Why David Bowie never wanted to sing: “I would give my right arm”
There aren’t many pieces of musical history that David Bowie wasn’t able to touch on during his lifetime.
He liked going down every single musical rabbit hole he could find every single time he made a record, and even if it proved to be a terrible mistake half the time he was working on, he would have rather gone down making the music that he felt sounded best to him than worrying about following whatever trends were happening in music and getting the hottest producers in the studio with him. He could do anything on his own as long as he had the right idea, but he wasn’t as fond of the finer details of being a rock and roll star.
But ‘The Starman’ did have somewhat of an advantage compared to every other frontman that walked the Earth. He was always more than happy to play a character whenever he went onstage, and while he was usually giving everyone the show that any other rock and roll star would have killed to give, the fact that he was channelling another persona meant that he could put his ego on the shelf whenever he was writing songs.
He didn’t need to worry about what a typical David Bowie song would sound like because they didn’t really exist, and whenever he walked into the studio, he was free to do whatever the hell he wanted. But when it came to the raw performance of everything, Bowie was much more comfortable giving his songs away for other people to sing than relying on his voice to do the heavy lifting.
Then again, that’s one of the main reasons why half of Bowie’s songs worked. He didn’t need to have the greatest voice in the world, but that didn’t matter because his voice was right for that kind of music whenever he was making albums like Diamond Dogs. And considering how many times he changed directions, his voice could do a lot more than your average singer, like being able to fit into industrial rock on Earthling or interpreting soul music on Young Americans in the middle of his glam period.
If Bowie had his way, though, he would have gladly given his songs away to someone else, saying, “I hate my singing voice. I hate singing. I like interpreting songs, I guess that’s what I like about the whole process. I like writing firstly and foremostly. I would give my right arm, maybe not my right arm. I would give somebody’s right arm if I could get someone else to sing my songs for me.”
And it’s not like Bowie wasn’t really good at giving songs away for other people, either. Nirvana’s version of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ is still the definitive version of the tune, and while Bowie’s version of ‘All The Young Dudes’ is etched in glam rock history, hearing Ian Hunter deliver the song is just as good as Bowie’s version when he was at the height of his ‘Ziggy’ persona.
If we’re talking about Bowie’s singing voice, though, no one else could have sung the album Blackstar with the same inflexions as he could. Here was a man that was facing down mortality and trying to live with the fact that he wasn’t going to be on this planet for much longer, and hearing him talk about how he couldn’t give everything away to his fans and trying to make peace with his time on this planet is still one of the most chilling works of brilliance that anyone has ever done, musically or otherwise.
So while Bowie’s singing voice isn’t the most ordinary rock and roll voice that anyone has ever heard, it was absolutely necessary for him to deliver those songs back in the day. He was an outsider in the sense that he didn’t seem to fit into normal society, but the fact that he could become a star gave everyone else the confidence that they could become stars even if they weren’t the flashiest musicians in the world.
