Bowie Song Quotes

I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man Just a mortal with potential of a superman I'm living on. -Quicksand

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

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. - Five Years

I needed to sing because nobody else was singing my songs.

And the stars look very different today.

Ben had never seen his mother cry before, and it startled him, so he didn't ask again. Right afterward she'd put on her favorite record and played a mysterious song called "Space Oddity," about an astronaut named Major Tom who gets lost in space. She used to listen to the song over and over again. With her eyes closed, she'd place the palm of her hand against the fabric of the speaker, so she could feel it vibrate against her skin.

He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't seem so different from Catholicism - the hemlines were just a little higher.

I got really bored, so I decided to pick a theme song! Something appropriate. And naturally, it should be something from Lewis’s godawful seventies collection. It wouldn’t be right any other way. There are plenty of great candidates: “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie, “Rocket Man” by Elton John, “Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan. But I settled on “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees.

Zane zane zane, ouvre le chien

You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.

An dem Tag, an dem du denkst, du kannst nicht mehr besser werden, fängst du an, immer den gleichen Song zu spielen.

You remind me of a man." "What?" "A man with the power?" "Who do?" "You do. Remind me of a man.

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

The thought makes my teeth gnash and my lip snarl and my jaw fill with a scream. A scream that always has the same chorus. What they took away, seemingly so easily, was a person. "This was a person!" A person who could watch a sunset and feel the wind against their cheek. Smell fresh-cut grass or listen to a Bowie song. A person who could scrape up enough money to buy themselves a hot-fudge sundae. A person who could still close their eyes and dream. That's what the media refuses to understand. No matter how down and out someone may seem, no matter how many drugs they took or arrests they had or rock bottoms they hit-they could have still done all those things. Those things that make us human. And one day, someone came along and took all those things away. Every single one of them. And left them with darkness.

The twenty-seventh was Blackstar, or simply (the symbol of blackstar) - a suggestion that the A-Z was over, but there was more to come, beyond the known alphabet, beyond ordinary language; a second set of letters, communications, a rebirth. Inside the A to Z, and all the possible combinations of songs, styles, secrets, themes, discoveries, redirections, emotional climaxes, sheer drama, tension, relief, beauty, there was all you needed to know in order to construct and understand the language of Bowie (re morley's alphabet of bowie albums)

One of the songs which certainly impacted greatly in the summer of 1977 was a song which sounded as if Kraftwerk had gone potty and recruited a bona fide American soul singer. In fact, it wasn’t Kraftwerk, but Italian musician and producer Giorgio Moroder. ‘One day in Berlin,’ says Bowie, ‘Eno came running in and said, “I have heard the sound of the future.” … He puts on “I Feel Love”, by Donna Summer … He said, “This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.” Which was more or less right.

From strange alter-egos, to the occult concept of androgyny, and of course including references to Aleister Crowley and his Thelema, David Bowie did decades ago what pop stars are doing now. “Bowie’s alter-ego named Ziggy Stardust was a representation of the “illuminated man” who has reached the highest level of initiation: androgyny. There was also a lot of one eye things going on. Drawing the Kabbalistic Tree of Life The difference between Bowie and today’s pop stars is that he was rather open regarding the occult influence in his act and music. In a 1995 interview, Bowie stated: “My overriding interest was in cabbala and Crowleyism. That whole dark and rather fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain.” In his 1971 song Quicksand, Bowie sang: “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn Immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery” (Golden Dawn is the name of a Secret Society that had Crowley as member). These are only some examples of the occult influence on Bowie’s work and an entire book could be written on the subject. Since the main antagonist of Labyrinth is a sorcerer who also happens to enjoy singing impromptu pop songs, David Bowie was a perfect fit for the role.

I open the door to see him on my doorstep and he doesn’t even say hello. He says, “Let’s cut the crap, Daisy. You need to record this album or Runner’s taking you to court.” I said, “I don’t care about any of that. They can take their money back, get me kicked out of here if they want. I’ll live in a cardboard box.” I was very annoying. I had no idea what it meant to truly suffer. Teddy said, “Just get in the studio, love. How hard is that?” I told him, “I want to write my own stuff.” I think I even crossed my arms in front of my chest like a child. He said, “I’ve read your stuff. Some of it’s really good. But you don’t have a single song that’s finished. You don’t have anything ready to be recorded.” He said I should fulfill my contract with Runner and he would help me get my songs to a point where I could release an album of my own stuff. He called it “a goal for us all to work toward.” I said, “I want to release my own stuff now.” And that’s when he got testy with me. He said, “Do you want to be a professional groupie? Is that what you want? Because the way it looks from here is that you have a chance to do something of your own. And you’d rather just end up pregnant by Bowie.” Let me take this opportunity to be clear about one thing: I never slept with David Bowie. At least, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I said, “I am an artist. So you either let me record the album I want or I’m not showing up. Ever.” Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.” I shut the door in his face. And sometime later that day, I opened up my songbook and I started reading. I hated to admit it but I could see what he was saying. I had good lines but I didn’t have anything polished from beginning to end. The way I was working then, I’d have a loose melody in my head and I’d come up with lyrics to it and then I’d move on. I didn’t work on my songs after one or two rounds. I was sitting in the living room of my cottage, looking out the window, my songbook in my lap, realizing that if I didn’t start trying—I mean being willing to squeeze out my own blood, sweat, and tears for what I wanted—I’d never be anything, never matter much to anybody. I called Teddy a few days later, I said, “I’ll record your album. I’ll do it.” And he said, “It’s your album.” And I realized he was right. The album didn’t have to be exactly my way for it to still be mine.

Bob Dylan The only time Jobs can ever recall being tongue-tied was in the presence of Bob Dylan. He was playing near Palo Alto in October 2004, and Jobs was recovering from his first cancer surgery. Dylan was not a gregarious man, not a Bono or a Bowie. He was never Jobs’s friend, nor did he care to be. He did, however, invite Jobs to visit him at his hotel before the concert. Jobs recalled: We sat on the patio outside his room and talked for two hours. I was really nervous, because he was one of my heroes. And I was also afraid that he wouldn’t be really smart anymore, that he’d be a caricature of himself, like happens to a lot of people. But I was delighted. He was as sharp as a tack. He was everything I’d hoped. He was really open and honest. He was just telling me about his life and about writing his songs. He said, “They just came through me, it wasn’t like I was having to compose them. That doesn’t happen anymore, I just can’t write them that way anymore.” Then he paused and said to me with his raspy voice and little smile, “But I still can sing them.” The next time Dylan played nearby, he invited Jobs to drop by his tricked-up tour bus just before the concert. When Dylan asked what his favorite song was, Jobs said “One Too Many Mornings.” So Dylan sang it that night. After the concert, as Jobs was walking out the back, the tour bus came by and screeched to a stop. The door flipped open. “So, did you hear my song

Johnny Rotten slouches at the front of the stage, propped up on the mike stand. He's leaning so far forward he looks as if he might topple into the empty space in front of the audience. · His face is pale and his body is twisted into such an awkward ugly shape he looks deformed. He looks ordinary, about the same age as us, the kind of boy I was at comprehensive school with. He's not a flashy star like Marc Bolan or David Bowie, all dressed up in exotic costumes, he's not a virtuoso musician like Eric Clapton or Peter Green, he's not even a macho rock-and-roll pub-band singer – he's just a bloke from Finsbury Park, London, England, who’s pissed off. Johnny sneers at us in his ordinary North London accent, his voice isn't trained and tuneful, it's a whiny cynical drawl, every song delivered unemotionally. There's no fake American twang either. All the things I'm so embarrassed about, John's made into virtues. He's unapologetic about who he is and where he comes from. Proud of it even. He's not taking the world's lack of interest as confirmation that he’s wrong or worthless. I look up at him twisting and yowling and realise it's everyone else who's wrong, not him. How did he make that mental leap from musically untrained, state-school-educated, council estate boy, to standing on stage in front of a band? I think he's brave. A revolutionary. He's sending a very powerful message, the most powerful message anyone can ever transmit. Be yourself.

final syllable of Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’—the word suffragette being, perhaps not coincidentally, among the McCartney song’s lyrics).

The song was folky; David played it vaguely in the style of the Byrds, and it was called “Let’s Dance.” “And I was like, That’s not happening, man. It totally threw me. And it was not a song you could dance to.” Rodgers simply didn’t understand. Was this some kind of mind game? So he called a mutual friend in New York. “Do you think David is the kind of guy who would play a trick on me?” he asked. “Is he playing me this song he says is going to be a hit to see if I’m some sort of sycophant?

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.

One of the methods that he and Bowie used on Low was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs. Did the Oblique Strategy cards actually work? They were probably more important symbolically than practically. A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more need of a mental circuit-breaker than someone like Bowie, who was a natural improviser, collagiste, artistic gadfly. Anyone involved in the creative arts knows that chance events in the process play an important role, but to my mind there’s something slightly self-defeating about the idea of “planned accidents.” Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: “Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you’ve got to understand something. I’m a musician. I’ve studied music theory, I’ve studied counterpoint and I’m used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: ‘Here’s the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.’ So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, ‘This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.’ I totally, totally resisted it. David and Brian were two intellectual guys and they had a very different camaraderie, a heavier conversation, a Europeanness. It was too heavy for me. He and Brian would get off on talking about music in terms of history and I’d think, ‘Well that’s stupid—history isn’t going to give you a hook for the song!’ I’m interested in what’s commercial, what’s funky and what’s going to make people dance!” It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno’s experimentalism that was more productive than the “planned accidents” themselves. As Eno himself has said: “The interesting place is not chaos, and it’s not total coherence. It’s somewhere on the cusp of those two.

A gift for polyphonic universality is another characteristic of Bards. They speak out in the voices of people from all walks of life and they say things in such a way that we think they are voicing our own thoughts. As David Bowie put it in his ‘Song for Bob Dylan’: “And you sat behind a million pair of eyes/And told them how they saw.

My favored stick of rock was glam, where Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music, Sparks, and Cockney Rebel provided the soundtrack to my youth. Each had an individually captivating sound, and together they told the story I wanted to hear through those times in Britain. Other kids at school were lost in a haze of Pink Floyd and Genesis, or were queuing endlessly to secure Led Zeppelin tickets. We were all members of different factions, but wherever you belonged, the music was inspirational. It was an important voice in our culture, a way for our generation to express its singularity.

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

That said, I am supremely confident that there would be one exception: We would unanimously agree upon David Bowie being the common pivotal influence on all of our collective musical styles.

The album is still a treasured possession and a source of pride that “not only was I to cover [a] Velvets’ song before anyone else in the world, I actually did it before the album came out. Now that’s the essence of mod.” In forthcoming years, David Bowie would become the world’s best-known champion of the Velvets, but in 1967, his attempts to assimilate its narco-deadpan thuggery resulted in some of his most ludicrous music.

Lower Third demoed “The London Boys,” which they considered a standout song, but Hatch and Pye turned it down at their weekly sales meeting. According to Hatch, the main reason was not the downbeat subject matter or the references to pill popping but that “it takes too long to get going. It would never make a single.” Its replacement was far more concise, with a simple three-chord chorus once again lifted shamelessly from “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere.” But while “Can’t Help Thinking about Me” thieves exactly the same three-chord trick as “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” it makes far better use of it, with that punchy chorus allied with a subtle verse whose minor-key chords perfectly match the foreboding lines of a “question time that says I brought dishonor.

One evening Bowie vented his frustration, says Pitt, by telling him, “I’m going to write some Top Ten rubbish,” then proceeded to write a song that was neither. “Let Me Sleep Beside You” would be his first collaboration with Tony Visconti, the producer with whom he’s most associated; the finest song Bowie had written to that point, it also became the cause of his biggest artistic setback.

Having written the definitive anthem of the 1970s, David simply gave it away. Some thought that this was a self-serving act, designed to underline his own musical omnipotence. Bob Grace, the man who’d overseen most of Bowie’s recent songs, is emphatic that in giving away the song, Bowie paid a price: “I thought that was a mistake. If David had put out ‘All the Young Dudes’ himself that autumn, he would have been huge beyond our comprehension. It was great he gave [Mott] the song, but I’m convinced it cost him.” The argument ignores the fact that Bowie remained, at heart, a fan. This was simply a spontaneous act, and in any case the music was pouring out of him.

I tell you what completely took the biscuit for me – the song ‘Tonight’ with Tina Turner. Now she was really good, but I just thought, This record is so poppy.

I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song ‘China Girl’, it better sound Asian. You call a song ‘Let’s Dance’, you damn well better make sure people dance to it.

If it was too windy sixty feet up, Bowie couldn’t perform the song for fear of toppling off his mounting and becoming a rock’n’roll casualty. For the 1987 tour, as if in a fit

You remind me of the babe." "What babe?" "The babe with the power." "What power?" "The power of voodoo." "Who do?" "You do." "Do what?" "You remind me of the babe.

by refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001—“Space Oddity” and “After the Gold Rush.” Both did classic songs about imperialism that name-checked Marlon Brando—“China Girl” and “Pocahontas.” Both were prodigiously prolific even when they were trying to eat Peru through their nostrils. They were mutual fans, though they floundered when they tried to copy each other (Trans and Tin Machine). Both sang their fears of losing their youth when they were still basically kids; both aged mysteriously well. Neither ever did anything remotely sane. But there’s a key difference: Bowie liked working with smart people, whereas Young always liked working with . . . well, let’s go ahead and call them “not quite as smart as Neil Young” people. Young made his most famous music with two backing groups—the awesomely inept Crazy Horse and the expensively addled CSN—whose collective IQ barely leaves room temperature. He knows they’re not going to challenge him with ideas of their own, so he knows how to use them—brilliantly in the first case, lucratively in the second. But Bowie never made any of his memorable music that way—he always preferred collaborating with (and stealing from) artists who knew tricks he didn’t know, well educated in musical worlds where he was just a visitor. Just look at the guitarists he worked with: Carlos Alomar from James Brown’s band vs. Robert Fripp from King Crimson. Stevie Ray Vaughan from Texas vs. Mick Ronson from Hull. Adrian Belew from Kentucky vs. Earl Slick from Brooklyn. Nile Rodgers. Peter Frampton. Ricky Gardiner, who played all that fantastic fuzz guitar on Low (and who made the mistake of demanding a raise, which is why he dropped out of the story so fast). Together, Young and Bowie laid claim to a jilted generation left high and dry by the dashed hippie dreams. “The

LOW PRESENTS BOWIE AT THIRTY, IN ALL HIS CONTRADICTIONS: artist, hedonist, introvert, astral traveler, sexual tourist, depressive, con man, charmer, liar. Low, released in January 1977, was a new beginning for Bowie, kicking off what is forever revered as his “Berlin trilogy,” despite the fact that Low was mostly recorded in France. Side 1 consists of seven fragments, some manic synth pop songs, some just chilly atmospherics. Side 2 has four brooding electronic instrumentals. Both sides glisten with ideas: listening to Low, you hear Kraftwerk and Neu, maybe some Ramones, loads of Abba and disco. But Low flows together as an intensely emotional whole, as he moves through some serious psychic wreckage. For the first time since he became a star,

Hours, packaged as “Bowie’s R&B album,” went equally deep. “Seven,” “Survive,” and “Thursday’s Child” felt like Babyface and Toni Braxton doing Young Americans. The major flaw of these records, one that many listeners understandably found (and still find) impossible to get past, was the butt-ugly guitar sound of Tin Machine leftover Reeves Gabrels, which was even more irritating than the techno effects. It would have been great to hear Bowie redo these songs with a better band and better production. I played them a lot anyway.

THE TOP TEN: David Bowie and Mick Rock, Moonage Daydream. Universe, 2002. David Buckley, Strange Fascination. Virgin, 1999. Kevin Cann, David Bowie: A Chronology. Simon & Schuster, 1984. Kevin Cann, Any Day Now: The London Years, 1947–1974. Adelita, 2010. Simon Goddard, Ziggyology. Ebury, 2013. Chris O’Leary, Rebel Rebel: All the Songs of David Bowie from ’64 to ’76. Zero, 2015. Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie. Titan, 2011. Thomas Jerome Seabrook, Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town. Jawbone, 2008. Mark Spitz, Bowie: A Biography. Three Rivers Press, 2009. Hugo Wilcken, Low. Continuum, 2005.

Dylan arrived on the scene with a beat-up acoustic guitar and a voice that David Bowie later compared to “sand and glue” in his “Song For Bob Dylan” from Hunky Dory (1971).

But one concert stood head and shoulders above the rest, sonically: Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court on May 25, the finale of a five-concert run, during which Zeppelin played a three-hour, 20-song set, including a three-song acoustic segment. Comparing Wings (a group unashamed to put out a nursery rhyme as a single) to Led Zeppelin was like comparing a comfy pullover with a studded leather suit, but just as the Bowie concert in Nashville had turned Paul on to the appeal of a live horn section, watching one of Britain’s premier rock groups up close was eye-opening. “The basis for our [1975–76] show was a Led Zeppelin concert we saw in London,”54 Paul happily acknowledged.

It was just the songs and the trousers,” Bowie said in 2002. “That’s what sold Ziggy. I think the audience filled in everything else.