What was the final song David Bowie ever recorded?
What is it about the beckoning mystery of the universe that inspired David Bowie so much? Around his seminal glam archetype as the Martian rock messiah Ziggy Stardust, his explorations of Major Tom’s three-song space odyssey, or his jungle-frazzled electronica alien video for Earthling‘s ‘Little Wonder’, extraterrestrial visitations and the infinite cosmos proved to be a recurring motif throughout his career, a theme Bowie would return to when in need of creative rejuvenation.
His most starkly personal may be his most alienated. As cocaine and 1970s excess took its toll, a pale and skeletal Bowie saw something of himself in Thomas Jerome Newton, the being from planet Anthea who arrives on Earth searching for help with the severe droughts devastating his home planet. Starring in 1977’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, an adaptation of Walter Tevis’ acclaimed novel, Bowie threw himself into the central role, pouring all his drug-fuelled, numb detachment into a gripping performance spiked with disquiet energy. So gripped by the character’s outsider divorce, Bowie used stills from the picture for Station to Station‘s and Low‘s album covers, the latter featuring instrumental synthscapes intended as the movie’s soundtrack.
Following his semi-recluse ten-year break from recording and touring and surprise triumph with 2013’s The Next Day, Bowie looked set to usher a late creative purple patch. Privately grappling with a liver cancer diagnosis, Bowie and longtime producer Toni Visconti assembled a group of jazz musicians and recorded in secrecy at New York’s The Magic Shop and Human Worldwide Studios for what he knew would be the sessions for his final album. Dropped two days before his death, 2016’s Blackstar was hopelessly viewed through the prism of mortality, the album’s lyrics filled with eerie clues and hinted gestures exploring his own legacy and impending Earthly departure.
In one of his last projects before his death, Bowie contributed three songs to Lazarus, a musical directed by Ivo van Hove that continues Thomas Jerome Newton’s lonely navigation of homesick extraterrestrial depression set to recontextualised interpretations of Bowie’s songbook. Opening Off-Broadway at the Theatre Workshop, Bowie’s attendance at its December 2015 world premiere would be his last public appearance.
“I felt with David, from day one, a huge urgency to do [this show]. I wanted to postpone it because of calendar issues. And he said, ‘No, no, we have to make it now, it has to happen,’ van Hove told Rolling Stone shortly after Bowie’s death. “By then, he was aware that he was already ill. So, there was an urgency in him to get this onto a stage. And that’s what I really admired so much, that the man, at that moment of 68, had such a fire within himself, such a fire and an ambition — I mean, a real artistic ambition, to make something happen. Because he believed, really, that it was something important.”
So what were David Bowie’s final songs?
Driven in his final days by the Lazarus project, his final recordings were in aid of the sci-fi production. Originally performed by its cast members, ‘No Plan’, ‘Killing a Little Time’, and ‘When I Met You’ were afforded final studio versions by the man himself, released posthumously on the No Plan EP in January 2017.
The final artefact in Bowie’s celebrated journey signalled an artist still full of ideas, succinctly distilling his many styles across intrepid experimentalism and strutting alt-rock.
