‘Don’t Look Down’: David Bowie’s “lame” cover of Iggy Pop
It’s difficult to fathom just how bizarre it was for David Bowie to go pop in the 1980s. Today, he’s Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, one of the godfathers of modern pop music. It’s part of his enduring mythos to be massive. At the time, though, it was a genuine gamble. Especially after Bowie’s ’70s run, where he spent the first half as a gender-bending glam-rock icon and the second making the most wilfully experimental, least commercial music of his entire career. In modern terms, imagine if, after having her work literally exhibited at the MoMA in 2015, Björk suddenly dropped ‘Uptown Funk’.
It was during that ‘70s run that Bowie met a kindred spirit. Someone who also spent half his time making the most iconic music of the decade and the other half with his snout in a trough of Columbia’s finest. He struck up a friendship with Iggy Pop, who at the time was at his lowest point. His fans, his label, and even his own band, The Stooges, had long since given up on the guy. He even had to be cajoled into meeting Bowie in the first place, so the story goes. He was watching a marathon of westerns and didn’t want to be disturbed.
He did put his novelty cowboy hat away and meet Bowie, though, which ended up being the best thing he could have done at the time. Bowie was a Stooges die-hard, and in the Space Oddity, Iggy met someone who believed in him with a tenacity that bordered on cult-like. No matter how many sessions he missed, how many fights he got into, how many column inches Iggy got for all the wrong reasons. Bowie was always there to get him out of bed, get him in the studio, and only occasionally pay his bail.
Did Iggy become the star Bowie believed he could be? Not quite; though his solo work in the ‘70s is rightfully revered, it didn’t move the needle commercially. The jury’s out on whether you need to, though, when you’re making The Idiot and Lust For Life and then touring it with literal David Bowie as your keyboard player. 1979 saw the release of the last album Bowie and Iggy collaborated on to any real degree, New Values, before Bowie decided that all this cold, intense experimental music was all well and good, but he’d like some hits, please and thank you.
The truth was, Iggy was never really fussed about being a commercial concern the way that Bowie was, so when the Spaceboy swanned off with Visconti to churn out some guff called ‘Ashes to Ashes’ or whatever, that was the end of their first professional relationship, at least until 1984. Four years is a long old time in pop music. Long enough for Iggy’s old mate to suddenly become one of the world’s biggest pop stars and for Iggy himself to remain a cult concern that no one could quite figure out.
At least partially to throw him a bone commercially, but mostly because the song’s an absolute banger, Bowie decided to cover one of the highlights from New Values, ‘Don’t Look Down’. Throwing down his finest white boy reggae groove for this Lou Reed homage of a song. Look, it was a risk in a career of risks; they can’t all be winners, and the song’s co-writer, James Williamson, agrees. He told Songfacts, “I always thought it was kind of lame, but I loved the royalties that started coming in from his recording.”
For their entire partnership, Bowie seemed to care more about supporting Iggy than creating successful art with him. With that in mind, you’d imagine that just getting him some royalty checks when he needed it most mattered more than a weak-sauce cover version ever could, which is heartwarming in hindsight. We all can use our most successful periods to help a friend in need.
