(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 20 September 2025 1:00, UK
David Bowie was never meant to have only one genre of music as his template.
He wanted to sample everything he could get his hands on, and nothing was off the table when it came to what ended up on a record, be it soul music, glam rock, jazz, or even the occasional flirtation with genres like hard rock and industrial music. But no one starts their musical journey with that kind of confidence. Bowie knew he could change the world, but he needed to see an example of how to do it right.
When Bowie was first starting to strum his folksy rock tunes in the late 1960s, though, the music world had already begun to change. Sgt Pepper had only been out for a few months after he released his official debut album, but considering he was trying to make his own vaudeville take on rock and roll, it didn’t take him long to leave that persona behind and transform himself into the musical alien that we know today.
But Bowie wasn’t simply a musician when he walked into the studio. He wanted to be a sonic actor in many senses, and that meant inhabiting every character that he wrote about. It could be the sexual energy of Ziggy Stardust or the sinister demeanour of The Thin White Duke, but whichever person showed up on record, Bowie would always keep that energy inside him when he walked onstage.
Then again, making a persona around an album was nothing new. The Beatles had opened up the possibility of becoming another group when they embraced the studio, but if that was a suggestion of what could be done, Pete Townshend took that model and ran with it the minute he settled on the concept for Tommy.
No one had any idea of what the rock opera format was supposed to be, but all the motifs in Townshend’s magnum opus seemed to make perfect sense together. The deaf, dumb and blind kid may have been a strange concept for everyone to grasp, but once the music began, it was easy to get swept away in the story when hearing Roger Daltrey cry out in pain on tracks like ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’.
Although ‘The Starman’ had to wait until Heathen to eventually work with Townshend, the magic wasn’t lost on him when his idol entered the room, saying, “I’ve known Pete for years, of course and have always thought of him as a mentor in some ways. We’d written back and forth about doing this for a while, and he was due to do his part when he came in for the Concert For New York, which we both played at.”
Heathen might not stand as Bowie’s most conceptual work, but all the pieces are there for those willing to look for it. Despite a lot of the songs being written well before 9/11, a lot of paranoid energy that Bowie was singing about on the record was the perfect backdrop for what a lot of New Yorkers were feeling as they tried to come to grips with how much the world had changed within the span of a few hours in 2001.
That might not have been what he intended, but that’s the beauty of studying the music of people like Townshend. Any artist can be writing about an extremely specific part of their lives when they’re in the studio, but once it goes out into the world, that song could serve as the perfect backdrop for whatever the fans are going through.
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