The greatest lyric David Bowie ever heard: “A major inspiration”
David Bowie‘s lyrics deserve more credit. Take, for instance, “I’m an alligator, I’m a mama-papa comin’ for you”, perhaps the greatest opening lyric ever written.
Only Bowie would have the daring bravura to begin a song with a line that hits like an unexpected kiss. It’s as rousing as they come and absolutely original. It’s a line that couldn’t have come from any other pen than his own weird quill.
The introduction of Ziggy Stardust is befittingly bombastic. With the influence of William S Burroughs clearly in the mix, Bowie usurps usual rock lyric standards to bring forth the colour and imagery of the words themselves. It’s a crazy sonic handshake, and it seduces in an instant. Few musicians think in these terms, but Bowie has been forever grateful for one strange forebearer who showed him the way to creating your own peculiar universes within the English language.
“Syd [Barrett] was a major inspiration for me,” Bowie declared in the wake of his death back in 2006. “He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter.” The boldness of this originality, the stirring flamboyance of it all, ushered the young lad from Bromley towards finding his true artistic self. Barrett rubbished all conformity and tried to find new psychedelic shades of expression.
Bowie added, “Also, along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent. His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed.” This added to the individualism that made him so appealing. As utterly bizarre as Barrett was, he was very much himself.
In Bowie’s favourite lyric of all time, you see both the daring self and stirring otherworldliness. Taken from ‘Gigolo Aunt’, Bowie told HMV that his favourite lyrical verse ever written was the following:
“Heading down with the light,
the dust in your way, she was angrier there,
than her watershell male
Life to this love to me”.
These peculiar lines featured on the former Pink Floyd man’s final album, Barrett. Though they might be mystified by the obfuscation of their strange flow, you get a clear sense of their intent and where they belong. In a similar manner to alligators bursting into the mind, you don’t have to pore over the finer details of Barrett’s words; you just have to be led down the garden path by them. Bowie certainly was.
His love for early Pink Floyd under Syd Barrett was profound. His landlady, Mary Finnigan, who soon became his lover, once recalled that Bowie played her some of his favourite records in 1969: “We went into his room and he made a little nest on the floor, with cushions and great big speakers on either side, and played his favourite music. Jimi Hendrix – that was the first time I heard stereo phasing – and Pink Floyd, Jacques Brel, some baroque music, probably Monteverdi.”
Around this time, Bowie also started expanding his bohemian coterie, including the hip photographer Mick Rock, who had worked extensively with Syd Barrett. “We started hanging out,” Mick once said. “And he loved hearing all my stories about Syd Barrett.”
In fact, he would even form a short-lived band called the Arnold Corns, a name which derived from the Pink Floyd song ‘Arnold Layne’. Although the band failed to survive a few brief months in 1971, it was clearly a dry run to Ziggy Stardust.
You can also glean a lot from how Bowie stuck with the concept despite the failure of the band. Like Barrett before him, musical evolution was a central tenet of his artistry. Bowie was more than happy to embrace bruising dismissals if it meant magical breakthroughs could also be mustered.
Some of that was perhaps born from Barrett’s own carefree, unguarded approach to consistency. You’ve got to experiment with lines like the utterly atrocious, “I know a mouse, and he hasn’t got a house / I don’t know why I call him Gerald / He’s getting rather old, but he’s a good mouse,” to be able to happen upon a gem like those in ‘Gigalo Aunt’.
With that in mind, Bowie left his Barrett-like failure behind, buoyed rather than dismayed. Although the sound and styling of the Arnold Corns phase may have transitioned significantly from its early Pink Floyd-laden genesis, much of Ziggy Stardust’s space dust trail leads back to the iconoclastic presence of Syd Barrett, a fellow so far out that even Bowie was forever humbled.
