Space Oddity
When David Bowie wrote and recorded Space Oddity in 1969, I wonder if he ever imagined it being played in orbit?
When David Bowie wrote and recorded Space Oddity in 1969, I wonder if he ever imagined it being played in orbit? Even more so, would he have imagined (or worried about) the legal concerns of extra-planetary music?
The version of Space Oddity that I recorded on the International Space Station has had an amazing response – one I couldn’t have foreseen and has made me think about ever since. Just before we took it off of our YouTube channel to honour the 1-year agreement, it had been viewed 23,489,187 times. With the countless re-posts and re-broadcasts on television the actual number was far higher – hundreds of millions of people, from Seoul to Lahore to Lagos, watched, listened and thus took part in what has become a defining moment in my life. A humbling experience, shared with the whole planet.
The reasons we originally made the video were multifold. It was in response to repeated widespread requests via social media. It was a fun Saturday project with my son, Evan. It was a continuation of the other music that I was playing and recording while on ISS. But maybe most importantly, it was a chance to let people see where we truly are in space exploration. We’re not just probing what lies beyond Earth – we inhabit it. For the past 14 years, humans have lived and worked aboard a research vessel orbiting our planet. It is science fiction come to life. Like at all initial outposts, we’ve brought our traditions and sensibilities and are applying and appreciating them in a new place. Sometimes, as in the case of Oddity, it has let us see our ideas and creations, ourselves, in a new light. I had hoped to be able to capture the feeling of this one small step for humanity, and share it with you all.
Thus it was with some regret that we took the Space Oddity video off YouTube last May. David Bowie and his publisher had been very gracious. They had allowed his work, his intellectual property, to be made freely available to everyone for a year, and had in fact worked with us and the Canadian Space Agency to make it happen. There was no rancour, and we removed it from YouTube to honour that agreement.
This sequence wasn’t anyone’s fault. The day we took the video down we started to work again to get permission to get it re-posted. But the legal process is careful and exacting, and thus takes time. Despite countless on-line expressions of frustration and desire, it wasn’t anyone’s ill-will or jealousy that kept this version of Oddity off YouTube. It was merely the natural consequence of due process.
In the magazine The Economist, Glenn Fleishman wrote an excellent summary of some of the legal concerns. The Space Station was built by 15 countries, and depending on where I floated while singing and playing, whose copyright laws applied? Which Space Agency owned the recording? Whose jurisdiction was I in?
I’m not a space lawyer (although if I were a lawyer that’s the type I’d want to be!), but I’d imagined some of these complexities and had contacted Bowie’s publisher and legal team from orbit. They had subsequently worked happily and professionally with me and the Canadian Space Agency. The release of the video was all agreed-to when it was originally posted on May 2013. Bowie himself loved it, posting on Facebook that it was “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created”. As a result of this, the recent reapplication of the legal process has been fairly straightforward.
And now, we are so happy to be able to announce that my on-orbit cover of Space Oddity is back up on YouTube. This time we have a new 2-year agreement, and it is there, for free, for everyone. We’re proud to have helped bring Bowie’s genius from 1969 into space itself in 2013, and now ever-forward. Special thanks to Onward Music Ltd, to the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, to musicians Emm Gryner and Joe Corcoran, to videographer Andrew Tidby, to my son Evan, and mostly to Mr. David Bowie himself. For the countless others who have helped work to bring about a new era of exploration, the art of it sings to us all.
– Chris
