Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

had great ears for singles, and to my mind there was
no question that ‘Space Oddity’ should have been a
number one single. I was Bowie’s biggest supporter
at the company. And other people in the promotion
department seemed to like the record. At that time
back in the sixties, if you really wanted to get a
record on the air there were certainly ways to do it.
But Mercury never really pushed it that hard. It wasn’t
a hit initially because Mercury really didn’t get behind
it the way they should have gotten behind it.”
The Phillips and Mercury marriage was a relatively
new one and there was still infighting going on
between people who were reluctant to cede any
power to one side or another. Bowie’s fate seemed
to rest on the possibility of a tenuous harmony being
achieved. Rather than reaping the huge publicity
benefits of the Apollo 11 landing, “Space Oddity”
languished in the outer reaches of the British Top 40
for most of the summer and barely registered in
America. If NASA couldn’t help get him a hit, what
hope did he have? Bowie would see his first stroke
of real professional luck with the arrival of Olav
Wyper at Phillips.
Wyper was a former journalist who had happened
into a career as a copywriter in the ad department of
the massive EMI Corporation, which distributed the
Beatles and the Beach Boys’ records. He had
managed to move laterally into a different
department (a feat still difficult today in the eternally
compartmentalized record business) and by the late
sixties he was the marketing manager at CBS