Bowie Short Quotes

My brain hurt like a warehouse It had no room to spare I had to cram so many things to store everything in there And all the fat-skinny people And all the tall-short people And all the nobody people And all the somebody people I never thought I'd need so many people. - Five Years

Pushing through the market square, So many mothers sighing. News had just come over, We had five years left to cry in. News guy wept and told us, Earth was really dying. Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying. I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies. I saw boys, toys, electric irons and T.V.s. My brain hurt like a warehouse, It had no room to spare. I had to cram so many things To store everything in there. And all the fat-skinny people. And all the tall-short people. And all the nobody people. And all the somebody people. I never thought I'd need so many people. A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children. If the black hadn't a-pulled her off, I think she would have killed them. A soldier with a broken arm Fixed his stare to the wheel of a Cadillac. A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that. I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, Drinking milk shakes cold and long. Smiling and waving and looking so fine, Don't think you knew you were in this song. And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor, And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there. Your face, your race, the way that you talk, I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk. We've got five years, Stuck on my eyes. Five years, What a surprise! We've got five years, My brain hurts a lot. Five years, That's all we've got. - Five Years

Eno again: “I know he liked Another Green World a lot, and he must have realised that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become friendly with them.” Another Green World (1975) has a different feel to Low, but it deploys some of the same strategies. It mixes songs that have recognisable pop structures with other, short, abstract pieces that Eno called “ambient”—with the emphasis not on melody or beat, but on atmosphere and texture. These intensely beautiful fragments fade in then out, as if they were merely the visible part of a vast submarine creation; they are like tiny glimpses into another world. On the more conventional tracks, different genres juxtapose, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not—jazzy sounds cohering with pop hooks but struggling against intrusive synthetic sound effects. The end result is a moodily enigmatic album of real power and ingenuity. One structural difference between the two albums, though, is that while Eno interspersed the “textural” pieces across Another Green World, Bowie separated them out and put them on another side, which provides Low with a sort of metanarrative.

There was an extraordinary flow of players and talent concentrated in that time and place, gathered around Woody’s record. George Harrison walked in one night. Rod Stewart would pop in occasionally. Mick came and sang on the record, and Mick Taylor played. After not hanging about much on the London rock-and-roll scene for a couple of years, it was nice to see everybody and not have to move. They’d come to you. There was always jamming. Ronnie and I hit it off straightaway, day in, day out, we had a load of good laughs. He said, I’m running short of songs, so I knocked up a couple of songs for him, “Sure the One You Need” and “We Got to Get Our Shit Together.” That’s where I first heard “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” in Ronnie’s studio. It’s Mick’s song and he’d cut it with Bowie as a dub. Mick had gotten this idea and they started to rock on it. It was damn good. Shit, Mick, what are you doing it with Bowie for? Come on, we’ve got to steal that motherfucker back. And we did, without too much difficulty. Just the title by itself was so beautifully simple, even if it hadn’t been a great song in its own right. I mean, come on. “It’s only rock and roll but I like