appears that the sample was never cleared and a settlement was reached with Queen and Bowie long after Vanilla's song hit it big.
This song has been used in a number of movies, including 2002's 40 Days And 40 Nights and 2004's The Girl Next Door. It is also included in the hugely successful Queen tribute show We Will Rock You.

During the Taste Of Chaos tour, the singers from My Chemical Romance and The Used would come out and perform this song at the end of the show.

Joss Stone covered this for the 2005 Queen tribute album Killer Queen.

Reinhold Mack, who did production work on the Hot Space album, told an amusing story about the vocal recording for "Under Pressure," where one of the two singers would record their improvised vocals with the other being locked out so they couldn't hear what the other was doing.

Said Mack: "Freddie is doing all his bits and pieces and I see out of the corner of my eye David sticking his head in and listening. Then Fred came down and David went up, and Fred was quite impressed how David was counterpointing to what he (Freddie) had done before. Fred said 'what do you make of this?' and I said 'Well, it's kinda easy if you stand in the doorway and listen!'"

At which point Freddie apparently had some choice words for David!
According to a 2017 Mojo interview with Brian May, Freddie and David "locked horns" in the studio. Asked to elaborate, the Queen guitarist replied: "In subtle ways, like who would arrive last at the studio. So it was sort of wonderful and terrible. But in my mind I remember the wonderful now, more than the terrible."

The two singers first met a dozen years before they recorded the song. In 1969, Freddie Mercury fitted David Bowie for a pair of boots during his day job working on a boot stall in Kensington Market.

Ashes To Ashes can be seen as a sequel to Bowie's 1969 hit, "Space Oddity." It revisits the fictional astronaut, Major Tom, who is now in space. He has regained communication with Ground Control and tells them he is happy, but they deem him nothing but a "junkie, strung out in heavens high, hitting an all-time low." Fans believe this to be Bowie's autobiographical piece about his fight against drug abuse and other personal demons.

The closing refrain of this song, "My mama said to get things done, you'd better not mess with Major Tom," suggests that in order to make the best of the future, one should not dwell on the past. It has also been suggested that "Space Oddity" was a thinly veiled reference to a drug trip, and that "Ashes to Ashes" is hinting that in order to move on, Bowie must kick these drug habits.

In his 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine, Bowie explains that the song "Inchworm," which was sung by Danny Kaye in the 1952 movie Hans Christian Andersen, was a big influence on "Ashes To Ashes." Said Bowie: "I loved it as a kid and it's stayed with me forever. I keep going back to it. You wouldn't believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song. Not that you'd really recognize it. Something like 'Ashes to Ashes' wouldn't have happened if it hadn't have been for 'Inchworm.' There's a child's nursery rhyme element in it, and there's something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they're so identifiable even when you're an adult. There's a connection that can be made between being a somewhat lost five-year old and feeling a little abandoned and having the same feeling when you're in your twenties. And it was that song that did that for me."

The music video for "Ashes to Ashes" features Bowie dressed as Pierrot in a variety of bizarre situations. Steve Strange of the New Wave band, Visage, cameos. Bowie has said the shot of himself and other characters marching towards the camera in front of a bulldozer symbolizes "oncoming violence." During this scene, the characters behind Bowie are not bowing, but simply trying to pull their gowns away from the bulldozer so they don't get stuck! This, and many other images in the video suggest that Bowie may be trying to bury the various personas he developed.

The video, which Bowie directed with David Mallet, cost £250,000 to produce, making it the most expensive music video ever made at the time. It was released a year before MTV went on the air.

In 1983, Peter Schilling released "Major Tom (I'm Coming Home)," which is based on the Major Tom character. It was a rare instance of someone making a sequel to a song by another artist.

This was sampled on Samantha Mumba's "Body II Body." Bowie gave his seal of approval to Samantha's song, but a lot of his fans hated it.

The British BBC TV series, Ashes to Ashes, was named after this song. The series served as the sequel to Life on Mars, which was also named after the Bowie song of the same name.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) was ranked at #30 on Q Magazine's "100 Greatest British Albums Ever."
This song had a huge impact on Marilyn Manson; it was the first video he saw on MTV. "He'd created a radio pop hit that was so unnatural, so different, full of unease and tension," Manson told Rolling Stone. "And yet it had some sexiness to it. It was like I was watching a movie."

According to Madness, Bowie told them he tried to rip off their song "My Girl" in "Ashes To Ashes" but he couldn't find the right drummer to do it. "He should have just asked me," Madness drummer Danny Woodgate said during a Q&A at Pryzm in Kingston. "If you listen to both songs, they sound the same."