“It’s beautiful”: The line Lou Reed thought he could have never come up with
Sometimes, a part of a song will jump out at you for being just that little bit more special than the rest – call it what you want, a snippet, a sound bite, a songlet – they’re moments to savour and repeatedly listen to. Just the smallest addition to a composition can really hold the power to elevate a classic rock song beyond the level it had previously been at, turning it from simply being good to a work of genius.
One person who was a master of this was David Bowie, and while there are few qualms about his talents as a songwriter, it’s the subtle moments of magic that he was so effortlessly able to produce time and time again that really set him apart from his peers throughout his illustrious career.
Take, for example, the section around a minute and a half into ‘Five Years’, where virtually all of the instruments drop out, leaving just Bowie’s voice and Mick Ronson’s autoharp as the only elements to focus on before the full band step back into action. It’s a moment that would go unnoticed by many, but it sticks out as being an inspired moment within an already brilliant song. One track of his that perhaps isn’t as great is ‘Fill Your Heart’, an album cut from Hunky Dory that pales in comparison to the rest of the record, but the descending piano scale played by Rick Wakeman towards the end of the track is a slice of brilliance that prevents the song from being totally forgettable.
Perhaps the greatest example of a small moment that Bowie ever slipped into a song, however, was not even on his own release, and instead comes in the coda of Lou Reed’s classic track ‘Satellite of Love’, a song that Bowie played more than just a small part in bringing to fruition.
Taken from Reed’s seminal 1973 album Transformer, ‘Satellite of Love’ is perhaps one of his best songs, and like the rest of the record, it features Bowie and Ronson on production. Without the golden touches provided by the duo, the song would have still been a work of brilliance, but there’s a particular moment that Bowie contributed to the track that even Reed concedes that he wouldn’t have conceived if it wasn’t for the outside influence.
While Reed repeats the song’s title over the top of a jaunty piano riff during the closing section of the track, Bowie and vocal group the Thunderthighs are contributing backing vocals that echo Reed’s utterance of ‘satellite’ before sliding into some classily placed ‘aahs’. After one repeat of the refrain, Bowie bursts into life from nowhere with a soaring high note to provide an additional harmony, and this is the exact moment of genius that Reed felt he wouldn’t have even considered himself.
“It’s not the kind of part I could ever have come up with,” Reed explained, “Even if you’d left me alone with a computer programme for a year. But David hears those parts, plus he’s got a freaky voice and can go that high. It’s very, very beautiful.”
It’s a wondrous touch that feels like a fitting way to close out one of the highlights of Reed’s career, and while it could have continued on longer, Bowie himself insisted that just a couple of repeats of the vocal line would be enough, saying that the song needed to be more about Reed than it did himself.
