to the BBC television programme Doctor Who serial The Three Doctors, which featured a reunion of the show's lead actors to celebrate its tenth anniversary. The serial was broadcast in early 1973 when Bowie was recording his follow up album Aladdin Sane. Release "Starman" was released as the lead single of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on 28 April 1972 by RCA Records (as RCA 2199) with "Suffragette City" as the B-side. According to Cann, the single was released in the US on 20 May with a slight variant from the UK single: Bowie's spoken intro was edited out and "to comply with the preferred duration among American radio stations," the song was shortened by ten seconds. The US single was released in both mono and stereo formats. The single originally featured a "loud mix" of the "morse-code" piano-and-guitar section between the verse and the chorus. This single mix appeared on the original UK album, but not on other vinyl editions of the album internationally, in which the "morse-code" section was lower in the mix. The single mix appeared on the 1980 compilation album The Best of Bowie, but ChangesTwoBowie (1981) and subsequent compilations featured the more subdued mix, until the "loud mix" finally reappeared on Nothing Has Changed (2014) and on Re:Call 1 as part of the 2015 box set Five Years (1969–1973). "Starman" was sequenced as the fourth track on the album, between "Moonage Daydream" and "It Ain't Easy", released on 16 June 1972. It was a late addition to the album, replacing a cover of American singer-songwriter Chuck Berry's "Round and Round". According to Rob Sheffield, "Round and Round" would have fit the concept of the album but it was excessive, as side two featured multiple Berry-style tracks. Pegg also commented: "It's extraordinary to consider that one of Bowie's definitive songs replaced a Chuck Berry cover almost as an afterthought." From a commercial point of view, "Starman" was a milestone in Bowie's career: it was his first hit since "Space Oddity" three years before. NME critics Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray reported that "many thought it was his first record since 'Space Oddity'", and assumed that it was a sequel to the earlier single. Pegg states that due to this assumption, the title and acoustic intro might have given the suggestion that Bowie had "only one song in his