David Bowie - Wild is the Wind

 

Considering that David Bowie was such a consummate songwriter, it seems almost perverse to represent him in the 1970's Show with a song he didn't write but it took me years and years to realize that he didn't write it because it sounds so much like a Bowie song that one can hardly be blamed for not thinking otherwise. It's often of interest to see which songs major artists choose to cover, from The Beatles Baby It's You, The Ramones Be My Baby and when I saw Elvis Costello circa 1979, his One Day I'll Fly Away encore, all acknowledging girl group masterpieces, which can go at least as far as Bowling for Soup doing Britney's Baby One More Time. Rolf Harris doing Stairway to Heaven, amongst others, was post- ironic but mostly it's homage, like Oasis Come on Feel the Noize, The Human League You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling or Soft Cell's Tainted Love.

Wild is the Wind appeared on Station to Station, the 1975 album of six extended tracks, all of them glorious, that completed a run from at least as early as Hunky Dory if not earlier, through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and still had the three 'Berlin' albums to come. Not everybody accepts my thesis that it was Bowie, not the Beatles, that was the most important pop music for my generation but I was 11 when the Beatles went their separate ways and, although conversant with much of their material, my most formative years were still ahead of me.

And while Hunky Dory is a certainty for any Greatest Album shortlist with me hearing Changes as Tony Blackburn's Record of the Week on the R1 Breakfast Show and yet still somehow too far ahead of its time to make the Top 30, it's Station to Station that brings the Golden Age of Bowie to its greatest moment, for me. 1975 wasn't a good year with T. Rex having lost their way, the 'glam' stars becomimg tarnished while they tried to find 'other musical directions' and The Sex Pistols still waiting to happen although the New York Dolls already had.

Nobody took a 'gap year' in those days to go to Machu Pichu or Vietnam to find themselves in between 'A' levels and university. One was glad enough to scrape sufficient 'A' level grades to get into a university, even if it wasn't a very good one that was going to teach you things it would take you the rest of your life to un-learn. I took my own gap year away from pop music and listened to Beethoven and Shostakovich, with Station to Station as a last monument to help me along. Al Green was in there somewhere but it would be worth taking up again by 1977. 

It's the way Bowie sings Wild is the Wind that makes it seem so obviously his own but it isn't. But you might have thought Queen Bitch was a Lou Reed song. It isn't. While Lou possibly might not have sold as many records without being taken up into the Bowie sphere of influence which would stretch far enough to include Steeleye Span, and Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople surely owed their string of chart hits that followed All the Young Dudes to him, David was nothing if not expert in seeing something he could use and whether there would have been any Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust or any of what came on the back of them if there hadn't been the Velvet Underground, well, who's to say.