The 10 best songs by Iggy Pop from 1977–1982Ī meditation on mortality and the remorseless tempo of life itself, Bowie’s words are given an added shiver of meaning by Mike Garson’s dissonant piano lines.Aside from referencing Aleister Crowley, Heinrich Himmler, Winston Churchill and Greta Garbo, Bowie declares: ‘I’m not a prophet or a stone age man / Just a mortal with potential of a superman.’ It will fuck you over.Bowie’s early fascination with Nietzsche, the occult, religion and politics found an outlet in the thick dream reality of one of Hunky Dory’s standout tracks. Their artistic vitality will, as promised, sting your soul. If you retrospectively found closure in Blackstar, then you’ll discover a more open ending here: loose threads to unravel that suspicious neatness. And they provide a more ambiguous finale to a consistently surprising career. They might feel movingly true at times but they’re stories, from a master storyteller.įor a fan, these three songs reignite that January sadness, but they also underline what Blackstar implied, which is that Bowie wasn’t winding down but racing as fast as his health allowed through a final burst of creativity that was cut short too soon. Taken alone, it would be a hell of a swansong (“Am I nowhere now?”) but play it beside the feverish discontent of Killing a Little Time and it loses its soothing finality. “All the things that are my life / All my moves, my beliefs, my designs / Me alone, nothing to regret / This is no place but here I am / This is not quite yet,” Bowie croons. It’s an exquisitely lush, star-speckled torch song, which refracts the late-in-life stocktaking of Piaf or Sinatra through the stasis and fatalism of Talking Heads’ Heaven. The best of the three, No Plan, is also the one most likely to inspire literal readings. Bowie sounds like a man coming apart - “I’m falling, man / I’m choking, man / I’m fading, man” - but it feels like Newton talking. Mark Guiliana’s astonishing, tentacular drumming alone confirms that Bowie’s last band, led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin, was one of his best, capable of anything. Killing a Little Time has the same neurotic momentum as Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) and a touch of Outside’s 1990s industrial clamour, pitching Bowie’s sinisterly theatrical vocal into shrieking, churning jazz-rock. When I Met You is the kind of briskly anthemic, self-quoting rock that Bowie delivered on his 2013 comeback album The Next Day, climbing a ladder of chords to a stirring chorus, until a swarm of overlapping backing vocals knocks it sideways, giving it a stranger, more chaotic quality. Indeed, they were recorded at the same time, with the same band and producer, and give the same impression that Bowie was on one last hot streak.Įach one has its own flavour. But these songs are as fully realised as anything on Blackstar. Posthumous material often resembles a scrawny cigarette, scraped together using strands of tobacco from the butts in the ashtray. These songs were written for actors to sing, so interpret with caution.ĭavid Bowie at the New York premiere of Lazarus in December.
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Of course, Bowie seemed to mindmeld with Walter Tevis’s creation at one psychologically fraught point in the mid-70s – the covers for Station to Station and Low both used stills from Nicolas Roeg’s movie cocaine has a way of making one identify with an emotionally numb alien far from home – but still, there was, and is, a difference between the singer and the character. Here are the final three songs recorded by a titanic artist whose death triggered a volcano of grief, so how could we not comb them for clues? But they are also components of a long-dreamt-of musical about Thomas Jerome Newton, The Man Who Fell to Earth. The Lazarus material really is the last word.
The theory that this was a calculated farewell was alluring and not without foundation but it was suspiciously neat, given what we know about his art. Confirmation bias led listeners to literalise any line that was remotely death-related and downplay the rest. Before he died in January, Blackstar seemed to be yet another of his slippery, enigmatic creations, so it felt a little disappointing to see its array of possible meanings reduced, upon his passing, to a deathbed address.
You can have a lot of fun guessing what they mean but you can never fully explain them. His lyrics, even from a song as beloved as Life on Mars?, contain confounding twists and pockets of mystery. Bowie was never one for straightforward autobiography.
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