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Mon 22 September 2025 22:00, UK
Of all of David Bowie’s acclaimed but cryptic lyrical songbook, 1971’s ‘Life on Mars?’ forever demands the greatest scrutiny.
Bowie’s celestial music hall ballad wasn’t an instant classic. While its video features the ‘cracked actor’ in full Ziggy Stardust clobber for its strikingly austere, sci-fi promo, ‘Life on Mars? was first issued as a single a full two months after 1973’s Aladdin Sane and well into Ziggymania’s global stardom.
Tucked away on Hunky Dory, Bowie’s dazzling slice of piano surrealism would tease the first real signs of songwriting brilliance prior to finding its niche among the glam rock taking over the pop charts, Bowie yet to embrace his famous messianic Martian and instead still playing the svelte, Pre-Raphaelite decadent on 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World cover.
‘Life on Mars?’s roots go back earlier than Peter Noone’s first cut of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ or even the Apollo 11 cash-in ‘Space Oddity’, the latter again given a promo make-over and single rerelease post-Ziggy. In 1968, Bowie’s writing services were sought after by publisher David Platz to pen an English version of Claude François’ ‘Comme d’habitude’, but Bowie’s eventual offering, ‘Even a Fool Learns to Love’, was rejected by the French publishers and eventually landed in the hands of Paul Anka, penning ‘My Way’ and gifting Frank Sinatra with one of his biggest standards.
Out of aggrieved inspiration, Bowie would craft his own attempt at a big, grand pop statement in the vein of ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ himself. Atop its majestic arrangements and featuring Rick Wakeman’s expert piano before his Moog noodles with Yes, ‘Life on Mars?’s most puzzling features are its lyrical canvas that explores Hollywood’s silver screen landscape as both a cultural beacon of glittering escapism as well as a conveyor belt of tired cliches and stale mistruths, all through the eyes of a “girl with the mousey hair” and her grapple with media overload.
“I think she finds herself disappointed with reality,” Bowie partially elucidated in 1997. “That although she’s living in the doldrums of reality, she’s being told that there’s a far greater life somewhere, and she’s bitterly disappointed that she doesn’t have access to it”.
So, what’s behind those lyrics?
Among lyrics depicting “sailors fighting in the dance hall” and “the mice in their million hordes”, the most curious line opens the second verse: “It’s on America’s tortured brow / That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow”.
There’s never been any conclusive, definitive explanation of what such artfully beguiling lines mean, as is the case with all of Bowie’s work. There’s a general consensus among Bowie fans and experts, however, that the mentioned lines touch on the paragons of American 20th-century pop culture and the decay of meaning that’s no longer a window to another world so sorely desired by the weary protagonist and her fatigue with grim reality. Mickey Mouse, Disney’s immortal mascot and symbol of US imperialism, has de-evolved into a cash cow for his corporate owners, a sad close to childhood nostalgia and the echoes of Hollywood’s more innocent age.
The United States would continue to fascinate and repel Bowie throughout his career, describing Aladdin Sane as “Ziggy goes to America” and losing himself to Los Angeles’ cocaine glamour before seeking sanctuary in Europe ahead of his ‘Berlin Trilogy’. Even when settling permanently in New York’s SoHo district in the early 1990s, Bowie would drop the paranoid ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ with Trent Reznor, dreaming up another navigation of the US’ influence with equal parts honour and subversion.
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