The Bowie song you're thinking about right now thread

[muppet hi fi]

I listened to Cygnet Committee the day he died. That song really gets to you now. Especially the end with him yelling "I want to live."

i've loved everything about that song since i was a little kid and had no idea what he was on about. maybe my fave song from a vastly underrated album.

[Marky Dread]

I listened to Cygnet Committee the day he died. That song really gets to you now. Especially the end with him yelling "I want to live."

i've loved everything about that song since i was a little kid and had no idea what he was on about. maybe my fave song from a vastly underrated album.

It's about the failure of his Arts Lab project he set up and how those involved were only interested in hanging on to his fame as opposed to expressing themselves as something more original.

Cygnet Committee” begins as David Bowie’s break-up letter to the Arts Lab, a communal arts venture he had co-founded that was run out of the back room of a Beckenham pub, and over its near-ten-minute span the song becomes a bile-filled, self-righteous attack aimed at the counterculture itself.

So something whose roots are in petty, specific gripes (Bowie had hoped the Arts Lab (which featured everything from tie-dying lessons to free-form jazz performances) would be a free-flowing exchange of ideas, and found it was mainly a bunch of grubby, needy kids trying to latch onto the slightly-more-famous types like Bowie—“I opened doors that would have blocked their way…I ravaged my finance just for those”) blossoms into a jeremiad against the New Left, cult figures, false hippie capitalists, deluded kids and their various empty slogans (including “kick out the jams” and “love is all we need”): it’s an unrelenting damning of a movement that Bowie was barely part of.

[Wolter]

Another true fact from that album: at the real Free Festival from Memory of same, Bowie was actually in a foul mood all that day and tremendously bitchy to his friends.

[Flex]

MOST notably, Cygnet Committee was used on an episode of Pex Lives.

[River]

I hate to admit it, but I've never actually listened to that album in full. I've only really listened to a few songs from it.

[tepista]

To be fair, he had kicked the coke by that time. It was all alcohol with Iggy around then!

Quitter.

[Marky Dread]

MOST notably, Cygnet Committee was used on an episode of Pex Lives.

Pex Lives/Bowie Dies!

[Kory]

To be fair, he had kicked the coke by that time. It was all alcohol with Iggy around then!

Quitter.

No coke, no soul, right?

Plastic soul, anyway.

[tepista]

http://scallemang.ca/bowie25albums/

[101Walterton]

The drum pattern for Ashes To Ashes was taken from Madness' My Girl.

[Wolter]

The drum pattern for Ashes To Ashes was taken from Madness' My Girl.

Always have to make it about Madness, eh?

[101Walterton]

The drum pattern for Ashes To Ashes was taken from Madness' My Girl.

Always have to make it about Madness, eh?

Not my call I read it but the all important timeline is correct so it must be true!
Although it was an old Invaders song it was on One Step Beyond that was released 19 October 1978 but the single was released on 21 December 1979. Ashes to Ashes was recorded in February 1980.

[Wolter]

The drum pattern for Ashes To Ashes was taken from Madness' My Girl.

Always have to make it about Madness, eh?

Not my call I read it but the all important timeline is correct so it must be true!
Although it was an old Invaders song it was on One Step Beyond that was released 19 October 1978 but the single was released on 21 December 1979. Ashes to Ashes was recorded in February 1980.

Yeah, but who really cares about drums?

[Marky Dread]

Inspiration for Ashes To Ashes.

[101Walterton]

The drum pattern for Ashes To Ashes was taken from Madness' My Girl.

Always have to make it about Madness, eh?

Not my call I read it but the all important timeline is correct so it must be true!
Although it was an old Invaders song it was on One Step Beyond that was released 19 October 1978 but the single was released on 21 December 1979. Ashes to Ashes was recorded in February 1980.

Yeah, but who really cares about drums?

Interestingly, Woody (who apart from Barson was the only muscisian in the band at that time) was told to stop drumming when they were recording OSB to leave space in the songs. Less is more.