David Bowie’s favourite David Bowie songs
As an artist, looking back on your own career through the lens of analysis can be a thankless task. These are songs you’ve created and brought into the world, each one sacred in its own way. This challenge becomes even more daunting when dealing with a body of work as revered and revolutionary as David Bowie’s.
By the end of his touring career, after more than 30 years as a recording artist, narrowing down his vast catalogue of hits to a setlist was a challenging task for Bowie. No matter what he chose to play, it was impossible to please everyone in the audience, and inevitably, many beloved songs were left out.
With a live show, Bowie at least had a whole evening to delve into his back catalogue, but in 2008, he went a step further and narrowed it down to a greater degree by creating a compilation that collected 12 of his most favoured songs. While, of course, it means that some vital records are missing from his roster, the list still provides a keen insight into the Starman’s personal perception of his career.
Initially, the CD was billed as a collection of personal favourites and was made available exclusively as a free gift with an edition of The Mail on Sunday. However, due to popular demand, the newspaper quickly sold out, and the CD became a collector’s item. It’s no surprise, considering the wealth of Bowie’s artistic mystique – often willing to chop out the greatest hits from his tours – that fans would be desperate to know exactly what songs the man himself considered to be his best.
With Bowie’s US fans disappointed at their inability to get their hands on the record, Virgin/EMI released the CD in an identical format to the one that first appeared in The Mail on Sunday. The difference, however, was that it was released with a booklet that contained the song-by-song comments which originally appeared in the newspaper. On top of that, the US and Canadian release was enclosed within a standard jewel case packaging, which may be the most perfect cover for such an esteemed collection of tracks. In later years, 2015 to be specific, a limited edition red vinyl version was released to celebrate the opening of the exhibition David Bowie Is which showed at the Philharmonie de Paris in France.
A significant reason the compilation has become such a favoured collector’s item is that Bowie decided to avoid most of his most popular hits. In fact, Bowie only included three official singles: ‘Life on Mars?’, ‘Loving the Alien’, and ‘Time Will Crawl’. Furthermore, the latter was a remixed version by engineer Mario J. McNulty, who featured several newly recorded parts.
While this was an unconventional move by Bowie, it was to be expected. He was never one to take the ordinary route, and his fans would have expected nothing less. Furthermore, these songs selected may not be among his most popular works, but Bowie’s adoration towards the collection is far more important than where they charted.
For example, Bowie chose to include the rarity ‘Some Are’, a song which became unavailable after he removed it from his eleventh studio album, Low.
Additionally, speaking about the selection of ‘Teenage Wildlife’, Bowie commented: “So it’s late morning and I’m thinking, ‘New song and a fresh approach. I know. I’m going to do a Ronnie Spector. Oh yes I am. Ersatz just for one day.’ And I did and here it is. Bless. I’m still very enamoured of this song and would give you two ‘Modern Love’s for it anytime.”
Despite dodging some of his more famous hits, Bowie did pick one huge tune from his collection, ‘Life on Mars’. The Ziggy Stardust track helped make him a star, and for Bowie, it stayed precious until the end. When discussing the construction of ‘Life on Mars‘, he commented: “This song was so easy. Being young was easy. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. ‘Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap.’ An anomic (not a ‘gnomic’) heroine. Middle-class ecstasy.”
He added: “I took a walk to Beckenham High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts but couldn’t get the riff out of my head. Jumped off two stops into the ride and more or less loped back to the house up on Southend Road.”
Another song many hardcore fans will appreciate its inclusion is ‘The Bewlay Brothers’. Bowie commented on the track in the 2008 liner notes, remarking: “The only pipe I have ever smoked was a cheap Bewlay. It was a common item in the late sixties and for this song, I used Bewlay as a cognomen – in place of my own. This wasn’t just a song about brotherhood so I didn’t want to misrepresent it by using my true name. Having said that, I wouldn’t know how to interpret the lyric of this song other than suggesting that there are layers of ghosts within it. It’s a palimpsest, then.”
Additionally, the obscure but beloved song ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ features among the dozen, a number which Bowie said was “written for a wonderful young girl whom I’ve not seen for more than 30 years. When I hear this song she’s still in her 20s, of course. A song will put you tantalisingly close to the past, so close that you can almost reach out and touch it. The sound of ghosts again.”
While everybody has their own opinion on the best Bowie tracks, no opinion holds more weight than his own did. The tracklisting may not read like a greatest hits collection, but in the mind of Bowie, they were a dozen songs of the highest order.
