David Bowie’s 100 Greatest Songs

Photo: Brian Ward

David Bowie's untimely death on January 10, 2016 brought into focus his immeasurable contribution to music and culture. For five decades, he had been a true visionary, whether wowing audiences in the early '70s with his otherworldly Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane personas, retreating to bleak, pre-unification Berlin to record innovatory electronic music with Brian Eno, remodelling himself as a blond-haired pop idol for the 80s or making the extraordinary avant-garde jazz-rock that graced his final albums. Bowie's is the richest, the most forward-thinking and diverse back catalogue of arguably any recording artist. MOJO delves deep into it to bring you what we believe are his 100 greatest songs...

100.

Let Me Sleep Beside You

(from The World Of David Bowie, 1970)

Decca’s The World Of… budget compilation series usually concerned itself with harmless MOR sorts like Mantovani, Max Bygraves or Frank Ifield. But in 1970 Bowie’s turn came, when his ex-label cashed in on the success of Space Oddity. One selection was this 1967 recording: apparently written to be a hit, Bowie’s first collaboration with Tony Visconti presented a strings-augmented folk rock companion to the Stones’ equally blunt Let’s Spend The Night Together, with the singer on world-weary yet determined form. See him Elvis’ing the song up on the Love You Till Tuesday film.

99.

Bring Me The Disco King

(from Reality, 2003)

Bowie’s last track before his welcome recent reprise, this minimal meditation shows his appetite for risk-taking was undiminished; swooping singing set to the most spare of backgrounds, of Mike Garson’s restrained piano chords and a spritely drum loop. It’s fascinating as autobiography, too; you can appreciate Bowie’s joy in his own singing, even while he tells us, “close me in the dark, let me disappear.”

98.

Move On

(from Lodger, 1979)

If Lodger’s Yassassin and African Night Flight reflected Bowie’s global roaming, Move On explores the impulse behind it. There’s jaded bravado in the “travelling man” mentions of Cyprus and “old Kyoto”, but he’s also a “shadow”, a “leaf”, something fading in a vibrant world. Crowd-surge vocals and unstoppable train-like rhythm can’t push him through the loneliness, though: “Can’t forget you.” Tellingly, the backing is a reversal of All The Young Dudes: his past is chasing him and there’s no escape.

97.

Conversation Piece

(B-side of The Prettiest Star 7-inch, 1970)

A Country song replete with weeping pedal steel and hopelessness rooted in existential crisis, Conversation Piece is a singular curio. Painting a vivid picture which is almost Edward Hopper-like in its rendering of loneliness, the singer is a faltering academic living above a grocery shop, whose Austrian proprietor invites him down for awkward dinners. In the final verse, our troubled protagonist is shaking with anxiety – “I’m invisible and dumb/And no one will recall me” – before the last chorus alludes to suicide.

96.

Repetition

(from Lodger, 1979)

Buried on Lodger’s second side, Repetition unveiled a new David Bowie – the social-realist commentator. Tethered to George Murray’s two-note bass line and Dennis Davis’s robotic kick drum, it’s remorseless, airless but compelling. Lyrically, a coldly observed treatise on personal failure and systematic domestic violence, it details the tangible frustrations of one Johnny who “could have had a Cadillac/If the school had taught him right.” Bowie’s vocal is unusually detached, until the moment he steps into the narrative to plead, “don’t hit her”

95.

V-2 Schneider

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

With a title referencing the Third Reich’s infamous missile programme, this song presented an ambivalent tribute to Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, who had recently name-checked Bowie and Iggy on Trans-Europe Express. But V-2 Schneider has more in common with the rock-based German kosmische sounds of mid-’70s Neu! or La Düsseldorf, levitating for its three minutes 10 seconds on a motorik groove while Bowie vamps on sax and recites the title through heavy processing. Four-to-the-floor live versions in the late ’90s amped up the disco-biscuit aspect.

94.

Joe The Lion

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

A salute to the indomitable creative courage of artist Chris Burden, renowned for audacious performance works in which he was purposely electrocuted, shot or, as Bowie acknowledges in his spontaneously improvised lyric, nailed to his car. Bowie’s increasingly frenzied vocal claws against a wall of heavily processed Carlos Alomar and Robert Fripp guitars, which relent only on the almost-jaunty “It’s Monday” bridge, before plunging back in again as Bowie delivers the gloriously redemptive pay-off line, “You can be like your dreams tonight.”

93.

Time

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

When Bowie recruited then-virtually unknown keysman Mike Garson, he unleashed his inner weird. The meld of ’20s stride and Kurt Weill songspiel piano dominates the song, although Mick Ronson’s brilliant Beethoven-pastiche guitar runs it a close second. Bowie performs the song – stopping mid-song to take a breath – and the lyric is full of morbid Brel-esque asides (“I look at my watch it says 9.25 and I think Oh God, I’m still alive”). In interviews, Bowie was predicting an early death. But he got through it… just.

92.

Fall Dog Bombs the Moon

(from Reality, 2003)

When is a protest song not a protest song?  When it’s a David Bowie song.  Like Fantastic Voyage and Loving The Alien before it, Fall Dog… is an oblique encoding of perspectives on world politics, written as war broke out again between the West and Iraq. The song’s protagonist (“goddam rich” “cruel and smart” and with “oil on his hands”) bombs the moon (Islam’s crescent moon, speculates Bowie writer Nicholas Pegg) in a world degraded, where greed rules, and the reality of life is depthless and shapeless. The song’s resigned, stately pace completes the mood of a man, perhaps, willing to give it all up.

91.

The London Boys

(B-side of Rubber Band 7-inch, 1966)

Knowing the creature David Bowie would later become, 1966 single Rubber Band is, on the surface, a curiously reactionary package. The A-side is a slice of tea-and-cake English psychedelia where a man recalls his days in the “14-18 war”; the B-side, meanwhile, cuts through the moustache wax and whimsy with a cautionary tale. of a teenager who heads to the capital in search of excitement and companionship, loses his head to pills, and winds up alone in a grim rented room, his “flashy clothes” no comfort. While Pye had earlier rejected the song and Decca, bothered by the pills, swapped it for There Is A Happy Land on Rubber Band’s US release, Bowie himself appears fond of The London Boys. Producer Ken Scott remembered a plan to re-record it for Pin-Ups, and it was finally revisited on 2000’s unreleased Toy. Time has been kind to it, too. Knowing what the next drug-curdled decade would hold its wariness about getting what you wish for seems prescient, full of resonance.

90.

I’m Deranged

(from 1.Outside, 1995)

Track 16 of 19 on 1.Outside weds a punchy, cinematic intro – inspired by John Barry – to Brian Eno’s sculptured, skittering, fast-driving ‘treatments’. Meanwhile, Bowie delivers his finest, most beauteous Scott Walker impression to paint a sombre, sensual portrait of a protagonist lost to contrasting emotions, where “the clutch of life and the fist of love” are juxtaposed. Mike Garson’s piano punctuation – expertly positioned bursts of splattered notes – here emphasise a state of near-mental collapse.

89.

Big Brother/Chant Of The Skeletal Family

(from Diamond Dogs, 1974)

Rounding off proceedings on Diamond Dogs, the big finale of Bowie’s never-realised 1984 musical presents Winston Smith’s brainwashing as both submission and resistance, praise for a “saviour” that might equally be an acerbic mocking  of his dictator’s new dawn, suggesting that an individualistic spirit remains. A segue into instrumental Chant Of The Skeletal Family follows, its jake-leg rhythms prefiguring Young Americans’ broken soul, its jarring ending foretells a new digital age of skipping CDs.

88.

Beauty & The Beast

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

With small, sharp stabs, BATB introduced “Heroes”’s disparate musical elements, quickly coalescing to a fizzing band wallop that nailed the new energised mood after the exorcism of Low. A playground-like chorus – and Eno’s warping interventions – also suggests they’re having a ball. Not that Bowie was out of the woods. The mood remained claustrophobic and his lyrical perspective (reviewing past “crimes”, re-addressing schizophrenia fears) anxious. Fusing menace and liberation makes for one of his most taut thrillers.

87.

1984

(from Diamond Dogs, 1974)

Written in 1973 and evolving through slower versions while George Orwell’s estate mulled over, and finally nixed, Bowie’s proposed musical of his 1984 novel, its dark subject matter would be a cliché in the singer’s canon were it not for the song’s solid construction and his resounding, convincing vocal delivery. Sung with a late-period Anthony Newley stagey bravado, the guitar (Alan Parker) sources Skip Pitts Jr’s Shaft wah wah, there’s a hint of Philly strings and a vocal arrangement that anticipates a just-emerging Queen.

86.

Watch That Man

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

When Bowie first toured the States in autumn ’72 to coastal raves but Midwest apathy, he followed an impossible act: the Stones. That summer they’d instigated bombs, riots, and excess all areas. Exile On Main St. was the album, murky overload the sound. As Jagger explained, lyrics you couldn’t easily make out demanded you replay the track. Kicking off Aladdin Sane, this rocker was imagistic overload incarnate. To hear the lyrical bacchanal crystal-clear, check Lulu’s Bowie/Ronson-produced version.

85.

Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix)

(Single, 2013)

He’d made a lengthy meal of retiring LCD Soundsystem, and hadn’t done a remix for five years, but James Murphy aimed to please when reworking this anxiety-wracked The Next Day track. Commencing with a lift from Steve Reich’s 1972 Clapping Music, the song’s original flinty rock is replaced by a slowed Moroderesque nod to Bowie’s past: at 6.27 it gives us our first clear sight of an Ashes To Ashes sample, connecting post-hibernation Bowie with his earlier self.

84.

5.15 The Angels Have Gone

(from Heathen, 2002)

An unsettled, post 9/11 mood suffused Heathen, felt most intensely on this elegant and enigmatic piece, describing a series of train journeys to no particular destination. Building upon an irregular drumbeat, off-kilter bass riff and quiet, celestial female backing vocals, Bowie, singing in an unnerving register, opaquely unfolds the tale of man escaping a relationship, but not love; yet the symbolism of “angels have gone” goes far deeper. This is really about a loss of faith, not just in womankind, but perhaps in God himself (cf. Quadrophenia’s Jimmy The Mod, riding the antecedent 5.15).

83.

Blackout

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

New York’s 1965 blackout had been an evening of benign togetherness. 1977 was its dreadful flip-side of arson, looting and riots. Performed live at Berlin’s enormous Hansa Tonstudio 2, Blackout plays like 1965’s romantic memories (“I'll kiss you in the rain”) consumed by the urban hysteria of 1977. Assailed by Dennis Davis’ gut-punch drumming and Robert Fripp’s night-terrors guitar, Bowie radiates a terrifying energy, relishing the real-time slide from euphoria to nightmare, high on the horror of collapse.

82.

Heathen (The Rays)

(from Heathen, 2002)

“The words started appearing out of nowhere. I just couldn’t control them,” says Bowie of the early morning outpouring that reduced him to tears and spawned the title track of Album Number 22. Written prior to September 11, 2001, the song was released in the wake of the attacks, giving greater meaning to Bowie’s three-verse reflection on his own mortality. Whether his wistful assertion that “all things must pass” was a nod to the recently deceased George Harrison is a moot point, but Heathen sounds restless, forlorn, and yet strangely calm. Some may even say accepting.

81.

Lady Grinning Soul

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

Pianist Mike Garson’s extravagant embroidery on Aladdin Sane is key to why it’s so much more than Ziggy II, and he drives the album’s dreamy, epic closer, rivalling his employer’s decadent vocal for theatricality. For there’s a knowing lick of Liberace here, and a whiff of ham and wry in Mick Ronson’s Spanish stylings. Maybe the Lady is fame itself – “She’ll lay belief on you” – and you must be alive to her dangers, ’cos “she’ll also be your living end”. Perilously lush.

80.

Win

(from Young Americans, 1975)

The aural equivalent of the golden halo surrounding Bowie’s face on the Young Americans sleeve, Win is pure goosepimples and superbly recorded, with tons of space for The Astronettes’ periodic backing vocals, Tony Visconti’s barely noticeable strings allowing space for the real dialogue that was going down. Following the observational tack and dizzy wordplay of Young Americans itself, Win was the entry point for the ‘Bowie revealed’ agenda the singer had promised on its completion (his most personal album since Space Oddity, apparently). Bowie had indeed never sounded so naked and wired, so anguished and exhausted, but there’s defiance too in the repeated mantra, “it ain’t over” A promise? A threat?

79.

Drive-In Saturday

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

John, I’m Only Dancing was hyperactive, The Jean Genie hard. This, Bowie’s first single of 1973, moved more gracefully, providing a decorative, character-filled glimpse into a sexless, post-nuclear future. If the primary inspiration was bobbysoxer balladry, the mocking Mothers Of Invention-style horns, space-age sirens, chummy shout-outs to Jagger and Twiggy and quietly explosive choruses catapulted Bowie further out, into space-age, Nabob of Sob territory. All that from spotting a few moonlit domes through a train window while Bowie/Ziggy journeyed through Arizona.

78.

Silly Boy Blue

(from David Bowie, 1967)

As a dispatch from the heart of the psychedelic age, Silly Boy Blue is an anachronism: a swooningly orchestrated ballad befitting an older crooner. If sonically out of step with the vogue, however, its lyrical content reflected the burgeoning spirituality of the times, in this case Tibetan Buddhism. Bowie depicts rain over the Lhasa mountains and “yak butter statues that melt in the sun”, before focusing in on the struggling or rebellious pupil of the title. Eventually re-recorded in a more dreamily psych form on 2001’s Toy.

77.

African Night Flight

(from Lodger, 1979)

Eno had introduced Bowie to the claustrophobic atmospheres of The Walker Brothers’ 1978 album Nite Flights, an influence that went beyond the titular nod in this teeming Lodger highlight. Lyrically inspired by an encounter with hard-drinking German pilots in Mombasa, Kenya, and propelled by an Eno-manipulated ‘cricket menace’ rhythm track, it finds Bowie delivering a stream-of-consciousness ‘art rap’ and a chanted refrain (in a potpourri of African tongues); the whole exotic/quixotic thing a palpable augury of Eno’s impending African experiments with Talking Heads.

76.

D.J.

(from Lodger, 1979)

The Clash and Elvis Costello had already railed against commercial radio, now here was Bowie’s damaged answer record, delivered from within the crumbling psyche of a delusional disc jockey. Disco as dissociative identity disorder, D.J. plays like it’s been pressed-off-centre, where George Murray’s bass-groove heartbeat is needled by Adrian Belew’s askew guitar, Bowie’s queasy keyboards and Simon House’s horror-movie violins until a 16-bar coda – and that deranged cry of “time flies when you’re having fun” – signals the final descent into madness.

75.

The Drowned Girl

(from Baal EP, 1982)

The Baal EP was a trademark Bowie blend of inspiration and cynicism; designed as a contract filler to close his RCA contract, it ended up as an authentic, arresting farewell to both Berlin and – for several decades – Tony Visconti. The Drowned Girl is one of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s darkest collaborations, depicting a suicide’s rotting corpse. Bowie’s version stands today as a master-class in singing, his voice metamorphosing from smoky to crystalline in perfect synchronisation with the beautiful, disturbing lyrics.

74.

Subterraneans

(from Low, 1977)

Washes of early ambient synthesizer and bassy booms from collaborator Brian Eno introduce the final track on the first album of their Berlin Trilogy and one of Bowie’s first, and most effective, mood pieces, its early melody leaning heavily on a phrase from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variation Nimrod. Like the soundtrack to a modern black-and-white movie, layers of mist and mood accrue. After three minutes, Bowie’s wistful sax joins the palette; after four, his sparse lyrics arrive, uttered for sound rather than sense. Brave and broody rumination.

73.

It’s No Game (no.1)

(from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980)

Based on an unreleased 1970 Bowie song, Tired Of My Life, It’s No Game came in two parts on Scary Monsters… No.1 is an angry swagger, with Bowie’s vocal verging on the demented, offset by a Japanese lyric translation strictly delivered by erstwhile Sparks cover star Michi Hirota, and the needling fretwork of Robert Fripp (who regards it as among his finest playing on record), a solo torrent which concludes the song before an irate Bowie tells the guitarist to “shut up!

72.

Andy Warhol

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

It starts with its own Warhol multiple: the singer repeatedly correcting the pronunciation of his subject’s name (an important detail to someone with their own tricky vowel sound?). Bowie’s silkscreen-thin voice turns the artist into art, a collectible hung “on my wall”, yet tense guitar scrabbles at Warhol’s surface trying to draw blood. No wonder the recently shot artist disliked the song on hearing an acetate. A “scream” – with something of the Munch about it.

71.

Slip Away

(from Heathen, 2002)

Based on a completed, but so far unreleased song, Uncle Floyd, from Toy, Slip Away captures the middle-aged Bowie with a raw poignancy. The stylophone is back, and immediately triggers our nostalgia receptors. But what is also back is the sort of epically-wrought melody we perhaps hadn’t heard since Station To Station. Lurking in the sonics are spacey keys and weird refrains – think Blur’s Strange News From Another Star. In the long tradition of not releasing his best songs as singles, this remained an album track only.

70.

Hallo Spaceboy

(from 1.Outside, 1995)

Bowie’s most ferocious sonic outburst since the climax of 1974’s Sweet Thing, Hallo Spaceboy features repeat phrases like, “Do you like girls or boys”, uttered in a knowing Mockney-Bowie style that says, “Look at me! Nearly 50 and fronting a hardcore industrial rock band!” He’s clearly having a blast, dressing up the concrete with dizzying electronica and elegant Mike Garson piano. Enlisting Pet Shop Boys to sweeten the innate beastliness and make it chart-worthy was another masterstroke.

69.

Neuköln

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

Named after the once mainly Turkish Neukölln district of Berlin (German place-name spelling is not a Bowie strong point, as the video to Where Are We Now? attests), this highlight of “Heroes”’ instrumental side, co-written with Brian Eno, offers four and a half minutes of wintry, futuristic spy music, with Eno’s variously textured synths framing Bowie’s by turns lugubrious and baleful, vaguely Eastern-tinged sax soloing. It remains endlessly evocative of blasted cold war cityscapes, shadowy men in overcoats and profound Mitteleuropa melancholy.

68.

Buddha Of Suburbia

(from Buddha Of Suburbia, 1993)

Written for the 1993 TV adaptation of fellow Bromley tech student Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 coming-of-age novel, Buddha Of Suburbia initially plays like a knowing pastiche of late ’60s/early ’70s Dave, but underpinning this collage of Space Oddity guitar riff, Bewlay Brothers split-octave vocals and All The Madmen’s “zane zane zane” refrain is a wistful autobiographical rumination on Bowie’s own suburban flight and Starman transformation, itself serving as restorative fuel for yet another escape into the artistic unknown.

67.

Something In The Air

(from Hours, 1999)

A Passionate autopsy of a relationship at the moment it crumbles to nothing, Something In The Air could easily be a diva-driven break-up anthem. Yet Bowie skews that particular reading with a gruff, alien blues delivery that adds scars and depth to the smooth surfaces. But what is the failed relationship in question? Released in 1999, from the first full album by a major artist available via the new medium of download, Something In The Air is Bowie bidding farewell to the decade with a melancholy fin-de-siècle drama.

66.

Sons Of The Silent Age

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

His nibs’s sobbing tin-sax theme fades away into calm, as Bowie goes in for some more sci-fi sociology, viewing this new breed of man-morlock – who “make love only once, but dream and dream” – through his fractured futurescope. Echoes of Jacques Brel’s Fils De… and Les Vieux bounce around in Bowie’s documentary-voiceover sprechgesang (does he actually have modern Berliners in mind?) until that pleading release of a chorus bursts in, as if from another song entirely. The mysterious calm before Blackout’s storm.

65.

Teenage Wildlife

(from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980)

An act of artistic provocation, midlife crisis or mental breakdown, Teenage Wildlife begins as Bowie’s ‘Letter To The New Romantics’, before unravelling gloriously, in real time. Behind its ridiculous Spector/Springsteen Wall of Sound, the song slips from fatherly advice (“You’ll get chilly receptions, everywhere you go”) to fuck-you (“Same old thing in brand new drag”) to defiance (“no-no/They can’t do this to me”), all heightened by Robert Fripp’s ironically insolent guitar and those mocking nyah-nyah backing vocals.

64.

The Jean Genie

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

There were times when Bowie could sublimate his experiences into onomatopoeic pieces, and no more so than on this loud, dirty, cock-thrusting, drug-pumped stomper written in summer 1972 in Warhol starlet Cyrinda Foxe’s Manhattan apartment. Over a razor-like riff ever straining to reach the chorus-change, Bowie raps about an out-of-town character inspired by Iggy Pop who sucks up New York, “selling nutrition” and making underwear from people’s dead hair. Getting fucked-up never sounded more exciting.

63.

China Girl

(from Let’s Dance, 1983)

Of their mid-’70s co-writes, Iggy’s Tonight is definitive, but Bowie’s remake of China Girl bests the original. For all its Nile Rodgers-buffed pop perfection, it’s sick at heart, and Bowie’s vocal, from tender murmur to crazed dictator, brings more meaning(s). She’s a girl, she’s a drug, she’s the East, invaded, polluted and objectified by the West (all there in Rodgers’ chop-suey guitar intro). She’s ripe for an answer song, now the boot’s on the other foot.

62.

Word On A Wing

(from Station To Station, 1976)

Written from the depths of a cocaine-depleted spiritual crisis and what Bowie called the “psychological terror” he experienced while filming The Man Who Fell To Earth, Word On A Wing is the sound of someone reaching out to religion, with reservations. He can’t bring himself to sing the words Sweet Jesus (using “Sweet Name”) and logic is making him resistant (“Just because I believe don’t mean I don’t think as well”). All of this matched to shiver-inducing ornate piano balladry that harks back to Aladdin Sane.

61.

Absolute Beginners

(12-inch A-side, 1986)

Written for the soundtrack of Julien Temple’s big-screen adaptation of Colin MacInnes’s novel, Absolute Beginners is one thing appearing as another. It plays as a perfect three-minute love song, but in fact is a series of ambiguous amendments to the absolutes of love, a duplicitous valentine floating free inside eight minutes of valedictory drift, aided by soaring strings, Rick Wakeman’s Rachmaninov piano and a sax coda that, like Bowie, constantly hints at a need for freedom. Absolute Beginners is also the epic sound of Bowie bidding farewell to a depleted late ’80s (“there’s nothing much to take”) and attempting to start again, a pop song freed from the hooks and nets of pure pop, floating off into an unfashionable outer space of art, experiment and play.

60.

Black Country Rock

(from The Man Who Sold The World, 1971)

Debate rages over the extent of Bowie’s input to this funky hard rocker, cooked up in a basement jam at Haddon Hall and named for its apparent resemblance to The Move. The star turn is Mick Ronson’s tough, proggy riff, delivered over Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey’s chunky rhythm parts; yet the stirring chorus whiffs undeniably of Bowie’s casual gift for a singular melody. The last-minute lyrics, teased out of the then apathetic, love-struck singer, are intriguingly opaque (and scant) and sung in an imitation Marc Bolan voice. Yet, being Bowie, curiously this becomes a virtue.

59.

Lazarus

(from Blackstar, 2016)

With hindsight, it seems astonishing that anyone could have missed the message within Lazarus’s elegiac final goodbye (something underlined by the accompanying video featuring Bowie floating up from his hospital bed towards the everlasting). Only a matter of weeks after its release as a single in December 2015, the message would be devastatingly clear, however. Neatly fulfilling the lyrics’ prophecy of popular immortality, following Bowie’s death it became his first US top forty hit in over 28 years. Aint that just like him...

58.

This is Not America

(12-inch A side, 1985)

Written for John Schlesinger’s 1985 cold war drama, The Falcon And The Snowman, and based around an aerial eastern instrumental by jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Lyle Mays, This is Not America is Bowie unmoored in a dreamlike niemandsland between ’80s US pop and the icy jazz swirls of ’77 Berlin. The first in Bowie’s orphic ’80s soundtrack trilogy with Absolute Beginners and When The Wind Blows, its looped melancholy drift eerily anticipates the beatific dreampop of Julia Holter and Animal Collective.

57.

What In The World

(from Low, 1977)

Slightly overshadowed on Low’s first side, What In The World would be the star of any other room. Tuning into a blast of psychic static, it broadcasts some unsteady states: claustrophobia (“you never leave your room” – the same upsetting space as Breaking Glass?), paranoia and lust. The manic energy is quickened by space-age synths, strident drums and Iggy Pop, shouting against Bowie’s coolly unhinged voice. It ends by suggesting Bowie has a “real me”, which is tantalising, but on this fractured evidence, hard to believe.

56.

Diamond Dogs

(from Diamond Dogs, 1974)

This loose, Stonesy roller was a fitting fanfare for the titular Droogs-like gang who run amok through Diamond Dogs’ dystopian, Orwellian future-scape. From its messy slide guitar intro over a Faces live LP sample to its honking sax finale, the whole thing’s a wonderful anarchic mess, Bowie no longer a theatrical, broken rock’n’roll suicide but a gleeful voyeur of street violence and genocide. This was the glam-drug-nihilism axis tilted to its precipitous limit: a serious, grown-up soul boy soon needed to get out.

55.

Queen Bitch

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

Covering I’m Waiting For The Man in 1967, Bowie was the UK’s Velvet Underground uber-fan. Though no stranger to naughtiness in London, he was intrigued by the New York scene as spot-lit by Lou Reed and the Factory crowd. In January 1971, a promo trip to New York inspired a cinematic song of camp jealousy cut fast, flip and furious to slashing acoustic and Mick Ronson’s Les Paul riffing à la Sweet Jane out of Eddie Cochran’s Three Steps To Heaven.

54.

Cat People (Putting Out Fire)

(from Cat People OST, 1982)

Paul Schrader’s film Cat People, a Freud-fest in which a girl’s sexual awakening transforms her into a black leopard, had at least one redeeming feature: electronic pathfinder Giorgio Moroder’s noirish soundtrack, for which Bowie wrote and sang the lyrics to this grandiose opening piece. Crooning sensually in a rich, smouldering baritone before breaking angrily into the title phrase, the track showed Bowie’s remarkable sensitivity to the source music and film’s theme – though its alluring, Expressionist feel was defenestrated a year later when he mystifyingly re-recorded a clumpy version for Let’s Dance with an over-wrought Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo.

53.

Look Back in Anger

(from Lodger, 1979)

Describing an inconclusive encounter with a hesitant angel of death, Look Back In Anger rages against the dying of the light with desperate, unrelenting velocity. It’s perhaps no surprise that single-buyers rejected this peculiar beast. Bowie emulates Scott Walker in the verses, Visconti sounds like a Beatle on the chorus and Dennis Davis lays down an infernally busy drum part that could almost be The Chemical Brothers. The video aptly portrayed Bowie as Dorian Gray, the man who refused to grow old.

52.

John, I’m Only Dancing

(7-inch single, 1972)

Despite being a married father, Bowie ‘outed’ himself as gay in 1972. The scenario here is just as ambiguous. Is the protagonist apologising for hitting on a girl in a sleazy club to his own boyfriend, or to hers, or maybe ‘she’ – in gay parlance – is another man? Basically a strummed R&B shuffle, this smart, concise song is brilliantly embellished by the Spiders. Mick Rock’s extraordinary video, featuring Lindsay Kemp erotically dancing with a net-clad female’s legs wrapped around his waist, was banned by the BBC.

51.

Hang On To Yourself

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, 1972)

Referencing radio and parents in a riffy little number recorded by the short-lived Arnold Corns group in February 1971, Bowie had clearly cocked an ear to The Velvet Underground’s new song Rock And Roll. Though a flop, the tune and chorus were too good not to salvage and supercharge months later for the Ziggy Stardust project. Echoing the biker rock rumble of Elvis’s Baby I Don’t Care and Duane Eddy’s Ramrod, this live crowd-rouser was Bowie’s Get It On.

50.

Let’s Dance

(from Let’s Dance, 1983)

In the Autumn of 1982, David Bowie had left his long-term label RCA and wanted something fresh and unexpected for his next record. Having met Chic’s Nile Rodgers at New York disco, the Continental, he suggested the pair should work together. Bowie had one proviso: “I wnt you to make hits”. Despite being six flop albums into a hit drought and buried in a serious coke habit at the time, Rodgers delivered, transforming a folky 12-string acoustic number into a whip crack disco pop diamond. Recorded in just two takes, Let’s Dance was the only Bowie single to top both the UK and US charts. Mission accomplished.

49.

Kooks

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

Written just after the birth of Zowie (while Angie was cracking her pelvis, Bowie was at home, listening to Neil Young), Kooks should by rights be a trifle. It’s so daft and jaunty, a ’60s throwback. Yet the tenderness and self-doubt resonate with any new parent who wonders if they’re up to the job. Unusually humble in imagining a new-born as an autonomous human being, it’s both a promise and a plea: “Will you stay?”

48.

After All

(from The Man Who Sold The World, 1971)

A subdued but spooky ending to side one of The Man Who Sold The World, in which the song’s ostensibly childish outlook ripples gently with intimations of nightmare as it swaps allusions to Lewis Carroll (“they’re just older children”) for an Aleister Crowley-like philosophy on the afterlife (“Live ’til your rebirth/And do what you will”). With the waltzing time signature adding an air of stately, twisted darkness, After All would provide the ornate, gothic cornerstone for the black-eyeliner brigade who followed a decade later.

47.

Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)

(from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980)

“David’s not an outdoor person,” says Carlos Alomar, which would help explain the highly-strung street neurosis of this metronomic rocker. Dave’s in ‘Sarf Lahndahn’ gangster mode, haunted and haunting, beset by Visconti’s barking synth-dogs, issuing sinister semi-threats (“I’ll love her ’til the day she dies”) and thieves’ cant (“waiting at the lights – know what I mean?”) while the chilly relentlessness of Alomar-George Murray-Denny Davis, plus Robert Fripp at his most aggressively random, thicken his insulation against punk. ‘Pukka’, as another iconic South Londoner had it.

46.

It’s Gonna Be Me

(Outtake from Young Americans, 1975)

With his vocal range, gospel soul’s dramatic melisma was no stretch. Here Bowie luxuriates in the emotionalism of an Al Green-style confessional epic with a side order of Springsteen’s street romance. A high-wire act of beseeching and regret, this show-stopper was expensively string-sectioned and previewed live to acclaim. Yet it was bumped from the new made-in-Philadelphia blue-eyed soul album in favour of the misfitting, over the top Across The Universe, baffling even John Lennon. Blame the cocaine.

45.

All The Madmen

(from The Man Who Sold The World, 1971)

“Day after day, they send my friends away,” Bowie sings over acoustic guitar, pinged cymbals and recorder, introducing this unflinching examination of mental illness – attitudes to it, treatment of it, phobia about it. That some in his family, notably half-brother Terry, suffered from schizophrenia, gives the writing the heft of rectitude, while strings, Ronson’s guitar solo and busy drum fills create a vivid background as the story evolves. “Day after day,” he sings at the end, “they take some brain away…”

44.

Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)

(Parlophone single, 2014)

Given the song’s reupholstering on Blackstar, the original version of Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) Bowie cut with the Maria Schneider Orchestra is often seen as transitional rather than critical. But on the 2014 take, Schneider’s arrangement has a methodical frenzy that builds on the innovations of her mentor, Gil Evans. It suggests a tantalising path not quite taken on Blackstar, an avant-garde big band meltdown that simultaneously references Scott Walker’s music of both the 1960s and the 21st century. And it places Bowie in a truly unfamiliar musical context: for once, he seems not totally in control.

43.

Fantastic Voyage

(from Lodger, 1979)

After the wired art-mystique of Low and “Heroes”, Lodger’s languorous opening track hits like a revelation. His most confessional lyric since 1971’s Quicksand, Fantastic Voyage combines lessons learnt (“Loyalty is valuable/But our lives are valuable too”) with Cold War apocalypse and weary mission statement (“They wipe out an entire race/And I’ve got to write it down”) on a valedictory track that pointedly muddies Visconti’s triple mandolin pop optimism beneath stretched-tape bad-vibes murk.

42.

Breaking Glass

(from Low, 1977)

Pop quiz: what’s this disturbing song’s most fucked-up element? Carlos Alomar’s sneery, out-of-character guitar riff? Bowie’s deranged confession that “Baby, I’ve been breaking glass in your room again” (oncewould be enough)? The band all making like crazy robots? All close but no: it’s the “awful” thing that Bowie’s protagonist has drawn on the carpet. Don’t look, he pleads, as if it’s an occult symbol with a power to harm. Then comes that terrible, contradictory “see”. The flatmate from hell? Perhaps literally.

41.

Warszawa

(from Low, 1977)

Now that Low is considered one of Bowie’s best albums, it’s easy to forget some of the reactions it provoked on its release in 1977. Writing in NME, Charles Shaar Murray referred to what he saw as its studied blankness as “synthetic and depersonalised” and a “soundtrack to complete withdrawal”. The chief offending track, Warszawa, also demanded a leap of faith: that we listen to Bowie not as a pop star, but as a composer of electronic instrumental music. However, Bowie – aided by co-composer Brian Eno – proved once again to be a natural in his new (or should that be Neu!) skin. A brooding, melancholic soundscape, as Warsaw had none of Bowie’s usual lyrical personae to filter through, far from alienating listeners, it actually brought them closer to the emotional core of it composer.

40.

Cygnet Committee

(from Space Oddity, 1969)

The longest song Bowie had written up to this point, Cygnet Committee was his proggiest creation in its ambition if not in the way of baroque instrumentation. Using his disillusionment with his lackadaisical followers at the Beckenham Arts Lab as a springboard into a flight of fancy, Bowie inverts slogans from The Beatles and the MC5 to describe a poisoned revolution in which he is both weary leader and the collective voice of his disciples.

39.

Can You Hear Me

(from Young Americans, 1975)

Having cast off his early ’70s glam characters, Bowie reconnected with R&B influences, hitching a ride on the Philly soul train at Sigma Sound to develop his mature mid-’70s sound. On this fine ballad his vocal rests on a lush bed of Visconti-arranged strings, lifting into falsetto, swooping to bass, in a fascinating and sumptuous performance. David Sanborn’s sax and Luther Vandross-marshalled backing voices add colouring. The song had first surfaced during his project to record Lulu. Her loss, our gain.

38.

Alternative Candidate

(from Diamond Dogs 30th Anniversary Edition, 1974/2004)

It’s post-Hammersmith ‘retirement’, and having recently travelled through the Eastern Bloc, Bowie’s head is full of totalitarian themes, and specifically 1984. This, a demo for a planned musical take on George Orwell’s novel, is a hidden gem. Bowie is at his most preening: looking at his own reflection makes him pleased with himself, and his most directly sexual – “inside every teenage girl there’s a fountain”. The piano-led melody is also one of Bowie’s finest. Broken apart and reimagined, it became the epic Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) suite on Diamond Dogs.

37.

The Next Day

(from The Next Day, 2013)

A bracing riposte to the autumnal sigh of Where Are We Now?, the first track on Bowie’s miraculous comeback album finds him maniacally determined to go down fighting. The song is ostensibly about the victim of a religiously inflamed lynch mob in a century long gone, but “Here I am, not quite dying” is surely a sly allusion to rumours of Bowie’s retirement due to serious ill-health, and “They can’t get enough of that doomsday song” reads as a self-review.

36.

The Width Of A Circle

(from The Man Who Sold The World, 1971)

Having played on bills with underground titans Hawkwind, The Groundhogs and High Tide, the opening track on Bowie’s breakthrough album is a suitably heavy eight-minute-plus guitar-driven hard-rock epic, whose titular spiritualism is echoed in the questing, knowing lyricism that chronicles a Faustian pact. “I smashed my soul and traded my mind!” confesses the 23-year-old Bowie, all the while sneering at the prevalent New Age adoption of Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 poetic essays, The Prophet.

35.

Speed Of Life

(from Low, 1977)

Exchanging LA heat and cocaine sunblindness for Mitteleuropa chill, Bowie’s Berlin era dawned with this beatific funk instrumental, opening Low on a paradoxically carefree note. Speed Of Life deals synthesizer future-shock with a human touch, as the Carlos Alomar/Dennis Davis/George Murray engine bulked up under their director’s microscopic vision, Davis’s drums in particular realising new dimensions via Tony Visconti’s harmoniser FX. From within its three interlocked melodies, rigged to play für immer, Bowie says: really, I’m fine.

34.

Panic In Detroit

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

Iggy’s stories of late-’60s Detroit, related when he and Bowie were hanging out in that city in 1972, gave the Dame inspiration for another ambiguous critique of an American icon – this time, White Panthers leader and MC5 mentor John Sinclair. Part glam boogie, half Bo Diddley shuffle, the stylistic confusion fuels the sense of chaos, as Bowie diminishes the importance of the revolutionary Sinclair (who is unnamed) to a semi-cult figure who looks like Che Guevara, signs autographs and drives a diesel van.

33.

Stay

(from Station To Station, 1976)

Bowie had a habit of turning up at the Station To Station sessions and announcing he had a new song – only it wasn’t written yet. Stay, dominated by Carlos Alomar’s clipped guitar and the first of many super-funk Davis/Murray rhythms, was surely one of those. Maybe that’s why Bowie is content to peck stiltedly at the groove – his “for ev-ah” is very 21st century. He’s more assertive for the crooning, flyaway chorus, before making way for Earl Slick, who plays the song out with an unprecedented two minutes’ worth of virtuoso squalling.

32.

Where Are We Now?

(from The Next Day, 2013)

Where Are We Now? arrived seemingly from nowhere, on the morning of Tuesday January 8, 2013 – David Bowie’s 66th birthday. The previous day the world had been a different place, still convinced that David Bowie was a semi-reclusive superstar, whose final album was 2003’s Reality, and whose last live appearance was in 2006, a man too ill or too disinterested to make music again. A deluxe art-rock ballad, built around stately piano chords, robust drums and warm synths, Where Are We Now? seemed immediately, ineffably, Bowie-esque. Its ruminative name-checking of once familiar city landmarks – the Dschungel night club, The KaDeWe department store, the Bösebrücke cold war border crossing – presented lyrics as emotional Polaroids, all sung with a touchingly candid poignancy that made David Bowie’s improbable revival seem all the more remarkable and all the more moving.

31.

Aladdin Sane

(from Aladdin Sane, 1973)

Against a background of imminent war, Mike Garson’s lavish Liberace-like piano caresses the opening verses of decadent nightclub music. For the solo section, Garson had tried a number of approaches that didn’t work, until Bowie encouraged him to play something “avant-garde”. We are suddenly plunged into a dazzling sequence of atonal crashes, crunching misquotes of Bernstein and Gershwin and splintered, high speed runs. Garson has played on hundreds of recordings, yet gets asked about Aladdin Sane almost every week.

30.

Under Pressure

(single (with Queen), 1981)

A notable recording in many ways, not least that this extravagant assembly of egos was able to channel their competitive instincts so modestly. Although it’s overly simplistic to suggest that Under Pressure is Bowie’s words set to Queen’s music – the famous bassline was reportedly dictated by Bowie to John Deacon – it was Bowie who transformed a rich men’s Montreux jam into this vulnerable humanist anthem with his impassioned vocal and lyric (“Because love’s such an old fashioned word”). Bowie’s glasnost period was now in full onward march.

29.

The Bewlay Brothers

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

With sparse acoustic guitars, Bowie conjures up a uniquely disconcerting atmosphere with his most eerie and least comprehensible imagery. Each chorus steadily rises into the plaintive cry, “Oh and we were gone.” But who were they? Bowie has called it “Star Trek in a leather jacket” and the lyrics sketch out sinister characters sliding in and out of history, “Hanging out with your 12 men.” The song retains its inscrutability, ending with a hideous nursery rhyme sung by the Laughing Gnome’s evil progeny.

28.

Be My Wife

(from Low, 1977)

Low’s celebrated futurism actually comes with a generous dollop of Bowie’s rock’n’roll origins. Its first side is a suite of schizoid fragments with a teddy boy swagger and a Joe Meek-like illogic to their sound. Case in point, this gumbo of rollicking piano (by former Rebel Rouser, Roy Young), sinister organ, dustbin drums and duelling guitars. Bowie serves it up with a Cockney twang, as a song that manages to be simultaneously neurotic and uplifting. Altogether now: "Sometimes I get so lonely!"

27.

Five Years

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From 
Mars, 1972)

Five Years is a masterful overture, musically and dramatically, from the slow suspenseful fade-in of drums to Bowie’s scene-setting grip of sudden shock. It’s a masterstroke of tension-building, a slow, simmering rise through the reactions of the dramatis personae, whose collective tone of disbelief is offset by Bowie’s almost nonchalant delivery. As the narrative unfolds, strings creep in and his voice turns strident before unleashing a climatic chorus worthy of a terrace anthem to impart a collective outpouring of panic.

26.

Boys Keep Swinging

(from Lodger, 1979)

As glam rock’s bedazzled children took punk into mainstream consciousness, the original grande dame instigated a return to the primitive. This, however, was no fond nostalgia, but a dissection of masculinity’s clichéd properties (“you can buy a home of your own!”) set to a drunken grind. Tension abounds, first because Bowie had swapped Carlos Alomar to drums and Dennis Davis to bass, then quite remarkably hands over the song’s entire second half to Adrian Belew’s migraine guitar solo.

25.

Up The Hill Backwards

(from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980)

Listen to plenty of Bowie’s work from 1976-80 and you realise how much winging-it is going on, how much he relies on twisting rock’n’roll’s staple components out of all recognition, how his song structures disobey convention. After a Willie And The Hand Jive intro, multiple Davids give us some robotic doo-wop for 90 seconds. When the voices stop the band wakes up for a minute of wigging out. Like the lyric, it shouldn’t make sense but almost does. “Yeah, yeah, up the hill backwards, it’ll be all right.” Yeah, right.

24.

Space Oddity

(from Space Oddity, 1969)

Given away by Tony Visconti, who branded it a “cheap cash-in”, this magical song was bestowed the most intricate of productions by Gus Dudgeon and a sweeping arrangement by Paul Buckmaster (they defined the sound of early Elton John, too). The music, from the echoey handclaps, the mournful acoustic melody and the chattering, spacey ending sees Bowie take a great leap; the words, a lonely dialogue of alienation between a doomed astronaut and ground control provide a metaphor for Bowie’s entire career. He’s out there somewhere, but where exactly? A 1979 remake, sparse, intense, Lennonesque, is almost as good.

23.

Suffragette City

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, 1972)

Bugged by a male flatmate (or lover?) and anxiously awaiting the arrival of a “mellow-thighed chick”, the narrator of Suffragette City is a basket case of sexual anxiety. The song moves at the speed of racing hormones before Bowie finally achieves release in one of the finest fake endings in pop. Stuffed with allusions (T.Rex, Charles Mingus, A Clockwork Orange), it presents Bowie as an omnivorous pasticheur with an endless appetite. Inexplicably, Mott The Hoople turned it down.

22.

Rebel Rebel

(from Diamond Dogs, 1974)

Rush-released in February 1974, Rebel Rebel was the year’s teenage party fire-starter supreme. The lyric his tribal manifesto, Bowie’s seductive Pied Piper beckons us headlong to messy excess. Not just glam, of which this was Bowie’s brilliant sunset, this was rock’n’roll excelsior. A few months later, not even the Stones’ cheeky rabble-rouser could match it.

21.

‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore

(from Blackstar, 2016)

Its title taken from a 1633 play by English dramatist John Ford, ‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore was initially recorded with the Maria Schneider Orchestra along with Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime ). Retooled and re-recorded for Blackstar, it burrowed deeper into the intersection between free jazz and hip-hop (Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly was an influence) creating a raucous five-minute mesh of melody and discord, gasping under the pack-ice of no-wave sax squawk.

20.

Station To Station

(from Station To Station, 1976)

Clearly the work of someone who’s just finished playing an alien, this 10-minute oddity feels like a ride to oblivion for the first few minutes before shifting abruptly into some twitchy prog and a lengthy Ziggy-like rock out. The chilling lyric nods to mystical places in the Kabbalah (“Kether to Malkuth”), White Stains (Aleister Crowley’s 1898 collection of erotic poems), and a direct reference to cocaine, which drove the sessions so hard Bowie claims not to recall them at all.

19.

Fashion

(from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980)

Still ahead of his own game, Bowie’s discotheque apotheosis arrived a whole three years before Let’s Dance. Fashion gets overlooked in the scramble to decipher Ashes To Ashes, but it’s full of brilliant detail, whether seemingly accidental (Bowie rolling with the second verse’s fluffed metre, “on thuuuh dancefloor”), indulgent (Robert Fripp’s show-subverting guitar), and above all the supreme pliability of the Davis/Murray rhythm section. The “fashion”/“fascist” dialectic never gets old either. Was Bowie ever so well attired again?

18.

Oh! You Pretty Things

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

After Chrysalis rejected Hunky Dory, RCA signed Bowie, then gave one of the album’s best songs to Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits. He obliged with a hit, featuring Bowie on piano. Only marginally less jaunty, Bowie’s version still contrasted lyrical themes of alien intervention at the end of the human race with a sing-along chorus. “The Earth is a bitch!” exclaims Bowie (toned down to “beast” for Noone’s version), but even so, one hell of a weird subject for a pop hit.

17.

Quicksand

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

Baked on hash oil, Bowie used Haddon Hall’s decadent interiors to devour not just bodies but philosophy, including his first forays into occult ideology and Nazi myth. Quicksand found Bowie “sinking” under the weight, “torn between the light and dark”, citing Crowley, Himmler, Garbo, Churchill and (Nietzsche’s) Homo Sapien, while immaculate, saddened hues of piano, guitar – mostly multiple layers of translucent acoustic 12-string – and strings provided exquisite melodic relief. Never has the Buddhist wisdom embedded in the chorus, “knowledge comes with death’s release” sounded so comforting.

16.

TVC15

(from Station To Station, 1976)

Bowie’s Top Of The Pops performance of Starman was burned onto a nation’s retinas, but what of dance troupe Ruby Flipper’s eerie, nuts interpretation, rolling around a futuristic living room, with no little rhythmic component, as a warped rocker blared aggressively. Said to be inspired by a very high Iggy claiming the TV was eating his girlfriend, this truly opaque song is anchored by Roy Bittan’s pounding piano as Carlos Alomar sprays random guitar over it all.

15. Moonage Daydream

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, 1972)

A flash mid-paced rocker essentially about a futuristic mating ritual, what stands out is its arrangement. Ronson’s carnivalesque instrumental break, scored for baritone sax and penny whistle, stemmed from a song Bowie heard by a Kim Fowley group, The Hollywood Argyles. The way Ronson’s strings illuminate the third chorus is spine-tingling, as is his guitar solo over the coda its insistent single bent notes a response to Bowie’s instructions, drawn with marker pen.

14.

Fame

(from Young Americans, 1975)

Largely directed at Bowie’s then-manager Tony Defries, Fame is as angry as its groove is locked down and its production trebley and cocaine fizzy. Carlos Alomar’s riff, cribbed from a much-changed tour cover of The Flares’ Foot Stomping, evokes Class A sleaze. The presence of John Lennon on falsetto backing vocals is a fitting touch and the cartoony pitch-shifted repetition of the title at 3.35 underlines the hall-of-mirrors aspects of its subject matter.

13.

The Man Who Sold The World

(from The Man Who Sold The World, 1971)

Written days after Bowie’s pact with new manager Tony Defries, this supernatural rumba with its faint air of wish-fulfilment quickly became a title track and seemed destined for big things. But Lulu’s cover aside, Bowie largely ignored it for two decades. Kurt Cobain resurrected the song in November ’93, and killed himself months later. Clearly, that opening encounter on the stairs carries a secret: a crossroads perhaps, where a soul is sold as a solemn organ wheezes and a downbeat, two-note guitar hooks.

12.

Golden Years

(from Station To Station, 1976)

There’s a persistent story that Golden Years was offered to Elvis Presley. On that evidence, it seems wholly engaged with the mainstream, out in the world, pressing the flesh. Its touch is oddly cold, however, and under the disco lights, it’s hard to read its face. Whatever stories lie beneath, though, Golden Years hits the perfect balance between the immediate and the unknowable. Simple in comparison to Station To Station’s wildly allusive title track, it’s still elusive, its emotional state hard to decode. When it slips back into the darkness with an eerie closing whistle, it’s danced the night away without giving up its secrets, untouched, untouchable.

11.

Ashes To Ashes

(from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), 1980)

Bowie badly misjudged the start of the ’70s: The Prettiest Star, The Hype and The Man Who Sold The World had all failed as he sought to build on the success of Space Oddity. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake entering a new decade. A funeral pyre of past archetypes, Ashes To Ashes rebirthed Bowie – singer, writer, actor, mime, film-maker – as rock’s foremost living work of art. The promo video, still a novelty in summer 1980, sold the song and gave it an epic narrative. Today, its clunky edits and saturated solarisation betrays its age. But the music, much like Bowie himself, time-travels far more successfully. If the grand piano fed through an Eventide Instant Flanger lends the song much of its weightlessness, it’s the narrative force of Bowie’s lyric, delivered in a series of whispers, falsetto, deadpan and that lunar croon (“I never did anything out of the blue/Woah oh-oh”) that continues to transport the enigma.

10.

Ziggy Stardust

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, 1972)

Between Mick Ronson’s salute-the-new-hero fanfare and Bowie’s high camp, take-a-bow finale, sits the arc of Ziggy’s career. If Hendrix (left-hand, voodoo, snow-white tan, jamming with his two sidemen) was the primary inspiration, the target was the young audience newly unlocked by Bowie’s competitive foil, Marc Bolan. There’s a brash sense of entitlement here, underscored by T.Rex licks and speech-bubble phraseology (“Boy, could he play guitar”). It worked: the man in the quilted onesie was soon method acting his “Leper Messiah” creation.

9.

Always Crashing In The Same Car

(from Low, 1977)

Reputed real-life episodes (feeling ripped off, Bowie rammed his drug dealer’s car, and/or nearly crashed in his hotel garage) aside, this remains much more a metaphorical ride – out of control, speeding between projects, risking health, never learning from past mistakes. Bowie’s vocal and the music’s misty tones of grey are stained with remorse, but there’s light at the tunnel’s end through a series of gorgeous ascending guitar lines. Bowie even lets rip with a “yeah yeah yeah!” as he climbed again from the wreckage.

8.

Blackstar

(from Blackstar, 2016)

As with Blackstar’s Lazurus, the album’s title track is a brilliant, daring, haunting self-epitaph. Two-step beats and wailing Eastern brass give way at the five minutes mark to an impassioned sweet soul excursion as if the sun has shone through the black clouds at the moment of death: an idea reinforced by the crucifixion scene in the accompanying video.

7.

Young Americans

(from Young Americans, 1975)

Credit its misleading warmth and Luther Vandross’s breezy hook with enticing actual young Americans to mistake this cold, harsh song for a compliment, giving Bowie his first US hit. Coming straight out of Diamond Dogs, he has a frantic, coked-up verbosity, as if trying to splurge every thought he’s ever had about America before the clock runs out. He’s a psychic tourist, perceiving the country through glass – a limousine window, a TV screen or a microscope slide – as a fascinatingly alien mess.

6.

Rock’n’Roll Suicide

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, 1972)

As Five Years is a brilliant intro, so Ziggy’s death-trip finale couldn’t have been better. Again, it’s a song-as-story, with beginning, middle and end, built like a bolero with Gallic torch song leanings, from suspense subdued voice/12-string to the addition of electric guitar flickers, the kick forward of drums and woozy sax to the strings-swirled, hollered final verse and astonishing climax, as Ziggy and his fans become one with “gimme your hands, you’re wonderful!” The Grand Guignol agony of the David Live version is equally rivetting.

5.

Changes

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

With its “Children that you spit on/As they try to change their worlds” and skin-shedding, future-facing chorus, Changes is a precursor of Starman’s wraparound warmth and optimism. The stutter on “ch-ch-ch-changes” suggests someone taking a run-up for the great leap forward, and the rest of the chorus is pure liberation, ditching the rules to move onwards and upwards. It might be the manifesto of a “faker” – the stagey cabaret twinkle of the verses implies as much – but gloriously, it’s all heart.

4.

Sound And Vision

(from Low, 1977)

The freewheeling first half of Low spawned one of the strangest hits of Bowie’s career, a bout of depression disguised as pop, delivered in a casual croon and structured like an old 78, where the vocalist arrives late – in this case exactly half way through – to sing about the blue room where he’ll go “drifting into my solitude” and wait for inspiration to strike. Its old-world feel is heightened by a cheesy string-machine, like Mantovani on ice, and a saucy burst of Dave’s honky sax.

3.

Starman

(from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, 1972)

David Bowie pointing straight into the camera during Starman’s Top Of The Pops appearance might have been a generation’s Creation Of Adam moment, but even without visuals, this transmission about a transmission is a dazzling enactment of an alien recruitment drive. Hints of Wichita Lineman zing down the wires, while the intergalactic communique shares rock’n’roll’s conspiratorial thrills: pirate radio’s under-the-counterpane frisson, parent-frightening transgression, secret codes, the need for hope and “sparkle”. A call to arms: never over, just far out.

2.

“Heroes”

(from “Heroes”, 1977)

This has the lot: a theme that’s both self-serving and (those quotation marks) ironic, an epic “lovers across the Berlin Wall” backstory, Eno’s ‘magic briefcase’, dolphins, three Robert Fripp guitar parts rolled into one, and Bowie himself rising above waves both new and old. Less remarked upon are parallels with ’60s heartbreaker ballads like Cilla Black’s You’re My World or Mina’s Se Telefonando, which are echoed in emotion-packed words (“nothing”, “together”, “forever”) and Visconti’s production masterstroke of opening up Bowie’s vocal in stages – a dynamic twist on that old arrangement cliché the key change

1.

Life On Mars?

(from Hunky Dory, 1971)

In 1971 Bowie was tapping into the mood of a jaded, exhausted age, the psychic fallout from the optimism and upheaval of the ’60s. For his wearier contemporaries, this was a reason to hunker down and build cocoons, but Bowie saw an opening. Cannily flattering his would-be tribe of disgruntled teenagers, he extrapolated his own impatience for fame into a generational hunger for grand transformation. The title refrain of Life On Mars?, an apparent non sequitur, could have been an opportunistic allusion both to the recent launch of Soviet probes to study the red planet and to Bowie’s own post-Space Oddity reputation, but, rocketed into the stratosphere by the singer, it also suggests a genuine yearning for new wonders. Something needs to happen. There must be more to life than this.  Mick Ronson’s extraordinarily cinematic arrangement gives Life On Mars? scale and transcendence and it builds magnificently towards a glorious Hollywood finale before the fade-out gingerly returns us to reality.Ultimately, the song itself provides the escapism that its heroine craves – for all its images of bathos and decline, it’s the work of art that temporarily makes a straitened life seem bigger and brighter. A more transparent lyric would only have clipped its wings because it’s the insoluble ambiguity in Bowie’s imagery that allows it to be covered by both Barbra Streisand and The Flaming Lips, to speak to each listener in mysterious ways. The question mark continues to hang over this magnificently strange creation, unanswerable.

Compiled by: Phil Alexander, Martin Aston, Jenny Bulley, Geoff Brown, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Tom Doyle, Danny Eccleston, Pat Gilbert, Ian Harrison, Jim Irvin, Dorian Lynskey, Andrew Male, John Mulvey, Mark Paytress, Victoria Segal, David Sheppard, Mat Snow, Paul Stokes.