Brief Thoughts on Three Deram Outtakes

Bunny Thing, Your Funny Smile, Pussy Cat (excerpts).

These long-documented but unheard (well, by most of us) outtakes from Bowie’s first album are the most intriguing finds so far in this springtime of “new” Bowie tracks from the Sixties. Who knows what’s driving the onrush of this stuff—the tapes being sold at auction; the costly vinyl box sets offered on a near-monthly basis. Some of it’s likely copyright-spurred, some of it’s possibly tied to the recent death of Bowie’s manager in the Sixties, Kenneth Pitt, who had an archive of early Bowie material.

The latest “demo” tape, which will presumably be sold to a wealthy collector next week, is labeled as “rejected 1967 demos.” Unless I’m mistaken, these aren’t demos at all, but complete studio outtakes from Bowie’s Deram album sessions. The auction site’s link thus has tantalizing 30-second excerpts of three songs recorded for David Bowie but left in the vaults for over fifty years (the fourth so-called demo appears to be just a different mix of the 1967 B-side “Did You Ever Have a Dream“).

The rumor was that Decca had long wanted to release these tracks, first on the 1997 Deram Anthology and on 2010’s 2-CD deluxe edition of David Bowie, but that DB had vetoed them. They may well never be released. Still, instead of rumor, we now have fragments.

Bunny Thing

(Bowie.) Recorded: 12 December 1966, Decca Studios, London. Bowie: lead vocal; John Renbourn: acoustic guitar. Produced: Mike Vernon; engineered: Gus Dudgeon.

Taped on the same day as “Come and Buy My Toys,” the equally acoustic “Bunny Thing” suggests a session fully devoted to Bowie working with the folk guitarist John Renbourn. Renbourn, who was living on an old boat on the Thames in this period, co-founded Pentangle soon afterward.

As per a mid-December 1966 acetate of a provisional David Bowie sequencing, “Bunny Thing” was slated as the closer of Side One. It is…not difficult to see why this track later got the chop. A “spoken word” performance over Renbourn’s guitar, it’s a satirical piece about drug trafficking in “a village of little bunnies.” Heard in the excerpt is its opening stage-setting verse. Reportedly, the full piece delves more into its main character, an elderly, dying bunny customs inspector called Br’er Hans Hitler, who speaks in DB’s attempt at a German accent. Br’er Hitler (“he was a drag, dad…he lost his bag of groove”) contends with some young bunny delinquents smuggling in carrot juice and bunny drugs; Renbourn takes a solo; it’s done in under three minutes.

“Drug songs” were a minor Bowie interest of this period. See “Silver Tree Top School For Boys,” where masters and students smoke joints on their school’s cricket ground, or his love of Biff Rose’s “Buzz the Fuzz,” in which a Sunset Strip rookie cop tangles with “Alice Dee.” In all these cases, Bowie keyed in on a younger generation of dopers tangling with adult authority figures. “Bunny Thing” also suggests a homage to/parody of the Beat poets, and as such it fit into the bits of poetry Bowie would do on stage until 1970 (as per Kevin Cann, Bowie performed “Bunny Thing” at the Roundhouse that year).

As “Bunny Thing” sounds like a piece of true Bowie weirdness, it’s a shame that it may well never be heard in full. In 1991, Bowie’s friend and collaborator Derek “Dek” Fearnley called “Bunny Thing” one of his favorite tracks on the album, saying “I was really disappointed it didn’t make the LP.” Still, you can understand Bowie’s desire to keep his “Nazi bunny customs inspector’s deathbed reminiscence” piece locked away.

Your Funny Smile

(Bowie.) Recorded: ca. 14 November-mid December 1966, Decca Studios. Bowie: lead vocal; Renbourn? Big Jim Sullivan? guitar; Derek Boyes: piano; Derek “Dek” Fearnley: bass; John Eager: drums; uncredited musicians: strings. Produced: Vernon; engineered: Dudgeon.

The reason for this track’s deletion is less obvious. Originally sequenced to follow “Sell Me a Coat” on David Bowie‘s first side, “Your Funny Smile,” at least from its fragment, is a pleasant-sounding and very “Deram 1966” pop track. You’d assume Decca would have favored it over the likes of “We Are Hungry Men,” but perhaps Bowie won that particular battle.

The excerpt is of its refrain, possibly moving into a bridge, and the string arrangement’s in line with other work done by Dek Fearnley for the album. From what we hear of it, “Your Funny Smile” sounds like a midway point between Bowie’s 1966 singles for Pye and some tracks cut for David Bowie (see in particular “Maid of Bond Street“). Perhaps by the album’s last sequencing in spring 1967, it seemed too out of date.

Pussy Cat

(Bowie?). Recorded: ca. 8 March 1967, Decca Studios. Bowie: lead vocal; Renbourn? Sullivan? guitar; Boyes: piano?; Fearnley: bass?; Eager: drums?; uncredited musicians: tuba, other brass. Produced: Vernon; engineered: Dudgeon.

As per Bowie archivist Kevin Cann, “Pussy Cat” was likely recorded on a notable date—the last session for “The Laughing Gnome!”

Until now, it’s been assumed that this was Bowie covering a 1964 single by Jess Conrad, or, alternatively, a 1966 track by Chubby Checker. However, as the excerpt shows, that’s not the case—Bowie’s “Pussy Cat” appears to have nothing to do with these songs. The other Conrad recording of a song called “Pussy Cat” is on the B-side of a 1970 single, “Crystal Ball Dream,” and I’ve not heard it. But unless Bowie was a time traveler (always possible), the timing doesn’t really work out for that one.

[A clarifying addition!: as commenter Rufus Oculus notes below, “Pussy Cat” uses the melody of Marie Laforêt’s 1966 “Manchester et Liverpool.”  So “Pussy Cat” appears to have been one of Bowie’s translation jobs (see “Pancho” or “Even A Fool Learns to Love“) or him using Andre Popp’s melody for a prospective song of his own.]

So it’s Bowie playing on a nursery rhyme to scold a two-timing girlfriend (“don’t tell me no fairy tale/ for I’ve been following your trail”). If there’s any likely influence, it’s Bacharach/David’s “What’s New Pussycat?,” whose Tom Jones recording was an inescapable hit in 1965. Bowie’s “Pussy Cat” has an under-construction Mockney accent and a guitar-brass arrangement. Cann has described the full recording as sounding like a demo and that Bowie’s “vocal deteriorates as he seems to tire of the song.” It’s unlikely that it was a serious contender for David Bowie, as March 1967 was late in the game for that, particularly for a song of such modest potential as this.

New Career, New Towns

I’ve noted this on the Twitter but haven’t made a full announcement yet. But: I’ve started a new writing project, called 64 Quartets. This is, as its title suggests, about 64 musical quartets. The first entry is on Booker T. and the MG’s, the next one will be about another group of four people, and so on. This is where much of my time and energy will be going over the next year or so. I hope you enjoy it.

I’ve also set up a Patreon for it and for other writing projects, such as this site. For a very modest monthly sum, you’ll get previews of new posts (so for instance, patrons got this post yesterday), and sometimes I’ll write exclusive essays—one fairly soon, I believe. Any support would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

Love You Till Tuesday

Love You Till Tuesday.

“Love You Till Tuesday” is catchy and rancid enough to have been a top 10 hit in 1967. It could’ve even been a smash, the single that finally broke Bowie. Instead it utterly flopped and soon vanished, even after favorable reviews (except Syd Barrett, who vaguely panned it in Melody Maker (“Very chirpy, but I don’t think my toes were tapping at all.”)).

An album track promoted to a single (after getting a new strings arrangement by Ivor Raymonde), “Love You Till Tuesday” has a taste of desperation in its cheer. Bowie sings in an affected nasal tone, as if he’s pretending that this track is from the cast recording of Oliver!, and he oversells his mildly-clever lyric. There’s also a sense, as in “When I Live My Dream,” of old-fashionedness to it—it could be a 50-year-old Catskills entertainer’s spin on free love.

Still, all of that shouldn’t have hurt its prospects. The summer and fall of 1967, at least in terms of the pop charts, was a time of bleary fatigue, indulgence and slack. Look at the top songs in the UK—“All You Need Is Love” and “Hello Goodbye,” two of the Beatles’ less inspired songs, Lulu’s “To Sir With Love,” Englebert Humperdinck’s “The Last Waltz,” The Bee Gees’ “Massachusetts,” Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco.” “Love You Till Tuesday” could’ve contended.

Imagine an alternate timeline in which “Tuesday” hit, say, #2 for weeks in the summer of ’67, giving Bowie at last a taste of pop stardom. Then a rushed-out sequel single, maybe “Sell Me a Coat,” that also hit big. The Ed Sullivan Show, Las Vegas revues, duets with Petula Clark and Nancy Sinatra, Bowie Sings Bacharach. An ongoing cabaret show (“Man of Words, Man of Music, Man of Mime”) that extended well into the ’70s (towards the end, playing Sun City for weeks). A disco crossover hit. A mysterious death in the mid-’80s in a Honolulu hotel.

Instead, once again, Bowie was knocked back to the start of the board.

Recorded initially on 25 February 1967 and re-recorded on 3 June. Released (version 1) on David Bowie and (version 2) as Deram DM 135 in July 1967 (it of course was the title song of Bowie’s 1969 promo film). “Love You Till Tuesday” would be the last thing Deram released by Bowie until he became famous on another label.

When I Live My Dream

When I Live My Dream.

Bowie’s first LP was essentially finished in mid-December 1966 but Deram sat on it for more than six months. In February 1967, Bowie cut two new tracks that became last-minute additions, leavening the album’s weirdness with more standard pop.

Much like “Sell Me a Coat,” “When I Live My Dream” has a lovely melody burdened with awkward lyrics (“the trees will play the rhythm of my dream” ?) and smothered (in later versions) by an overdone arrangement. Whenever Bowie deliberately tried to write for a mainstream audience in this period, as he appeared to be doing here, he fell into weak artifice. He could easily connect with the sad, the lost and the eccentric, but found it difficult to, basically, write for squares.

That said, Bowie and his manager Ken Pitt apparently thought “Dream” could be their break-through song and so kept flogging it despite the lack of label enthusiasm. A fairly spare initial version was soon followed by a remake with a sodden Ivor Raymonde arrangement, the latter version proposed as a single (Deram nixed it). Bowie pushed “Dream” for the rest of the decade—including it in the mime show Pierrot in Turquoise, recording a German version and making it the closing number of his “Love You Till Tuesday” promotional film. He finally gave up in July 1969, when Bowie performed “Dream” in a big-band arrangement at the International Song Festival competition in Valetta, Malta, and lost to a Spanish child prodigy named Cristina.

The song suffered from bad timing, in part—it reeked of stale sentiment and sounded corny when it was released in the summer of ’67. And the lyric, with its tired knights-and-castles imagery, its weak rhymes (“horse” paired with “voice”) and the occasional groan-inducing line like “tell them I’m a dreaming kind of guy,” is a real muddle. The singer’s been dumped and contents himself with imagining his lost lover in his dreams, but he also keeps putting off his illusions, as though he needs her legal consent to get things started. It builds up to the final histrionic verse where he assures her that he’ll only stalk her in his dreamworld.

Best suited as a cue for nostalgia, despite it having had no resonance in its own time. Leos Carax used it in 1984’s Boy Meets Girl, and Seu Jorge‘s version, recorded in 2004 for the Life Aquatic soundtrack, is likely the song’s finest interpretation. Singing most of it in Portuguese helped.

The first version was recorded on 25 February 1967, the remake on 3 June 1967 (both are on Deram Anthology).

Top: Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky in Godard’s La Chinoise, 1967.

Please Mr. Gravedigger

Please Mr. Gravedigger.

What I remember is Bowie standing there wearing a pair of cans with his collar turned up as if he was in the rain, hunched over, shuffling about in a box of gravel. And you thought Brian Wilson had lost it!

Gus Dudgeon, on the recording of “Please Mr. Gravedigger.”

“Please Mr. Gravedigger,” the last song on the David Bowie LP and the last recorded in the main sessions, is a graveyard soliloquy by a child murderer, accompanied by a series of sound effects—thunderclaps, raindrops, tolling bells, shovel scrapes, footsteps, cawks.

And sneezes. Bowie gets pretty Method with his character here, so that once he sneezes he has to sing the rest of the track in a snotted-up voice. After another juicy sneeze, Bowie sounds as though he’s shoved cotton into his nostrils.

Like “We Are Hungry Men,” “Please Mr. Gravedigger” is something of a radio play, complete with bizarre voices and sound effects. For the latter, Bowie was able to plunder Decca’s fantastic library of noises (much like the Beatles did with EMI’s vaults): the harvest of decades of radio productions, novelty LPs and horror/SF movie soundtracks.

The tone is the puzzle here—how seriously are we meant to take this thing? It’s overly gruesome and darkly comic, with its stuffy-nosed murderer (its title, and the skeleton of a tune that Bowie offers, seem to be playing off the UK pop oldie “Oh Mr. Porter“), but there’s also a horrible desolation to it, its lyric filled with images like a once-serene graveyard left shattered by a bomb—crooked death layered upon death—and a gravedigger with a strand of a dead girl’s hair in his coat pocket.

The storyline’s out of an EC horror comic like The Haunt of Fear: a man who has murdered a 10-year girl stands in a bomb-blasted Lambeth cemetery, watching an old man dig graves; the killer decides that he’ll need to murder the gravedigger (either for discovering his crime, or for taking a locket of his victim’s hair); as the track ends, he’s begun digging the gravedigger’s own grave.

It’s as if the characters and sounds of the rest of the LP—the children in “There Is a Happy Land” and “Come and Buy My Toys,” the eccentric loners in “Little Bombardier” and “Uncle Arthur,” the shadow play of “Hungry Men”—were all drawn together here and packed under the same dark earth.

Recorded 13 December 1966; on David Bowie. Bowie demoed “Gravedigger” in the same session in which he recorded “Rubber Band” and “The London Boys,” but it’s never been available, even on bootleg (apparently, it’s only Bowie and an organ, no sound effects). He also performed it on the German TV program 4-3-2-1 Musik Für Junge Leute in February 1968, but sadly the footage, which must’ve been wonderfully freakish, hasn’t survived.

Top: Gray Morrow, cover of Creepy No. 13, Feb. 1967.

Come and Buy My Toys

Come and Buy My Toys.

Minimalist by the standards of David Bowie, “Come and Buy My Toys” is just Bowie and a 12-string guitar. “Toys” is in the same vein as “There is a Happy Land” but lacks the latter’s sense of mystery and ominousness, in part because the cod-medieval imagery Bowie’s stuffed the lyric with (“you’ve watched your father plow the fields with a ram’s horn” and so on).

It passes its brief span pleasantly enough, though. “Come and Buy My Toys” best serves as an advertisement for the whole record—Bowie as a purveyor of assorted sweets, sours, tapestry tales, jewels and baubles.

Recorded on 12 December 1966; on David Bowie. The guitar line that runs through the verses reminds me a bit of the one in Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me”: they have close to the same chord sequence: D/Am/C/G for Madonna, D/Am/C/G6 for Bowie).

Top: Patrick Troughton, the new star of Doctor Who, in “The Power of the Daleks,” November 1966.

Silly Boy Blue

Silly Boy Blue (1965 demo).
Silly Boy Blue.
Silly Boy Blue (Riot Squad demo, 1967).
Silly Boy Blue (BBC Top Gear, 1967).
Silly Boy Blue (Billy Fury, 1968).
Silly Boy Blue (Toy, 2000).
Silly Boy Blue (live, Tibet House Benefit, 2001).

I want to go to Tibet. It’s a fascinating place, y’know. I’d like to take a holiday and have a look inside the monasteries. The Tibetan monks, Lamas, bury themselves inside mountains for weeks, and only eat every three days. They’re ridiculous—and it’s said they live for centuries…As far as I’m concerned the whole idea of Western life—that’s the life we live now—is wrong. These are hard convictions to put into songs, though.

David Bowie, interview with Melody Maker, 24 February 1966.

I stumbled into the Buddhist Society in London when I was about seventeen. Sitting in front of me at the desk was a Tibetan lama, and he looked up and he said “Are you looking for me”? He had a bad grasp of English and in fact was saying “Who are you looking for?” But I needed him to say “You’re looking for me.”

David Bowie, 2001.

“Silly Boy Blue” is gorgeous and stately; it proceeds slowly past us like a monarch. A British teenager’s attempt to depict Tibetan culture in a pop song seems like it can’t help but be ridiculous, but Bowie, humbled by the grandeur of a culture that’s fired his imagination, writes a sweet pop hymn with a taste of majesty. It’s his first great song.

Most of all, it’s got a joy of a melody—one so memorable that you could sing lines like “yak butter statues that melt in the sun” over it, as Bowie does, and still come off all right. (That said, there are yak butter statues all over Tibet—as surreal imagery goes, it’s pretty literal in this case.)

Bowie’s interest in Tibetan Buddhism wasn’t a sudden trendy affectation—he had begun exploring the religion when he was in his mid-teens, first inspired by reading Heinrich Harrer’s 1952 book Seven Years in Tibet, and he eventually met and befriended the Tibetan lama Chimi Youngdong Rimpoche, who was exiled in London. Bowie even fantasized about becoming a Buddhist monk—cropping his hair and dyeing it black, wearing saffron robes and even changing his skin color (he’d have to settle for becoming Ziggy). Buddhism was an early influence in his songs: he had meant for the backing chorus of his single “Baby Loves That Way” to sound like chanting monks.

“Silly Boy Blue” is structured as four verses, divided in pairs by a bridge. As if emulating a long climb up a mountain, the song changes key on the third (wordless) verse. The first recorded version of the song, recorded in late ’65 with the Lower Third, had a basic Beatles knock-off rhythm that seemed ill-suited for the song’s aspirations, so here Bowie’s used a classic Hal Blaine “on the four” beat for dynamic effect—it’s a variant of Phil Spector tracks like “Be My Baby” and “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah.”

It’s telling that Bowie’s lyric, while full of Tibetan Buddhist imagery (the references to chelas and overselves, etc.), still sympathizes with the young monk who can’t pay attention, who’s a bit at odds with his culture. Even in the midst of worship, Bowie has an eye for the heretics.

Recorded on 8 December 1966; on David Bowie. The Lower Third demo (whose lyric is completely different) has never been released but is found on bootlegs like The Forgotten Songs of David Robert Jones. Bowie recorded “Silly Boy Blue” twice in BBC sessions, most notably in a 1968 performance featuring an elaborate Tony Visconti arrangement complete with gongs and chimes (on Bowie at the Beeb). It was covered by Billy Fury in the same year.

Bowie’s 1997 “Seven Years in Tibet” is a thematic sequel of sorts, while Bowie revived “Silly Boy Blue” for his failed Toy LP around 2000 and performed it at the Tibet House Benefit at Carnegie Hall in February 2001, where it sounded as if he had discovered a lost folk song and sung it back to life. Nicholas Pegg notes that Right Said Fred’s 1991 hit “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” nicks some of the verse melody.

Top photo: ca. 1966-1967, burning of Buddhist classics outside the Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, Tibet, during the Cultural Revolution.

Maid of Bond Street

Maid of Bond Street.

A word-jammed jumpy little thing, “Maid of Bond Street” at first listen seems another acid portrait of Bowie’s hip contemporaries, but the lyric’s more of a fractured self-portrait: Bowie dividing his persona into the lonely glamorous girl made of lipstick and film outtakes and the envious provincial boy shut out of her world who “wants to be a star himself.”

It’s a chore to listen to, though; thankfully it’s short. Bowie spills out his lines as if in a breath endurance contest, the galumphing waltz rhythm seems at cross-purposes with the melody. As the track ends, Bowie finally gives up a chorus as if in recompense: a pure Anthony Newley-style stage belter that ruins whatever subtleties had survived to that point.

Recorded 8 December 1966; on David Bowie (cut from the American version, apparently for being too British).

Top: Twiggy on moped, 1966.

Little Bombardier

Little Bombardier.
Little Bombardier (Top Gear, 1967).

[Bowie] went to Decca around the time I was doing “The Wizard.” He was into bombardiers then. Don’t you remember “The Little Bombardier”? He was very cockney then. I used to go round to his place in Bromley and he always played Anthony Newley records.

Marc Bolan, interview with Melody Maker, 12 March 1977.

Why was Bowie into bombardiers, anyway? Maybe the uniforms. Or maybe it was just a random obsession, the result of rummaging around in the past’s cupboard and grabbing a few shiny pieces. Perhaps it was just the delight in how the phrase sounded when sung—the way “lit-tle” is made by two tiny darts of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, while the “BOMB” in “bombardier,” hurled from the back of the throat, can be drawn out for grand effect.

The lyric: shabby old veteran lives sad and alone, then is rejuvenated when he spies two children. He buys them candy and presents, they love him. Shabby old veteran, suspected of being a pedophile, is then run out of town. Strings, piano, curtains. Bowie deliberately keeps the key detail vague—was the bombardier really a pedophile or the victim of mob injustice? His vocal, equally sympathetic and cold, discloses nothing.

“Little Bombardier” is a waltz, one of two Bowie recorded in the same session. In 1966, using 3/4 waltz time was still an unusual choice for rock musicians, and here it’s an ironic commentary on the lyric: the character can’t cope in the modern world, so naturally his song is a throwback to Edwardian dance halls. The lushness of the arrangement—the sweep of strings, the trombone that drives the dance and also delivers a somber solo—seems to mock the coarseness of its title subject.

Recorded on 8 December 1966; on David Bowie. The BBC liked it enough to request that Bowie perform it during his first broadcast on Top Gear in late 1967.

Top photo: London, 1966 (photographer “Ralph46”).

Sell Me a Coat

Sell Me a Coat.
Sell Me a Coat (remake, 1969).

Well before Bowie’s first album was released, his manager Ken Pitt sent acetates to American musicians, hoping that Bowie, like Bob Dylan or Laura Nyro, could first get a name as a songwriter. Pitt sent “She’s Got Medals” and “Silly Boy Blue” to the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Co. (both rejected both) and, in a sign he considered Bowie to fit into the “folk” niche, Pitt singled out Judy Collins, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, to whom he sent everything from “When I Live My Dream” to “There is a Happy Land” (sadly, not “We Are Hungry Men”—a Peter, Paul and Mary version of that track would’ve been one for the ages).

No one wanted anything to do with Bowie’s admittedly odd songs. It’s surprising that they all rejected “Sell Me a Coat,” though, as it’s one of Bowie’s catchiest early compositions, with its nursery-rhyme chorus. Someone could’ve made a hit, a minor one at least, with these materials.

“Sell Me a Coat” is Bowie coloring within the lines—it was almost certainly written and produced to be a possible single. The verses’ melody is in a lower range, with Bowie singing phrases slowly and somberly; the chorus has a brisker tempo, is in a higher key and is made of short, punchy phrases (like the consonant “little patch pockets”). Overlaid onto all this are Bowie’s alternating images of winter and despair (the verses—his girlfriend has dumped him) and warmth and renewal (the chorus—he’s looking for a new one).

It’s almost too perfect, and so winds up feeling a little fake and cloying. Still, those qualities didn’t hurt a great many Top 10 hits. “Sell Me a Coat” is a girl dressed up for the ball who wound up with no dance partners.

Recorded 8 December 1966. A revised version (heard in the promo clip above) was made for Bowie’s promotional film “Love You Till Tuesday” in 1969, with new backing vocals from Bowie’s then-partners Hermione Farthingale (you don’t get names like that anymore) and John “Hutch” Hutchinson—the new version’s a mess, mainly because, due to odd mixing, the backing vox often drown out Bowie’s lead); on David Bowie.

We Are Hungry Men

We Are Hungry Men.

On the oddly-sequenced LP David Bowie, sandwiched between the hushed, eerie “There is a Happy Land” and the saccharine “When I Live My Dream” is Bowie’s abrasive science-fiction radio play “We Are Hungry Men,” which opens with a frantic “BBC announcer” bewildered by cities apparently overpopulating by the hour, offers a comic-book Nazi rant interlude and reaches its insane peak with Bowie chanting like a Dalek, over shrieking horns:

I’ve prepared a document legalizing mass abortion!
We will turn a blind eye to infanticide!

“We Are Hungry Men” may be one of the more embarrassing things Bowie has ever recorded but it’s also a spectacular car wreck of a track, whose chorus is, perversely, one of the album’s catchiest. As with “She’s Got Medals,” it’s Bowie’s first crack at a theme that will preoccupy him for much of the following decade—here, messianic fascist political figures and the dystopias in which they come to power (“Cygnet Committee,” “The Supermen,” much of Diamond Dogs).

The lyric’s specific enough (people arrested for breathing too much air, etc.) that Bowie must have been reading some contemporary science fiction. So here’s a brief generalization on postwar SF, which you can feel free to skip.

Where much of US postwar science fiction is visionary, po-faced, curious about drugs, ultra-masculine and often rife with can-do positivism (Alas, Babylon offers nuclear war as a means of restoring America’s pioneer spirit), UK SF is far more pessimistic, full of ruin and doomed societies.

The UK of the ’50s and early ’60s produced John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (grains disappear, civilization ends) and John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (plague, then plants kill almost everyone) and The Midwich Cuckoos (your children are evil—they will kill you). Most of all, there were the great postwar British dystopians JG Ballard (Jonathan Lethem: “Ballard in a grain of sand — the visual poetry of ruin…the convergence of the technological and the natural worlds into a stage where human life flits as a violent, temporary shadow“) and Brian Aldiss. Aldiss, by 1965, had written novels about humanity being reduced to a bestial state and hunted by insects (Hothouse), human civilization as a generations-long sham (Starship) and the grim spectacle of a world with no children, only the aged (Greybeard).

So in “We Are Hungry Men” Bowie is working in an already well-tilled field. He’s also flashing on a hip topic of concern in the mid-’60s: global overpopulation. This would come to mainstream attention with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968, but the concept was already in wide circulation before then. Images of humans packed like sardines in cities, living ten to a room in teeming high rises, are all over the late ’60s: the Star Trek episode “The Mark of Gideon” and John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar, both from 1968, being just two examples.

But the key inspiration for Bowie’s lyric may have been Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!, serialized in the August to October 1966 issues of the British SF magazine Impulse. Make Room! (set in 1999, in a New York City overrun by 35 million people) is better known as its movie adaptation, Soylent Green. “Soylent Green is people!” is a better catch phrase than “we are hungry men!,” though.

Recorded 24 November 1966; released on David Bowie.