10 Most Expensive Rock Music Videos Of All Time
9. Ashes To Ashes - David Bowie ($581,000)
In 1980, David Bowie became the first musician to spend more than $500,000 on a music video.
The Starman clearly thought that Ashes to Ashes, his sequel to Space Oddity, deserved special treatment and nobody in the world was going to tell him no.
Bowie continued to make his intentions clear when he directed David Mallet to co-direct the video with him. Mallet was one of the biggest names in his field at the time, having been behind the camera for Queen's Bicycle Race, Blondie's Hanging on the Telephone, and Peter Gabriel's Games Without Frontiers.
The result of this collaboration is a video fully suitable for a song about an astronaut on drugs.
Most of the shots are bathed in a multicoloured hue, as Bowie and his bizarre friends dance around the beaches of England's Beachyhead. The Thin White Duke can also be seen in a large padded cell and hooked up to several tubes on a wall.
In the end, all this madness cost $581,000, which amounts to over $2 million in today's money. Still, the video is a joyous celebration of everything weird and wonderful about David Bowie, so it was probably worth it.