The song guaranteed to make David Bowie cry: “Heartbreaking”
Few artists in popular music come close to curatorial authority as much as David Bowie.
Guided by a fierce embrace of music’s myriad permutations and changes ever since he cut ‘Liza Jane’ as Davie Jones with The King Bees, Bowie’s ravenous appetite for art saw no stone unturned in his thirst for the new sound or cutting-edge concept. Eventually finding fame as glam’s iconic Martian messiah, a career encompassing plastic soul, haunted electronics, and avant-pop would smatter his output before the 1970s were even out.
While Bowie could inspire, transport, excite, or motivate in his dazzling songbook, his moving moments were less frequent. His covers were usually unremarkable, except for his gobsmackingly stirring cover of Nina Simone’s take on ‘Wild is the Wind’, a stunning closer to 1976’s Station to Station, which flexes Bowie at his most passionately tearjerking—an extraordinary feat considering he was too cocaine-blitzed to remember making the album. Then there’s his funereal coda 40 years later, an eerily gorgeous grapple of mortality that hovers all over his final LP Blackstar and is charged with the restless creativity of an artist not long left of this world.
Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2003, Bowie headed a feature exploring his favourite albums. Characteristically eschewing big names and obvious choices, Bowie instead rifled through the leftfield corner of his record collection and presented an intriguing collation of the LPs that scored his life and inspired his work.
Weaving through The Last Poets, Steve Reich, and Linton Kwesi Johnson among more expected acts such as James Brown and The Velvet Underground, Bowie reached into the discography of eccentric pop mage and former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt as the pick to encourage many a weep.
“Not an album, a 12-inch single,” Bowie confesses when highlighting 1982’s ‘Shipbuilding’, playing fast and loose with the rules of his brief. “A vinyl nonetheless. A well-thought-through and relentlessly affecting song co-written by Elvis Costello, and Wyatt’s interpretation is the definitive. Heartbreaking—reduces strong men to blubbering girlies”.
As Bowie was chasing superstardom with blonde hair and Let’s Dance awaited around the corner, Wyatt had entered one of the most intriguing episodes of his already colourful career. Joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1979, Wyatt began cutting a series of socialist pop singles for Rough Trade Records across 1980-’81, including everything from covers of old pro-Stalin patriotic songs, Latin revolutionary anthems, and poems extolling the might of trade unionism.
Originally released in 1982 but reaching number 35 in the UK charts upon its rerelease a year later, ‘Shipbuilding’ explored the working class communities that surrounded the shipyard industries, excited that The Falklands War would bring prosperity and economic opportunity to the area as their enlisted sons sail away to the conflict they may lose their lives for. Written with Wyatt in mind, his pensive vocal narration depicting the small-town rumours and anxious hopes is what ties the whole piece together, his singing style gifted with an understated emotional affect that makes him sound like any of the residents of Clydeside or North East.
While Bowie peppered his lyrical songbook with pop-art fancies, Beat edge and plenty of stargazing aliens, it’s interesting and humanising to know that the number that moved him the most was the simple but powerful vignette of British industry and war’s subtle but pernicious shadow over the lives of those who have no say in the international war games that so affect them, and all of us.
