David Bowie, ‘We Are the Dead’, 1974.
As with any artist whose work traverses multiple eras and varied collaborations, it’s irresistible to play the game of ‘what might have been’ with the career of David Bowie. What if, instead of working with Queen on ‘Under Pressure’, Bowie had met with the band a year earlier to assist on their epochal soundtrack to Flash Gordon (sessions which proved fractious, as Bowie brought along Brian Eno whose insistence on employing the chance elements afforded by his Oblique Strategies cards clashed with the doggedly scientific methodology favoured by celebrity astrophysicist, Brian May. ‘Ah yes,’ Roger Taylor would smile ruefully in BBC4 music documentaries thirty years after the event, before giving a throaty chuckle: ‘the battle of the Brians…’). Or what if, after joining Placebo for a regrettable cover of ‘20th Century Boy’ at the 1999 Brit Awards, Bowie enlisted the band’s irksome androgene, Brian Molko, to star in Ziggy Played Guitar, a pioneering jukebox musical celebrating the sights and sounds of the glam-rock scene (a show which proved fractious, as Molko consistently missed the cue for his opening rendition of ‘Tiger Feet’ by Mud to instead arrive onstage purposely late and deliver the lie fondly remembered by those who saw Placebo play the 1999 ‘Big Day Out’ at Milton Keynes Bowl: ‘I’m sorry I’m a little late, but I was busy backstage having my cock sucked by Marilyn Manson’). And what if, instead of living into fruitful old-age, Bowie had died of cancer in 2016, and thus not lived long enough to write more than a handful of songs that would ever seem suitable for a blog about love songs? For, as those who write blogs about love songs know, Bowie tracks that appear to be about love usually prove on closer inspection to be not about love at all, because they stubbornly insist on being about space or isolation or Nietzsche instead. So instead of looking for Bowie songs that declare amorous passion or document the experience of heartbreak, let’s turn to Bowie’s copious and loving affirmations of shared isolation, whereby singer reassures listener that singer loves listener and understands their pain (aka, the ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ trope). A smashing example can be found in ‘We Are the Dead’, a track that originated in Bowie’s aborted 1984 musical before ending up on Side 2 of Diamond Dogs (with its title phrase taken from the Orwell book). Gothy and preposterous, ‘We Are the Dead’ finds the singer addressing his partner in a forbidden relationship (‘People will hold us to blame’), set against the backdrop of a nightmarish dystopia (‘Dancing where the dogs decay/Defecating ecstasy’ and the like). The song pitches its emotional state straight at the heart of adolescence, describing the preciousness of a relationship in the midst of a cruel and uncaring world (‘Pressing our love through the night/Knowing it’s right, knowing it’s right’). As a result, the song’s overwrought emotional high-stakes evoke teenage experience as much as they do life under a dictatorial regime and, depending on the inclination of the listener, the line ‘Oh dress yourself, my urchin one, for I hear them on the stairs’ could suggest either the goosestep of forces of totalitarian oppression or, more prosaically, irate parents disapproving of you spending time listening to mordant music with your boyfriend/girlfriend when you should be revising for your GCSEs. The refrain ‘Because of all we’ve seen, because of all we’ve said/We are the dead’ becomes a positive affirmation of the singer and listener’s shared separation from the outside world. Bowie knew better than most how important shared connection through music can be, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that all music that intelligent teenage outsiders have felt an impassioned connection to ever since has owed something to ’70s Bowie. R.I.P.