three bars. Afterwards, another sequence plays out before the next verse begins. Ronson based his string arrangement on the bassline Bolder worked on during rehearsals for the track. The other instruments act as a counterpoint to the strings during the chorus: on drums, Woodmansey plays, in O'Leary's words, a "snare-medium tom fill to echo a descending violin line", while Wakeman adds "dancing" replies on piano. Ronson plays the recorder during the second verse at the "Ibiza" line. Bowie noted that Wakeman "embellished the piano part" of his original melody and Ronson "created one of his first and best string parts" for the song. Author Peter Doggett describes Ronson's string arrangement as "gargantuan", and Sandford argues that the "lush, orchestral arrangement" of the track is what Hunky Dory would be best remembered for. Towards the end, after Ronson gives a short, "vibrato-saturated" guitar solo—recorded in one take—the strings play "grand sweeps" before a climactic tom-roll. Doggett and O'Leary compare the tom-roll to the timpani from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while Pegg and Christopher Sandford compare it to the poem Also sprach Zarathustra. After a false ending, Wakeman's piano plays the chorus melody "off in the distance". Then, in O'Leary's words, "a phone rings, the song's manufacturers grumble, we're left awake and alone." According to Pegg, the phone ring occurred during an earlier, scrapped take at the end of the tape, which Bowie decided to keep for the final mix. Lyrics BBC Radio 2 describes "Life on Mars?" as having "one of the strangest lyrics ever", consisting of a "slew of surreal images" like a Salvador Dalí painting. Spitz sees a theme of optimism, in the song. A "girl with mousy hair" looks to the cinema as a way to escape from reality. Sandford writes that it "sets up a complex parallel world in which the cinema becomes life." After the girl becomes "hooked to the silver screen", Bowie uses an array of images one might see when viewing films from different decades, naming the likes of Mickey Mouse, John Lennon, "Rule, Britannia!", Ibiza and the Norfolk Broads. At the time of Hunky Dorys release in 1971, Bowie summed up the song as "A sensitive young girl's reaction to the media." In 1997, he added: "I think she finds herself disappointed with reality... that although she's living in the doldrums of reality, she's being told that there's a far greater life