DAVID BOWIE
UNSUNG HEROES THE FIVE BEST BOWIE SONGS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD
1 ‘CRYSTAL JAPAN’ (1979) This melancholic electronic instrumental was only ever a single in Japan, where it also featured alongside a suave Bowie in a sake advert. It didn’t make the cut for Scary Monsters where, given the crazy abrasive guitar splattered all over the rest of that album, it would have sounded a bit odd. The chords and melody were lifted wholesale by Trent Reznor for ‘A Warm Place’ on the 1994 Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral. They became pals later, so he must have let it go. 2 ‘DEAD AGAINST IT’ (1994) Rather than taking the overblown Black Tie White Noise album on the road in 1994, Bowie stayed in the studio and made the understated ‘lost’ album The Buddha of Suburbia, which accompanied the TV adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s novel. A catalyst for the next decade of work, it features this, one of the best fizzy pop songs of his career, and some ambient instrumental pieces along the lines of the much-lauded stuff on the Berlin albums.
3 ‘I CAN’T READ’ (1989) Tin Machine. There, we said it. Known more for the derision levelled at them than for their music (some of which is actually pretty good) Bowie’s noisy garage band made two albums before he retook the wheel of his solo career. Three years later, we were all listening to grunge (maybe it was the suits). Tin Machine shared the rhythm section with Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life album – which curiously does make the hipster list (perhaps this is like the similarly-overlooked fact that the drummer on Brian Eno’s ‘cool’ 70s albums was Phil Collins). 4 ‘AMSTERDAM’ (1970) Bowie has recorded dozens of covers, including songs originally written by the Pixies, Morrissey and Springsteen. OK, his hit rate is variable, but now and again – as with his take on Nina Simone’s ‘Wild is the Wind’ – he nails it. This version of Jacques Brel’s impassioned ‘Amsterdam’ not only survives the translation into English, it reminds us just what he can do with a 12-string guitar and his voice.
5 ‘PETER AND THE WOLF’ (1978) Not strictly a song, this recording of Prokofiev’s classic with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Bowie as narrator needs to be heard by everybody. Later talking of it as a Christmas gift for his then 7-year-old son – yep, Duncan Jones of Moon and Timecode fame – listeners expecting OTT ‘visions of swastikas in my head’ vocal acrobatics will leave disappointed. Instead it’s a measured narration by someone who knows how to tell a good story. (Hamish Brown) 21 Feb–21 Mar 2013 THE LIST 19
music landscape of today. Yet, his influence is everywhere.
Perversely, nobody has worked harder than Bowie himself to combat this tendency to over-mythologise, preferring to confound rather than simply meet audience expectations, especially when engaging with his own back catalogue. It’s not always successful – few fans would consider his 1996 jungle reworking of The Man Who Sold the World as essential – but the spirit of innovation is a permanent fixture. Even the front cover of new album The Next Day – essentially a one-minute MS Paint makeover of 1977’s Heroes sleeve – references dealing with the past, and perhaps the inability of others to let him progress beyond his. Despite decades of hits behind him, Bowie has never traded opportunistically on former glories and has always made a point of having something new to say. As explored at length in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, a glance at any live music listings will attest to the popularity of ‘legacy’ acts. Often (but not always) these tribute bands are authenticated by members of the original line-up, who are prisoners of both their back catalogue and the audience’s demand that they hear those hits on their own terms. In fact, perhaps Bowie’s success and our ongoing affection for him best illustrates that we crave the very opposite of this comfort for the familiar. Even when we think we want more of the same, what we might actually desire is something completely different.
’David Bowie is’, a retrospective of Bowie’s career opens at the V&A, London, Sat 23 Mar; vam.ac.uk. Bowie’s new album The Next Day is out Mon 11 Mar; see davidbowie.com for info. Filmhouse, Edinburgh presents ‘Planet Bowie’, with screenings of Bowie films, including The Hunger, Labyrinth and Christiane F. from 10 Mar–4 Apr, see film.list.co.uk for listings.
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