"Ashes to Ashes" is a single by David Bowie, released in 1980. It made #1 in the UK and was the first cut from the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) album, also a #1 hit. As well as its musical qualities, it is noted for its innovative video, directed by Bowie and David Mallet. Bowie has said that with this song he was "wrapping up the seventies really for myself, and that seemed a good enough epitaph for it". The video clip for "Ashes to Ashes" was one of the most iconic of the 1980s. Costing £250,000, it was at the time the most expensive music video ever made. It incorporated scenes both in solarised colour (helped by an innovative Quantel Paintbox technique) and in stark black-and-white, featuring Bowie in the gaudy pierrot costume that became the dominant visual representation of his Scary Monsters phase. Also appearing were Steve Strange and other members of the London Blitz scene, forerunners of (later participants in) the New Romantic movement that was heavily influenced by Bowie’s music and image. Bowie described the shot of himself and the Blitz Kids marching towards the camera in front of a bulldozer as symbolising "oncoming violence". Scenes of the singer in a space suit - that suggested a hospital life-support system - and others showing him locked in what appeared to be a padded room, made reference to both Major Tom and to Bowie’s new, rueful interpretation of him. Contrary to received opinion, the elderly woman lecturing Bowie at the end of the clip was not his real mother. Record Mirror readers voted "Ashes to Ashes" and Bowie's next single, "Fashion", the best music videos of 1980.