David Bowie’s favourite John Lennon song
For a moment in time, David Bowie and John Lennon were inseparable. They admired each other’s artistry, which sparked a friendship like no other, and the pair famously brought their bold creative minds together on ‘Fame’.
When they began to grow close, Lennon’s personal life was in dire straits as he succumbed to the addiction and took flight on his lost weekend. Around his first meeting with Bowie in 1974, the former Beatle was estranged from Yoko Ono and living a life full of reckless abandon. However, one ray of light from this period of darkness was his bond with Bowie.
“We kind of started knocking around with each other and at the time he gave me what I thought was one of the better Lennon quotes, which I have said a number of times,” Bowie once commented about their friendship. “I asked him what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on.’ I was impressed, as I was with virtually everything he said.”
Furthermore, Lennon was also Bowie’s favourite Beatle. He admitted to MTV in 1995: “He [Lennon] was probably one of the brightest, quickest witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life. Socialist in its true definition, not in a fabricated political sense, a real humanist and he had a really spiteful sense of humour which of course, being English, I adored.”
Bowie continued: “I just thought we’d be buddies forever and get on better and better, and all that fantasy, I know which Beatle I always liked.”
Unfortunately, their friendship was cut short after just a few years when Lennon was shockingly murdered outside his home in New York. It left a deep pain inside Bowie, which never left him, but at least he still had Lennon’s music as a reminder.
In March 1979, BBC Radio 1 invited Bowie on air to live out his DJ fantasies and spin the decks at Britain’s biggest station. The show made for a fascinating broadcast as Bowie opened up his record collection to the nation. It included one song by Lennon, ‘Remember’, which suggests it was his favourite track by the Liverpudlian.
The song, which originally appeared on John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, controversially refers to a nursery rhyme to Guy Fawkes’ plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Incredibly, this began life as an ad-lib before transforming into a beast of its own.
Explaining ‘November’ to Jann Wenner in Lennon Remembers: “In England it’s the day they blew up the Houses of Parliament. We celebrate it by having bonfires every November the fifth. It was just an ad lib. It was about the third take, and it begins to sound like Frankie Laine – when you’re singing ‘remember, remember the fifth of November.’ And I just broke and it went on for about another seven or eight minutes. I was just ad libbing and goofing about. But then I cut it there and it just exploded ’cause it was a good joke.”
Listen below to Bowie’s favourite Lennon song, ‘Remember’.
