THE DAVID BOWIE TOP TEN
THE DAVID BOWIE TOP TEN
Earlier this week I posted a long-read about David Bowie and why he’s so important to me. It’s here: https://lowenotes.substack.com/p/david-bowie-and-me
As a companion piece I have finally forced myself to contemplate what are my top ten tracks to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death.
There is always a danger of lists feeling trivial, but the cogitation involved in deciding which tracks and why has been a painful day-long enterprise, because there are so many brilliant songs you have to leave out. Here goes…
LIFE ON MARS from Hunky Dory 1971
Much of Bowie’s writing was characterised by cinematic imagery – but here he employed it to describe an actual visit to the cinema by “the girl with the mousy hair.”
He employs a small story to illustrate a wider point. It’s really a song about disappointments in life and art. “The film is a saddening bore, for she’s lived it ten times or more.”
And later she’s asked to contemplate: “Sailors fighting in the dancehall. Oh man! Look at those cavemen go. It’s the freakiest show…”
This classic track is enhanced by a wonderful string arrangement by guitarist Mick Ronson and by the distinctive piano playing of Rick Wakeman, whose very first keystroke on a single note identifies the song immediately.
SWEET THING/CANDIDATE/SWEET THING REPRISE from Diamond Dogs 1974
Probably not in most people’s top ten – but I just love this. Bowie fans will know that the Diamond Dogs album was partly born out of Bowie’s wish to make a theatrical piece based on Orwell’s 1984, but he couldn’t get the rights.
The desire morphed into the creation of the dystopian scenario of “Hunger City”, the backdrop for Diamond Dogs.
This triptych mixes exquisite melody (Sweet Thing) with his raunchiest rock and roll (Candidate) which builds in tension until the “release” into the moody reprise: “Is it nice in your snowstorm, freezing your brain. Do you think your face looks the same?”
It’s amazing! And I can’t think of a track that better demonstrates the enormous range of Bowie’s singing voice.
SPACE ODDITY from David Bowie, later renamed Space Oddity 1969
I’ve written in my long-read about the spellbinding impact this track had on me when it first came out to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The intricacy of it, the episodic nature, the use of violins, cellos, flutes and an organ as well as Bowie on guitar and Rick Wakeman on keyboards, transcended anything I’d ever heard before when I was about thirteen.
“This is Major Tom to Ground Control. I’m stepping through the door, and I’m floating in a most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today…”
ASHES TO ASHES from Scary Monsters 1980
This is in many ways a companion piece to Space Oddity, written eleven years and twelve albums later. The Major Tom character is acknowledged in a self-reflective way.
“Do you remember a guy that’s been in such an early song? I heard a rumour from Ground Control. Oh no, don’t say it’s true!”
There seems to be some lament about the drug-fuelled mid-1970s. “Ashes to ash and funk to funky. We know Major Tom’s a junkie…”
The song was promoted by the most technically difficult and expensive video (at the time) and introduced Bowie’s highly painted Pierrot character, which undoubtedly had a hand in the rise of the New Romantics at the start of the 1980s.
HEROES from Heroes 1977
The title track from Heroes is the most important song from the three albums in Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of LPs – Low, Heroes, and Lodger.
As in Life on Mars, he takes a single incident to illustrate something bigger and more profound.
Bowie saw a couple kissing in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and imagined it as a story about two lovers – one from the east and one from the west – taking great risks to pursue their relationship. In my other article I write about how the symbolism he conjured was an inspiration on both sides of the divide.
“We can be heroes…just for one day…”
DRIVE-IN SATURDAY from Aladdin Sane 1973
A sumptuous track which combines futuristic imagery with the nostalgia of drive-in movies. “His name was always Buddy, and he’d shrug and ask to stay. She’d sigh like Twig the Wonder Kid and turn her face away.”
We’ve all seen that movie.
(Twig the Wonder Kid is a reference to the model Twiggy who appeared with Bowie on the front of the covers album Pin-Ups in the same year).
I vividly remember listening to Radio 1 at the time Drive-in Saturday came out as a single. It was a programme where people gave their opinion on new records. One of the contributors said: “Any song containing the line ‘crash course for ravers’ is bound to be a hit.”
Drive-in Saturday has the most glorious melody, especially at this depiction of a movie scene in the pre-chorus: “With snorting head he gazes to the shore, where once had raged a sea that raged no more, like the video films we saw.”
TIME from Aladdin Sane 1973
This is an almost operatic track which includes what I thought was a magic moment that I played repeatedly as a teenager – lifting the stylus and putting it down again.
It’s after the lyric gets towards the end: “Perhaps you’re smiling now, smiling through this darkness…but all I have to give, is guilt for dreaming.”
On “guilt for dreaming,” Mick Ronson’s guitar wails a powerful, spine-tingling lament. I just listened again to the track as I’m writing this. It’s Bowie at his most theatrical, and Ronson’s guitar is perfect.
WHERE ARE WE NOW? From The Next Day 2013
It was a huge moment when this single dropped completely out of the blue on Bowie’s 66th birthday in January 2013. He had not produced a record since Reality in 2003, and it was assumed he’d retired from making music since his heart operation of 2004.
But the song was a precursor to an album called The Next Day, released two months later.
“Where Are We Now?” is a simple and spare song, with Bowie looking back at his time in Berlin, visiting the places and ghosts of his past.
“Had to get the train, from Potsdamer Platz. You never knew that – that I could do that. Just walking the dead.”
It’s melancholic, reflective, even elegiac in tone. And it’s beautiful.
STATION TO STATION from Station to Station 1976
This album was sandwiched between the blue-eyed soul/funk of Young Americans and the spartan, electronic sound of Low, the first of the Berlin trilogy.
You can hear that journey happening on this record. Golden Years leans back to Young Americans, and the title track Station to Station has Bowie leaving behind America and leaning forwards to a European culture.
When I first played Station to Station, given that it starts with a recording of a train, I thought the reference was to railway stations. But Station to Station is about the stations of the cross, the route followed by Christ before his crucifixion, and many of the song’s references are about Kabbalah.
I can’t decipher what all the lyrics mean, and maybe Bowie himself would have struggled. He claimed little memory of the process of making the album in Los Angeles.
The song, according to other musicians involved, started off as three separate tracks, which were fused into one in the studio. And it’s the song that introduced us to a new Bowie persona.
“The return of the Thin White Duke, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes.”
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SUICIDE from Ziggy Stardust 1972
I hesitated over this slightly because, if you ask me at any one moment whether I’d rather listen right now to Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide or Loving the Alien, All the Madmen, Young Americans, Lady Grinning Soul, Queen Bitch, or I’m Always Crashing in the Same Car, then I might opt for one of the others.
That’s because Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide must be listened to in context of the album’s narrative. You ideally need a run-up to it via other tracks on the album, not least Ziggy Stardust and Suffragette City.
It’s the denouement to a story which is such an important part of Bowie’s journey to superstardom, and it’s the song which closed the famous 1973 concert in Hammersmith in which he declared it was the “last concert we will ever do.”
The lyrics are vivid.
“Chev brakes are snarling, as you stumble across the road. But the day breaks instead, so you hurry home.
“Don’t let the sun blast your shadow, don’t let the milk float ride your mind…”
The music and production are all about drama. It’s the rock and roll equivalent of the last act of a Greek tragedy or a Wagner opera.
FINALLY
The process of choosing ten tracks led me to conclude that the best two Bowie albums since Scary Monsters are his last two – The Next Day and Blackstar.
I didn’t choose a track from Blackstar in the top ten, maybe because it’s too sad. But the album itself, conceived, produced, and performed while he was sick and aware that he was dying, deserves to be rated amongst the greatest works of this superhuman creator.
Other Bowie articles from Peter Lowe:
This is a real aficionado’s list - not the work of a mere fan. It oozes nostalgia and teenage memories and avoids some of the obvious choices that a radio DJ, for example, might make.
I never took enough notice to realise that the bit in the middle of Sweet Thing has a different title, but it’s great and it is one song. Perhaps it troubled so few radio playlists because in the old days the DJ would’ve had to fill in three PRS forms or whatever they were(MCPS?) for each play of the complete song.
It’s a welcome list and nice to see due credit given to Messrs Ronson and Wakeman.