The song David Bowie thought was better than ‘Space Oddity’ and a direct attack on the hippies
Long before his experimental spell in Berlin with Brian Eno, or even his stellar years basking under the glam rock wonderment of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, David Bowie was a young scamp circling the streets of London that exploded with the creative energy of the 1960s. It was during this time that Bowie made his first efforts as a recording artist, but his fame and fortune turned out to be a slow-steeping cuppa.
Bowie came out of the trap with his eponymous debut album in 1967. The record performed woefully in the charts and was a crushing disappointment. The tracks seemed to be limited by their detachment from the normal formalities of pop music. They were also difficult to take seriously with their tongue-in-cheek sound that seemed more befitting of some bizarre nursery rhyme stage production.
Bowie’s first commercial breakthrough came with the release of Space Oddity, an album that still didn’t achieve much critical or commercial attention, but its eponymous lead single was timed perfectly with the US moon landings with its release in 1969 and became his first major hit.
While Bowie followed the commercially profitable direction of ‘Space Oddity’ over his subsequent, more successful albums moving into the 1970s, he maintained that one of the long-forgotten tracks from the Space Oddity LP deserved much more appreciation than any of its neighbouring cuts.
Bowie was enamoured with Space Oddity’s nine-and-a-half-minute side one closer, ‘Cygnet Committee’ and had hoped that his record company would allow him to release it as a single alongside ‘Space Oddity’.
The creatively dense piece references Bowie and his girlfriend Angela Barnett’s Beckenham Arts Lab. They set up the art installation to encourage young people to be creative. However, he discontinued the Arts Lab when he realised most people were coming just to see him perform and not to participate. ‘Cygnet Committee’ voices Bowie’s disappointing encounter with hippies during this period as he felt he was being used by the teenagers: “I gave them [my] life… They drained my very soul…”
In Living on the Brink, Bowie discussed the track with George Tremlett. “It’s me looking at the hippie movement, saying how it started off so well but went wrong,” Bowie said. “The hippies became just like everyone else, materialistic and selfish,” Bowie said, before citing the track as the best and most important on the album.
Picking it above ‘Space Oddity’ may feel strange when looking at the track through a simplistic paradigm of fame. After all, the tune about space adventure and the insignificance of human existence landed just as Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. So its fame and consequential impact on the cultural zeitgeist were hard to ignore or continue to ignore. But, Bowie has rarely been troubled by fame.
An artist ever determined to feel his feet barely touch the bottom of the ocean, Bowie found more worth in the music that truly said something. ‘Space Oddity’ had a point, of course it did. But the Starman saw it more as a coincidental hit than any kind of monumental revelation or societal scythe.
A lot of work went into the epic, and Bowie had wanted its message to permeate society. In a conversation with Interview Magazine in 1973, Bowie spoke passionately of the track once again. “I basically wanted it to be a cry to fucking humanity,” he said, later citing Beat generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as “the truest form of any form of any revolutionary left.”
Continuing the point, Bowie explained that the hippie followers of the Beat Generation ideal had sadly lost their way. “The hippies, I’m afraid, don’t know what’s happening,” he told Interview, before adding that Yoko Ono was the real “underground”.
Listen to David Bowie’s ‘Cygnet Committee’ below.
