With a budget of £250,000 ($500,000), it was the most expensive music video ever made at the time.
Tony Wilson described this video as "the great symbol of that period before MTV. It is low tech but low tech pushed to the limits of the imagination, which is a wonderful thing."
While filming the music video David Bowie: Miracle Goodnight (1993), David Bowie shared an anecdote with crew member Michael Dignum about the production of this music video. According to Dignum, Bowie recalled how, while shooting the bulldozer scene at the beach, an elderly man and his dog were walking in front of the camera. Because of that, Bowie decided to walk aside, sit down, and wait until the man left the scene. Director David Mallet approached the man, asked him to go away, pointed at Bowie and said "Do you know who that is?". The man looked to Bowie and responded "Of course I do. It's some c*nt in a clown suit". Bowie told Dignum 'That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realise, "Yes, I'm just a c*nt in a clown suit."
The innovative style of the music video was made using a then experimental technique known as solarized or solarization, a phenomenon where a picture or photograph, after to be submitted to an extreme overexposure to a light-sensitive material, causes a partial or total reversal in the natural color of the image, a process that it can be used in a negative of a photograph or in a copy of it. This technique was the same that Stanley Kubrick used for the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) arrives to an alien world after to be sent throughout to the universe by the monolith, finding a planet with a so different color scheme in its landscapes.
Record Mirror readers voted "Ashes to Ashes" and Bowie's next single, "Fashion", the best music videos of 1980.