The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell (partially found David Bowie music video; 1999)

Stills from the unreleased 1999 video.

Status: Partially Found

David Bowie was an English singer-songwriter and actor. He was a leading figure in the music industry and is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

"The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" is a song written by Bowie and Reeves Gabrels for the album ‘Hours’ in 1999. First issued on the soundtrack of the film ‘Stigmata’, it was the first single released from the album in Australia and Japan (in the rest of the world it was "Thursday's Child").

The music video for "The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell" exists, but is officially unreleased. In it, Bowie encounters four of his "past selves" (The Man Who Sold the World, Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and Pierrot) as played by life-sized, mannequin-like puppets. In 2013, Bowie resurrected the two latter puppets in his homemade video for James Murphy's remix of "Love Is Lost" from the album The Next Day.

Production

The video was directed by Dom & Nic (working name of directors Nic Goffey and Dominic Hawley), shot in September 1999. Bowie hired Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to design the four puppets (allegedly for £28,000).^[1] In his website, puppeteer Rick Lyon shared photos and some insight about the production, besides confirming that the video was shelved:

"In early September, 1999, I had the pleasure of puppeteering for a David Bowie music video for a song on his latest album at the time. In the picture at right, you can see me at the far left puppeteering a full-size puppet of Mr. Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona. He was seeing the puppet for the first time, and was conferring about the length of Ziggy's hair. At the far right, with blonde hair, you can see one of the directors, Dom, who was lining up a shot of Ziggy smoking a cigarette. Just out of the frame at right is John Tartaglia, who was puppeteering Ziggy's hand while I did the head and face.
This video has never been released. I spoke to someone at the production house in Dec. of 1999, and they said it had been shelved. Too bad.
The video was produced by Oil Factory, and the beautiful puppets were built by the Henson L.A. Creature Shop. The lead puppeteer was my good friend David Barclay, and the other puppeteers were the aforementioned John Tartaglia, James Godwin and Eric Jacobson"^[2]

In an online chat in October 2000, Bowie explained why he didn't release the video.^[3]

Melissay1: Mr. Bowie, whatever happened to the video you were working on with the Jim Henson Creature Shop for "The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell"?
david_bowie_live: It was abandoned after we found that the puppets ended up looking like puppets.
david_bowie_live: What I mean is it didn't have the east European darkness that Dom and Nick had wanted to achieve. Some of it is downright funny and I'm sure it will make its way onto a video compilation one of these days. To be a source of endless amusement to you all and another form of Chinese torture for myself.
david_bowie_live: You can probably find it on Vidster."

Availability

So far, the only fragments of the video that had surfaced are the clips of Bowie performing the song in a theatre. Some stills of the puppets sequence taken by Kevin Mazur were published in different magazines and are easily found on Pinterest. Puppeteer Rick Lyon shared two photos of the Ziggy Stardust puppet. Bowie also posed for a photo with the four puppets as a promo pic. Two of the puppets can be seen in action in the much later video "Love is lost".