White Hinterland the Destruction of the Art Deco House Lyrics

Y'all could release countless Bowie anthologies and never quite capture how special the Sparse White Duke actually is. Here, Chris Roberts, Nil Lowery, Joe Stannard, Frances Morgan, Petra Davis, Wyndham Wallace and John Doran reveal their favourite Bowie tunes which weren't smash-hitting singles

God knows he'southward good... and then does The Quietus. Our writers plunder his dorsum catalogue to unearth the finest Bowie tracks that weren't hit singles. Listen to the David Bowie Across The Hits Spotify Playlist here.

'Tin Y'all Hear Me?' from Immature Americans (1975)

One of the highlights of Young Americans (the album which unmarried-handedly switched a generation of white boys on to soul music), Bowie'southward "plastic soul" is more soulful than nigh others' "authentic" soul. He originally drafted this for Lulu, but the way he sings it hither could surely never be bettered past man, woman or fauna. It's a love song which seems to exist completely shorn of irony. Fifty-fifty if his singing is that of a consummate actor, information technology doesn't affair: trust the outcome, not the process. In that location's a mature credibility to the lyrics also: while the protagonist admits the relationship in question has been imperfect, and "there'southward been many others, so many times", the primal line is: "I want love and so badly/ I desire you most of all". This is no prettified 'Lady Grinning Soul' but half a dialogue between grown-ups. There's a gorgeous gospel-tinged call-and-response at the denouement. I can't really reduce this song with verbiage, every bit everything most its tone, sound, core and sheen possess a hotline to my unconscious and move me like a seismic sea wave's cuddle.
Chris Roberts

'The Loneliest Guy' from Reality (2003)

In sonic terms lone, 'The Loneliest Guy' is ane of latter day Bowie's most compelling pieces. Without the anchorage of a beat, guitar, bass and piano create the musical equivalent of a clotted sob, a lifetime's accumulation of tears without cathartic release. Then there's the song performance, for which Bowie appears to be drawing on a new awareness of his own mortality. He sings in an upper range croon, fragile, as though slipping by degrees into a world of shades, while the lyrics enumerate images of neglect and empty legacy: "Weeds between buildings/Pictures on my hard drive." Suddenly, the creative person'southward 'glorious' past, with all its private betrayals and little slights, discloses itself as an unmanageable burden: "All the pages that have turned/All the errors left unlearned." Like 'Thursday's Child' from the previous album, 'The Loneliest Guy' expresses the fear that mistakes can never truly exist put correct, that wrong is wrong forever, that love lost tin can never be retrieved no matter how hard one regrets.
Joe Stannard

'Art Decade' from Low (1977)

A pun on Fine art Deco and purportedly named later a Berlin strasse - maybe Hauptstrasse in Charlottenberg where he bunked downward during the "Heroes" years - Bowie has been quoted equally maxim that 'Fine art Decade' is his paen to Due west Berlin. A fitting coda to its album antecessor, 'Warszawa', 'Art Decade''s simple beauty lies in the sparse, cogitating organization of repeated unproblematic melodies. Delicate, somewhat mournful and, like 'Warszawa', painting Bowie's empathy with the isolated, borrowing Eno's sonic language, and creating another piece of seductively spacious, refined nonetheless contemplative construction. Tangibly yearning, 'Art Decade' is the winter of Bowie's discontent projected on his mythical Berlin.
Nix Lowery

'Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed' from Space Oddity (1969)

Breach, isolation, fierce insecurities – chronologically this - track two on Space Oddity - is where the Neat Themes kicked in. But you know what else? Information technology merely fucking rocks. "A weird little song I wrote because 1 twenty-four hour period I got a lot of funny stares from people in the street," he said in 1969. "Most a boy whose girlfriend thinks he is socially inferior. I thought information technology was rather funny really." Lines like "Don't plough your nose up – well you can if yous need to, you won't be the first or last" bear a candour and intimacy that few writers at this fourth dimension were matching, although "I'm a phallus in pigtails" is simply nuts. Really this is all nearly the climactic wig-out Bo Diddley riff session with his high-pitched Bolanesque vibrato whinny and that harmonica solo (by Benny Marshall of The Rats). Sounds awful the way I only described it. It isn't awful.
Chris Roberts

'Win' from Young Americans (1975)

'Fame' and the title track aside, 1975's ersatz soul experiment Young Americans is often placed low in both classicist and hipster Bowie summit tens, languishing in £1 bins and charity shops. I know I got my copy somewhere similar that, years ago; what's more than unusual is that I became briefly obsessed - that repeated listening, planning cover versions kind of obsessed - with the second track, 'Win'. Sonically, information technology'south a lush, saturated power ballad affair where the saxes (tight and funky elsewhere on the album) float and ripple on a bed of mega-reverb and strings keen like a ho-hum disco lament; structurally, information technology veers between soothing grooves and anthemic DRAMA as the rhythm goes from a slinky, slow 4/4 beat in the verse to emphatic triplets and a squealing guitar in the chorus. Thematically or lyrically, the song makes no sense at all; the delivery is full of emotion but the words devoid of weight or coherence. The exhortations of the backing vocalists ("It ain't over...that's all you gotta do") tin't pull us from the void at the heart of 'Win' (and, in fact, the whole album), and the more than yous mind to it, the less this song is well-nigh; and the less Bowie seems to know what it's virtually either. It doesn't terminate him delivering some killer lines ("Someone like you. Should not exist allowed. To kickoff any fires...") and information technology doesn't stop information technology being cute, as the outro spirals lullaby-like hazily downward into a couple of lazy drum breaks. Like a lot of highly produced music, 'Win'south reflective surface denies full understanding, and thus information technology retains a strange, sad affect. Brook's well-nigh-sampling of the track on 'Debra' does it no justice whatsoever in my opinion.
Frances Morgan

'We Are The Dead' from Diamond Dogs (1974)

Some consider Diamond Dogs to exist Bowie'due south masterpiece. For me, the silliness of its Orwellian-Burroughsian narrative is made but about bearable past its writer'southward growing predilection for studio experimentation. 'We Are The Dead' alone comes within spitting distance of fulfilling the project'due south lofty aims. The music is a lugubrious slog, the chromium flash of glam rock melted downwards into a woeful mess of molten metal and rancid sleaze, and yet this sloppy, solipsistic arroyo bolsters a lyric which leaps from the depths of idiocy ("Defecating ecstasy" and "We're today'due south scramble preachers.") to peaks of crystalline lucidity ("Something kind of hit me today/I looked at y'all and wondered if y'all saw things my way" and "Why don't we pass information technology past/But respond, y'all've changed your mind?"). Somewhere between lines that are frankly more fuck-up than cutting-upward, Bowie manages to blast the apple-polishing hopelessness of Orwell'southward Nineteen 80-Four, building a cumulative atmosphere of inevitable horror that allows the vocal to rise above both its own shortcomings and those of the rest of the album.
Joe Stannard

'It's Gonna Be Me' from Young Americans Reissue (1991)

Now, even within the most extraordinary body of work in the whole damn game, this is extraordinary. First, under working title 'Come Dorsum My Baby', it got dumped off Young Americans in '74 when Bowie decided late in the day to include the Lennon collaborations ('Fame', 'Beyond The Universe'). It wasn't fifty-fifty released equally a bonus rail until 1991. So it must be a sketchy mediocrity, an afterthought, right? Far from information technology. 'It'southward Gonna Be Me' is a planet-huge, slow soul ballad with stop-start arrangements and an impassioned, oceanic vocal which is nothing brusque of astonishing. On any other album it would exist the stand-out, the talking signal. It's baffling even to close Bowie associates why he didn't rate it. My approximate is he may have felt his lyrics portrayed him in an unflattering light as a heartless bed-hopping "womaniser". But it's a genre slice, then that shouldn't have stymied it. Plus there are countering, over-romantic flourishes – "loved her earlier I knew her name", "be holy once again", and my personal favourite, "I wanna race down her street and knock hard hard hard on her door until she breaks downwards into my arms similar a treasured toy". Peradventure it's the way he sings "treasured toy". Yeah, it is. Information technology'due south the way he sings the whole affair. Yous haven't heard a white boy sing blackness till you've heard this. Among the best three tracks from the Immature Americans sessions, which is a gigantic statement.
Chris Roberts

'That'south Motivation' from Absolute Beginners: The Official Soundtrack (1986)

Among the standouts of Gil Evans' extraordinarily brilliant soundtrack to the 1986 film accommodation of Colin MacInnes' hosanna to retromodernity, Absolute Beginners, is this set up slice track of Bowie'due south. While critical reaction to the film - and especially to Bowie'southward performance every bit Vendice Partners, the anachronistically yuppified Mayfair advertizing executive – was deeply disapproving, the soundtrack has quietly crept past the film'southward embarrassments to install itself in the shortlist of notable OSTs. Littered though information technology is with offerings from Sade, Ray Davies, Paul Weller, Jerry Dammers and Smiley Civilisation, it's the central writing relationship of Bowie and Gil Evans – former collaborator of Miles Davis, here in his full 80s folly phase – that gives shape to an otherwise meandering drove.

On offset listening 'That's Motivation' foregrounds its showtuneiness, with its membranous horns irresistibly recalling Bernstein, but listen over again: this tune is greatly odd. Evans' key atomic number 82 guitar motif (threaded through the entire production, including the introduction of the title track, Bowie's best-known contribution) is openly post-punk, a straight steal from XTC's 'Milkshake You Donkey Up', in fact, and Bowie'south song is poised somewhere between Dick Van Dyke and Iggy Pop. The track bridges the unbridgeable with sheer arts and crafts; none of the soundtrack's other contributors manage to capture the relentlessly plastic quality of Macinnes' prose as Bowie does with this lyric. Performatively, too, this is a high point, though there'd be little to choose betwixt Bowie equally Partners and Bowie equally Jareth the Goblin King (Labyrinth was released in the same year), were it not for the choreographic nods to Busby Berkely. Meet, he leaps from fundamental to key of a giant typewriter like some Lynchian grasshopper, or tapdances in the sky, roaring the value of ambition. Why die lost in infinite when yous can dance on a cloud? Free energy is the matter, the root of the thing. Bowie in '86 had piles of it.
Petra Davis

'Subterraneans' from Low (1977)

Bowie's almost po-mo moment on Low, and also arguably the almost beautiful, 'Subterraneans' is a multi-layered and angelic piece, a sonic painting brimming with referentiality and subtext. With a reversed bassline taken from his rejected The Man Who Barbarous To Earth soundtrack, Bowie references his attachment to the pic, to his character Thomas Newton, and to the general sense of a human being out of step, and out of time, with his surroundings – allegorically explored before in his piece of work through his 'Major Tom' graphic symbol. The main melody, a sweeping and encompassing phrase, contains a melody audibly mirroring Edward Elgar's 'Nimrod' from his Enigma Variations. Whether coincidental or deliberate, there are subtexts to exist read here. 'Nimrod' is part of a series Elgar wrote in which each piece obliquely referenced one of his acquaintances. 'Nimrod' referenced Augustus J Jaegar, who convinced Elgar, when in a moment of great despair, to continue writing music, citing the German composer Beethoven as an inspiration. Bowie, too, was surfacing from a flow of disillusionment, despair and drug induced creative drought – peradventure Visconti and Eno were his Jaegar? Or perhaps the idea of Berlin, and its isolated idealists, was his muse? The shimmering ethereal backwards melodics combined with synth-strings recall Eno's solo piece of work significantly – on 'Subterraneans' more and then than on any other Low limerick. Lyrically, Bowie echoes the cut-up way of beat poetry, and a lone jazz saxophone answers the lyrical call, summoning surrealism and the creative fire of Burroughs and Ginsberg. Regardless of the replete referentiality of this track, its existent beauty is that it works emotively, a contemplative and delicate beauty similar ripples on a lake, Subterraneans' melodies menstruum organically. Ripples too, of its magic tin can be discerned in Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, and most audibly in Angelo Badalamenti's collaborations with David Lynch – Subterraneans reaches towards futurity with a surreal and mystical compages.
Zip Lowery

'Sugariness Thing/Candidate' from Diamond Dogs (1974)

His Guernica. His Ulysses. His Ariel. More accurately, probably, his something by Jean Genet, but I don't know enough nearly Jean Genet to barefaced it. What a movie this is. Before yous crazy kids had your videos and your deely-boppers and your Sinclair C5s and stuff, we had to – wanted to – apply our minds and imaginations to pic the scenes evoked in a lyric, and this monster was the motherlode. In the best of the Bowie books, The Complete David Bowie, Nicholas Pegg writes: "It's a stunningly bleak glimpse into the completeness and remains ane of the most comprehensively imagined and dramatically performed of all Bowie'due south recordings." And it is a operation. The Diamond Dogs album has already given us foreshadowing – we're in a post-apocalyptic landscape, people – and now we're walking through its blackened streets. The initial section of the triptych is huge carol 'Sweetness Thing', then 'Candidate' is a quickfire cut-up recitation (I maintain that this was the first rap record, though I've yet to notice an marry), then 'Sweet Thing (Reprise)' returns to crooning of such magnificent grandeur that information technology'southward simply showing off actually. Oh and so in that location's a bonfire of guitar feedback. Along the sight-seeing bout we come across Charles Manson, Cassius Dirt, "les tricoteuses", and many of the sassiest rhyming couplets ever conceived. That hissed "When it's good it'south really good, and when it's bad I go to pieces" – the context, the urgency, the phrasing - has always moved me more than whatever line in the history of popular music, and always will. Strutting, vulnerable, cocksure, yearning: this is ix minutes of narcotized, narcissistic nirvana.
Chris Roberts

'Five-2 Schneider' from "Heroes" (1977)

It fades in similar the drone of an budgeted missile, the rattle of snare drums in turn similar gunshot in the distance, an ominous bassline chirapsia like a nervous pulse: '5-2 Schneider' may have been the B-side to the kickoff 7" single I ever bought, "Heroes" - 2d-hand from the Notting Colina Tape Commutation, natch – merely it was mode more exciting than its flipside, mysterious as Bowie's desire to swim with dolphins seemed. The 5-2 rocket was a wartime Nazi ballistic missile and this lent the song a significantly nighttime aura, peculiarly amidst the paranoia of Cold War politics. Just like Bowie'due south all-time work the track had a man element to it, something that the addition to the title of the give-and-take 'Schneider' seemed to emphasise. (I had no idea information technology was actually a tip of the hat to Kraftwerk'southward Florian Schneider.)

The song continues with Bowie's (there's no other word for it) squonking saxophone and the disconcerting sound of his voice, phased and distorted, reiterating the title and slowly coming into focus as though it'southward clearing the clouds. And and then in that location'southward ane final guitar chord, a whammy bar sending it low as though the missile is divebombing, its engines on fire, inescapable, chilling. I could run into it all, can meet it all still, equally exciting as it is terrifying. My adrenalin just subsides as the song fades, as though I take, somehow, cheated Armageddon.
Wyndham Wallace

'Lady Grinning Soul' from Aladdin Sane(1973)

The swooning epic romance of this song - such an unlikely, serene finale to the edgy, jittery, nervy Aladdin Sane - warped me for life at the most impressionable of ages. I am still mildly disappointed if my romances don't in every aspect resemble Brief Encounter, a Wong Kar-Wai motion picture, or at to the lowest degree a Walker Brothers carol. Somewhat disappointing, then, to find information technology was inspired by the aforementioned American soul singer who inspired The Rolling Stones' rather less idealistic 'Brownish Sugar' – Claude Lennear, who worked with crusty worthies like Leon Russell, Stephen Stills, Joe Cocker. Only ever believe the painting, not the back story – 'Lady Grin Soul', all ridiculously baroque piano, wonderful flamenco guitar from Ronson and a vocal that comes from a aging clifftop, is a torch song to burn for. And now you know where Suede got 'My Dark Star' (and one or two other songs) from.
Chris Roberts

'Something In The Air' from "Hours..." (1999)

Having effected an artistic rebirth in the early on 90s with a serial of high concept releases, "Hours..." featured a good few songs which seemed inspired not by artful roleplay or po-mo posturing but by genuine human emotion. The verses of 'Something In The Air' are tense, clipped, detailing the decline of a relationship in blithely realistic terms while the verses correspond the outpouring of grief and recrimination that accompanies the terminal expiry: "At that place'due south something in the air/Something in my centre/I've danced with you besides long." The pain becomes all the more apparent during the vocal'south extended coda, which homages Annette Peacock's 1972 avant jazz masterpiece 'I'm The One' with its chord sequence and the conspicuous use of ring modulation on the vocal. The issue of this is to twist and warp Bowie's words like guilt in the gut.
Joe Stannard

'I'm Deranged' from Lost Highway: Official Soundtrack (1997)

If any of David Lynch'due south films has fallen off the radar in recent years, information technology'south most likely 1997's Lost Highway, and I'd contend that this is in some part to do with its soundtrack album, equally compiled and produced by Trent Reznor. The music in Lost Highway is more than 'of its time' than in any other Lynch moving picture, and thus much of information technology hasn't anile at all well, from Marilyn Manson to Rammstein, and the film'southward opening rail, David Bowie and Brian Eno's 'I'm Deranged'. I really really like most of it, although I exercise describe the line at the Smashing Pumpkins ane. Originally on Outside, Bowie'southward 1995 album featuring the flatulent mashup of 'Hello Spaceboy' and sundry other over-aggressive, Matrix-ish techno-metal cuts that I suspect will 1 day get a reappraisal just maybe not yet, 'I'm Deranged' exploits the sudden vogue for putting a vaguely pulsate and bass rhythm behind everything, including adverts, that hit the mainstream in the mid-1990s. Here, it powers a melancholy, mellifluous vocal line that makes me think of Baton Mackenzie on Outernational, inclement guitars, and a wildly emoting pianoforte direct out of 'Aladdin Sane'. It'south pretty dizzy, perchance, but it has a momentum, a synthesised sweep and a sense of night space that, for me, is wonderfully inseparable from the juddering, corybantic yellow lines, pale headlights, and pitch-black road to nowhere of Lost Highway's iconic opening and closing sequences.
Frances Morgan

'God Knows I'grand Good' from Space Oddity (1969)

Not ane of the great Bowie songs - non even among the best half of Space Oddity - but there's something unique in his oeuvre almost this. It feels as if information technology comes from a halfway firm between his early on Cockney dodger persona and the nascent alien freakoid. And the freakoid is observing these puny homo/mortal types, not without compassion. As he watches a "woman hot with worry" caught shoplifting, he even manages to drop in an anti-backer, anti-corporate sentiment or two. What a hippy. Oh wait, what a decades-ahead-of-his-time seer. The beauty is in the detail: an former lady nearby faints. Honest people assistance her, fifty-fifty though the song's full general tone is one of dismay at how greedy and selfish we are. See, contrasts and grey areas and no dogmatic absolutes - that's, like, proper writing. Dumb, tricky chorus likewise - and if you wilfully misunderstand information technology, you lot tin sing along in a self-aggrandising mode.
Chris Roberts

'Without Yous' from Let'due south Trip the light fantastic toe (1983)

Following the recommercialisation of Bowie'due south sound on Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), Let's Dance is often dismissed as Bowie'southward MTV anthology, opening as it does with three singles: the gloriously attainable 'Modern Dear' and 'Red china Daughter', and the more than complex, sinister funk of the title rail. But the pop of 'Mod Love' and 'China Daughter' is dissonant on this anthology, which is more often dominated past the carefully-constructed, lyrical postal service-disco of this rail - a product of the co-product, with Bowie, of Chic'south Nile Rodgers. Rodgers was soon to become notorious for his power to inject disco infectiousness into pop records (he co-produced Madonna's 'Similar A Virgin' anthology and many of Duran Duran's more than interesting tunes), but here his sound is relatively restrained and minimal. 'Without You' benefits from a shimmery remove – Rodgers gives the multitracked guitars (including lead from Stevie Ray Vaughan) and Bowie's own multitracked song the aforementioned heft and prismatic treatment, with the thin bankroll vocals providing the but clarity. The vocal structure, too, is shifting: unpredictable chord changes and a restless song line provide little comfort. "Without you, what would I do?" sings Bowie sadly, and the backing vocals respond with a cheerful "ooh-hoo." It'south hardly the bluster we associate with the MTV video culture of the early 80s; this is one track whose delicacy of construction suffers for the clan.
Petra Davis

'All Saints' from All Saints: Collected Instrumentals 1977-1999 (2000)

This rail, from the Berlin recording sessions which produced Depression, is most indistinguishable from early on Throbbing Gristle. Play information technology dorsum-to-back with TG circa 1979 (as compiled on 1986's CD1) and you'll run across what I mean. A gnarly squall of low-end electronic noise punctuated by sprite-like coils of treble, this track more matches the original industrialists for uncompromisingly ugly beauty and offers a stark contrast to the far less visceral instrumental pieces which made the album'due south final cut. In truth, Bowie's decision to leave this piece off Low is understandable; it seems likely that the other tracks would take simply withered in its proximity. Bowie wouldn't properly release annihilation as harsh as this until 1995's flawed but fascinating reunion with Eno, Outside, by which fourth dimension the term 'industrial music' meant something completely different.
Joe Stannard

'Warszawa' from Low (1977)

Beginning ominously with a pulsing repeated chord, juxtaposed past a soft tune insinuating an virtually spectral melancholy and resignation, 'Warszawa''due south looped descant eventually builds to a charily optimistic sweeping annotation before resolving, then offset its gentle upward swing in one case once again. Berlin Trilogy collaborator Brian Eno lays claim to the repeated Chamberlin melodies and much of the construction of 'Warszawa': as the tale is told Warszawa'south nascent stages were developed in the Château d'Hérouville (the same studio in which he wrote 'Pinups' and collaborated with Iggy Pop on The Idiot) by Eno and producer Tony Visconti's son whilst Bowie and Visconti were away attending a courtroom case. Upon returning, Bowie adopted the sonic development, added tonal abstract vocals and fashioned complementary melodies, crafting the rail into a paen to the still mythologised cities of Eastern Europe. Warsaw struck a chord in Bowie: hidden, trapped, struggling and exploited, but also cloistered and creatively fertile. A metaphor for the self, of course, equally Bowie'due south cocky imposed exile in Berlin was imminent. The oft-quoted relationship with experimental sound construction is visible throughout Depression's second side, and especially in 'Warszawa': a simple exposition of counterpoint loops, creating a mournful tension, and yet a hypnotic grace.
Aught Lowery

'After All' from The Homo Who Sold The World (1970)

The Man Who Sold The Earth is the no-nonsense, proto-metal, hard stone album. Except when it isn't. 1 of Bowie'due south most muted, whispered, sotto voce tracks ever, 'Subsequently All' is a trippy haunted-fairground flit with faintly Buddhist themes. Maybe a dash of Aleister Crowley. Information technology'southward those dubbed multi-octave refrains though, later on deployed to great effect at the stop of 'The Bewlay Brothers' on Hunky Dory, which make a poignant song profound. And information technology's fair to say a (meaningless? comical? po-faced?) refrain of "Oh by Jingo" shouldn't achieve profundity. But it does. Here, it does. Cleanly inside whatsoever true Bowie fanatic's tiptop ten, and nowhere almost any populist Best Of.
Chris Roberts

'Ever Crashing In The Same Automobile' from Low (1977)

They always call Bowie a chameleon, merely rarely was he more so than on Depression's 'Always Crashing In The Aforementioned Motorcar', in which empathetic confession, paranoid frustration and a discrete, almost paralysed sense of lethargy sit down side by side. Nearly certainly a metaphor for the cocaine abuse that had prompted his motion to Europe, the song's impressionist lyrics obsess over his inability to resist, nevertheless hard he tries, from driving at speed at every opportunity until he crashes.

Bowie'south voice remains tender over a backdrop of swirling electronic effects throughout the vocal'south opening poesy, but when the drums clatter at the showtime of the chorus his tone seems to switch to resignation, despite the optimistic arpeggio that climbs behind him into the bridge. Such euphoria is shortlived, withal: he admits seconds later that he's spotted his passenger, Jasmine, "peeping as I pushed my foot downwardly to the floor", and the utter futility of the experience is summed upward succinctly in the image of Bowie "going circular and round the hotel garage / must have been touching shut to 94". The constant changes in vocal register exercised throughout hint at his unsettled, edgy land of mind, and his concluding howled "yes, yeah, yeah" sounds practically traumatised, a drastic last attempt to fool himself. The song ends with a guitar solo – a tertiary verse was apparently excised – that judders to an ugly halt a minute later, the electronics behind information technology now phased like police sirens. He's crashed once more. Human being weakness and the disability to avert an inevitable fate have rarely been expressed and so sympathetically.
Wyndham Wallace

'Be My Married woman' from Depression (1977)

Oh, more haemorrhage-heart desperate alone romantic yearning disguised as cold haughty robotic heartlessness. Tears of a pierrot, fears of a auto. A perfect meaty nugget of everything Bowie did best during the Low/"Heroes"/Lodger trilogy. You tin can say all y'all like near the influence of Kraftwerk and Neu!, well-nigh Eno's studio experiments, nearly how Bowie'southward psycho-geographical switch to Berlin confused both sides of the punk wars so much that they shrugged and waved him through the barricades. Withal that canny advertizing campaign – "there's Former Wave, there'south New Wave, and at that place's Bowie" – was the nigh accurate sentence in the history of rock criticism. There are just eight brief, simple lines of lyrics in 'Be My Wife', but accept them away and its consciousness would irrevocably alter. Bowie'due south personae spoke to united states of america zealous fans, nailing it every time. We didn't give a fuck nearly Eno, to tell you lot the truth. Eno was for boffins and critics. And musicians. Information technology was all nigh what our prophet was uttering, every bit Zen or Ziggy or soulboy or sultan. In this song he was just like us. The dazzler of it being that he wasn't similar us at all, and then the mystery and enchantment continued.
Chris Roberts

'Fantastic Voyage' from Lodger (1979)

1979'south Lodger witnessed the debut of a conspicuously 'clean' Bowie persona breaking free from the cocaine mayhem of the 'Cracked Actor' era and the grey purgatory of the Berlin period. Although generally discussed every bit part of a trilogy with Low and "Heroes", Lodger was recorded in Switzerland rather than West Berlin, and features no instrumental pieces. The lead-off track, 'Fantastic Voyage', finds Bowie in cogitating mood, if somewhat perturbed. Addressing his own peripheral relationship to a world of trouble and admitting his confusion, he sounds a great deal wiser than the paranoid freak who gave an alleged Nazi salute at Waterloo Station merely a couple of years previously. Y'all can well-nigh hear the cringe as he croons, "It'southward a very modernistic world/But nobody's perfect." The accompaniment to these rueful words is stately and unhurried, similar in feel and instrumentation to Eno's 'I'll Come Running' from Another Green World. With this tune, the newly rehumanised Bowie sounds every bit though he'south emerging blinking from a hangover, or a nightmare, or both, although the the genuine danger of the world he is emerging into offers trivial in the way of comfort.
Joe Stannard

'Queen Bitch' from Hunky Dory (1971)

The glam rock highlight from one of Homo Superior's RCA-royal phase volume-end albums, was written on a determinative trip to America. "The biggest thrill was meeting Lou Reed", he said on his return, stating the obvious. 'Queen Bitch' his tribute to VU and Lou was obviously a lot more than heartfelt than 'Andy Warhol' - a bang-up but weird ditty that manifestly pissed off the soup can male monarch more than a soupcon. (Information technology was certainly more inspiring than the tedious Song For Bob Dylan at whatever instance.) At this point Bowie was a sponge feeding voraciously off New York and Lou, par-lifting and combining the riff, system and, more importantly, feel of the Velvet's 'Sis Ray' and 'Sweet Jane' and Eddie Cochran's 'Iii Steps To Heaven'. But he would be dorsum less than a year subsequently with his summit coat and bibbity bobbity hat to more repay the favour by producing Transformer. Meanwhile, and more than importantly, 'Queen Bitch' really was one of the cornerstones of the whole Ziggy Stardust phase.
John Doran

'All The Madmen' from The Man Who Sold The World (1970)

Oscillating between subdued feyness and macho guitar squalls, this ready-piece from The Man Who Sold The World was Bowie'southward offset endeavour to give voice(s) to the voices in the head of his one-half-blood brother Terry Burns, who suffered from mental illness. (The Southward London hospital to which Terry was confined featured on the artwork of the album'south US release). It'south far from sentimental, often very g guignol, and sympathetic: "all the madmen...are just as sane as me." And more fun than "the pitiful men roaming gratis". Some lines repeat Kerouac'southward On The Route. Visconti and Ronson deserve neat credit for the arrangements here. Many years on Bowie returned to the theme of Terry'due south state of mind in "Jump They Say". Clearly the issue, and this song, stayed with him. The surreal/nonsense closing refrain of "Zane, Zane, Zane, ouvrez le chien" was repeated in 'The Buddha Of Suburbia', and on the '95 Outside tour a huge sign reading OUVREZ LE CHIEN hovered over the stage. The phrase has become as much of an emotional trigger for Bowie fans as "Oh By Jingo..."
Chris Roberts

'Red Sails' from Lodger/i> (1979)

Equally is probably the case for many of my generation, I heard music influenced past Krautrock a good while earlier I heard the 18-carat commodity, and this vocal would be the closest I came to the Utopian pulsebeat of Neu! until coming across a dodgy Germanofon bootleg of Neu! ii in the mid 90s. Familiarity with Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger'due south linear innovations hasn't dimmed my amore for this rails, however. Not only is it one of the most glaringly cheeky instances of Bowie's tendency for stylistic theft - he and Eno announced to have drilled the Dinger motorik firmly into the cognitive cortex of drummer Dennis Davis while Carlos Alomar's guitars contrive a perfect facsimile of Rother'due south vapour trail melodicism - it also boasts a bizarre piratical narrative which, like much of Lodger, illustrates Bowie's hitherto hidden capacity for playfulness. Information technology'southward difficult to imagine lines like "The hinterland! The hinterland! We're gonna sail to the hinterland! It'southward far, far, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa far away! It's a far, far, fa-fa-fa-fa ta-ta-ta-ta-ta!" issuing from the bloodless lips of the Thin White Knuckles for instance. For more Bowie-instigated Neu! thievery, see as well 'Funtime' from Iggy Pop's 1977 solo debut, The Idiot.
Joe Stannard

This article was originally published in January 2013

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Source: https://thequietus.com/articles/04884-david-bowie-beyond-the-hits

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