The five best covers of David Bowie song ‘The Man Who Sold the World’
Considering the heights David Bowie reached over the 1970s and beyond, it’s surprising to note how excruciatingly long his career took to lift off. With very few seeing eye to eye with the eccentric creative on his eponymous debut album in 1967, Bowie would have to labour a couple more years before the green shoots of Space Oddity appeared.
If 1969’s Space Oddity gave Bowie a leg up, it was almost entirely thanks to its title track, which timed itself to perfection and became the UK’s televisual soundtrack for the Apollo 11 moon landings. High on this success, Bowie lurched into his third studio album, which would again fail to bring fame and fortune on the scale of Hunky Dory or Ziggy Stardust.
The Man Who Sold the World, released in 1970, has been retrospectively lauded as a seminal beauty thanks to proto-glam hits like ‘The Width of a Circle’ and ‘Black Country Rock’, but as with Space Oddity, the album’s highlight was its title track.
In a 1997 interview with BBC Radio 1, Bowie described his state of mind when writing the classic in the late ’60s. “I guess I wrote it because there was a part of myself that I was looking for,” he revealed. “That song for me always exemplified kind of how you feel when you’re young, when you know there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet – you have this great searching, this great need to find out who you really are.”
Today, we celebrate this soul-searching beauty with a look at its five greatest covers.
The five best covers of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’
Lulu – 1974
Scottish singer Lulu burst into global consciousness in 1969 after singing Alan Moorhouse and Peter Warne’s winning entry, ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’, at the Eurovision Song Contest. Five years later, she would make the headlines again after recording ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’ for the James Bond film of the same name.
That same year, Lulu also outed herself as a huge Bowie fan and hit the studio to record reimagined versions of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ and ‘Watch That Man’. Both covers were produced by Bowie and guitarist Mick Ronson with the former adding saxophone and backing vocals to the mix. It is rumoured that Bowie and Lulu had been engaged in a brief affair at the time.
Nirvana – 1993
In 1993, Nirvana offered their take on Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ for MTV and became the only artist to surpass the appeal of the original. Kurt Cobain and his cohort served up something special during their hour-long set for MTV’s Unplugged series in New York. The timeless performance also included covers of Lead Belly, The Vaselines, and Meat Muppets.
“I was simply blown away when I found that Kurt Cobain liked my work,” Bowie once said of the cover. “And have always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ (…) it was a good straightforward rendition and sounded somehow very honest. It would have been nice to have worked with him, but just talking with him would have been real cool.”
David Bowie and Brian Eno – 1995
Bowie’s live performances often stuck dutifully to the recorded versions, but creative chameleon as he was, he enjoyed mixing things up from time to time, especially to give his oldies a good dust-off. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ was given a revived sound on several occasions over the years, but in 1995, Brian Eno helped create something special.
During his 1995 Outside Tour, Bowie performed the 1970 classic in a modernised trip-hop style. The recording was subsequently mixed and overdubbed by Eno, who also offered his backing vocals. “It sounds completely contemporary,” Eno happily wrote in his diary. “I added some backing vocals and a sonar blip and sculpted the piece a little so there was more contour to it.”
Simple Minds – 2001
Scottland’s answer to Ireland’s U2 made a name for themselves throughout the 1980s as a diverse band capable of synth-pop chart invasion, anthemic stadium fillers and progressive exploration. Having built upon David Bowie’s sonic contributions of the 1970s, they felt it only fair to cover their muse on occasion.
Perhaps Simple Minds’ most memorable Bowie cover came in 2001 as part of their 12th studio album, Neon Lights. The album consisted of covers serving as a warm-up before 2002’s Cry. Other notable covers on Neon Lights include Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, Patti Smith’s ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and Roxy Music’s ‘For Your Pleasure’.
Emel Mathlouthi – 2020
One of the most captivating renditions of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ came in 2020 courtesy of Tunisian singer-songwriter Emel Mathlouthi. The slow, brooding cover is wholly focused on Mathlouthi’s haunting vocals that flow powerfully over a bed of shimmering piano melody.
The brilliant cover was released on her 2020 album, The Tunis Diaries, which was split into two parts. Disc one consists of Mathlouthi’s original compositions, while disc two devoted itself to covers, with entries from Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, Jeff Buckley and Black Sabbath.
