US single release: Love You Till Tuesday

David Bowie’s single ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, was released in the USA on 28 August 1967, with ‘Did You Ever Have A Dream’ on the b-side.

The single had previously been issued in the UK on 14 July 1967. As with all Bowie’s singles prior to ‘Space Oddity’, it was not a commercial success.

‘Love You Till Tuesday’ originally appeared on Bowie’s debut album. Two days after the album’s 1 June 1967 release, the single version was recorded at Decca Studios. It featured a new vocal by Bowie, and an Ivor Raymonde string arrangement – including an instrumental coda taken from ‘Hearts And Flowers’ by 19th Century Austro-Hungarian composer Alphons Czibulka.

We re-recorded ‘Love You Till Tuesday’, which we all thought was a potential hit single. We got Ivor Raymonde to do a string arrangement for that, an orchestration which made the record more acceptable to radio. That was the last [Bowie] record that got released by Decca. It was a record we thought should really do some damage chart-wise and it got close, but it was at that point Ken Pitt made a decision to go somewhere else, even though nothing happened to Bowie for a couple of years after that. That was when he started to rethink things.