The David Bowie song that is a “blatant copy” of an Iggy Pop classic
The late David Bowie wasn’t afraid to look close to home for inspiration. One person he once turned to in order to bring a classic track to life was his good friend and close confidant, Iggy Pop, a man with whom the British musician shared a long history.
Notably, Bowie and Iggy Pop were so close that the former even penned one of his best-loved early tracks as an “ode” to the latter. This was ‘The Jean Genie’, a track taken from 1973’s Aladdin Sane. “‘The Jean Genie’ was an ode to Iggy, I guess, or the ‘Iggy-type’ person – white trash, trailer-park kid thing – the closet intellectual who wouldn’t want the world to know that he reads,” Bowie claimed in 2002.
Adding: “I think it’s a really good song, and I actually enjoy playing it and singing it. It’s one of the few that I can keep going back to. I guess it’s because it is essentially rooted in straight old-fashioned blues. I mean, it’s basically Muddy Waters’ ‘I’m A Man’, isn’t it?”
Their friendship was so profound that after Bowie passed away in 2016, Iggy claimed that his British counterpart had saved his life and “resurrected” him when they lived and worked together in Berlin during the late 1970s. “He resurrected me,” Pop said. “He was more of a benefactor than a friend in a way most people think of friendship. He went a bit out of his way to bestow some good karma on me.”
Given how close they were during the Berlin period, Bowie felt he was within his rights to pinch a substantial portion of an Iggy Pop solo song they’d worked on together and turn it into a track of his own.
Iggy completed the lyrics for ‘Sister Midnight’ and recorded it in the summer of 1976 at the Château d’Hérouville studio in France. Produced by Bowie and featuring his guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, it eventually became the opening track to Pop’s solo debut album, The Idiot. The song was also released as a part of a 12″ promotional single issued by RCA that featured a remixed version of Bowie’s ‘Sound and Vision’.
Later, during the sessions for his album Lodger in 1979, Bowie added new lyrics to the original backing track of ‘Sister Midnight’ – this became the final song on the album, ‘Red Money’. The chorus lines of “Can you hear me call? / Can you hear me well? / Can you hear me at all?” evolved into “Can you hear it fall? / Can you hear it well? / Can you hear it at all?”
Bowie spoke about the track to Melody Maker in 1979. He explained that he believed ‘Red Money’ was about accountability. He said: “This song, I think, is about responsibility. Red boxes keep cropping up in my paintings, and they represent responsibility there”. However, Bowie’s longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti – who provided additional mixing on The Idiot – was more cutthroat in his account of ‘Red Money’. He labelled it a “blatant copy” of Iggy Pop’s song before touching on the prominence of synthesisers in it.
In the book, A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982), Visconti says: “‘Red Money’ is a blatant copy of Iggy Pop’s ‘Sister Midnight’ where we took off his vocals, added more guitars and wrote an entirely different song over it… Roger Powell played full and punctuated synth lines throughout, especially noticeable on ‘Red Money’ and other songs when you think you’re hearing guitar but it is really a bendy, growly synth.”
Listen to ‘Red Money’ below.
