The music meanwhile is essentially a gentle reworking of Boys Keep Swinging: same key, same chords, only slower.ĭavid Bowie in Rotterdam, 1976. Inspired by the ongoing cold war and its attendant nuclear paranoia, its combination of anger and fatalism still sounds pertinent. The album Lodger opened with that rarest of things in the Bowie canon, a protest song. A stark, brass- and woodwind-assisted depiction of those – like Bowie himself – left with their noses pressed against the glass of the Swinging London party, it feels like a monochrome kitchen-sink drama compressed into three minutes. Tellingly, Bowie’s first great song centred on outsiders. Jittery but commercial funk is undercut by a dark lyric that returned to the subject of Bowie’s mentally ill half-brother Terry, this time brooding on his 1985 suicide. Hailed as a return to peak form on release, Black Tie White Noise was nothing of the sort, but its first single was authentically fantastic. The demo version – much talked up by Bowie in later years – remains unheard. A 2018 remix helps matters a little, and the stripped-back 00s live versions available online are better yet. A strange, genuinely great song about religion smothered by overproduction. The solitary moment that sparked on 1984’s inspiration-free Tonight.

The melody is beautiful, the arrangement – very Visconti strings over electronic beats – perfectly poised.

Its highlight sits somewhere between: ostensibly a love song that gradually reveals itself to be about God. Uniformly strong, the songwriting on Heathen stretched from the prosaic – the letter-to-adult-son of Everyone Says Hi – to the baffling.

Something in the air david bowie